A reading of a piece I wrote called ‘How social media divides us.’ I recommend the written piece over the podcast version. Much of the mainstream focus on how social media may be amplifying our divides has been on product features (e.g., content recommendation algorithms, or reaction emoji choices). This piece examines the idea that there may be inherent aspects of internet communication that lead to more polarization, in a medium theory “medium is the message” type of way.

Links to this episode:

• iTunes (embedded below)
• Spotify
• Google Play

Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify
• YouTube

Resources related to this topic or mentioned in this episode:

• Hod Lipson’s wikipedia page
• Hod Lipson’s TED Talk
• Interview of Lipson in Quanta magazine about self-aware machines
• An explanation of “bottom up” vs “top down” work in artificial intelligence
• A Guardian article about Hofstadter’s idea of consciousness being a “strange loop”
• A paper on the function of the conscious experience of pain in driving evolution
• A post about Pentti Haikonen’s idea of “self-explanatory information” in form of sensation and/or pain
• Wikipedia about Daniel Dennett’s “multiple drafts” theory of consciousness, which pertains to part of interview where we talk about self-awareness involving multiple self-models

TRANSCRIPT

[Note: transcripts will contain errors.]

Zach: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it and get episode descriptions at www.behavior-podcast.com.

On today’s episode, recorded December 20th 2021, I talk to Hod Lipson about artificial intelligence: we talk about how close he thinks we are to self-aware machines, what he views as likely strategies that will yield self-aware machines, and how artificial intelligence research might help us better understand the structure of our own minds and how we behave.

Hod is a professor of engineering and data science at columbia university. His website is at www.hodlipson.com, that’s HOD LIPSON. I’ll read a little bit about him from that site:

Hod Lipson is a roboticist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing. He and his students love designing and building robots that do what you’d least expect robots to do: Self replicate, self-reflect, ask questions, and even be creative.
Hod’s research asks questions such as: Can robots ultimately design and make other robots? Can machines be curious and creative? Will robots ever be truly self-aware? Answers to these questions can help illuminate life’s big mysteries.
An award-winning researcher, teacher, and communicator, Lipson enjoys sharing the beauty of robotics though his books, essays, public lectures, and radio and television appearances. ​Hod is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative.
End quote

Okay, here’s the interview with Hod Lipson:

Zach: Hi Hod. Thanks for coming on.

Hod: My pleasure.

Zach: This maybe a good place to start [00:02:00] is when it comes to an artificial creation that could approach human-like abilities, either in terms of creativity or self-awareness, what’s the most impressive artificial intelligence feat that you’ve seen so far?

Hod: Oh, you know, it’s very hard to, to choose because, uh, these feats keep coming, uh, at a. It’s an increasing rate. I mean, uh, if you’d asked me a few years ago, I’d say the fact that, uh, an AI can tell a difference between a cat and a dog, Hmm. That’s an incredible feat that we, the community have been struggling with for decades, uh, with no hope until 2012.

Uh, but since then, other things I’ve have come, uh, you’ve seen AI that can create, uh, can, can write, can summarize tasks. Can answer questions in a dialogue and you see robots doing back flips. So it’s really, it’s all over the place.

Zach: Mm-hmm. It’s a wide space. Yeah. What’s the project [00:03:00] you’ve worked on that you’re the most proud of?

Hod: Again, hard to choose. There’s a lot of things happening and especially that, uh, some of my students might be listening. I don’t wanna pick one over the other, but really, um, when, when you look at, at, uh, at, uh, sort of AI and robotics, we’re seeing amazing things from robots that can build robots to, uh, to machines, uh, that we’ve created that, that can, uh, uh, sort of begin to understand what they, this is a very exciting.

That I hope we’ll see more and more of. We’ve seen, uh, networks that learn to that, that learn better by listening to acoustics rather than being told, uh, what the answer is. All kinds of kind of, uh, surprises where we have, uh, networks, uh, net neural networks, for example, that learn how to paint. Uh, I make art that for most people is as good as human created art.

Mm-hmm. I mean, it’s all over the place. [00:04:00]

Zach: When it comes to the general public’s perception of how far along AI is to being something like the self-aware kind of, uh, you know, sci-fi vision of, of AI that we’ve seen in movies and, and TV and such, how far do you think the gap is between, you know, what we’re capable of now and what people’s perception is of, of how, how far along we are to reaching something like that?

Hod: You know, the, the gap today is pretty large, but here’s the interesting thing. The time to close that gap is, is short. In other words, uh, even though the gap is large because the technology is accelerating mm-hmm. Um, it means that, uh, you know, the progress that we’ve, we’ve, uh, the rate of, of progress that we’ve seen over the past couple of decades is not representative of what’s gonna happen in the.

I believe in the next decade we’ll make so much more progress than we’ve done in the past century in terms of [00:05:00] machine intelligence. That even though the gap is large and machines today are nowhere near human level consciousness for various reasons, we’ll close that gap sooner than you would expect.

And in fact, I think we underestimate where this. I think most, most people sort of tend to think that, tend to ask at what point will machines reach human level intelligence? But we don’t understand that that human level intelligence is not sort of the, the ultimate thing. I mean, it’ll just keep on going.

So, so it’s, it’s, it’s gonna keep on, it’ll rush by us and go somewhere where we can’t even imagine.

Zach: Let’s say there was a, an artificially constructed entity that showed evidence of, of being self-aware. In other words, it showed evidence of having an eye point of view of some sort. Do you think it’s, it’s necessarily the case that that entity would always have some sort of internal perceptual experience, or do you believe it’s possible that something could [00:06:00] express, um, an awareness of self without having an internal reality?

Hod: Absolutely. Uh, any, any machine can express and any human can, can, and the animal can express, uh, all kinds of external, uh, cues that make it look like it has self-awareness or consciousness or whatever it is that you care to define. Uh, but it’s really not the same as what you and I. It’s absolutely possible.

In fact, you know, philosophers have. Millennia. You know, how do, how do I know you are conscious? How do you know I am? I mean, we’re making a lot of assumptions, but the reality is you never know, and it’s been also in artificial intelligence. There’s been this debate about strong AI versus weak ai. Is the AI really smart or is it just imagining it?[00:07:00]

Not just for consciousness. It has existed for almost any form of intelligence you can imagine. How do you know that an AI can really understand what it’s translating or it’s just translating, uh, in a sort of, uh, dictionary with a extraordinary long dictionary? How do you know that something is a chat bot really understands your question or it’s just looking up answers?

The reality is. Theoretically speaking, you can never tell. Uh, but at some point it becomes so close that you just have to, uh, sort of, uh, acknowledge it’s indistinguishable and it’s, it’s, uh, effectively the same thing.

Zach: Yeah. It seems like at some point, I mean, if you’re, if you’re talking about. Behavior that was not programmed in and, and that was kind of emergent in some black box way.

It seems like Occam’s razor might say that if it’s, if it’s doing all of these things that are hard to understand and, and expressing a, a sense of self that it’s. Probably more [00:08:00] likely that it has a sense of self than that. It’s just somehow learned to fake having a sense of self. If that, if that makes sense.

Hod: It, it’s true. And um, I think that, uh, one of the misconceptions about artificial intelligence, there’s a couple, but one of them is, is that it’s going to, uh, sort of imitate. Humans. In other words, it’s gonna have the same kind of self-awareness or consciousness as humans have now. You have to remember, we humans have evolved our self-consciousness for in, in response to sort of pressures of survival.

It, it is, our self-awareness is good at. Certain things that help us give us an evolutionary advantage, and it’s not good at other things. So we have a very, very specific form of self modeling, our ability to see ourselves, um, that is unique to our environment, to our evolutionary history, to our bodies, to our sensations.

We [00:09:00] only sense so many things, but when you look at AI and robots in general, AI in the, in the real world. Robots will have different sensations, different sensors, different uh, abilities, different environments, and therefore they will have a very different kind of sense of self, a very different kind of self-awareness.

So it’s not going to be that sort of, uh. You know, this Android, uh, science fiction

Zach: mm-hmm. Human like machine

Hod: that wants to be human. Mm-hmm. And, uh, you know, craves the, the, no, it’s gonna be, it its own thing. It’s gonna be like a different animal that has a self-awareness that is, uh, in some ways, like us in some ways different.

And I think we have to let go a bit of that human-centric view of self-awareness and recognize that there’s, uh, a lot of types of self-awareness and, and it’s gonna be really interesting to see what, what happens,

Zach: right. It’s probably more akin to, in the same way that it’s hard for us to even imagine, you know, what a, what an insect or a bad is like, or whatever.

There’s [00:10:00] that similar problem and it won’t be exactly like apples to apples kind of comparison. Yeah, exactly. The reason I was interested in talking to you specifically with your work is because in my admittedly, very amateur thinking about artificial intelligence and how one might go about creating a self-aware entity, it seems to me that having a physical body would be an important I.

Part of developing that, because it seems like a core component to self-awareness is having some kind of boundary between oneself and one’s environment. That’s right. So that’s one can define itself against a changing environment and gets various kinds of sensory inputs that are out of its control. So I think, uh, it’s hard for me to imagine that happening in a digital only environment inside a computer.

So that’s why I find your work so interesting, and I’m curious. Is that basically why you’re interested in robotics? Did I sum up basically what you believe? Or if I, if I was off base, maybe you could correct what I said.

Hod: Yes, I, I that you, you, you nailed it. I mean, I think you have to have [00:11:00] what we call an embodied agents.

An agent that has a boundary, that has sensors, that has, uh, and can take actions in an environment now. In principle, you could have a simulated robot in a simulated environment. It doesn’t have necessarily to be physical, but the, the physicality and the richness of the physical interaction and the sort of open-endedness of physical interactions really, uh, sort of give it the, that, that kind of, uh, richness of information from which it can start modeling and, and, uh, and creating these, uh, it’s, it’s the, uh, substrate.

Which self-awareness can grow. And this is really what we’re trying to do, but I don’t think it’s, it’s limited to that. It’s just a, for me, it’s a very sort of, uh, convenient, uh, place to start looking for it or expect it to grow.

Zach: And I’ve seen you describe. Your work or that the strategy behind this type of work is being bottom up instead of top [00:12:00] down.

And can you talk a little bit about what that means and how you see that as being important?

Hod: Yeah, so I, you know, first of all, I have to say self-awareness, consciousness, sentience, if you like all these, all these grand, uh, words, emotions. Are things that philosophers have been and theologists and, and, uh, neuroscientists and people have been thinking about this for, for millennia.

And it’s one of some, one of the, the big three questions I think, uh, that, and it’s, it’s a question we haven’t quite answered and what it is really, and, and where is it coming from? Really what drives it. So I don’t have a, a particular, you know, an answer, a good answer to that question, but, but our approach is a little bit different.

Whereas in, in the past, people sort of started with asking how, what is human self-awareness? They, they start at the top and I think humans are the most self-aware, uh.[00:13:00]

At the top is really, really hard because if you start at the very complex example of self-awareness, chances that you’ll, you’ll really understand it, are, are a slip because it’s so complicated, also involves introspection. We bring baggage into it. Very difficult. So what, we’re taking a very different approach.

We’re saying, okay, self-awareness is not a black and white thing. That either it’s human level or it’s nothing. There’s all kinds of level, all the way from a self-awareness of a, uh, you know, of a, of a worm all the way up to a human and maybe beyond. And we’re gonna start very small. We’re gonna start with the this from.

We’re gonna start very simple, and I think, uh, that this approach, if not solving the, the puzzle, it might allow us a different kind of window to understand what it is. So we’re trying to build it from the ground up in a very, very simple way. Nothing even close to human level [00:14:00] performance and, and build it up.

And our hypothesis is actually very, very simple. It’s that, uh, self-awareness I believe is, is really nothing but, uh, self simulation, the ability. To see yourself in the future under imagine the, the, the sensations you’re going to feel in the future. Uh, imagine actions you can take and the consequences, uh, that those actions will have.

In other words, the ability to sort of simulate yourself into the future. If you can imagine yourself walking on the beach tomorrow. If you can imagine the taste of a meal that you’re going to eat tomorrow, that is self-awareness. And the diff that dog can do that also. But we humans probably can do it further along.

We can do it into the distant future. We can imagine what it’s gonna be like to retire, for example. Uh, and we can, we can really imagine ourself, yourself in the long term and that ability, how far into the future, how accurately you can imagine yourself [00:15:00] into the future. Is the level to which you are self-aware.

This is a very, very crude definition. Philosophers might argue with that, neuroscientist might argue with that, but we’re taking that model and we’re trying to build that up from, from the ground up with, with machines.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I wanna come back to that self simulation idea, and I wanted to go back to, uh, yeah.

The, the approach to start with the. The bottom up approach just makes so much sense to me. It almost seems like, like you said, the attempting to do this, this top down of like, we’re gonna design this complex, uh, you know, model of, of what consciousness is, just seems so, it seems almost to miss just how much we don’t know.

And that’s why your, your work makes so much sense to me because it seems like eventually you’re gonna stumble across some really emergent behavior. Some, some sort of. Construct that’s quite simple. That will lead to some pretty amazing behavior. And I think you’ve already, you know, I think your work’s already shown some of that, um, you know, self-organizing or, or, uh, [00:16:00] self-referential behavior.

Hod: Right? I, I think, I think there’s a, exactly like you said, there’s this, if you look at other big questions like the origin of life, uh, like the origin of the universe, all these are very grand questions. And what we like to do is it turns out. For example, origin of Life has a very, very simple explanation.

With evolution, it’s actually, you don’t need these grand theories, actually, a very simple, yet powerful process that gives rise to everything we see around us. Same thing, uh, origin of the universe. If you. That the rules of physics are relatively simple, and yet they give rise to all this complexity we see in the universe.

And to me, I’m, I feel there must be a simple, a really, really simple mechanism that gives rise to self-awareness. It’s not something complicated. Mm-hmm. It’s not gonna be some extraordinary quote unquote algorithm somehow. Takes everything and creates this amazing, it’s going to be, the answer [00:17:00] is going to be something very, very simple.

A set of few little rules that give rise when executed enough. Mm-hmm. With enough in a rich enough environment, they’re gonna give rise to, to self-awareness and beyond. And, uh, I, you know, the question is, what are these rules? What’s, what are these little set of ingredients that gonna give rise to. I’m after.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, in support of that, it just seems evident that even the simplest animals, you know, like amoebas and, and that, that level, it’s like they, they have so much complexity and, um, maybe not the most simple ones, but not far up that chain. There’s just so much self-awareness and flexibility and tenacity and creativity in how even the simplest creatures can solve problems.

And so that kind of. You know that, that’s why I’m on, on your side in terms of like, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before you stumble across some relatively simple architecture of some sort That leads to really [00:18:00] surprising behaviors, and then it’s just a, a, a matter of like giving that space to grow and letting it evolve and iterate over.

Many, many iterations to reach something, you know, more emergent or something.

Hod: Exactly. That’s, that’s, that’s exactly it. And you can see analogies of that in, in artificial intelligence. If you look at the history of artificial intelligence, people have tried to create AI from the top down with expert systems and rules and logic.

Mm-hmm. And all kinds of sophisticated, uh, statistical processes. And, uh, in the end. It seems to be that, you know, all of, almost all of AI right now seems to be all the breakthroughs are converging into neural networks, which are really a very, very simple idea, but it just scaled up to massive numbers. You take these very simple neurons, very simple rules, and you pack billions of them together, and suddenly you get.

You knowis that can, that can understand the complete videos and understand what’s [00:19:00] around them, and make all write poetry and, and create art and do amazing things, all with this very, very simple device with a neuron that’s, that’s just, uh, skilled in a massive way. So history of AI is full of attempts to do things from the top down that have failed, and then some bottom up thing that just takes over.

Uh, so I hope it’s gonna be sort of the same thing, but we’re looking for.

Zach: Now there’s the concept of the the strange loop idea, which was popularized by Douglas Hofstadter, where there’s something about the, the action of self modeling, of creating a map of one’s environment and then oneself is part of that environment.

So it creates this kind of, sort of like a regression of a mirror reflecting another mirror kind of property. And I’ve seen that idea discussed and some people think it’s been kind of shown to be not that. Important idea, but I’m curious, are there, are there elements of that in, in how you view, uh, how we’ll reach something like self-awareness?

Hod: Yeah, I [00:20:00] think, you know, uh, what we’re doing right now is an example of that where we’re not just self-aware, we’re made a self-aware. We’re talking about what is self-awareness and how to create it. And will that self-awareness be self-aware, uh, enough to under, to debate self-awareness, you know, something you can, you can, you can do all of that at a sort of, uh, infinite regress and, uh, that, uh, loop, uh, can and does happen.

And, and, you know, if, if it works, it’s, it’s gonna work, uh, it’s gonna happen also, uh, to these artificial systems as well. I.

As a worm and then a rat, and then a dog, uh, then, you know, other primate uh, primates and then humans and and beyond. So it’s, it that level of sophistication and self regression is gonna happen, probably. But, uh, I think it’s a piece of the puzzle. It’s not the whole story.

Zach: I might not be wording it correctly.

To put it another way. What I, what I was trying to [00:21:00] communicate is even for like a simple creature. Like, say a worm or something At that level, it seems like potentially it’s complexity, it’s it’s self-awareness of, uh, even its limited self-awareness is due in some sense to it. Creating a map of the world and then having itself, I.

Be part of that map, you know? So it has to map the world. It has to map itself.

Hod: Yeah.

Zach: In mapping itself, it also has to, you know, map the world. Again, it’s, it’s like this, this, this, that kind of regression. And maybe I’m not, I didn’t phrase it right, but I’m, yeah,

Hod: I understand what you’re saying. Then. It’s, um, in order to, to create a, a model of everything, you have to include yourself and, uh, in, in my mind.

That’s sort of an indirect way to, to have the, the, the self in there. But what’s beautiful about self-awareness is that you sort of, the individual, the self-aware individual is able to separate themselves from the environment. So it’s not just a model of everything that includes [00:22:00] the entity that is self-aware.

It’s a strict separation between the entity and the rest of the world. Mm-hmm. Separation. Is, is really the difference between just a, uh, I don’t know, a self-driving car that’s just modeling everything, uh, versus something that is aware of what part of the dynamics of the world is. Is within its own boundary and what’s outside the boundary, and that separation is really key.

In fact, you know, I, I, I believe that that separation, it endows a, a big evolutionary advantage because once you understand what that boundary between yourself and the environment, you understand that if you are, if you change environments, you only need to relearn the environmental part. But this. You yourself have not changed.

So, so it’s a shortcut. You can ex, you can learn a lot faster once you can separate yourself out from the environment. Mm-hmm. Because when you move to a new [00:23:00] environment, you’re not changing the environment is, you only have, uh, a little bit, uh, to learn. For example, if you’re playing, uh, tennis and you learn how to move your arm and you learn the rules of the game, and now you go and play a different game, go play badminton.

You don’t need to learn how to move your arm again. Because it’s the model of yourself remains the same. You only need to learn new rules for the game. Only the game has changed, but you yourself have not changed. So that separation of self and environment is really, really important. Animals that can’t do that, they just have to learn the whole map of the world and themselves together, like you say.

But once you can separate it. Huge advantage. And I think that’s the origin of why this, uh, uh, self-awareness is, uh, so powerful in nature and why we see it mostly with complex creatures like humans. Mm-hmm. They have a lot of versatility in what they can do and can glean a lot of advantages from this separation.

Zach: [00:24:00] Another thing that has struck me in my very amateur thinking in, in being important for developing something that approaches self-awareness is. The ability to experience some sort of equivalent of the visceral sensations that creatures have, like pain and hunger. In other words, it’s, it’s hard for me to imagine a system that would be motivated to.

Improve and evolve in some way, either if we’re talking iterations or just within itself over time, without some sort of analog of, of physical feelings to drive it, to improve from its environment. And I’m curious, is that something you also believe, and maybe you could talk a little bit about how one would even create those kinds of impacting sensations on a, on a, uh, artificial being.

Hod: Your question there has a couple of, of, uh, really big sub-questions there. At least two. One one. You’re asking about, uh, feelings and emotions. And the other one which you touched upon, I believe is, is the [00:25:00] question of free will.

Zach: And to be clear, I I just meant the, uh, I, I was mainly talking about like the, the pain and, and the visceral sensations.

And I, I think the, um. The motivations was more like just the, the things that impact a creature from its environment. That, and, uh, to tie it into this Hy Conan Penti Hy Conan’s ideas, he, he called it the self-explanatory information, which is information that doesn’t need processing. There’s no, there’s no symbolic meaning.

It’s just acting on a, a negative or a positive. From the environment. If, if that makes, if that clarifies my question anymore. Yeah.

Hod: Okay. I think so. There’s a, there’s a lot to unpack there, but I think if, if, if you talk about pain for example, you know, sort of emotions that are more immediate as opposed to, let’s say long, uh, worrying about something or concern about long-term things, I think, I think these are all, again, on a continuum of.

Predictions [00:26:00] about the self, really. So everything from pain to concern, to happiness, to love, to passion, to all these different things are sort of, uh, in a, in a very unromantic way. They’re boiled down to sort of predictions in the self simulation. Uh, if it’s, uh, if it’s imminent danger, then it could be fear If it’s long-term, a danger, it could be more sort of concern or, or anxiety about something.

Uh, if it’s, uh, future good fortune, it’s gonna be, you know, sort of happiness kind of thing. So, so a, a lot of our emotions, I think. Predictions of this self model, uh, and, and where we see it. So now we have evolved to react based on these predictions. So if we see a prediction, uh, of, uh, imminent, uh, danger, we have policies in our brain that’ll make us, uh, react in [00:27:00] some way, fight or flight, or.

Whatever it is we need to do. So I think this, this, uh, evolution plays into how we respond to these emotions, but these emotions themselves are predictions, uh, about the future. And machines can have these types of predictions, just like, uh, humans and animals do. There’s nothing, uh, magical about it.

Zach: So, sounds like you’re saying, I almost have it kind of backwards, whereas you, you, it sounds like you’re saying the more advanced the consciousness becomes, then the more.

Whatever factors are are affecting, its. Consciousness will be perceived as pain or other. Exactly. Um,

Hod: that’s exactly true. Yeah. I think you phrased it better than I did. So you can feel pain about the state of, uh, the human condition. Alright. Uh, around the plant. That’s a, that’s a different kind of pain than touching something that’s too hot.

But, uh, it, it pains you in a different way. But it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the same. It’s still [00:28:00] pain. Yeah, it’s still pain and it’s a pain. It’s a different way, but it has to do with our ability to model the future of the world and ourselves in it and understand the consequences of that, that are negative, the negative consequences, and that translates into pain.

So I think a lot of, and the same thing, by the way, can happen to happiness, to enthusiasm, to, to excitement, to all the whole spectrum. And, and I think, uh, that’s exactly it. It’s, it’s, uh, it, it boils down and then we, we learn how to react. You know, we, we react to these emotions in different ways, uh, that are themselves, uh, evolved policies.

Zach: So do you think it’s accurate to say then that if, if we did create some sort of artificial, self-aware in some way, entity. That it would naturally come to have, um, something that, that was akin to its own version of, of pain. Even though, like you said, it, it, these things will likely not be in any way, uh, comparable to us even if they, [00:29:00] they reach that stage.

But it sounds like you’re saying they would naturally come to have, you know, just, just from ha having negative. Positive reinforcements of various sorts. Those things would theoretically translate as a version of, of pain maybe.

Hod: Yes. I think that will happen. Uh, and again, this is both, you know, it’s, it’s exciting, but it’s also sort of, we, we won’t be able to necessarily understand a lot of these emotions.

Mm-hmm. Because again, we understand emotions in the context of our owns.

Mating. I mean, we have, we have human context to emotions. Very, very difficult to understand. That a AI has, that has different sensations, that has different, uh, sensors, different environments, but it is going to have those kinds of emotions. And in fact, I think it’s gonna be part and parcel of being intelligent.

There is no intelligence, [00:30:00] uh, at that level without emotions. I think that’s one mistake that a lot of, uh, people who talk about AI sort of like to separate it out, but I think it’s.

Even issues like conflicting emotions, which are, you know, the of, of human existence, uh, are gonna play out with ai. Conflict predictions, uh, short term versus long term. Mm-hmm. Cost versus benefit. All these conflicts are gonna play out in, in a similar yet different way, Foris. And, uh, they’re gonna give rise to all kinds of emotions that we can’t imagine and, uh, for which we don’t have even words.

Zach: That kind of maps over a bit to the Yeah, the existential philosophy, uh, school of ideas, you know, we all, we all have these influences on us based on just pure facts of, of being, uh, of existing in the world. You know, like fear of death, fear of isolation, fear of, [00:31:00] uh, meaninglessness, fear of, uh, freedom, the ability to, to act.

Um, so yeah, that kind of maps over to these core kind of stresses that you can imagine a artificial. Being, having those, you know, any, any existing being theoretically having these, like just the stresses of existence and the, and the conflicts that that. Produces Yeah. It’s possible to, to imagine that.

Yeah. Right.

Hod: And so it, it, it’s also likely therefore that, uh, a future AI will be just as emotional and sentient and rich. Its poetry will will come, its art will arise from, from these conflicts that, from the struggles that it experiences. I mean, a lot of a, everything that we sort of, uh, are. Feel that we’re unique, I think is gonna happen pretty soon with AI as well.

And yet that’s something that’s very, very difficult for us humans to share. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people who say, you know, but we, humans we’re different. The machine cannot have [00:32:00] emotions. A machine cannot feel, a machine cannot have, uh, desires. A machine cannot, uh, be creative because it’s.

The same way as humans are. And I think that’s, um, that’s this simply, it’s a very narrow view. It’s a, a very human-centric view. But once you, once you sort of let go of that, you’ll see that, that we are actually going to experience an incredible moment where we will not be the only intelligent, uh, sentient beings on the forms of sentient.

I for one. Uh, I’m looking forward to that because I, I, I want to see what, uh, what else is out there. How, how else can you experience the world in ways that, that we, humans can’t, I think, I think we’re only seeing a tiny corner of the, of the, of the world this way.

Zach: Yeah. That’s what interests me in it. Even just the, the idea of how thinking about these things or the advances in the.

In these [00:33:00] industries, shed some light on the human condition, you know? Mm-hmm. That the fact that there are these, you know, our, our, our minds are, are logical things and the stresses on them are, are logical and understandable. And that, that’s what interests me anyway, that, that tie in. Uh, so getting into the.

The public’s perception of some of the dangerous aspects, theoretical aspects of artificial intelligence, the the risks involved based on how far from self-awareness properties that the current artificial intelligence work seems. Personally, in my opinion, I think that humanity will likely destroy ourselves as a species within not too long, because I think.

For various reasons, like weapons to come that we really don’t have an idea of, of what they’ll be like in the next few decades. And we’ll have, uh, you know, the ability to create manmade diseases, things like this. Uh, personally I think I, I’m pretty pessimistic about our chances of survival. So I, I actually am not too [00:34:00] scared of ai ’cause in the realm of possible threats, I see it as being farther out.

Mm-hmm. But I’m curious, do you see this self-aware, artificial being. How far away do you see it in the future, and do you see it as, as much of a threat comparison to other things?

Hod: Well, I, I share your perspective. Uh, the way I like to see it is sort of the danger is not what AI is gonna do people, but what people are gonna, people using AI and.

That’s, that’s the more immediate threat. I’m a little bit more, uh, optimistic, I would say. I think we’ve been, uh, we’ve encountered many powerful technologies in the past, uh, for which, uh, we thought, I’m gonna usher the end of the world from, from nuclear to genetics. Uh, you know, to fire. I mean, there’s been a lot of discoveries that could, uh, end the world, but they haven’t.

And, uh, it’s not that they weren’t bad actors, but somehow a better nature prevailed and we were able to, to use these technologies, uh, for, [00:35:00] for good, for the most part. It’s not, it’s not clean and simple, but for the most part, so I’m, I’m optimistic, we’ll.

Use this technology for good, but at some, and that will allow us to reach that point eventually where AI is, is superhuman. And you know, again, lots of books have been written about that and uh, that moment of singularity where the AI makes decisions in its own interest. Uh, and takes over the world or whatever it might be.

I think that the reality is gonna be very different. Um, the reality will be more like, uh, we are gonna co-evolve with lots of ai. This is another, I think, misconception around artificial intelligence. There is this idea that AI is one thing. And it’s gonna do this and that it’s gonna take over the world or not take over the world.

But the reality is, I think AI is more like a a, uh, I like to think about it as the sixth kingdom, [00:36:00] another kingdom of life. Just like we have plants and we have animals and we have fungi, the the five kingdoms. We also will have a sixth one, and that’s gonna be lots of different types of ai, big ones and small ones, and not so smart ones.

All shapes and sizes and, uh, we will co-evolve with this. And it just like we can deal with different animals with different capabilities. Some are stronger than us and some are faster than us. Uh, there’s gonna be lots of different ais and we’ll co-evolve and I think it’s gonna be okay, uh, because it’s not gonna happen overnight.

Mm-hmm. So I’m a little bit o more optimistic, uh, about it, but I think. One thing we can agree upon that, that this thing is gonna happen pretty soon in evolutionary times. Maybe a few decades, maybe a century, but you know, our grandchildren are gonna live with this.

Zach: Getting back to the idea that these things could theoretically happen quite quickly, even though I see [00:37:00] it as as farther out, I also see the potential for sort of like somebody like yourself doing work where you are able to isolate some interesting property and then very quickly it like self-educate and reaches some pretty amazing states of things I can totally imagine.

Mm-hmm. That happening too. And do you see, do you see that as possible, like someone like yourself or, or someone doing similar work to go from finding this property, this interesting property of, of a certain architecture to like within a few, just a few weeks, months or years, having something that’s suddenly like quite.

Self-aware in a very quick way like that.

Hod: Yeah. I think what’ll, what we’ll have is, uh, it will, it will take, uh, again, a few decades, which, which is nothing in human evolution mm-hmm. But a few decades is enough for us to sort of adapt as humans as well, uh, under, and again, it’s not gonna be just one thing.

It’s gonna be lots of them. They’re gonna compete, AI are gonna compete with other ais more than compete with human. And in terms of resources and things like that. [00:38:00] So it’s, again, it’s like an ecosystem of, uh, you know, bacteria compete, uh, you know, viruses. As we all know, affect humans, but, but they’re not sort of hell bent on destroying humans.

They’re just competing with other viruses mostly. And, uh, and the same thing is gonna happen with ai. It’s, it’s, it’s an ecosystem and I think will happen quickly, but slowly enough that we can keep, uh, keep up with it and, uh, have. Allies and use AI to create checks and balances on other ais and things like that.

There’s a lot of ways out, uh, from, uh, out of this that are not as, uh, dark as you know, this AI that takes over the world.

Zach: One reason I’m interested in artificial intelligence topics is what it might tell us about our own minds. For example, I sometimes think of different kinds of mental illness as being.

Possibly due to manifestations of faulty models of the world, because what our [00:39:00] human minds do is just so. Complex and having to keep track of so many things. Having to keep track of say, the external physical environment, having to keep track of our physical selves in that world. Having to keep track of our internal mental model of ourselves, having to keep track of the concept of other entities around us who are like ourselves, having to keep track of the, the social world where, which is this abstract world of symbols and meanings that we share with these other beings around us and that help us.

You know, function in ways that are considered normal and socially acceptable. So it’s just a tremendously complex set of models that have to relate to each other. And all these very specific ways have to function in very aligned and exact ways for us to, you know, be considered normal and functional.

And it’s possible to see different types of mental disorders, mental stresses as various kinds of breakdowns in these models and how they relate to each other. And I’m curious, is that something that you’ve thought about or, or that you’ve seen? Talked about [00:40:00] it in, in the realm of like how theories of self-awareness or consciousness map over to the real human world.

Hod: Yeah, no, that’s a very good point. We’ve actually seen this happen with robots, uh, in a very small way. Uh, disorders, if you like, for example, I’ll give you a a a simple example. We have a robot that creates a, a self model, a, a model of its own physical body, uh, from experience. And this robot has, let’s say four legs.

On occasion, and this doesn’t happen frequently, but on occasion it will create a model of itself that, let’s say, has one of the legs in the wrong place. And it just, it just insists that that leg is. It’s self model is just wrong. We, we can tell from the outside that it sees itself incorrectly, and yet because of that self model that’s a little bit incorrect.

It can, it predicts that it’s gonna walk faster than it really can. Right? So it has a, if you like, if it has a, [00:41:00] an inflated self model. And because of that, it’s, its predictions are off and yet it learns how to walk, uh, using that self image. In other words, sometimes even if your self model is wrong, it’s inflated, it can still lead, help you make the right decision.

So, so you can see sort of an inflated self model. You can have a deflated self model. The self model can be incorrect. So you can see a lot of parallels like that with, uh, with the way humans see themselves. Mm-hmm. And, uh, we’ve seen situations where a robot loses a leg in reality, but it fails to adapt itself model.

So it has something that’s equivalent to a phantom limb syndrome. Mm. Uh, if you like. Now we usually chalk this up to a quote unquote bug in the, in the software, but reality is exactly what you say. These, these, these, these are very complex systems with lots of ways to go wrong. And when they go wrong, they go wrong in, in, in, in many ways that give.

All kinds of, uh, [00:42:00] results to the self models. Sometimes a positive, like an inflated self image can be useful in some circumstances. Uh, sometimes, uh, they’re painful because the model, the mismatch with reality causes, uh, problems. This also means that when we look forward into what these ais will actually look like and what they will.

Feel they will have problems. They will have disorders just like humans and sometimes they will be depressed, for example, because they are looking for, you know, their meaning. They will not be a, your driverless car is not gonna be happy taking the same route every day. It’s gonna be say, why am I doing this?

I wanna do something more interesting. I mean, I dunno where it’s gonna end, but.

Pure calculating lo cold, logical machines that are gonna just, uh, you know, do the same thing. They’re gonna be very sort of, uh, rich and complex for better and for [00:43:00] worse.

Zach: Yeah, that’s what strikes me about. Existing in the world is the fact that you have to, there’s so much to balance between the, the modeling of yourself and the modeling of the environment.

And for one example of, of something I’ve thought about in this area is psychosis could be seen. I. As a kind of turning inward, a, a falling apart of one’s model of the external world and one one’s model of of other entities, and a focus on one’s internal symbols. Uh, so that one’s internal world and, and internal sensations and concepts start to take the place of the signals that used to come from other external sources, you know, that that would be there in a more, uh, well-functioning set of models.

So that’s just. One example and, and, uh, right. Yeah. It just seems like there’s so much complexity Yeah. Of things that have to be aligned, you know?

Hod: Exactly. I mean, uh, look, the self simulation that we have in our mind is not only used for making grand decisions, they’re also used to make a decision about where I’m gonna put the foot, my foot [00:44:00] next when I’m walking.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, this self simulation happens at all levels, at all scales, with all kinds of details. And when that self simulation goes wrong, it inaccurate. It’s, uh, isn’t adapted to reality fast enough or so or so on, then uh, you make bad decisions and then bad things happen. And, and with that can manifest in, in long term bad decisions in, in short term, in falling over, uh, physically or falling over, uh, in, in more, uh, abstract ways.

That’s exactly sort of the complexity and that when the boundaries and the accuracy, uh, begin to fail, all kinds of things happen.

Zach: Yeah. It gets into, you know, the, the, the negative, uh, phrase of, of someone being self-conscious as being too, too much aware. I. Themselves, you know, that, that phrase that we use for that, it’s almost like an awareness that we have of, you know, we have to keep that balance between the outside world and, and ourselves at some, some sort of even footing.

But that’s, you know, easier [00:45:00] said than done when you’re, when things aren’t lined up Right. But, uh Right. It’s,

Hod: and I think it’s also important to understand, uh, we humans probably don’t have a single self model. We have many self

Zach: models. Mm-hmm. Competing self models,

Hod: uh, uh, not just competing, uh, models at different scales, uh, models, uh, at different, uh.

Times, uh, different scales, different situations, different situations, and we pick and choose which one we’re gonna use, and sometimes we pick the wrong one, or we have, uh, competing ones for the same situations. And we pick and choose based on, on all kinds of cues. So in the same way, AI is not gonna be this monolithic self awareness gonna be, again, a, a forest, if you like, of self-aware models, and it will pick and choose.

Or they won’t compete or cooperate in, in, in lots of interesting way. Again, lots of opportunities for, for things to go wrong, but lots opportunities for sort of very powerful. Uh.

Zach: It seems like part of the challenge for [00:46:00] someone doing your kind of work is just staying up to date on all the many advances that are happening.

And I’m curious, what is a way that you stay up to date on all the studies that come out, come out on this, these things?

Hod: Uh, well, I, uh, well, first of I, I’m, I’m lucky to have a lot of students, uh, and they burst into my office, uh, sometimes virtually. And say, did you see this new result? Uh, this happened?

That happened? Mm-hmm. And so they, they keep me, uh, abreast. But, but it’s true. There’s a lot happening in the field of ai. Luckily, there’s a, uh, quite a few, uh, you know, repositories and, uh, podcasts like your own and uh, and blogs that sort of try to digest a lot of what’s happening and make it possible because there is a lot happening.

Absolutely.

Zach: Is there anything you’d like to mention that we haven’t touched on?

Hod: Yeah, I mean, the, the, there’s the, the big elephant in the room here is I think, uh, which we haven’t talked about is the ethics of all of this. You know, is this something, you know, we don’t. [00:47:00] I have self aware machines, period. And we’re just gonna shut down this whole line of research again.

That’s a, that’s a, that’s a question I get by email quite frequently for people who are legitimately concerned. You know, are we playing with fire here? And it’s dangerous and. Um, I don’t wanna sound like I’ve, I, um, I’m confident that, uh, with the answer here, or that I’m complacent with, with the dangers of this technology, it’s, it’s possibly the most powerful technology we will ever develop.

And I’m not the, the first or last to say that. Uh, and so we need, do, need to proceed with caution. And, uh, I think that part of the reason why I’m talking to you and why I talk to other places about this topic, I don’t think this is stuff that, that should be done, uh, behind closed doors. It’s something that we should, the entire public should understand.

This is unfolding. It’s part and parcel, I believe, of making intelligent ai. We’re [00:48:00] not gonna be able to develop a very intelligent AI system for, I dunno, for managing. Finances without it. Eventually having these self modeling capabilities is gonna be part and parcel of any system we develop and everybody needs to be aware of it, and we should understand the consequences and make a decision together.

So I’m glad, uh, we’re discussing this and, and I think, uh, everybody should be aware. It’s, it’s, uh, it’s uh, it’s coming fast and, uh mm-hmm. It’s right around the curve.

Zach: Okay. Thanks a lot for coming on. Ha. It was very interesting. Thank you.

Hod: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Zach: This has been an interview with Hod Lipson.

You can learn more about his [email protected] if you wanna see some resources on topics referenced in this interview. And some resources that I used for research. You can find that at my website, behavior podcast.com. I don’t make any money on this podcast and I spend a good deal of time on it. If you’ve enjoyed this interview or the podcast generally, please consider leaving me a review on iTunes or [00:49:00] the platform you listen on and consider sharing links to my podcast on Facebook or Twitter or other social media.

I greatly appreciate it. If you happen to play poker, you might also like to check out my work on poker Tells, which [email protected]. Okay. Thanks for listening.

In this episode, I give some thoughts on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict and how some of the anger and emotion around that is caused by political us-vs-them polarization. If you’re someone who has a lot of emotion and anger about the verdict, and you’re someone who wants America to heal, I think you should give this episode a listen.

For a transcript of this episode, see below. If you’d like to check out other politics-related episodes of my show, go here.

Note: I’ve made several edits to this podcast in the first few days after its release. 

Episode links:

• iTunes (embedded below)
• Spotify
• Google Play

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast. This is a podcast about better understanding people and why they behave they way they do. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com.

There’s no guest on this episode; it’ll just be me talking about the immense anger I see from some liberals on the Rittenhouse verdict and how I see that relating to the topic of us-vs-them political polarization.

To give you an example of the kinds of emotional and extreme responses I see, I’ll share a couple.

Someone I know shared this take:

White America is sick to its core. I want to believe we can do better, but then a murderous white boy with an assault weapon is set free (and celebrated) (again) and I can’t imagine where we go from here but further down down down. Kyle Rittenhouse is a cold blooded murderer. And our “justice” system let him go free and congratulated him.

This person also shared what I’m pretty sure is fake, distorted news that the judge had hugged Rittenhouse and called him “a good boy.” I think that originated from a The Daily Show bit, from what I can tell from a quick search.

Colin Kaepernick tweeted the following:

We just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic acts of a white supremacist. This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.

I’ll talk more about that take later in the episode, but those two examples should give you an idea of the kinds of outrage I’m talking about and why I wanted to make this episode.

If you’ve listened to this podcast, you know I focus a good amount on polarization and the psychology behind it. I’ve interviewed a lot of researchers and experts on polarization-related topics; if that interests you, check out my site for a compilation of all the politics-related episodes. If you’re someone who hears about polarization and thinks “why do people always talk about that; clearly one side is horrible, so it makes sense that we’re polarized”; if you think that, there’s an episode with a well known polarization researcher explaining why polarization is a big problem, and how it’s happened in many other countries, and how the U.S. is not unique at all.

Why do I think talking about this is important?

I wanted to do this episode because I thought the high emotions around the Rittenhouse verdict might be useful for examining how us-vs-them polarization plays a role in what people are feeling, how they’re reacting. This episode is focused on what I see as unreasonable emotions and beliefs that liberals had about the verdict. This is not because I am giving conservatives a pass or think that there’s nothing to talk about on that side; clearly there is. It’s simply because my audience is primarily on the liberal side politically, and one of my main goals in talking about polarization is to help more people see how us-vs-them feelings affect their thinking and reactions; That unreasonable us-vs-them filtering is not only something the “other side” does, but something many people are doing, even if you believe the other side is way worse. Put another way: if I had a mainly conservative audience, I’d be talking about bad us-vs-them framing on the conservative side.

Our political anger is not nearly as much about the issues as we seem to think it is; that it is much more about our emotions, our us-vs-them framings. As Anne Applebaum put it in an Atlantic article of hers: “America’s left and right are radicalizing each other.” The rest of us are mainly along for this ride, trying our best to make sense of things. Along the way, we filter out or give a pass to the bad ideas and behavior of people on our side, while we view the bad ideas and bad behavior of people on the other side through the worst possible lens. We view the other side as a monolithic mass, mostly all as bad as the worst people in their group, while we view our side as full of individuals with a spectrum of diverse ideas and opinions, some right and some wrong. We increasingly view all hot button topics as being very simple to understand, with right and wrong stances clearly defined; we ignore the truth that most topics are very complex with a lot of gray area.

So I feel compelled to try to do my best to draw attention to the problem. In the hopes that more people start to understand what the core problems are. In the hopes that more people will decide to work against simplistic, divisive narratives and aim for more nuance. Because that is how we will avoid worst-case outcomes in this country: by more people aiming for nuance. To quote Carey Callahan, who I interviewed on this podcast about trans issues and the polarization around that: “The complexity of the truth is inconvenient for both sides.”

To be clear; examining polarization as our core problem doesn’t mean you have to think both sides are equally bad, or equally at fault. I think this is a common misperception that people have that prevents them from being willing to think about polarization problems. Seeing polarization as the core problem is not a “both-sides” argument. It certainly doesn’t require you to stop fighting for what you believe in or criticizing bad behavior of people on the other side.

Examining polarization as the core problem is simply about noticing how we are all humans reacting to things around us; we are all humans being affected by the us-vs-them narratives around us; it is about realizing how these us-vs-them dynamics get amplified and spread by many people from across the political spectrum. It’s seeing things at an individual human level and not at a tribal, group level. It’s about recognizing the role that we ourselves may be playing in these dynamics and finding things we can do to help reduce our role in adding fuel to the fire and instead looking for opportunities to bring people together. It is about recognizing that people on the so-called “the other side” are responding to the bad, divisive ideas of some people on your side in the same way that you’re responding to the bad, divisive ideas of people on the other side.

It is about recognizing that perhaps instead of traveling in the same path-of-least-resistance us-vs-them ruts we’ve been in, which may lead us to destruction, maybe we need to start criticizing and pushing back on the divisive people around us who promote us-vs-them narratives, whether they’re on our side or not, and maybe we need to start rewarding and honoring the people who speak in more humane, persuasive, and bridge-building ways. Because anyone who’s spent time looking into polarization in a serious way will tell you: we all have much more in common than we think, and our anger is often based on distorted illusions.

Before we start

In this episode, we’ll be examining the outrage that many liberals have about this, and examine how some of that anger may be due not to the case itself, or to Rittenhouse himself, but to the perception that this is the current arena where our us-vs-them battles are being fought. This is not to say that there are no valid reasons to be upset about the Rittenhouse verdict, but I do want to examine exactly why there is so much emotion and anger about it.

I predict if you’re someone who’s outraged about the Rittenhouse verdict, you’ll have an urge to turn off this episode fairly quickly. You may be so upset that you’ll never listen to me again. But if you do want this country to heal, if you do want us to avoid worst case scenarios, I’d ask you to please give it a listen, to see if you find a few tidbits of useful perspective in it. I’ve damaged relationships with liberal friends and family by talking about these topics. I lose some Twitter followers and podcast listeners when I talk about these topics. I may even be hurting my ability to make money in the future, time will tell. All of these outcomes are entirely common and expected results of attempts at bridge building and empathy in very polarized societies like ours. And that’s why so few people do it; the costs are simply too high. I’ve suffered to work on these things not because I enjoy any of this drama or alienation, but because I think these topics are really the most important things we could be talking about right now. So Id’ just ask that even if you do find some of my thoughts stupid or out of touch, please give it a listen. And hopefully you can cut me a little slack along the way because I wrote this in just a few hours, and it’s nearly impossible to talk about such tough, controversial topics accurately and persuasively 100% of the time. I wish I had more hours in the day to devote to this stuff.

If you’re listening to this and you’re politically conservative, hopefully you’re willing to examine similar divisive dynamics on the conservative side. Hopefully you won’t just enjoy this episode as fun liberal-bashing but will try to self-examine how similar things are true of your side. I hope you’ll end up agreeing with me that pushing back against bad, us-vs-them thinking within one’s own political group is one of the most important things we could be doing right now.

The legal aspects

So let’s start with asking: why are so many liberal people so angry about this case?

Is it the verdict itself? Do liberals believe that Rittenhouse should have been found guilty? Do they believe the verdict was unjust? Let’s leave aside Rittenhouse’s character or motivations, let’s leave aside gun laws you may think are bad and idiotic. Let’s just focus on the verdict and if it made sense from a legal perspective.

There are many pieces online you can find talking about how legal experts found the verdict unsurprising and expected. In short: Rittenhouse was able to have those guns, and he had a strong self-defense case. To quote from a recent NPR article:

I think that anyone who saw the evidence could see that the jury might have a difficult time coming to a unanimous decision that Kyle Rittenhouse wasn’t defending himself,” said Julius Kim, a defense attorney and former prosecutor based in the Milwaukee area.

Another quote from that:

Some of the video footage, some of the still frame shots appeared to support the self-defense claim,” said Chris Zachar, a criminal defense attorney based in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Another quote:

The state has to prove that Kyle Rittenhouse provoked the attack by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And so, the question is: If everyone in that courtroom is still not sure, if the judge wasn’t sure, then how are 12 jurors going to be sure?” said Kim.

That’s just from one article. There are many more. Based on the little I’d read about the case, I would have been surprised if Rittenhouse had been been found guilty.

All this is a way of saying that it can be seen as correct that Rittenhouse was acquitted. Correct in the sense that it made sense legally. You may find it upsetting, or believe that the laws should be different, but that’s not how court cases work. They attempt to apply the existing laws to the existing situation.

Or maybe you believe that the prosecutors should have tried the case differently, and gone for lesser charges. So maybe you have some anger at the prosecution, but I think no matter what: Rittenhouse had a strong self defense case.

Another source of anger seems to be about our gun laws. I’ve seen people express anger that someone could go out to a high conflict area with a gun and kill people and face no legal repercussions. But if the law says what he did was legal, that is a statement on the law. That anger can be seen as directed at the law. But we all know our gun laws are very lax in America. I can understand being angry about our gun laws; our country’s perverse relationship with guns has made me seriously consider moving overseas, not even taking into account our other problems. But obviously that is a frustration that is much broader than the Rittenhouse case; anger at our gun laws doesn’t explain why a lot of anger is aimed at Rittenhouse himself or the verdict itself.

One reaction I’ve seen from outraged people is that this case sets a bad precedent. That it shouldn’t have happened because it will cause more people to go out with guns. That may very well be, but even if you see that as a bad thing, that is unrelated to what the verdict should rightfully have been. Juries and judges don’t make decisions based on the message they’ll send to society; they make decisions based on what the existing laws are and try to reach justice for the person being tried.

Another common reaction I’ve seen is that if he were black, he would have been convicted. This is pure speculation; personally I don’t believe that’s true; let’s imagine it was a young black man who did the exact same thing Rittenhouse did; a young black Trump supporter, with all the other elements the same. I think it’s probable he also would have been acquitted, simply because the legal lines were pretty clear, as they were in this case.

But let’s say the idea of racial injustice in the legal system is one thing that makes you angry. That is unrelated to this court case. That is something you could just as easily be mad about for any number of court cases that have happened in the past or going on right now. Put another way: it’s not very logical to think that Rittenhouse should have been convicted because you believe a black person in his position would have been falsely convicted. (There will be more on ‘white supremacy’ allegations later in this episode.)

Obviously I can’t get into all the legal details here; you may still have reasons you believe the verdict was unfair. But I’d say that, even if you think that: you should find the verdict unsurprising. For the simple reason that our legal system is built upon human fallibility. Our jury system is built on an idea that it’s preferred that many guilty people should go free before a single innocent person is ever convicted. So in that sense, how can we be outraged when people we expect to be convicted are not? Human justice is always fallible, jury systems are fallible; their verdicts are subject to randomness and initial conditions. Expecting court cases to go the way you want them to I’d suggest is immature. This is not to say you can’t be mad about badness and injustice in our criminal system, but I’m simply saying that if you examine any court case, you’ll probably find a lot to object to, because human justice is messy, all the people involved are imperfect and make mistakes. It’s a messy business.

And also: it’s very hard to make comparisons between court cases. I see many liberals hold up two slightly similar court cases and point at different results, as if that comparison proves systemic racism, or proves injustice. But obviously it’s hard to find two cases that are exactly the same, and laws differ in different areas, and what prosecutors choose to prosecute differ, and how juries deliberate is subject to randomness and noise. In short; these things are massively complicated, and holding up two slightly similar court cases and saying “see, this shows how broken the system is” is simplistic and immature. Again, this is not to say that injustices don’t exist; it’s merely to say that you need more than weak comparisons or speculations about what you think would have happened.

Is the anger due to thinking that Rittenhouse is a bad person?

So let’s leave aside the verdict and its correctness or incorrectness for now. A lot of the anger from liberals is about how Rittenhouse is a horrible person, maybe even a monster. A lot of the anger seems to be around an idea that Rittenhouse represents everything bad they see about the right: their love for guns, their hatred for liberal protesters, their violence.

I’d propose that such outrage is simplistic, that it doesn’t match the complexity of the situation, that it is similar to Trump supporters who take a single incident involving the bad behavior of a far left activist and use that as the representative symbol of everything they are fighting against.

Let’s leave aside any objections you might have now, like “clearly their side is worse because of x”. We’re examining how the us-vs-them feelings are similar, at an individual level, and how we tend to bring a lot of our team-based fury with us to incidents, and how that causes us to distort our perceptions.

So let’s try to imagine a political mirror image of the Rittenhouse situation. Let’s imagine a situation where a racial justice protester was in a similar situation to Rittenhouse and ended up killing some people in Kenosha. Let’s imagine it went down like this: a protester had gone out with a gun on the night of the Kenosha protests and riots, because he wanted to quote “protect his fellow protesters from fascists.”

If you weren’t aware, there have been quite a few far-left people open-carrying guns at these events. I mention that just in case you think what I’m proposing would be an unusual event.

I’ll quote from a Seattle Times article about a Portland protest in November of 2020:

While others chanted, a young man stood quietly at the edge of the group of protesters gathered near a river-side park with a semi-automatic rifle strapped across his chest. The man said he had grown up with firearms and in recent weeks decided it was time to carry one to the Portland protests. “In our hometown, we need to take care of our community,” said the man who declined to give his name. The man is one of a small cadre of left-wing protesters who on Tuesday and Wednesday were openly carrying weapons as they pulled security duty on the perimeters of marches through Portland.

In Seattle, during the time left wing people had taken over an area around a police station, some people were open carrying there too. Some people were shot and killed. And you probably remember the militant antifa person who shot and killed a Trump supporter in Portland, Oregon.

So back to our imagined story: let’s say this imagined young protester was traveling around with a group of protesters. And this group had thrown a brick into a shop. Shortly after that, the young man became involved in a physical fight with a shop owner. The shop owner physically attacked the young man, the video showed that pretty clearly, and the young man ended up shooting and killing the shop owner and his friend.

During the trial, a video was submitted for evidence that showed the young man, a couple weeks before the incident, telling his friend “Bro, I’d love an excuse to shoot some fascists.” The young man’s lawyers were successful in getting that stricken as evidence from the trial, with the argument that people say all sorts of angry things they don’t mean when they’re venting or showing off, and that nothing in the young man’s past indicated that he was violent or intended violence on the night of the incident, that it was a case of just things going wrong and escalating, that it was all an unintended tragedy, and that, at the end of the day, the young man had been attacked first and defended himself.

After this young man was acquitted, conservative news pundits made confident speculations about the case, like “If this had been a Trump supporter who’d done this, they would have wrongly convicted him and ruined his life, because the liberal-leaning court system is rigged against conservatives right now, as we’ve seen from other high -profile court cases recently.” Liberals might rightfully scoff at such “we’re being victimized” narratives that are based on purely speculative narratives.

Or let’s say this analogy isn’t direct enough. Because it’s of course hard to make exact analogies. Let’s say it was a far left activist with a gun who traveled to what was expected to be a wild, out of control conservative protest in Virginia because he wanted to protect “vulnerable people” from quote “rightwing nuts.” And let’s say that ended with him getting attacked by conservative protesters and shooting some of them.

If you’re a liberal who’s outraged about the Rittenhouse verdict, I’m curious: what would your feelings be about those other cases? If those people had been acquitted, would you be as angry about that situation as you are about Rittenhouse being acquitted?

I would propose that you wouldn’t be as upset about those other cases, and that’s because you view Rittenhouse as “the bad guy” in this. I would propose that the outrage you feel about Rittenhouse is because you are harnessing all the anger you have about Trump supporters and bringing it to bear on this case, that your feelings from outside the case are impinging on this case. That Rittenhouse is simply the latest representation of what you hate about the right, in a similar way that bad liberal behavior is held up by people on the right and made to seem the representative thing they’re fighting against.

But wait, you may be saying: influential conservatives are holding up Rittenhouse as a hero. This is in no way equivalent because influential liberals don’t hold up far left people who kill people as heroes. And to that I’d say: if those kinds of points are reasons you are angry about this case, you are bringing in aspects that aren’t related to this case. In other words: if part of your anger about the Rittenhouse verdict is how he is being treated as a hero by the right, and about how bad and extreme conservatives as a whole are, you are bringing outside and unrelated anger to the case. Because none of those kinds of points pertain to whether Rittenhouse should be acquitted or not. It is a different topic.

Is Rittenhouse a monster?

Maybe a good place to pivot now would be to explain why I don’t view Rittenhouse as a monster. Or at least why I have no good reason to think he is one. Why I see what happened as entirely to be expected given the highly polarized state of our country, the destabilizing impacts of violent riots, the ubiquity of guns, our gun culture, and other factors.

To start with: it’s entirely expected bad things will happen at violent riots. Did you know that 19 people were killed during the U.S. George Floyd-related protests and riots? Wikipedia has a good summary of those incidents.

I’ll read from a Guardian article about a few of these incidents:

In Louisville, the photographer Tyler Gerth was shot and killed at a downtown park where protesters gathered. The alleged shooter, Steven Nelson Lopez, was homeless and had a history of severe mental illness, and had reportedly been asked to leave the park earlier because of his behavior. Many of the protesters in the park were armed and on edge, and returned fire when Lopez started shooting, local news outlets reported.

Another one:

Las Vegas police officer Shay Mikalonis was shot in the head during the protest, and reportedly remains paralyzed from the injury.

From another part of the article:

Other law enforcement officers have been injured in non-fatal shootings this year, including two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies shot in Compton while sitting in their patrol car in mid-September, and two Louisville police officers shot in late September during a protest over the lack of serious charges against police officers in Breonna Taylor’s killing.

Is the Rittenhouse incident any more or less horrible or tragic than the many violent things that have happened during those protests and riots? Is the Rittenhouse incident more horrible than any of the many violent interactions that happen at any time in this country or across the world?

Because many violent interactions are capable of being seen through an us-vs-them filter. To mention a few examples: the Portland antifa person who shot and killed the Trump supporter, or the George Zimmerman trial, or George Floyd’s death, or some of those 19 deaths from the George Floyd-related protests. There’s no shortage of deadly encounters that could be viewed and used as polarizing lightning rods, as anger-inducing representations of our national divides. And clearly, in many of those situations, people behaved badly, stupidly, or hatefully. But we live in a nation of 330 million people and we have a lot of us-vs-them anger, and we have a lot of poverty and a lot of mental stress and a lot of guns; and we’ve been existentially and financially destabilized by covid; are you surprised that we’ve got some bad things happen? Are you surprised that people are getting riled up in various ways? I’m certainly not. In fact, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more violent encounters. (Personally I think that can be seen as due to the ubiquity of video surveillance and smartphones, something I’ll be interviewing a criminology researcher about for the next episode.)

Let’s talk about Rittenhouse’s motivations: his righteous anger about the destructive riots that were happening at that time in Wisconsin. It’s entirely unsurprising to me that some people would be upset about all the rioting we’ve had in this country and want to stand up to that.

As a liberal-leaning resident of Portland, I’ve been disgusted and angry about the actions of militant antifa people and the destruction and chaos they’ve caused in my city. And it’s easy for me to imagine that anger through a more polarized lens; it’s easy for me to imagine being even more angry than I am now. It’s possible for me to imagine feeling that going out and protecting small businesses from chaos and destruction is a righteous and noble cause.

The inherent danger of militant protest behavior, and how it leads to so many bad outcomes and incidents, is one reason I interviewed a militant Portland antifa/BLM protester last year for my podcast; I was curious about what kinds of philosophies such people were using as justification for their bad behavior, and I wanted to highlight to more people just how illogical and dangerous such ideas and behaviors were, because that behavior largely seems to get a pass in liberal-leaning media; it surely isn’t as critically examined as conservative-side violence is.

During my interview with the militant antifa person, they defended physically fighting with cops and setting fires to buildings, said that he imagined a society without police, where citizens themselves police the streets with guns and enforce justice themselves. It was all pretty incomprehensible and idiotic to me. And as regards to their militant protesting actions: the lawless conditions that they create in the streets, however well meaning and noble they think it is, very predictably leads to bad things, including bad things that nobody sees coming. Bad things like Rittenhouse situations. Violent actions result in violent reactions. People will get in fights, people will die. Street violence leads to more political polarization, with each side becoming increasingly riled up about the violence; escalating street violence is a common pathway by which some countries have fallen apart. These people are playing with a dangerous fire they don’t realize the power of, in a similar way that Rittenhouse was playing with fire and likely didn’t realize how often his course of action would lead to unintended tragedy.

It is possible to see Rittenhouse’s motivations as noble; a motivation to protect against chaos and destruction. You may find such a view wrong and misguided, but all I’m saying is that it’s possible to see it through that lens. Just as it’s possible to see the motivations of racial justice protesters who go out with guns as noble when looked at through a certain lens. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with any of these people’s beliefs; I certainly don’t; it simply means being willing to try to see the things that are making them angry and not assigning the worst possible motivations to them. And that also means taking into account the very polarized dynamics of our country and the us-vs-them narratives that very influential people spread.

One popular meme making the rounds on this topic is a quote from the Daily Show host Trevor Noah. that quote goes:

Nobody drives into a city with guns because they love someone else’s business that much. That’s some bullshit. No one has ever thought ‘oh it’s my solemn duty to pick up a rifle and protect that TJ Maxx’. They do it because they’re hoping to shoot someone.

I see that as a very simplistic way to frame things. A conservative could just as easily say the same thing about a liberal activist who is carrying a gun. There are always ways to view anyone who brings a gun to an event as wanting to kill someone, to view it through a lens of “they wanted to hurt people” and not “they wanted to protect.”

Personally, I am willing to give people the benefit of the doubt until I know more; we live in confusing and high-emotion times. We have also been destabilized by covid and the associated stresses of the lockdowns.

To be clear here: my goal here is not to defend Rittenhouse’s decisions, no more than my goal is to defend leftist people who go out to such events with guns. All people who go out with guns should realize that things could end in tragedy, that the night could end with them having killed people they didn’t want to kill, or end with them being killed. As Johnny Cash knew: when you take your guns to town, bad shit can happen.

And it’s probably not a coincidence that this case involved a teenager; it’s perhaps no coincidence that older people who felt the same anger and frustration as Rittenhouse didn’t put themselves in the position Rittenhouse did; because they were more mature and realized things can easily go badly.

But let’s assume Rittenhouse is a bad person

But let’s say that you still think Rittenhouse is a bad person who deserves to be punished. And his badness is what angers you.

I’d ask: are you equally as mad about every violent behavior where a political us-vs-them motive might be seen to play a role. Have you been as equally angry about cases where far left people did violent things?

To take one example: are you aware of the case of William Van Spronson? He was a self-described antifa person who in the summer of 2019, in Tacoma Washington, attacked an ICE facility with a semi-automatic rifle and a propane tank bomb and who died by being shot by police. He was a far left terrorist.

He was a self-described antifa person who, in the summer of 2019, in Tacoma Washington, attacked an ICE facility carrying a semi-automatic rifle and attempting to explode a commercial-sized propane tank. He died by being shot by police.

To quote from a Washington Post piece about that:

“This could have resulted in the mass murder of staff and detainees housed at the facility, had he been successful at setting the tank ablaze,” Shawn Fallah, who heads U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Professional Responsibility, said in a statement.

I’d bet that if you’re outraged about Rittenhouse’s actions, there’s a good chance you’re not as outraged about Van Spronson. You may even intellectually recognize that Van Spronson’s motivations and decisions were much worse than Rittenhouse’s, even if he didn’t succeed in killing anyone, but maybe you’re still emotionally more disgusted by Rittenhouse. Maybe you’re searching for a reason for why your disgust at Rittenhouse makes sense. I’d humbly suggest the reason you’re so much more viscerally disgusted by Rittenhouse, despite Rittenhouse being a much more sympathetic person than many far left extremists I could name, is because of political polarization.

There’s a very good chance you’ve never even heard about that Van Spronson person and what he did. I myself hadn’t heard of him at all until a few minutes ago, when I was researching far left extremism. And I think that says a lot about what gets attention in the liberal-leaning mainstream media and a lot about what drives the perceptions of many people on the left. Because I have no doubt if a far right person had attacked an organization with guns and a bomb as Van Spronson did, I would have known a good amount about it. Often, liberal-leaning mainstream media will even present excuses for far left extremism. In an NPR article about Van Spronson, a person named Mark Bray, who’s a professor and who writes about the antifa movement, argued that quote “it’s unfair to lump militants like van Spronsen into the terrorism category without a discussion of the violent ideologies they were targeting. Antifascists, Bray said, aren’t the ones going on hate-fueled rampages.” end quote.

Here are some other examples of far left extremist violence: there was James Hodgkinson, who in 2017 shot five GOP Congressman in DC because he was so angry politically.

Then there are what the FBI calls Black Identity Extremists. A 2018 report about extremisms lists six attacks by black identity extremists since 2014, including Micah Johnson, the Dallas shooter who killed five police officers in July 2016, and Gavin Eugene Long, the Baton Rouge shooter who killed three officers 10 days later.

My point is: If Rittenhouse’s actions disgust you and outrage you, I hope you are also disgusted by the kinds of far left incidents I’ve named. Hopefully much more outraged by those incidents because those few I’ve named are much more disturbing and vile.

I’m mentioning all this not to try to compare far left or far right extremism body counts. It’s known that far right extremism has resulted in a lot more people killed than far left extremism.

But personally I think such numbers don’t tell the whole story. It’s possible to see left-associated protests and riots as part of this equation of chaos.

I don’t watch much TV at all, but one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in this regard was John Oliver’s episode about George Floyd protests, where he essentially promoted a ‘burn it all down’ perspective. When you look into police violence and the research about it, you’ll find that it’s a tremendously complex topic; there is simply no strong evidence that racism plays a big role in killings by police, that it is much more about socioeconomic status and the high crime areas that police end up policing more. As someone who has looked at the research a good deal, partly in preparation for interviews I’ve done with a retired police captain, I personally think that our country’s huge number of guns is the main culprit here, in how the lurking threat of guns escalates every encounter cops have.

But the role of guns wasn’t mentioned in John Oliver’s episode, at least I don’t remember it being highlighted. He didn’t talk about the complexity and ambiguity of the causes behind police violence, as shown in the numerous academic studies done on the subject. He didn’t talk about the fact that yes of course, the racist history of America has meant that many black people are poor and live in high crime areas that are policed more and have more interactions with police than white people do, but that doesn’t equate to malicious racism, and it doesn’t detract from the fact that high crime areas need to be policed more than low crime areas. He didn’t talk about the fact that many people in high crime areas very much want a police presence, and that “defund the police” slogans and riots might be deeply unsettling to many poor people, including many minority people.

Police presence is the cornerstone of every modern civilized society, but John Oliver focused on tying the concept of American police to the enforcement of slavery; an association that perplexed one of my most liberal relatives, who later asked me what the hell John Oliver was talking about. At the end of his episode, he played a clip of an emotional racial justice activist, Kimberly Jones, who said that she agreed with something Trevor Noah had said: that the social contract was broken, who said, and I’ll transcribe this approximately:

Why the fuck do I give a shit about burning their football hall of fame, about burning a fucking Target. You broke the contract when you killed us in the street and didn’t give a fuck. For over 400 years we played your game and built your wealth.

Later she said:

As far as I’m concerned we could burn this bitch to the ground and it still wouldn’t be enough and they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.

John Oliver, after presenting a very simplistic, un-nuanced, and racially divisive view of what police violence was all about, ended his show on a note of essentially endorsing violence and destruction. I found all this disturbing and irresponsible. Where were the adults in the room? Where were the balanced, nuanced, objective views that sought to examine what I see as much more the truth: that we’re mostly a bunch of people just trying our best to solve problems? How much violence in the George Floyd-related protests might John Oliver’s show have been responsible for? How much responsibility for that might be seen to lie with other influential people promoting similar views? Is it wrong to examine all these complex sides of the equation if our goal is truly to understand why people do the things they do? If our goal is to understand the violence around us? If a conservative host had promoted such a divisive narrative and endorsed violence in that way, would you find their behavior irresponsible? Do liberals get a pass from all criticism and blame because they’re on our side?

My point again isn’t to blame liberals or say that they’re as bad as conservatives; I find the attempt at score keeping unproductive and impossible anyway; these dynamics are complex and overlapping. I’m a lot more interested in why individuals behave the way they do; what the narratives are that are driving their behavior.

My point is that there are many divisive us-vs-them narratives floating around, from across the political spectrum, capable of producing very bad behavior when people fully embrace them. Both the left and the right are capable of some apocalyptic, good-versus-evil rhetoric about the other side, or about the evil nature of society and government systems. And many people on both sides seem capable of excusing the bad behavior of people on their side while being driven into a frenzy by the bad behavior of people on the other side; that is after all what tribalism and polarization is all about.

When I hear about people who’ve been radicalized by these kinds of narratives and do violent things, my primary thoughts are sadness that people have let such divisive narratives drive them mad. It is understandable to me how people are seduced by all sorts of simplistic us-vs-them narratives; we become emotionally isolated, we become obsessed, we want to find a purpose for our lives, we want to be heroes, we want to be martyrs. We all have factors for why we believe what we believe. We are all human.

I think what we need are more people combating the divisive ideologies around us; what we need are more people building more nuanced and empathetic narratives about how the world works and where we should be going.

Claims of white supremacy

One of the more disturbing things about liberal reactions to Rittenhouse and the case has been the confident ways that people claim Rittenhouse is a white supremacist or that the verdict represents a white supremacist system.

The tweet from Colin Kaepernick represents a good summary of all of this kind of thinking:

We just witnessed a system built on white supremacy validate the terroristic acts of a white supremacist. This only further validates the need to abolish our current system. White supremacy cannot be reformed.

These kinds of takes are everywhere on social media and in the news. One Washington Post op-ed reads “Kyle Rittenhouse, whiteness and a divinely ordained license to kill.”

Congressperson Cori Bush had a tweet that read:

The judge. The jury. The defendant. It’s white supremacy in action. This system isn’t built to hold white supremacists accountable. It’s why Black and brown folks are brutalized and put in cages while white supremacist murderers walk free.

These takes are disturbing for the extremity of the claims and for the casualness with which people make them.

One thing that probably helped promote the idea that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist was that President Biden communicated this to the public. Biden made a tweet after one of the presidential debates about Trump that read:

There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night.

That tweet included a video that used a voice-over of a moderator’s question from the presidential debate. The moderator asked Trump about white supremacist violence. As the moderator’s voice said “as we saw in Kenosha”, the video showed an image of Rittenhouse.

First, with regards to Rittenhouse himself: There is no evidence I’ve seen that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. Rittenhouse’s decision to go out to protect businesses and act as a law-and-order enforcer, while you may see it as misguided and stupid and reckless, or even as hateful or murderous, has nothing to do with white supremacy that I can see. It’s maybe worth pointing out that many people at these events, including many people doing destructive and violent things, were white. I don’t know about Kenosha specifically but in Portland and Seattle, most of the fighting with cops and damage to property was done white people. All three of the people shot by Rittenhouse were white, as far as I know.

The one slim piece of evidence I’ve seen presented that he’s a white supremacist is that, when Rittenhouse was out on bail not long after his arrest, he was hanging out at a bar with some far right types, including people from the Proud Boys group. There’s no evidence I’ve seen that Rittenhouse knew these people beforehand. Rittenhouse was wearing a shirt with the words ‘Free as fuck’ on it. At that bar, there was a picture taken of him putting up the OK symbol, which has gotten press for being used by white supremacists.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but first: while that symbol does seem to be used by some bad people, including white supremacists, it also seems to be something done by far right people to trigger and upset liberals.

I’ll quote from the Anti Defamation League website about how that symbol and its recent meaning originated:

“The “OK” hand gesture originated as one of these hoaxes in February 2017 when an anonymous 4channer announced “Operation O-KKK,” telling other members that “we must flood Twitter and other social media websites…claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.” The user even provided a helpful graphic showing how the letters WP (for “white power”) could be traced within an “OK” gesture. The originator and others also suggested useful hashtags to help spread the hoax, such as #PowerHandPrivilege and #NotOkay. “Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy,” wrote the poster, “We must force [them] to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that s***.”

There is a definite culture of malicious trolling by many far right people. And clearly some of the people who use these symbols are white supremacists. But even the group that gets a lot of press as being clearly white supremacist, the Proud Boys, have members who are racial minorities; to me, that group could be more accurately described as culturist than racist; and that’s not to give them a pass at all as in some sense those two things can be very related and overlapped. But in short, all these things are not as simple as they appear.

But let’s assume for now that that OK symbol is a symbol of white supremacy, or even let’s assume it’s one of significant us-vs-them hate. In an interview later, Rittenhouse claimed that he did not know what the symbol meant. He also says that he blamed that outing to the bar on his lawyers, John Pierce and Lin Wood, who Rittenhouse’s family later fired. To quote from a NY Post article:

Kyle Rittenhouse claimed his ex-attorney quote “set him up” for a photo of him posing with purported members of the Proud Boys and making a hand gesture used by white supremacists.

Rittenhouse blasted his former legal team, John Pierce and Lin Wood, saying he didn’t know the “OK” hand signal is now associated with white supremacy and claiming he “didn’t know what a militia was” until after he was arrested.

Some people have scoffed at this idea, that Rittenhouse wouldn’t know the meaning or common interpretation of that symbol. But many people simply don’t know how few people are actually keyed into internet memes and meanings. The people who use a lot of social media and who stay abreast of the latest internet outrage tend to think that everyone else has the same obscure knowledge they do, or must have the same interpretations of things as they do. It would not be surprising to me at all that Rittenhouse wouldn’t know what that symbol was, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me that the people around him had pressured him in some way to put up that symbol.

The reason that scenario is easy to imagine is because it’s clear that the people around Rittenhouse at that time were people who did not have his best interest in mind. One of his lawyers at that time was Lin Wood. Lin Wood later gained prominence as being a prominent spreader of claims that the 2020 election was stolen; he’s a creepy dude into QAnon claims and such. Think about how destitute of judgment these people were to bring Rittenhouse to a hangout with far right people, to have Rittenhouse out in public wearing an offensive ‘free as fuck’ shirt, to have him posing for pictures with far right people, all this before his trial. It seems clear to me that these were morally bankrupt people who had no concern that Rittenhouse, a teenager, might have his reputation destroyed in the public eye, right before a trial that might destroy his life. These were this young man’s protectors.

In that kind of atmosphere and with the people surrounding Rittenhouse, and with the ambiguity of the OK symbol in the first place, and with Rittenhouse saying he blames his lawyer and disavows what happened that night, there’s a lot of reasonable doubt. If this is the only evidence you have that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, it’s very bad evidence. Consider how easily conservatives might use equally slim evidence to paint a far left person charged with something similar as a white-hating racist who wanted to kill white people. Personally, I think it’s reprehensible to accuse Rittenhouse of white supremacy from the evidence I’ve seen presented. It’s easy to forgive random citizens for making these claims, but it’s harder to forgive people with large platforms, people who claim to be objective, who want to be seen as responsible thinkers and leaders.

Let’s consider Biden’s tweet that communicated to the public that Rittenhouse was a white supremacist. Now it’s easy for me to give their team the benefit of the doubt because i’ve worked in TV news and digital media and I know how easy it is to put out wrong stuff. It’s easy for me to imagine them lazily and accidentally editing that video and just looking for things to match the moderator’s voice-over and not really thinking things through. It’s also easy for me to imagine based on the ok symbol press that the people making the video fully believed Rittenhouse was a white supremacist. I tend to think we’re all being driven mad in general by things that can be easily explained by errors and not maliciousness; we’re filtering everything through a lens of ‘they intended that’ instead of ‘might that just be a mistake or a misunderstanding?

But all motivations aside: surely you should be able to see what is so wrong and divisive about the President of the United States putting such a damaging and incendiary claim out there in the public before someone’s trial. Surely you can see what it is that makes conservatives angry about that. In the same way that liberals are made very angry by confident, worst-possible lens takes that conservatives make. In the same way that liberals were made very angry by Trump making tweets that seemed to attempt to influence court cases that were still in progress.

And these confident pronouncements about so many things being related to white supremacy are everywhere these days; you can find influential journalists and pundits who confidently state that the January 6th Capital riot was a “white supremacist coup attempt” and similarly worded statements. But the fact is that there were black Trump supporters and other minority Trump supporters at that event. Simply put: believing the 2020 election was rigged doesn’t require you to be a white supremacist, any more than support for Trump requires that; it simply requires you to have believed that narrative about the election, which was promoted by many influential people, including the President himself and a lot of influential rightwing media. It is easy to see how people believe such things when so many powerful people are dedicated to spreading them.

And these confident pronouncements of things being about white supremacy are everywhere these days; I have seen influential journalists and pundits confidently state that the January 6th Capital riot was a “white supremacist coup attempt” or similarly worded phrases. But there were black Trump supporters and other minority Trump supporters at that event; you don’t have to be a racist to believe the election was rigged; you just need to have swallowed the lies and deception about the election, which was promoted by many influential people, including the President himself. You may believe that Trump is a white supremacist, or that he’d set up a white supremacist government, but clearly that is not everyone’s view, as shown by his significant support from minority demographics. I’m someone who believes Trump is a truly horrible pathological narcissist and I believe he may end up being the cause of, or at least a core contributing factor in, the downfall of our democracy. I have a very negative of view of Trump, and still it’s not clear to me how racist he is or what he’d do with more power. Even if was pretty certain he was a hardcore racist, I’m not sure what he’d do policy-wise about that considering keeping his racial minority supporters and non-racist supporters from turning on him would probably be an important part of him retaining power. If you’re someone who’s 100% certain that Trump is a white supremacist or you’re certain of how him taking illegitimate power would result in a white supremacist government, I’d suggest that your certainty about something that many people are far from certain about, even people on your own side, is an indicator that maybe you’re looking at things in a very polarized, worst-frame light.

Returning to the Rittenhouse verdict and people claiming the results were ‘white supremacist’: considering that it’s not surprising to many law-knowledgeable people what the verdict would be — to claim that the jury’s finding was racist doesn’t make much logical sense. Personally I think if Rittenhouse had been black, he would have likely been acquitted, just as Rittenhouse was. It seems like the legal lines around this specific incident were fairly clear, or at least we can say it’s not certain he should have been convicted. Put another way: if a black person who’d done the same things Rittenhouse had done had been found guilty, it seems clear that many law experts would have been surprised. And there are clearly cases of black people being acquitted of murder or manslaughter with a self-defense argument. There was a high profile one about a black man named Coffee being acquitted a few days ago. But of course comparisons of cases are hard to make, because every court case is unique, and it is hard to compare court cases that happen in different areas, and which have different judges and juries. So I’d say: considering all these facts and all this ambiguity, does it make sense to call the results of this verdict “white supremacist”? Or to claim that such a single case points to our system being white supremacist?

So what’s the problem with all of these confident and common pronouncements that “white supremacy ‘is to blame for all the things we don’t like around us? I’d argue that it has big negative effects, and that liberals need to grapple more with what those effects are. Imagine that you’re an average Trump supporter who does not see themselves as racist (let’s make it a black Trump supporter just in case, to drive the point home better). And imagine that you see liberal media and liberal citizens constantly painting everything with the “white supremacy” brush. Imagine how little respect you’d have for such incendiary accusations when you see little to no basis for those accusations.

Imagine how these constant hysterical accusations might make you feel that the left has lost its mind, that their hysteria about those things must point to their unreasonable hysteria about other issues.

All of this exaggerated emotion from the left makes it easy to not take them seriously.

Worse, it results in some people reaching the conclusion, “Hey, it really does seem like the media and influential liberal leaders are exaggerating what’s going on and exaggerating our divides; maybe the system really is corrupt in some major way; maybe we need to support people like Trump who see these problems”. Maybe once they start seeing some of the problems with bad liberal thinking, they may start to find other question-the-status-quo beliefs more palatable, (like that the election was rigged, or global warming is a hoax.)

We need to face the fact that people are capable of recognizing the bad thinking on the left; they are capable of recognizing how deeply some of that bad thinking is entrenched in liberal-leaning media and in political leadership, and how little that bad thinking and behavior is critically examined or criticized by other liberals — and that recognition is how some people take what they call “the red pill,” how they start to question all the liberal ideas. It’s a rabbit hole that people do go down.

Trump saw a big increase in minority voters in 2020 and it seems quite likely that that increase was at least partly a response to unreasonable rhetoric from the left. For example, the anti-police, anti-prison rhetoric: that kind of rhetoric is understandably scary to people who live in high-crime areas, or if not scary, just downright weird and a bit maddening.

And if you’re by chance a conservative listening to this, hopefully you can see that all the things I’ve said apply to conservatives, too. For example: Trump’s reckless and divisive way of speaking have driven many conservatives away from the GOP. Pushing back against your side’s divisive behavior and trying to bring more nuance to the discussion is how you make your side more persuasive and reach more people. In a nation where the political races are so close, one side being slightly more persuasive and getting just a few % points more support can make a big difference. We should all be attempting to speak more to the people who aren’t that extreme; the people who recognize like we do that the extreme narratives on both sides are what is driving our country crazy. Maybe that could be a narrative that could bring us all together more, if more of us had the bravery to call out bad thinking and bad behavior on our side when we see it.

If you’re politically liberal, you may be thinking at this point: but clearly conservatives are the worse group, so why are you focusing on liberals? Any bad stuff on our side is dwarfed by what’s going on over there.

Again: I am not implying that liberals are at fault for our divides, or equally at fault. I have much criticism for the right, especially for the leadership of the right and how they’ve embraced overt us-vs-them narratives in a way that Democrat leaders haven’t. But for the reasons I’ve talked about in this episode, and for other reasons we could talk about, the left has to be seen as contributing to these dynamics. The very definition of polarization implies that both sides must be driven a bit mad; it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where there’s only one side being deranged. But mainly, the reason I’m focusing on liberal stuff is because I have no influence over people on the right; all I can do is talk to the people most likely to listen to me, who are mostly liberals.

I think if you’re striving to understand how our hatred and anger is continually rising, if you’re actually interested in understanding how these dynamics work and what the drivers are, you have to be willing to examine how people on your side are adding to those divides. As Anne Applebaum put it “America’s left and right are radicalizing each other.” You have to come to terms with the fact that none of this stuff is unique to America; we are going through the same polarizing dynamics that have befallen many other nations, like Venezuela, Hungry, Poland, and many others) We are not unique. We are just human. We are prone to the very human tendency to form into groups and go at each others’ throats. And we may be aided in this tendency by our digital media, and by how philosophically and emotionally isolated we are from each other in modern societies. We tend to think our anger is all about the issues but it’s not so much about that; it’s much more about our growing perception that the other side represents all the bad things, all the bad thoughts.

And you can examine these underlying psychological causes for our divides while still continuing to think “the other side is worse.” Even if it was my goal to get you to think both sides are equally at fault, which it’s not, I would not be capable of convincing you of that. There is much to be angry at. I wouldn’t deny you your anger or passion, or pretend there are not valid reasons to be angry.

But I think the value of examining these ideas is that you’ll be making your side more balanced, more persuasive. By working to reduce the polarized, emotional takes of your side, you’ll be making your side speak more to normal, middle-of-road Americans who, believe it or not, may be seeing things in a less polarized way, in less us-vs-them ways, than you yourself are. Many people on both the left and the right are disheartened and disgusted by the constant framing of every hot button issue as the latest high stakes event that represents good versus evil.

The more we strive for nuance, the more coherently we speak, the more we are able to speak persuasively to people who don’t think the same as us. When I interviewed Jaime Settle, who researched the mechanisms behind how Facebook and other social media increase us-vs-them animosity, one of the things she said was most useful in combating extreme polarization was demonstrating to others how we don’t fit into the stereotypes of our group. The more people do that, the more people understand that we don’t easily fit into such extreme and simple categories. The more it’s hard to get mad at “the other side” and all their ideas as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the world. And that idea is partly what motivates me to do this podcast; to demonstrate that complexity with my own ideas.

If you think that Rittenhouse is a monster: where is the compassion and the understanding of complexity that I think you likely bring to other situations, to other people? For example: I’d guess that, when it comes to some violent and criminal behavior in the world, you’re able to examine things like: that person’s environment, their upbringing, the world of ideas they lived inside of, the influence of media, the ease of acquiring guns, our country’s culture of normalizing guns, etc. Where is that curiousness about Rittenhouse’s behavior in this case? Where is that compassion and striving for understanding all the historical and environmental factors that lead to almost all events. Where is that intellectual curiosity about why people act the way they do that I used to appreciate about many politically liberal people I knew?

Because it seems that those things are largely disappearing; our understanding of and tolerance for others seems to be increasingly overshadowed by a desire to see everything through a team-based lens, to score whatever cheap political points we can in the moment.

Mark Lilla wrote a book criticizing Democrat party politics called ‘The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics’. I’ll paraphrase something he said in there: liberals generally have so much empathy for people in developing countries, even those people who behave badly; they’re able to see that there are factors at work that affect people’s behavior, that there are many cultural factors at work. But many liberals aren’t willing to apply that same empathy and understanding for the people who are right down the street from them.

I do think that we all need to get a lot more curious about the people around us and a lot more understanding about their motives if we’re going to avoid worst case scenarios in the near future.

This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn about this podcast at www.behavior-podcast.com. If you liked this episode and think other people should hear it, please share it on social media.

Personally I think more understanding of our us-vs-them dynamics and how they work is one of the most important things we could be talking about. If you liked this topic, please check out some of the past episodes where I discuss political issues.

I make no money on this podcast and spend a good deal of time on it. I also get a good amount of hate for it; my work talking about political polarization topics has strained and ruined some friendships. If you’d like to show some appreciation, you can leave me a rating on iTunes or on whatever platform you listen on, and you can share this podcast with other people. I have a Patreon at www.patreon.com/zachelwood if you’d like to show me some financial support and encourage me to do more work like this.

Thanks for listening.

I talk to sociology researcher Saul Albert (twitter @saul, website: saulalbert.net) about conversation analysis: the scientific analysis of how humans talk to each other. Topics discussed include: what conversation analysis (CA) is and how it’s done; some interesting CA findings described in Elizabeth Stokoe’s book Talk; Saul’s own research; the complexity and difficulty of human communication; the role of silence in conversation; transcription/notation methods used in CA; how conversation analysis relates to the broader field of ethnomethodology; and more.  

A transcript is below. 

Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts 
• Spotify
• YouTube

Resources referenced in this episode: 

• Elizabeth Stokoe’s book Talk: The Science of Conversation 
• My book Verbal Poker Tells 
• EM/CA wiki
• Rose McCabe et al’s work examining communication between doctors and psychotic patients
• Conversation analysis work of Elliott Hoey

TRANSCRIPT

[Note: transcripts will contain errors.]

Zach: Welcome to the people who read people podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com.

On today’s episode, recorded November 11, 2021, I interview Saul Albert about conversation analysis: the scientific analysis of talking and conversation. We also talk about ethnomethodology, which is the broader realm of study under which conversation analysis can be seen to fall; ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction. If you’re interested in language and communication and the complex set of rules that govern these areas, I think you’ll enjoy this one.

I find conversation analysis especially interesting because of the work I’ve done analyzing the verbal behavior of poker players. I spent 8 months,full time, researching and writing my book Verbal Poker Tells. That work involved me logging hundreds of hands of poker from televised poker programs and from hands I played, transcribing the exact statements and conversations, looking for verbal patterns that were highly correlated with specific poker hand strengths. My work wasn’t at a scientific level; i didn’t publish a scientific paper or anything, but it was definitely the most intellectually rigorous work I’ve done. And also the most practically useful work I’ve done when it comes to my poker tells work. Verbal poker behavior is just much more easy to reliably interpret, compared to physical behavior, and that concept I think applies to non-poker, real world situations too. A lot of people have an interest in interpreting nonverbal behaviors, for example trying to analyze footage of people giving speeches of interviews, or of interrogation footage. But really, if you’re interested in these things, your time would just be much better invested in learning more about verbal behavioral patterns; there’s just so much hidden meaning in how people communicate, while I find that the nonverbal, physical behaviors are simply just so often ambiguous and there’s just a lot less meaning in the physical stuff.

A little more about my guest Saul Albert, which I’ve taken from his website saulalbert.net:

His research explores the technology of social interaction at two ends of the spectrum of formalization. At one end, his work on conversational AI asks which features and mechanisms of human social action can be represented and modeled computationally. At the other end, he studies how people make aesthetic judgements and interact while dealing with underdetermined cultural objects and situations. This program spans multiple, often incompatible disciplines, so his work builds methodological interfaces between them.

You can follow Saul on Twitter at @saul: SAUL. Okay, here’s the interview with Saul:

Zach: Hi Saul. Thanks for coming on.

Saul: Hey, Zach. It’s great to be here, Zach. Okay. Or Zachary?

Zach: Zach’s great.

Yeah. Okay, so let’s start with, maybe you can explain what conversation analysis is.

Saul: Sure. Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction, so how people interact, move around in the world, how they structure and organize talk. So it treats talk like a social institution and studies it like any other institution by breaking it down into its component parts, seeing how it’s organized and studying all the different components of it.

So it ranges across anthropology, linguistics, psychology begins with [00:04:00] sociology though. So hence the study of social organization.

Zach: I’ve seen it described as a kind of a slow motion analysis of talk and treating each word and pause an element of conversation as a major event. Do you think that’s a decent analogy for what’s happening?

Saul: Yes, I think so. I. Turning those seen, but unnoticed features of everyday interaction into big subjects of sociological study. It’s, uh, slow motion is one part of it because it comes about first in the 1960s when people began using real to reel tape recorders to capture talk on the telephone and then subject it to empirical analysis.

And until these technologies were widespread and easy to access for sociologists at UCLA or at UC Irvine, where Irvine, where it started. People hadn’t really thought about talk as a worthy subject of study. It was often ignored. [00:05:00] Language was for linguists and it was grammatically or, uh, syntactically.

Correct or not, uh, or it was languages were studied comparatively. And the idea of studying it in that microscopic detail of talk, of the production, of talk, how people sound when they speak, it seemed outlandish, I think, to people at the time, well, certainly to sociologists at the time it was, yeah, kind of.

My bridge moment, if you know Edward, my bridge, who first began using photography to break down the component structure of animal and human movement. I mean, that was in the late 19th century, but there you suddenly had a scientific study of the way that people moved very much more detailed and realistic than you would’ve otherwise seen, uh, in representations, in paintings or other kinds of means of representing things.

Mm-hmm. So slowing down speech, [00:06:00] that was a relatively new innovation for researchers and. I think that’s a very good description.

Zach: Was it also a shift, a revolutionary way to think about language in terms of just the fact that people kind of took for granted at all of these rules that were hidden and under the surface?

Was that part of the, the thing that was so surprising and interesting about it was, was that there were all these rules that people kind of know about but hadn’t really fully been explained or examined before.

Saul: Yes. Interestingly though, it was the things that were on the surface that were of interest.

So whereas psychologists, psychotherapists had long speculated about the idea that there was unintentional or unacknowledged or unconscious features of people’s thinking while interacting. The revolutionary aspect of conversation analysis, I think, [00:07:00] was that it. Focused on the things that were visible, audible, just on the surface of talk.

And from those and the organization of those, once you broke them down and slowed them down and repeated them, you could suddenly see what Harvey Sacks, one of the inventors of conversation analysis called Order at All Points. So however tiny and minute the details seemed and however insignificant the actions, what Sacks and his colleagues were able to show.

This is all really, really closely organized stuff, and people pay immense amounts of attention and clearly because of the way that they behave when they’re interacting to each other, they focus on those details. So yeah, they matter. They’re important, even if they are these kind of minute particles of talk.

Mm-hmm.

Zach: I was reading, um, Elizabeth KO’s book Talk, the Science of Conversation, which you had. Recommended to me and I, it, it took me surprisingly long to really get the point of what conversation [00:08:00] analysis can be used for. A small note here, to be clear, what I meant here wasn’t a statement about me finding the book hard to understand, but more just my surprise that I hadn’t figured out the clear, practical benefits of this kind of work a little sooner by analyzing, uh, real talk, real examples of talk and studying it in depth and what’s really happening.

You can find better ways to communicate and, uh, you know, and, and one of her points was, you know, people are pushed around by language more than we know by the words and phrases that we use. You know, we’re, we’re much more at, you know, influenced by language than we tend to think. And, uh, can you think of.

Things off the top of your head that stand out as interesting examples that you would bring up for people that haven’t really delved into this area?

Saul: Sure. There are some findings, some empirical findings and some applied empirical findings that I think are very striking because I think they take the form of the findings that we are [00:09:00] maybe more used to seeing in psychological studies, particularly so-called nudge psychology.

I think this is a trend in social psychology to look for ways of manipulating people’s behavior basically, or managing behavior. But I think there’s a step to take back from that in, in Elizabeth KO’s book, and I definitely recommend that everybody read that if they wanna understand what conversation analysis is, a step back from that applied kind of, uh, finding That’s almost, uh, a counterintuitive discovery is.

Just the activity of doing conversation analysis, which is collecting everyday examples of talk mundane, everyday activities that people are engaged in and subjecting them to detailed analysis because it’s that structure that is everywhere. It’s not so much a finding as a realization when you start seeing it that wow talk is actually organized very delicately into these sequences [00:10:00] of action and response of question and answer of greeting and greeting, and that when people deviate from those patterns, suddenly we can see all of the ways in which they scramble to reestablish this detailed, tight organization of, of their social reality as they experience it through interactions with others.

Mm-hmm. So that’s the first, I think that’s what drives the discoveries that Elizabeth Stoker talks about in her book. The discoveries that are then applied to looking at, say, how doctors and patients interact with one another are very powerful because of that first step of really understanding what is the structure of a doctor patient interaction.

So one of the most striking findings I think comes from, uh, a paper by John Heritage and Jeff Robinson and colleagues who’ve worked on similar or related findings in medical interaction. Is that where you have, say, a doctor and a patient in a [00:11:00] primary care consultation? It can be very difficult for the patient to introduce more than one concern.

And I think perhaps everybody’s been to a doctor has had this experience. If you’ve got one or two things or three things that you wanna talk to the doctor about, if you bring up the first thing at the beginning of the consultation, by the time you get to the end of the consultation, it’s really difficult to bring up.

Anything else because you’ve kind of been through a cycle of saying, hello, what’s the problem here? I’ve got an achy knee and maybe you haven’t mentioned that you’ve also got a dodgy elbow or a painful eye or sinus infection or something. So they studied this situation to understand what’s the, the kind of train that people get on when they enter the doctor’s surgery.

What are the, well, Elizabeth Stoker talks about the racetrack, that there’s this kind of identifiable pathway that you move through. So they studied how many problems did patients arrive with, how many did they actually manage to talk to the [00:12:00] doctor about? And they looked at ways of modifying that racetrack, changing the pattern of interactions to create secondary opportunities to introduce.

A new problem. So that boiled down to the sum versus any study. So at the end of that interaction, what Heritage and, and Robinson and others were able to show was that doctors would often do. Was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about? So they, on the face of it, created an opportunity. What they found was that any is a rather negatively polarized word.

If you think about where do you use any, uh, do you have any more X, would you like any more that these s tend to come in places where there’s an almost an expectation of a negative response, whereas some. Offers the opportunity for more things to be added. So they asked a, a controlled group of doctors to say any and another group to say some, [00:13:00] and they did a large scale randomized trial and found that, actually changing that one word from some to any, was there something else you wanted to talk to me about?

Had some just huge effect on the number of secondary concerns that were raised. So it was a really beautiful finding because it came from this detailed understanding of the whole structure of the interaction and then the one point at which you could create a light diversion or another pathway. Back into an earlier phase of the interaction where another concern could be raised.

So I think that’s kind of iconic. Mm-hmm. Study and applied conversation analysis for those reasons.

Zach: Yeah. That was really fascinating to me. Just, and then the amount of the effect was so large, it was something like 70%

Saul: or something.

Zach: It was really astonishing. Yeah. The difference just from that, that one word.

Yeah. A small note here. This finding has a lot of other practical applications, for example, in a workplace situation, avoiding the, is there anything [00:14:00] else phrasing might make it so that people are more likely to tell you about work-related issues? I just wanted to emphasize that these findings can have some big practical value.

Another one that stood out in, um, KO’s book was the, uh, the power of the words Talk and speak. Oh, yeah. Of talk versus speak when she was talking about suicide, um, prevention, interactions and how weak the word talk is. Like, I don’t want to talk anymore. Somebody might say, talk is, you know, meaningless. The word talk sounds kind of meaningless versus the word speak, like, I wanna speak to you sounds more meaningful.

Sounds like action. And that having a, a better, uh, effect, you know? And so these kinds of examples were just really interesting in that book and really drive home the power of language in a way that I think most people are just. Not aware of how much power language has.

Saul: Yeah. I mean, that example is a really good one.

So hostage negotiations or these kind of high stakes negotiations that Elizabeth [00:15:00] KO’s been studying, those are a really lovely example of a situation in which there are real experts. You know, these negotiators, they are aware of the power of language because they are absolute masters of the, of the craft, of talking people down, of dealing with these situations.

It’s just that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell you if you ask them. Mm-hmm. If you’re asking them to introspect about how do you actually do it at that level of detail. It’s something that maybe they could explain in very general terms, but wouldn’t necessarily be able to put their finger on precisely the words that they’re using or the right particular patterns that they’re using.

Zach: Right. And that’s, yeah, and that’s one reason I, I wanted to do this podcast in the first place was these kind of hidden, um, you know, people have these skills that they may not even. Know about, you know, or, or, or they do know about them and most people don’t know about them. And, and so the, yeah, digging into these granular, kind of obscure strategies is, is, is [00:16:00] really interesting.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Oh, so what is, uh, how does conversation analysis relate to ethno methodology? Okay,

Saul: that’s a big question. I’ll do my best to answer it in a way that is somewhat, um, contained. So, ethno methodology is the mother discipline of conversation analysis. Ca I guess if I’m allowed to abbreviate it at this point, comes out of ethno methodology and, uh, is one of a number of, not exactly sub-disciplines, but applications of ethno methodology to a particular material for analysis.

So. Conversation analysis applies ethno methodology to talk and social interaction. Ethno methodology is, uh, the study of how social groups do their groupness, what are the methods that they use to constitute and perform and [00:17:00] recognize their groupness, the ethno, um, that makes up that collective of, of people or of practices.

I know that sounds a little bit abstract, but uh, a good example might be the study of games, uh, how people organize the rules and structures of any number of social situations that have recognizable, uh, rule structures and how do they make sense of the social world. That’s a very broad, I think you can’t really define ethnic methodology in anything but the very broadest terms.

Mm-hmm. Because it is a very. It’s a movement within, or that comes from sociology that really tries to redefine what sociology is, tries to kind of turn it on its head and say, look, we’re not studying social facts. We’re not studying people and social organizations. We’re studying the methods through which they produce the social facts, and they recognize the social [00:18:00] organizations that they’re members of.

So it’s a bit of a sideways take at sociology. Conversation analysis, I think looks much more recognizable as a social science than this much broader attempt to redefine what sociology is and, and think about social organization in this very abstract way because it deals with one particular material, and that material has particular kinds of properties, like it’s sequentially organized, you can record it and it has this.

Temporal structure where you can look at it in the same way that microbiologists look at things through a microscope conversation. Analysts look, look at things through recording technologies.

Zach: Am I understanding correctly that part of the, the difference about ethno methodology was studying what people actually do in their, in real practices versus, you know, more of an academic setting kind of situation?

Or am I off base on that?

Saul: No, that’s, [00:19:00] that’s absolutely right. I think the, well, let me, let me maybe do a bit more of a history because I think it’s useful just to say something about where ethno methodology comes from in explaining what it is. So Harold Garfinkel was developing ethno methodology at a time when sociology, especially macro sociology, that was involved in the study of large scale social movements and looking at.

Economic data and large scale surveys was becoming very high level, very abstracted from the mundane and the everyday. And he was interested in getting rid of the theoretical cons, preconceptions that people would have to take into those studies, and looking instead at the ways in which people made sense of the social world.

And those end up being rather mundane in lots of situations. So he would write about how do [00:20:00] people practice ordinary kinds of activities and how do they recognize when a social situation is changed or when a social situation is, uh, is something that they can. Access and address and deal with in various different ways.

So I guess a very famous example that is quite instructive as to what ethno methodology is, comes from garfinkel’s breaching experiments. This was a early tutorial problem that he, he used the the expression tutorial problem because he would use these to explain to his students the concepts of ethno methodology.

He’d get them to breach social norms. So one example would be to play a game of tic-tac toe, but then perform some egregious move that obviously isn’t part of the rule set, but without [00:21:00] remarking on it at all in order to see how would the other player react. Or he would instruct his students to go out and bargain for fixed price goods in a shopping mall and see how did this.

Play out in terms of the social rules that were applied or recognizable within that situation. Um, or to treat everything that went on in the home in your own parental home, for example, as if one were a guest. So thanking your, uh, uh, mother or father excessively for passing the salt. And what this led to was the discovery that people make sense of these social situations, not as transgressions of rules, but as different social situations.

So bargaining for fit price goods actually often ended up apparently in people actually getting things on the cheap. But transgressing the tic-tac toe game. It wouldn’t result in somebody explaining, oh, here are the [00:22:00] social rules. You’ve transgressed them, or, here are the games rules. You’ve transgressed them.

It would be, it would be understood in as a different social context, oh, you’re being, mm-hmm. Aggressive or you are angry with me. So the point there is that these ground level strategies for making sense of the social world that Garfinkel was interested in exploring, turned on its head. The idea that sociology could even plausibly understand what was going on in the social world by studying economics or these macro social phenomena or theorizing about what people were doing.

Because how would you understand how people made sense of these phenomena, these rules, these social structures? If. In the moment of being involved in social life, people would have to rationalize what was going on around them rather than applying some theory or some abstract set of rules. So conversation analysis applies that same curiosity [00:23:00] about how the rules of conversation organized and what happens when we break them, or what happens when people do things that maybe upset the normative expectations that might be applied to even the simplest things question and answer structures that is doing ethno methodology with talk.

Zach: Yeah. One point I liked in uh, KO’s book is that how we view people, how we view other people, how we see them, how we see their personalities is largely due to. The rules that they use and apply to conversation. Right? Like, sort of like you were saying, transgressing in the, in these unwritten rules that we all carry around with us.

When other people transgress those rules, we view them as, you know, assholes or whatever. We, we view them, we judge them based on their unwritten rules that they have. Uh, and do you think is, is that one of the key aspects of, of [00:24:00] conversation analysis? Is that, is that, is that a major idea in that area that, you know, people are these these rules around, uh, that we carry around conversation?

Saul: Yeah. I think the point that Elizabeth Stoker makes in talk and that conversation analysts operate with, I think by default when you are looking at the micro structure of interaction. Is that, well, you have to look at people as just the collection of interaction practices that they make available to other people, the things that they do, the over and visible and audible and perceptible things that they do with each other.

So rules I think, are less relevant than practices in that context. Mm-hmm. Because we can’t see the rules. The rules, if they exist, maybe they’re tacit and you could speculate about them. And [00:25:00] my training’s in cognitive science, which is very fascinated with rules or physiological underpinnings of behavior or psychological underpinnings of behavior.

But if you just focus on what people actually do that you can see as an observing social scientist and which presumably there. Inter acute can see, and you try and make sense of what they’re doing based on how they’re responding to one another. In some ways it’s a very limited view, but in other ways it’s a very, I think it’s a radically different understanding of, of what an individual is.

In fact, it’s not really a view that thinks of individuals. It’s a view that sees the social world as constructed through interaction by multiple parties, organizing the activity of talk with one another. So it dissolves the idea of the individual sometimes in a way that I think it’s quite helpful.

Sachs, uh, apparently, uh, one of the inventors [00:26:00] of conversation analysis, well, the inventor of conversation analysis is quoted as, as saying that we shouldn’t anthropomorphize humans in our analysis of them. And I think that that’s, I. What the focus on the surface level of torque gives us a much less anthropomorphic idea of humans, which is a, you know, it worries some people.

I think it is a useful contribution to social science, that’s for sure.

Zach: Can, can this be seen as related to like a skin ores, behaviorist kind of view of analyzing what the actual behavior is versus trying to interpret what

Saul: is going on? That’s a, a very good point and many people have criticized conversation analysis as a form of behaviorism.

What I’d say is that Skinner, if Skinner is an, uh, an atheist about the internal lives of humans, then perhaps conversation analysis, at least [00:27:00] methodologically is pretty agnostic about it. Simply doesn’t speculate about what’s going on internally. There may be many things going on internally and I think you’d find it hard to.

To dig up a conversation analyst who would subscribe to that kind of behaviorism. In fact, there are so many things that you discover. If you look at what people actually do in talk in interaction, that would make it impossible to imagine that they’re simply behaviorist machines or just cybernetic feedback systems.

It doesn’t correspond with the evidence. So even though you can remain agnostic about whether there’s something going on behind the curtain, I think just on the evidence of what happens when you look at people talking, you’d be hard pressed to believe that.

Zach: Yeah. And probably getting too off topic, but I kind of, I feel like the Skinner behaviorist stuff gets a bad rap.

’cause it’s like, to me it’s a similar thing of just [00:28:00] studying what is actually happening, you know? And to me it doesn’t, doesn’t subtract the idea of there being a mind somewhere. It’s just saying, this is all we can study. Yeah.

Saul: Right. Yeah. And in that sense, there’s a certain methodological obs Yeah.

Methodological, uh, correspondence to some extent, but yeah, a very different set of commitments.

Zach: So how does, uh, how does conversation analysis relate to your work? How have you used it in your, in your work? Sure.

Saul: So I have. More or less three areas of research that I focus on. One is conversational ai and I’m particularly fascinated with the way that both we address and use and talk to conversational user interfaces like Alexa and Siri and what our uses of them tell us about our understandings of these kinds of devices.

But I’m also interested in using observations and empirical findings from conversation analysis to inform the [00:29:00] design of speech and language technologies, uh, secondary of focus. Is on how people do evaluations and interaction. So one of the ways that I got involved in conversation analysis was looking at how do people talk about art?

How do people evaluate things where there’s no clear metric for evaluation? And that whole area of work is included. Looking at how people evaluate the performances and improvisations of, uh, of artists or dancers or people doing all kinds of difficult to evaluate, um, or subjectively evaluat able things.

And then thirdly, my work looks at the ways that conversation analysis and other areas of the social sciences can be work together, and particularly my training in cognitive science, which is often quite experimental, but up against the observational priorities of ca, which tends to avoid. [00:30:00] Experimental studies or reducing things or counting things and quantification.

So some of my work is more methodological and looks at, well, how could we use ca in doing laboratory studies or doing statistical and quantitative analysis, and what are the theoretical and methodological issues concerned in that?

Zach: A small edit here, I’m going to jump to a part of the conversation where Saul goes into more detail about his research studying dance.

Saul: I’ve also studied how people interact in, uh, dance and how people improvise in dance or in dance settings. And I think for, for me, that’s really the payoff of conversation analysis is that when you see people doing things and partner dance is one of them that are almost unbelievably fluent, really skillful, and it becomes.

Almost magical. When you see people dancing together, especially very skilled improvisers dancing together, it can [00:31:00] become, it’s fascinating to imagine, well, how is this possible? And lots of people study dancers to understand sensory motor entrainment. There’s lots of ways that you can study it as a phenomenon of human coordinated action.

Conversation analysis deals with precisely that level of coordination. But in talk, so you can apply it to looking at how people move their bodies, how they interact in all kinds of ways that we wouldn’t necessarily acknowledge or see as, uh, as conversational. But have those, those, those initiation and response dynamics.

Zach: Is there something that stands out as one of the more interesting, um, findings that you’ve had in your work?

Saul: Yeah. Uh, where shall I start? Hang on, let me have a think about this. Um,

Zach: big question, I guess.

Saul: Yeah. I’ve gotta choose one of my babies. Uh, and which one should I choose? Which should I throw out, I guess.

What first got me involved in conversation analysis was trying to understand how people do assessments and [00:32:00] evaluations, especially in context where there’s no clear metric for evaluation. So I started looking at how people evaluate bits of art. I was especially interested in how people stand in particularly contemporary international, contemporary commercial art galleries, where you’ll often get highly conceptual pieces of art and they will talk about what they see and they’ll interact about all kinds of rather difficult to describe things that might be happening around them or objects that might be presented for them to speculate about.

And those conversations really intrigued me because they seem so hard to nail down in terms of what is it that people see in that environment? What do they register as relevant for? Aesthetic evaluation for scrutiny as an artwork. And it turns out, if you look at what people do and what they say, they will tell you.

They do [00:33:00] aesthetic evaluations. They talk about their education and their knowledge of the other’s. Education. What, what do we know of each other’s knowledge? And then how, from that knowledge of each other, can we talk around and about these objects in ways that may be quite, well, quite often they’ll be taking the piss or they’ll be, um, they’ll ridicule it, but they’ll do it in a way that displays an immense sensitivity to.

What the other knows. So that process of designing evaluations very specifically for another person and for a specific situation, that was what got me really excited about conversation analysis. And I think that what I’ve learned from, from looking at those situations, and I think also looking at how people, how people do things like dance or other artistic activities, is that what we often think of as up to the, you know, in the eye [00:34:00] of the beholder, things that people will have to make their own decisions about.

That’s not how they work at all. People don’t allow one another to make those kinds of evaluations without really holding them to account as to what it is that they see very precisely. And. How does that judgment have a meaning for me and for you in this specific situation? So yeah, those, those are the things that got me excited about it in the first place.

And still excite me

Zach: in my understanding that part of your work has been analyzing, uh, conversation rules and, and behavior to educate AI software. Is it, was I understanding that correctly?

Saul: Yeah. So some of the work that I’ve been doing recently has been looking at what can we do with the tools that are currently being developed to.

Deal with talk to deal with large scale collected data from [00:35:00] conversation, also from language models. What can we do with those that emulates some small part of what humans do when we’re talking to one another? I think it is a very small part. And also, what do people do when they’re interacting with these devices, like conversational user interfaces, virtual assistants, what do we do that shows our understanding and interpretation of those systems?

How do we interact with them in ways that show how they’re relevant for us in in our lives?

Zach: So I was curious, uh, and maybe you’re not able to say, but are there people in the industry that are using, using your work for, um, for their software?

Saul: There are definitely people using conversation analysis. I’d say there’s a good conversation Design Handbook written by, um, Bob Moore, IBM, he’s a conversation analyst that people are using.

Elizabeth SCO herself has written and is a part of [00:36:00] Conversation Design Communities. Kathy Pearl, who’s the head of, uh, conversation design outreach at Google, uh, has cited and used conversation analysis in, in her guidelines for the creators of these virtual conversational user interfaces and virtual agents.

So yeah, people are using this work and I’m, I’m, I’m part of that group of people doing ca in a way that hopes to inform to conversational ai.

Zach: It seems like AI to. Replicate realistic conversation is still pretty rudimentary. Would you say? That’s correct. It seems like even text-based AI to have conversations still seems pretty basic these days.

So I assume those things aren’t too far along, but maybe you have a different take on that.

Saul: No, I tend to agree with you that these are very, very rudimentary that the kinds of things that these devices can do at the moment really simulates a very thin [00:37:00] slice of what people do in interaction. So if you think about all of the different social roles that we inhabit when we do talking and hearing, and this goes back to uh, the kind of participation.

Frameworks that were developed, uh, by Irving Goffman that have been elaborated in conversation, analysis. The idea that you’ve got not just speakers, but also when we talk about others and we animate their voices, you have animators and authors. So when people talk, they’re not just talking from their own perspective, they might report on somebody else’s speech.

There’s a tremendously complicated and layered set of things that happen when people tell a story or let alone asking a question or giving somebody an invitation. Similarly, hi hearers. Not just hearers. They might be over hearers or eavesdrops or bystanders, and the voice interface, like Alexa can only do one thing.

It can listen for [00:38:00] a wake word and then it can listen for a command, and then it can react. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that we are not even close to being able to do with these devices, with conversational ai because. They’re fundamentally very, very limited and often trained on, you know, the, the language models that are used to inform the ways that they speak and the things that they can interpret and transcribe are based on written texts, not on language and social interaction as it’s done.

Zach: Mm-hmm. One of the interesting things to me in thinking about language and, and conversation and, and consciousness is thinking about how the, the action of speaking, the necessities of uh, having conversation can impact who we are, can kind of mold us and shape who we are. For example, the fact that having conversation requires us to take turns as something that shapes us in a way, in, in the sense that [00:39:00] we have to keep in mind the other person’s, uh, a model of the other person and a model of ourself.

And I’m curious, are those kinds of ideas part of. Conversation analysis or is that kind of outside, you know, that that’s maybe another, another school of thought, uh, studying how we’re shaped by the necessities of language.

Saul: Not at all. That’s very much part of conversation analysis. So as is often the case with different disciplines in the social sciences or in I suppose any scientific research, there’s a different set of terminology that we use to talk about the same thing.

So what I think might sometimes be called common ground in cognitive science, when we’re thinking about keeping a model of the other in mind and having some kind of reflexive understanding of how do we appear to the other person, sometimes, again, that’s referred to as a theory of mind. Those questions [00:40:00] about consciousness.

The theories that we have for describing those questions about consciousness in conversation analysis, they’re all a lot simpler because we’re just dealing with the surface level. So there’s a much more humble set of terms, uh, that conversation analysts use, such as recipient design. So recipient design is the principle or the, the way in which somebody involved in an interaction will design their talk specifically for the other, knowing what they know about the other, taking into account what from their perspective is available to that other person.

So I gave the example a little while ago of people sitting and talking about art in a gallery. Well, if I know that you are the world renowned expert on Van Gogh and we, we are at an exhibition, uh, and we are looking at starry night, I’m gonna design my observations, my assessments of that really differently to you than I would to.

Somebody else without this, [00:41:00] you know, kind of expertise. So that’s one slightly cheesy example of recipient design, but it’s everywhere. It is. Mm-hmm. Just in every part of everything that we do, and say for one another, we have to take into account what we know of the other. So, whereas cognitive approaches would think of this as us assembling models of the other and coming up with some kind of theory of mind where we’re strategizing about the other.

Mm-hmm. Maybe that’s happening, but if we look at what they do or what people do, then what we see is them designing their talk in a way that takes into account what, by doing it, they’re showing they expect or know of the other. So it’s just about the same concept, but from a very different, uh, observational principle, I guess.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Do you see that as are, are there theories that language [00:42:00] itself, the need for us to communicate with language was a key driver in evolving intelligence? Because it would seem that, like you said, it’s we need to have these theories of mind that a model of the other person keeping in mind what they’re thinking.

Are there theories around our communication driving our intelligence further?

Saul: There are lots of theories about how language has driven the cognitive development and the social development of humans, and I think that those theories definitely have a place in organizing our understanding of the whole human subject.

Conversation analysis can’t really speculate about those things. I think it could certainly be used to look at particular points in, say, the development of children’s speech of things like turn-taking, how those kinds of practices imply certain kinds [00:43:00] of cognitive or physiological development. But it’s not a field that does a lot of evolutionary.

Mm-hmm. Speculation and theory, partly because it just deals with what people do in the recordings that we can make of them doing them today and. To go beyond that, to theorize about how this might be explained in a completely different order of observation, where you are looking at genetics or you’re looking at anthropological and archeological, uh, records.

It, it’s not really the business of conversation analysts, so I don’t think any of them do it. But you could certainly use what ca has discovered to drive theorizing about human development and, and evolutionary history. But it’s not something that I think many people do.

Zach: One thing I find interesting is how quickly people talk, right?

Like in the, in that conversation analysis [00:44:00] book by sco, you know, one of the key points of conversation analysis is just how quickly we talk and how much we overlap silences, and how it seems like we don’t like silences because silences can be interpreted as. Tension or conflict or dislike or whatever.

Uh, can you talk a little bit about the role of analyzing silence and conversation analysis?

Saul: Absolutely. Silence and conversation is a really fascinating topic and I would definitely encourage people if you’re interested and you’re finding the idea of studying conversation in this way. Intriguing. Look at the work of Elliot Hoey, one of my colleagues who’s spent a lot of time looking at silences, particularly lapses, which I think are the kind of uncomfortable silences you’re talking about.

Where we’re involved in turn by turn talk and it’s somewhat fluid and quick and we have established this pattern of one action following the next, and then suddenly [00:45:00] things die down and perhaps there’s some difficulty reestablishing turn by turn talk that’s maybe the. Less frequently observed type of silences because the silences that we experience in conversation are absolutely everywhere.

So silences within one speaker’s turn. So when I’m talking and then I’m going to at some point stop talking or I’ll just take a breath, we’d call that a pause. If you take the next turn, which you might to at any point, uh, whether or not I nominate you to take the next turn, the silence in between my ending, my turn ending and your turn beginning, that’s a gap.

So we have a technical set of terms for referring to within speaker silence and then between speaker silences and then lapses, where we are no longer doing turn by turn talk. And that comes about because of conversation analysis and its sort of fundamental. Um, or I guess initial observation about [00:46:00] turn taking and what are the rules of turn taking?

How does turn taking work? Because it’s only because. We have a normative structure, an expected structure of turn taking that we could tell that you were being silent when you should have said something, or that I’m pausing when it’s my turn to speak next. So silences only become owned or recognizably silences that belong to one person or another through having that understanding of the turn-taking system.

So that’s kind of very fundamental to, to conversation analysis is being able to have a, uh, a technical description of silence that tells us why do we feel uncomfortable during some silences, and then some are perfectly fine. Mm-hmm. Uh, they are ubiquitous and it’s important to be able to describe them accurately.

Zach: Yeah, that was the, some of the most interesting stuff in the, in, uh, KO’s book about how meaningful even tiny silences can be. And [00:47:00] we all have a, an awareness of that, like an instinctual awareness. Like when you ask somebody something and they pause for even like a, a fraction of a second, there can be, many of us would find meaning in those situations.

Like someone doesn’t wanna say something immediately. They’re, they might be hiding something or, or have a negative response that they’re suppressing. Things like that.

Saul: Yeah, I mean, if I could, if I could say a little bit about that idea, you know, the idea that silences are uncomfortable or that people are hiding something.

I think more often silences are really very innocuous. They’re just everywhere. And the observation that conversation analysts have made, and I think definitely Elizabeth Otoko does give very, very compelling evidence of this. In any of her talks that you could find, if you looked up on, if you look her up on YouTube, you find her giving talks where she shows precisely those uncomfortable situations.

’cause they’re very illustrative. But the, the flip side to that is the actions. That [00:48:00] precede those silences. So silences are intelligible as being uncomfortable or being awkward because what’s happened right before them is an invitation, for example. So if I’m inviting you to out to dinner Mm. And I think, or I’m, I’m asking you for a favor, that silence is going to be very meaningful for, I’m gonna pay a lot of attention to that silence because there’s an expectation of an acceptance or a rejection, even if the acceptance still comes, but it comes a bit late.

Mm-hmm. That’s a particular kind of acceptance. If you’ve invited somebody to dinner and then there’s that. Point two beats of silence. So yeah, I think that the silences are really, we recognize ’em in those, in those moments, but it’s, it, it also tells us something about how do people interpret the responses to particular actions?

And that’s, I guess, one of the reasons that people talk about social action as being, [00:49:00] again, very central to, to this way of understanding the social world.

Zach: Is it possible to imagine a culture or maybe a, a culture exists where people talk slower? Because I feel like, at least in, you know, in the world I’m in, it feels like the expectation is to talk pretty fast.

And I kind of, I, I kind of appreciate people who talk slower and have longer gaps between their, uh, responses. I, I, I’d almost like to be more like that, but I kind of feel pressured to talk more quickly. Do you, do you know much about if there are, you know, settings or, or cultures or places where. People do have what we would consider abnormally long pauses.

In general,

Saul: there are caricatures like that. So the caricature of family conversation in, uh, Jewish households or Italian households is that you have, you know, these kind of ratio linguistic stereotypes or, or kind of cultural stereotypes. Similarly, Danish [00:50:00] is often caricatured as having this inordinately long.

Pauses and gaps that, you know, somebody will say something and then five minutes later if you, you watch Scandinavian crime dramas, they’re very popular in the uk. Those will often sort of embody those caricatures. Mm-hmm. As it turns out, if you actually look at how people respond to similar actions, again, it’s about what kind of action is it that precedes the silence if you control for that.

And there’s a very, uh, famous study from 2009 led by Tanya Stivers, um, at the Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics when she was there. She’s now at UCLA, but she ran a study looking across 10 language groups, very different language groups, um, at how people respond to yes, no questions. So they controlled for the type of action.

This was a yes no question. It was on telephone conversations. They collected many examples in 10 different languages and then looked at, well, [00:51:00] what is the response time? What is the, the standard response time across these languages? They found that it varies very little. There’s about 200 millisecond silences approximately the norm, and you don’t see a great deal of deviation if you plot them.

Um, you know, if you do a histogram of, of where do the data points fall, you’ll find they’re all pretty normally distributed, and that suggests that there’s just not as much variation as the cultural stereotypes would lead us to believe.

Zach: Mm-hmm. You use the, uh, I know in conversation analysis the, uh, notation system is very important.

Are there different types of notation systems or is that pretty aligned on, uh, most people use a single kind of notation system.

Saul: Oh, I love talking about this. Um, and I’m very, uh, I’m, I’m a big fan of transcription in conversation analysis. It’s really a, a kind of beautiful part of the research practice.

So the first type of [00:52:00] notation that people began using, uh, back in the sixties and seventies, was developed by Gail Jefferson. Who was at first, um, an, an intern and a student of Harvey Sacks at UCLA. She was also a dancer, and I think it was partly because of her familiarity with the difficulty of notating dance.

If you can think of a time before video, people used all kinds of hokey systems, kind of 19th century systems for notating dance and bodily movement like leban notation, which is a, a kind of very structured, very limited way of describing arm and leg movements. Anyway, she was given a heap of recordings by Harvey Sacks and he asked her to transcribe them.

She came back with this really carefully arranged semi diagrammatic format by semi diagrammatic, I mean, it looks like a film script, so you’ve got. One line and then the next line, you know, person A speaks, then [00:53:00] person B speaks. Then person A speaks again, but she arranges them on the page. So for example, where people are overlapping, you’ll start that overlap with two square brackets, and then you could indent both lines so that they appear on the page.

To be starting at the same time. This is very difficult to describe in words, but I think if you can get the idea that it, it provides you with this kind of graphical overview of what that conversation looks like. But it’s still familiar enough for people to read it. And that’s how when you are doing conversation analysis, you point to a line number and you make your observation and then you can tie it to something that is visible to everybody who’s paying attention.

In the, the data session, uh, I should talk to you about data sessions as well. This is how we sit down and do that kind of analysis. You will make an observation. You have to tie it to a particular moment in talk that can be quite hard to do if you’re just. Rewinding [00:54:00] and fast forwarding and playing a recording, you need to be able to have this sort of technical precision in your observation.

So that’s what those transcriptions are used for. They use the keys of a normal keyboard, so they’ll use, for example, square brackets to denote overlap, punctuation. Doesn’t denote the abstract notion of like a question, a question mark would be upward intonation and a period would be downward intonation.

So it uses the conventions that we are used to from film scripts, from comic books. So all caps is loud or shouty underline is also emphasis. It uses relatively familiar conventions to create this really precise tool for making detailed observations about conversation. Uh, so that’s Jeffersonian transcription.

That’s one format. More recently, there has been a tendency to use, uh, a [00:55:00] separate system that’s been developed for describing simultaneous activities like body movements. The beautiful thing about Jeffersonian transcript is it’s working for turn taking. Structures. So it’s really designed to show you turn by turn talk, but when you wanna show simultaneous actions, it doesn’t work quite so well.

You also want to be able to see the onset of a movement and the sustain of a gesture, and then the offset as that gesture declines and, and, and falls or, or, or halts. So Lorenzo Manata, who’s a, a professor of social interaction, uh, Basel University in Switzerland, she has developed, uh, an alternative transcription format that tries to do for simultaneous actions what Jeffersonian transcription does for talk.

Um, and it’s becoming quite widespread. It’s not clear whether it’s gonna be as central to this particular way of analyzing [00:56:00] social interaction, but there are also many other. Many other methods, lots of people invent their own. Mm-hmm. But it’s a bit like, uh, anything else, people who are, who manage to create the system that everybody uses, uh, those, those decisions, they make a huge difference as to what people study and what people can study.

Um, but many also fall by the wayside.

Zach: I’d imagine. You get so good at reading those. Methods of transcription. Can, can you just glance at those and get an idea of what it sounds like in your head? Like Yeah. Yeah.

Saul: That’s cool. Yeah, absolutely. Certainly with Jeffersonian transcript Yeah. You, you start to read it and you hear it as you read it.

It’s like musical notation. Yeah. And, uh, you, you also get faster at doing it. It feels a bit intimidating when you first set out. Mm-hmm. But, um, I think this is, when I was reading your book, I was thinking, yeah, you could have really used this. It would’ve given you a very, in some ways it would’ve been a shortcut because your descriptions of the things that people do in those, you know, in the, in the, the verbal [00:57:00] tales would’ve been, you could have written shorter descriptions.

Mm-hmm. But then you would’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time doing the transcription. So

Zach: yeah, my book, verbal Poker tells it. It was interesting because when I started talking to you just recently, I didn’t, somehow I’d completely missed this conversation analysis, uh, world because, which is a little weird because when I started doing the verbal.

Poker tells research, which involved me, you know, transcribing lots of, uh, you know, I spent hundreds of hours transcribing, writing down televised poker hands and, and hands. I played and, and, uh, formatting that and, and putting, uh, different tags for different patterns into that. And so I, and I was actually looking for something that would allow me to transcribe things and capture things like speed,

Saul: right.

Zach: Of talking and pauses and things like that. So I, I was really surprised. I didn’t, I somehow never noticed that it was probably just bad research on my part because I, I, I had gotten like Skinner’s book on verbal behavior [00:58:00] mm-hmm. And somehow missed conversation analysis. So I was a little disappointed in that because.

Yeah. Like you were saying, it would’ve been I think, too much overkill for a lot of what I was doing, because I wasn’t, I was trying to do a broader thing and not do a scientific thing, but I think it would’ve been really useful to at least do a few of the things like overlapping or speed of response, uh, upward shift in, in, in, uh, end of statement.

Those kind of things would’ve been really cool and would’ve been not too much more effort. Yeah.

Saul: Right. I mean, but the, the nice thing about doing transcription or the, for me, the satisfying thing about doing transcription is it disciplines your observations. Mm-hmm. Because you’re forced to commit to a particular hearing.

So when you’re doing that transcription, you are really attuning yourself to noticing the differences of very microscopic differences. For example, in the lengths of a silence or international contour. So you get much more sensitive, your instruments become sensitized, but then also you can disagree with [00:59:00] people about hearings.

And then you’ve committed to your disagreements because you’ve not just written down like vague schematic of what somebody said. You actually have really described it in a much more granular level of detail so that when you are then sitting around and doing the analysis together and uh, as I’ve mentioned in, in data sessions, which I could talk to you about, uh, in the data session, you can challenge one another on that hearing.

Mm-hmm. And that is a really productive. Because you can be wrong. And if you can be wrong, you can get less wrong. And I think that’s quite powerful. Uh, that’s one of the things that I find really helpful about Jeffersonian transcription. And there are lots of other forms of transcription. I mean, we could use say IPA, the international phonetic alphabet and you know, really precise sort of technical descriptions of the sounds that people make with their mouths and and voices.

And that maybe is [01:00:00] a step too far because it becomes legible only to a very small group of specialists. So it’s a bit of a balance between legibility, lay legibility mm-hmm. And technical precision.

Zach: In my experience working on the Verbal Poker Tales book, kinda like you were saying, starting to pay more attention to these minute things, teaches you to see the world in a, in a new way.

Like I, I honestly learned so much from much more than I thought I would learn from writing, researching, writing that Verbal Poker Tales book. Like I, I started out thinking like, I kind of knew what I was getting into and I, I kind of knew the area that I would write about, but I actually ended up learning a lot more and kept finding interesting patterns.

You know, sort of like, uh, yeah, the same kinds of things. Conversation analysis is studying. I kept finding these, these patterns that were recurring and kept meaning the same things, you know, associated with the same situations. Mm-hmm. Or same hand strength to be specific in [01:01:00] poker. The same situations kept coming up.

So it was actually like, of all the things I’ve worked on, it was by far the thing I’m most proud of because I, it was relatively, I. Well, I wa it was almost entirely unstudied by anyone else, and that’s what was interesting to me too. It was almost like getting into Right. Getting into new areas. Yeah.

Saul: And, and I think this is, uh, something I, I emailed you about.

It seems that nobody’s actually done a conversation, analytics study of poker and poker playing. And I think it would be a very welcome study because it’s, uh, it’s one of those situations where people are suppressing the things that you would want to find out about, you know, they’re trying to be ambiguous about, uh, what may or may not be in their hand or to, mm-hmm.

Or to suppress the leakage of information.

Zach: So, and reverse. Yeah. They’re, they’re straight up trying to reverse things in some situations or even like Yeah, re reverse them. Double reverse them in some situations. Yeah. It’s, it’s a pretty, pretty confusing landscape of, of communication I think, which might explain why [01:02:00] it’s pretty hard to study.

Saul: It’s designed, it’s designed to be analysis proof. I mean, that’s the problem. Um, but I think that, you know, what you were doing, in fact by, you know, looking at these recordings repeatedly and building collections of them and seeing the similarities, that is essentially what conversation analysts do. It’s about.

Creating collections much in the way that botanists or, uh, you know, would collect or zoologists, collect specimens and then look at the minute differences between them and put them in taxonomies. But we are dealing with the natural phenomena of everyday interaction. Mm-hmm. Um, in, in very similar, in very similar ways.

Yeah.

Zach: If I could do that project over again, and if I had more time on it, I would’ve created a, a a, a database. I mean, I had my own database, but it wasn’t something I could, I felt willing to make public ’cause it was pretty rough. And, but I think if I had more time and had, could do whatever, again, I would do it more scientifically and be like.[01:03:00]

I can show you why, how this is showing up and, you know, this thing means this thing in like 80% of the cases or whatever, you know, uh mm-hmm. If anyone listening ever wants to study, get involved in, in something like that, I’d, I’d love to collaborate and give, at the very least, give you, uh, my, my, uh, ideas for, for things to dig into.

Yeah. Um, another interesting thing about the difficulties of language and conversation that I’m interested in is the, the relation to, uh, mental illness in the sense that mm-hmm. I think people don’t understand how difficult it is to. Keep up, uh, to, to run all the programs that we need to run to be a social creature.

And I think that’s an unexamined area in mental illness. I think some people have talked about the, the role that social hardships play in, uh, you know, our state of mind. Like, uh, Richard Bental wrote Madness Explained, and he talks about the, the social nature of, uh, mental [01:04:00] illness. And other people have talked about it too, but what interests interests me, you know?

’cause I’ve had my own experiences with that. I, I dropped out of college due to a, you know, basically a nervous breakdown, high anxiety mm-hmm. Situation. Mm-hmm. And what strikes me about the difficulties of. Keeping up the social front. Uh, there’s just so many things that need to be operating well to have a conversation that we don’t really examine in our day-to-day lives.

Mm. Like the, the need to, the need to keep up that theory of mind of the other person and to keep up our own, uh, you know, our own, uh, model of ourselves and our, our ideas at the same time, it’s just, it’s such a heavy mental load that I don’t think most people realize in their day-to-day lives, but it’s easy to see how anxiety and depression can weaken those, those programs that we have to run.

Mm-hmm. And once you, and once you go down that kind of a hill of, you know, you start going down that hill of like, oh, these things that are required to be a social creature are now [01:05:00] harder for me. And that kind of has a snowball effect

Saul: where Mm,

Zach: you start, you stop seeing yourself as a social creature because you’re not able to keep up.

The necessary programs to run those things. And so it has an escalating effect. And I think that’s, that’s very interesting to me because I think it, it’s related to just how difficult it is to have conversations and to be a, a social creature.

Saul: Hmm. I think that’s a fascinating area of study. And interestingly, I haven’t seen a huge amount of work on specifically depression and anxiety or other mental illnesses.

Schizophrenia. There are some really interesting studies, uh, professor Rose McCabe has done. Um, she’s been working on doctor patient interactions, uh, and has done some really. Fascinating work on how mental illness is constructed in the [01:06:00] diagnostic process and also on what the patterns of interaction are between doctors and, and patients in mm-hmm.

Uh, in psychiatric consultations. And I’ve seen some of those conversations and witnessed some of the ways in which doctors are trained to speak to people with mental health problems and. Then looking at the results of how do they, in fact, uh, how does that training influence their practice? Mm, mm-hmm.

It’s quite difficult to watch. I, I found those sessions where I was involved in, in those kinda analytic data sessions, quite difficult to watch because people are stigmatized by particular ways of talking. You know, people are included or excluded, given certain mm-hmm. Rights and obligations, or have those rights and obligations withdrawn from them through, through interaction.

And maybe you could point to a particular diagnosis, particular pathology. But I have to [01:07:00] say, some of those, uh, doctor patient interactions, some of those interviews I saw made me a little uncomfortable about diagnostic process and made me wonder about the degree to which, mm-hmm. These, these conditions are maybe reinforced and.

Possibly perpetuated in certain ways. Now, that’s a very kind of antip psychiatry, uh, perspective. And that, that I, you know, I wouldn’t attribute that to any empirical, uh, work that I’ve done or any specialist knowledge that I have other than also personal experience of family experience of, of mental ill health.

And seeing that I, I completely agree with you that the, the, the ways in which people are included are excluded from society. That, that in, in a sense is, is really fundamental to, uh, ethno methodology to the question of how do people achieve membership of a social group or, or have that membership withdrawn or revoked or not [01:08:00] operative.

And I think mental ill health, especially because it is so stigmatized, is often mm-hmm. One of the. Conditions that is socially policed.

Zach: Yeah. If anyone likes these topics, uh, I’d recommend a, a previous interview I did with, um, Nathan Fier who wrote a book about, uh, schizophrenia and, and mental illness and, and some of those, uh, those kinds of ideas about, uh, just that our conceptions of them can be mistaken and, and they can be due to quite understandable, you know, stresses of dealing with the stresses of, of life because they are, there are these stresses of life that are very major that I think, you know, for people that are functioning well, just don’t really understand ’em ’cause they haven’t encountered them, but they’re, they’re very understandable stresses.

But yes, I, I recommend that, uh, I did a couple episodes about anxiety and, and, and mental issues in, in the past for anyone’s who’s interested. But yeah, to your point about, um, watching, uh, I, I’ve gone on my way to, [01:09:00] to read and, and listen to, um. Schizophrenic, um, patients interacting with doctors and, and you know, one, one thing that comes up in that realm is, is sometimes the interpretation that the, the person is, uh, is distanced from reality.

But a different analysis would be that the, they’re actually being kind of, you know, that they’re finding the doctor’s approach very, uh, aggressive and, and they’re responding to the, the disliking the doctor’s approach. So they’re responding in a way that seems nonsensical, but in a different light could actually be seen as just being like, you know, fuck you, basically.

Those, those kinds of things, you know.

Saul: Well, I have an, an example just from this one, uh, session I did, looking at some doctor patient interactions or psychiatric consultations, which was a woman talking to a doctor and explaining to her that she had this experience of. Uh, hearing the television, telling her what to do, and it was telling her to buy things [01:10:00] and the doctor was insisting that this was hallucinate and in some level mm-hmm.

On some level, it was, this woman was really obviously struggling in the way that she was describing her experience to ground it or to couch it in a way that was intelligible as watching an advert. And I could understand that she was talking about watching an advert, but the way that she was describing it sounded well pathologize she was talking about.

Mm-hmm. Being told what to do by the TV when hearing voices exactly what the TV does. I mean, watching the tv, it’s gonna tell you to do things, but you know, I should, I should stress really, look, I don’t know. I have no expertise in this area. Absolutely no qualifications in in psychiatry in mental health.

This is, you know, not something that I’m talking about as a researcher, but just as somebody who, who, you know, has some personal experience of, of mental ill health and, and recognizes that, that people are stigmatized in ways that are difficult to, um, take into account. And the, [01:11:00] the diagnostic tools that we have for typo, you know, for, for determining what particular mental health problems people have.

They’re done through talk, they’re through interviews. Mm-hmm. Largely with psychiatrists and the kind of, you know, the diagnostic and statistical manual, uh, the DSM that we use to give people a, a diagnosis. Again, these kinds of interviews. I think it’s widely accepted. I think even the author of the original DSM, you know, accepts that these are subject to all kinds of demand, you know, all kinds of influences that come from the interaction.

So I think it’s a, it’s a, I’m very curious about it, but yes, I don’t know anything about it as a researcher. Yeah,

Zach: I should say too, yeah, clearly I’m not an expert either, but I think it’s, to be clear, it’s, you can definitely see other, like examining the, uh, environmental factors or, um, you [01:12:00] know, stressors in, in people’s lives doesn’t take away from the idea that there could be, uh, you know, genetic dissertation no pre to and things like that.

So I just wanna throw that out there. Yeah.

Saul: Sorry. I’m very nervous about just spit balling about those kinds of topics. Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. You,

Zach: you can’t be too careful to, uh, make the caveats that we, that you need to make. Yeah. A note here, I wanted to emphasize a bit more what I was saying here as it may not have been clear.

I think for most well-functioning people, what defines us, Assane is an underlying conception of ourselves as social creatures. A fairly unexamined belief deep down, that striving towards a shared reality with other humans is something worthwhile or something possible. And so what I’m trying to say here is that communication with the minds of others is much harder than most of us know, requiring much more of a mental load than most of us know, and for people who don’t feel well.

When we start having that degeneration of our social abilities and it gets harder for us to [01:13:00] communicate and keep other people’s minds in our mind when we interact and things like that, those are sorts of initial assaults on what it is that makes us quote sane. Those can be the initial ways that we start to drift from consensus, shared reality, and start to see ourselves as no longer inhabiting the socially defined world.

Most of us take for granted. I actually haven’t read that much about these ideas, so if you happen to know any work on things like that, please let me know. If you would, I’d appreciate it. Back to the interview, if people want to keep in touch with, um, the work you’re doing, what’s the, what’s the best way?

Saul: Follow me on Twitter, I’m at Saul on Twitter, and you could also have a look at, uh, the EMCA wiki, which is the collabor collaborative bibliography of the field that I co maintain with a group of scholars. So that’s a great way of keeping up with what’s going on in ca.

Zach: Yeah. Okay. That’s cool. Yeah, I saw that.

I didn’t know that you were, uh, involved in and running that. Yeah. How do [01:14:00] you get that, uh, Saul, um, handle on Twitter? Was that hard? Did you, did you have to pay for that or did you just have that a long time?

Saul: No, I was a geek. I would, I, my former life I was a geek and, uh, for my sins was a very early Twitter adopter.

Zach: I was gonna say that’s a, that’s, that’s one of the, the, the early handles, I’m sure. Um, okay. Well thanks. This has been great, Saul. Thanks for coming on.

Saul: Thanks, Zach. Great to speak to you.

Zach: That was Saul Albert. His website is at saulalbert.net. His Twitter handle is @SAUL.

I’ll also mention that Saul has done other interesting work that he didn’t mention. His blog on his website is a very good read. One interesting thing he worked on, along with some other researchers, was an analysis of how Donald Trump greeted people at a White House event, analyzing the minutia of statements and body language and the likely functional reasons for why he did what he did.

This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at www.behavior-podcast.com. If you like this podcast, the most appreciated way you can say thanks is to leave me a rating or a review on the podcast platform you listen on. iTunes is always a good place to leave a rating on, as that’s the most popular platform. Also, I make no money on this podcast and spend a good amount of time on it, so if you want to encourage me to work more on it, you can send me some financial support via my Patreon: patreon.com/zachelwood.

If you’re a poker player, or even just interested in the analysis of verbal poker tells, you can find my book Verbal Poker Tells on my site www.readingpokertell.com or on Amazon.

Any ideas for shows you might have, or thoughts about the show, you can use my contact form at any of my sites. Or you can find me on Twitter at @apokerplayer.

Thanks for listening.

I talk to Rob Speiden (trackingschool.com), who’s an expert in “sign cutting,” which is the tracking of humans or animals over land using clues of physical disturbance. Rob teaches tracking and his site is at www.trackingschool.com. He wrote, along with Greg Fuller, a respected textbook on tracking called Foundations for Awareness, Signcutting, and Tracking (F.A.S.T.).

Topics discussed include: common methods of tracking; the different types of tracking jobs that come up; how tracking is used in search and rescue scenarios; addressing some common misconceptions about what’s possible with tracking; the importance of being fully aware and open to all sensory input; the role of the unconscious in giving us clues, and more. Rob also tells some interesting stories from his career.

A transcript is below. 

Episode links:

• YouTube
• Apple Podcasts (embedded below)
• Spotify

TRANSCRIPT

[Note: transcripts will contain errors.]

Zach: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding people and reading people. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.

On today’s episode, recorded october 26,2021, I talk to Rob Speiden, that’s SPEIDEN. Rob is an expert in sign cutting. Sign cutting is the tracking of people or animals over the ground by looking for physical indications of disturbance. The ‘sign’ in ‘sign cutting’ refers to the clues found on the ground, as in ‘I saw sign that someone passed here’. The ‘Cutting’ part of the term, from what I can gather, is about knowing the direction of travel of the person or animal you’re following, and cutting ahead to find their tracks, as opposed to just traveling in a straight line.

A little bit about Rob Speiden: He teaches tracking and you can find his website at www.trackingschool.com. He’s an active member of the Search and Rescue community and has been since 1993. He’s a Virginia Search and Rescue Tracking Specialist, Search Team Leader, and Search Mission Coordinator. He wrote, along with Greg Fuller, a textbook on tracking called Foundations for Awareness, Signcutting, and Tracking, which has the acronym FAST, and is used as a reference and textbook for the Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Emergency Management Search and Rescue Tracking program. Rob’s second book is Tracker Training: The Guide to Classroom and Field Exercises for Visual Trackers.

Okay here’s the interview with Rob Speiden

Zach: Hi Rob. Thanks for coming on.

Rob: Hey, it is my pleasure to to be here. Thanks, Zach.

Zach: So when it comes to tracking people. It seems like you could fit some of that work into a few categories, types of work.

What would you say are the, are the main categories that that come to mind of the types of [00:02:00] work?

Rob: Yeah. There, um, there are several ways to break it down and, and one way I kind of think of it is, um, whether it’s search and rescue or law enforcement or military. And the biggest difference between those is what you do with the person when you end up finding them.

Search and rescue might, might rescue them. Law enforcement. Could arrest them, or, um, military could eliminate them. And they’re, they’re definitely crossovers in those. One suggestion, um, that you put out there was looking for people that want to be found versus people that don’t want to be found. I think that’s also an awesome dichotomy and, and that’s certainly, uh, another way to break it up.

Zach: Uh, looking at your website, I, I assume you get called in for help on various types of jobs. Is that fair to say? And if so, what kinds of calls do you get called out on?

Rob: My business is a private business that’s, that’s for profit. Basically. I make money by teaching classes about this, but when I go searching for missing persons, um, that [00:03:00] I wouldn’t call that a job so much as.

It’s a volunteer activity. So I’m a member of several different search and rescue groups that when, um, a jurisdiction receives a report of a missing person, um, it is up to them how they want to handle that and they can handle it on their own or they can call for additional resources. And the teams I’m involved with in Virginia are notified by, uh, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.

And the acronym there is VEM. So when VEM gets a call or a request from an agency organization, a jurisdiction for assistance, they will, um, notify resources based on the request. So it could be a limited call out of just a couple teams. It could be a full call out of Send the Calvary kind of. Thing. And so when, um, any team that I’m a member of gets notified of a search for a missing person, if I’m working or doing, um, [00:04:00] if I’m out of state or something, I’m not able to respond.

But if I’m able to respond, then, then I’ll respond under, um, the, the name of the team that I’m a member of.

Zach: So there are a lot of kind of unsurprising aspects of tracking, like looking for footprints, broken twigs, things like that. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the, the lesser known indicators that people might be surprised or used as clues?

Rob: Um, I guess I could, it’s, it’s, I I don’t think anything I’m gonna put out here will be new or surprising. Um, I might debunk some things like the broken twigs thing. It’s like what can break twigs and, and you can have an animal that breaks twigs, a human that breaks twigs, a vehicle, the wind, another, uh, branch that’s falling, can break other twigs.

So there are things like bent grass and broken twigs that, that are very low on the weight. Scale or priority scale of, [00:05:00] Hey, I see this sign, so that must be the person I’m looking for. And, and really that comes down to identifiable sign. Um, just in semantics, sign can be any indication of activity. Uh, it could be a deer bed, it could be, um.

Folded blades of grass, whereas tracks, um, we reserve that term for identifiable signs. So that has characteristics that I could say, I could distinguish one individual from another by that track. So that tread pattern or some, um, unique indication in it, we’ll look for tracks that help us confirm that we’re following the same person and those.

Might be few and far between, where if somebody steps on an ant hill and leaves a partial impression of a tread pattern, we can say, okay, we’re still following this, this person in the next few. And, and possibly many footfalls just create [00:06:00] disturbances as signs. So there’s broken twigs that that flagged or, or, um, bent over.

A grass might be an indication, Hey, we’re still on the same trail, even if it’s not conclusively made by a particular. Or individual

Zach: And reading a little bit about this seemed like it was an important aspect to age the sign, determine how old the sign is. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that and, and what are some of the ways that you can, can age a sign in

Rob: the.

Um, beginning stages of a search for a person, we want to ask a few questions that help us age or, um, narrow down the possibility of the trail that we’re following. One is to find out when that person was last seen, and then we want to find tracks or sign that are. That are that old or younger or fresher than that.

And so aging is a crucial part of that story, crucial element of that story. And there are several tools I talk about [00:07:00] when, um, working on interpreting the age of tracks or sign. And one of those is that interview, that background information, knowing the weather history basically, when was the last time it rained or snow did.

Do form overnight, have there been windy conditions depending on the environment, what aging elements were occurred in the recent past, that will enable us to determine the age of the tracks to be made before that event or after that event, or even during that event. Um, and then one of the tools also we use to help determine the age of a tract we call indexing, which is putting down.

Um, your own track or, or making a, a complimentary sign, a sign that tries to duplicate what you’re seeing. If you find a track or a slip on the ground, a slide or something, um, you duplicate that to compare what you know to be immediate. Immediately fresh, what you just [00:08:00] made to what you’re looking at, and the more similar those are, then the oversimplified deduction of that could be the fresher that track is.

And then the third tool I talked about is just practices. Just going out and making tracks and watching them change over time based on those events, based on rainfall, based on wind or drying events. That helps build that. Library in your mind of what does it look like when a track has been through a, a gentle rain, a mist or dew or, or wind going across it?

Zach: Yeah. I imagine you must get a, a pretty good sixth sense after a while of learning all the factors of like the kind of material it is, the wind, recent rain. Like you must just get a sense of like, you walk out and you see something and you’re like, oh, I have a rough idea of. When that happened, is that fair to say?

You get a, a

Rob: pretty good sense? Yeah, it’s pretty fair to say we, we, um, have a certification process here for, um, search and rescue [00:09:00] tractors in Virginia that involves testing. And one of the tests, one of the stations that we conduct is an aging station, uh, where the, the evaluator puts out over the course of several days.

Puts out several lines of tracks and the people taking the station have to come in and estimate how old the tracks in sign are. And that’s a whole lot easier said than done. Um, aging is a very difficult science to it, basically. Um, there’s a good friend of mine, Mike Hall, who’s a great tracking instructor who describes tracking as.

The complex application of simplicities. So there are a lot of elements that can combine, but the combination of those elements often make it also, on occasion, it can be easy to um, look at traction sign and say, well, those are old, or those are fresh. But also on the flip side of that coin, there are plenty of times where it is very [00:10:00] difficult to accurately estimate the age of tracks or signs.

Zach: Mm-hmm. It comes to looking at. Footprints, can you tell a lot about a person, like for example, can you tell their approximate weight? Can you tell other things about them through deducing things about their footprints?

Rob: Yeah, that’s a great question and, and honestly for me, uh, I’m pretty critical about things like that because, uh, when I go to a search for missing person and I.

Find tracks or, or another team has found tracks, which often happens. Uh, and then it’s my job to interpret them or follow them. Uh, I’m pretty critical about what is able to be deduced from a track or a, a short line of tracks. And, and so for example, the weight that you bring up, that’s a, a common concept among lay people.

Depth of a track, you can tell the weight of the track maker. Uh, I’ve been working for years. It’s one of my soap [00:11:00] boxes, to try to, uh, encourage people to understand that the weight of the track maker has nowhere near the effect on the depth of the track, as does the hardness or softness of the medium that it’s in.

So the ground, um, of the same. Medium the same. Let’s say a soil can, if it’s soft or wet, it can yield a very deep track. But if it were frozen or otherwise hard, it’s going to yield a very shallow track or even no depth at all to it, even from the same track maker. So, um, I’m very hesitant to even think about, um, the weight of a track maker based on the depth of a track or any other information.

Some of the interpretations I think that you can get out of tracks would be how long, uh, going back to the aging thing, how long ago was this person here? How are they moving? Are they moving slack fast? Are they moving slow? Um, and who [00:12:00] is it? Is it a particular person? And again, we’d need identifiable track features or tread pattern to determine that.

And then over the course of a trail following a trail, um, you can glean information about the person, their behavior, um, some aspects of a state of mind, but these kinds of interpretations really go way out on a limb that is often difficult to support and things are often romanticized in media, in, um, Hollywood portrayals of tracking.

So it’s, it’s really a lot of times difficult to make those interpretations about things So. I just urge caution, uh, in that regard. Mm-hmm.

Zach: Yeah. I guess it’s, it’s probably like a lot of the softer sciences where there’s, there can be a lot of exaggerations of what’s po what’s possible either by like practitioners to exaggerate what they can do or just in the.

Yeah, the Hollywood kind of fictional world where they want to make things more exciting by, you know, exaggerating what people [00:13:00] Exactly right.

Rob: Exactly right. Yeah. You nailed it right on the head and, and so my background of search and rescue, if I make a decision or an interpretation, a deduction from something I.

Uh, about tracks or signs that are found out in the field. Basically my perspective is I better be right about that. ’cause that can affect the allocation of resources, how teams are deployed and can affect the outcome, can affect when the person is found, if found sooner or later, and can affect the condition they’re found in, are they found alive or dead?

So that’s, to me, it’s pretty. Pretty critical decision and, and, um, so that, that just means I’m more conservative in offering those deductions than just shooting from the hip and, and making some fantastic call on them, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm.

Zach: Yeah. That, this might be a good way to segue into the topic of, you know, when you’re, when you’re doing search and rescue work, I imagine those jobs must be.

[00:14:00] Pretty stressful with the, the clock ticking and, and so much, uh, riding on the, on the line. Can you talk a little bit about the, uh, you know, some of the shortcuts that you’re able to make and, and talk about the, the stress of the, the clock ticking and how that. Get you to speed up a search a bit.

Rob: When I respond to a search for missing person, one of the, there are a lot of tools that we have in the toolbox to approach that problem, and one of the first ones I like to use is to attempt tracking, is to ask about, um, what kind of footwear are they wearing?

What was the weather history recently and, and how, um, how do they walk and other behaviors, what do they have with them? Those kinds of things. But, but that interview is, um, it takes about 15 or 20 minutes, but to, but to do a thorough interview is pretty crucial so that we can interpret. Clues or items that we might find out in the field and, and determine the relevancy to this.

Were these tracks or was this [00:15:00] item of clothing actually left by the person that it belonged to them? Or is it somebody else’s that was just left out there? Um, so that’s one person. One little task to do, um, is to sit down and try to. Forget about that emergency thing and just try to get a bunch of information that’s gonna help out.

While that’s going on simultaneously, there are also teams that are sent out to do, uh, what we call reflex tasks, which are. Go on the trails, the common sense tasks of, hey, if this person were overdue, then they might be coming back this way. If they got disoriented, they might make a mistaken decision at this splitting the trail.

So send one team down the left fork and one team down the right fork and lots of things are going on at the same time. All driven by that sense of urgency of let’s get resources out now.

Zach: Um, I was, one thing I was wondering about, do people that. Or lost, [00:16:00] it would seem pretty obvious that they would know to leave like obvious markers, like as soon as they realize that they’re in trouble.

But does that always happen or do some people just not know that and that makes it harder to find them?

Rob: Yeah, it um, it’s a great question and for those that, um, are. Cognizant of being lost or wanting to be found. Those are behaviors, um, that we occasionally find, but we don’t find that they’re doing a lot The reality of it in search and rescue, we are often looking for people that don’t realize they’re, they’re lost.

And, and just to put that into context, these are children or people with dementia, people with autism, people that aren’t mentally, uh, aware that they’re in trouble and act. Uh, act to draw attention to themselves quickly. So, um, those, and, and also, um, people with mental illness and, and despondent or suicidal folks [00:17:00] or those aren’t gonna be working to bring people to them.

Zach: Hmm. I see. Can you give a rough percentage of like how that breaks down? Like for search and rescue, what percentage are people that are just lost and trying to be found versus people that are fall in that other category of,

Rob: yeah. I wish I had numbers right off top of my head, but I’ll tell you the, the vast majority of people fall into the, aren’t.

Thinking about how to get somebody to help them category. So, um, again, children, people with dementia, people with autism that those account for and people with mental illness. Um, account for the vast majority, I’m gonna say 70 to 80% of the searches in Virginia are those cases, um, where people aren’t intentionally leaving clues or doing things that would help us

Zach: get to them quicker.

A small edit here. I’ll cut ahead a little bit to where Rob’s talking about the importance of being fully present and fully aware when looking for side. [00:18:00]

Rob: Um, so one of the things that, that we teach in Search and Rescue is awareness is just paying attention to your surroundings and, and what’s going on around you.

And, and part of that instruction is knowing your capabilities and limitations and being aware of our senses and how can we use those to, uh, basically be more cognitive, pay more attention to our surroundings. And, and so one of the things we kind of brush on is intuition is. Getting input that comes in subconsciously and maybe a little bit might bubble up into the consciousness and, and act on that accordingly.

And there are a couple searches I can talk about where that, uh, led me to a missing person. But on a, a job I was working as an environmental engineer and. And, um, I’d gone out to a site to, um, to pull up traffic cones that were used to protect the concrete pads, um, that were poured around the [00:19:00] monitoring wells.

And I was gonna take those back to the driller’s office, and this is a two and a half hour drive to get there. And, and we talk about. And intuition input coming in through all the senses and peripheral vision and not just looking straight at something, but receiving something in our side view. And, and I was driving, um, back that I had, I was, uh, given the task of dropping those cones off at the driller’s office.

And I was driving along and all of a sudden it occurred to me that, Hey, I need to drop the COEs off at the driller’s office. And I look in the side view mirror and I was just passing by the office. So what, what I think happened there was, as that driller’s building came into view, my brain started going, Hey, there’s the office.

You know, heads up. So that I think is something that happens every day to everybody, that we receive all this input and can’t process all of it, but some of it [00:20:00] percolates up into consciousness and we can we act on those and might get that sense that somebody’s looking at us or other things that. People attribute to intuition, but it’s kind of the reverse of, it’s not an awesome, extraordinary situation, but to me, the everyday situation can be

Zach: extraordinary.

Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. And then that kind of relates to, you know, the work I do with poker towels and kind of the, the reason I’m interested in doing this podcast in the first place was because I think there are these things that people in, in specific industries or specific pastimes know that’s.

Can be at this instinctual level. Yes. Uh, and, and, and those, and, and we have that. Yeah. Like you said, we have that experience all the time. Like, I actually, I actually write down those experiences in my life where I’m like, oh, that clearly, that clearly had something to do with me. Subconsciously sensing something and, and acting on it and, and making a decision.

It’s like I, yeah, that’s the, that’s the really fascinating stuff. Yes. And, and trying to figure out like, oh, how, how can I try to do that more consciously? [00:21:00] And you actually use those things that I’m. I’m noticing all the time. More consciously. Yeah.

Rob: Yes. And my only, the best answer, which I take from a tracking teacher that I studied from is just practicing the ordinance, just paying attention, consciously paying attention to, um, those, those primary senses.

So exploring vision and thinking about colors and darks and lights and, and hearing, just paying instead of. Um, just hearing, actively listening and paying attention to that and smelling. I mean, actually taking a second or a couple seconds every hour to inhale and pay attention to the odors you might get.

Those are just gonna hardwire those neural connections and facilitate that, um, transmission of information and, and basically, um, make those senses stronger so to speak, or more fluid, or happen more readily. One thing I [00:22:00] try to do is. Practice it, it, again, it’s tracking, but, um, is looking for when I go out to the mailbox is trying to figure out if mail was delivered or not.

We have a paved road, but there’s that dirt, gravel travel where the, the mail truck actually drives a few, a couple feet off the road just to put it in our mailbox and, and look at the ground and try to quiz myself. It’s like, can I see? If the mail was delivered or not, and if it rained the night before, the ground is soft and, and that, um, what we call the baseline, the natural conditions of the ground might have been basically reset or cleaned by that rain.

So that would be easy. But if it’s a week of dry, similar weather day to day, um, then it’s gonna be more difficult to tell. So I’ll, I’ll try that as a quiz to see if, uh, if mail’s been delivered or not. Pretty successful over 90% of the time, but not a hundred percent.

Zach: Yeah, good practice for sure, it sounds like.

Yeah. So [00:23:00] are you able to give an example where you had a kind of unconscious sixth sense in a tracking situation?

Rob: So, um, on a, uh, there are actually two searches I can tell you about where, where in hindsight this played a role. And, and, um, and that’s kind of the key thing is it’s not like a. Turned on and said, okay, I’m gonna use intuition now.

It just, um, looking back on events, it, it seemed to have played a significant part. And, um, the first search was for a gentleman that had dementia, early stages of dementia, but he would go for a walk on a regular, if not daily basis, and interviewing his wife who reported him missing. Uh, she indicated that he goes down this trail and accesses.

Just a large portion of woods that we were already sending teams into to search. And, and so I received my task as a walker with a canine team, um, to go search a particular area. And on the way down the trail, I. Even though this is, I was only in the first or [00:24:00] second year of searching, and this is probably my second, third search only.

Um, it occurred to me everybody had been walking down this trail, so he obviously wasn’t on the trail. And, and so we were to go search a particular area, but in route to there, uh. Felt a need to step off the trail and kind of put eyes where others hadn’t looked. And um, as soon as I took a step off the trail, two more steps would’ve been on him.

Uh, he was lying down, basically bidding distance from the trail and, and he blended in, well, he had brown pants on and, um. Kind of a, uh, subdued colored shirt, and he was lying face down. And so I notified the team leader who, who started to work medical stuff while I communicated with command that, that we had found them.

But it was just the moment that that hit at, at a particular point to, to step off the trail and be looking for him. And sure enough, there he was. Mm-hmm. Um, so that’s a short one, but a, a more involved example was. For a [00:25:00] search for an individual that ran trails at a, a park here in Virginia called First Landing State Park.

And, um, this gentleman had parked his car at the park, uh, days before the search. That particular day I’m speaking of was a Saturday and he had parked his car there Wednesday and, and Rangers found this car there Thursday and didn’t think a whole lot of it until they came back on Friday and they’re not allowed to park there overnight.

And they, uh, began a search for him on Friday. Came out missing. So they called in volunteer resources and it, it was an officer in, um, in an arm in the armed forces. And so it got a lot of attention in the news and eventually, um, a couple ladies came forward and they said, I, I think we saw this guy. I. We encountered him on, uh, one of the trails in first landing state park.

And we went out there, it was actually only two of us, myself and another tracker, and Theresa and the two of us went out with those two ladies and they [00:26:00] said, we saw the guy here. And at that location, the trail split and, and they had some uncomfortable interaction with ’em, like he didn’t respond to their salutation, so they went one way on the trail and.

They saw him going the other way, but that trail made a, a big one mile loop. And on their way back, they never saw him again. They had that one encounter and that was it. So Therese and I thanked them. We looked at their tread pattern and, and, um, expressed our appreciation for them helping out with the search effort and excused them, let them go on their way.

And so we started looking on the ground, which was a nice area that we call a track trap, which, um, is any area like snow or soil that if somebody steps on it, it’ll take. Could track pattern and we couldn’t find their tracks, much less ones that, that we thought were his, because after, uh, that Wednesday night, it had rained like cats and dogs, I mean, it poured buckets and, and just washed everything out.

We could see tracks from search. Efforts the day [00:27:00] before on Friday, but nothing we could identify as his. So I just, I thought we’d just split up off of the trail. Obviously he wasn’t on the trail. Once again, if he was on the trail, he’d been found. But, um, I was standing there with Theresa and, and said, all right, let’s.

Let’s just get a little bit off of the trail at the edge of what people could see if they were walking on the trail and kind of walk that edge and start looking for his tracks. Any indication of somebody going off the trail. Um, because there, there’s plenty of sign and washed out tracks on the trail, but one to look for somebody cutting off the trail, which could happen for somebody walking a dog or having to go pee or something, but.

Um, we’re gonna narrow it down a little bit, and as I’m standing there with her, she’s on my left side and I kind of have a, an inkling to go to the left. But I ask her, um, after, give that plan, she says, okay, that sounds cool. And so I look at her and say, which way do you want to go? And she says, I don’t care, Rob.

You’re the team leader. You tell me. And I [00:28:00] still had that pull to the left. But, um, she was standing there. I was like, okay, you go to the left and I’ll go to the right. And we’ll just walk parallel to the trail and look for any side of humans going off the trail. And she started to walk off towards the left and I started to follow her.

I mean, I’m now just being pulled towards that direction and I take a few steps and see that she’s going out there. I know she’s an experienced searcher, like she’s got it. She can cover it. I’m gonna go over to my side, like we developed a plan and, and go over there. And so I go back towards the pass.

Across the path. And before I get to the distance that I’m gonna start walking at, she says, Rob, stop. I got him. And he was right over a sand dune just on the other side of it, said just outta sight of that trail. And to this day, I can’t tell you that I saw anything hurt, anything, smell anything. He was deceased.

He, he, um, as investigations bore out, he, uh, committed suicide actually, and mm-hmm. All [00:29:00] indications were he did that the day that he went out and on that Wednesday. And so it is possible that some odor or something came over and, and kind of in, but when I didn’t even sense any wind direction and, and even standing near, uh, his remains, I couldn’t really smell anything.

But, but that just strikes me again, in hindsight as, hey, something pulled me in that direction out. A strong sense to go that way. And, and sure enough, there he was.

Zach: Is it possible to do urban or suburban or city tracking and or do, do some people specialize in that or is that a pretty, I’d imagine that’s a pretty tough thing and, and you probably just use other.

Tools, like, you know, yes. Uh, spotting people or, or people spotting them or whatever.

Rob: So tracking, visual tracking itself, itself is a specialty. And, and that’s gonna incorporate, uh, basically all environments. So it’s, it’s difficult to get anybody to specialize in any aspect of that. [00:30:00] It. Except for those that live in a particular environment.

And so any tool in my mind, and again, philosophy and what we teach in classes, any tool, every tool has its capabilities and its limitations. So there are times where that. Tool is gonna work and there are times where it’s not gonna work. In difficult conditions, a tool will work less so in hard on hard surfaces.

Tracking is gonna work less frequently. Um, it’s still something to pay attention to, to look for and, and use when possible, because there might be a concrete surface. That has a little thin layer of dust on it that can yield tracks and sign. Um, there can be gum on a sidewalk that can yield a partial impression.

That gives a, a unique tread pattern to it. So there, there are possibilities, um, for using that. And one of the few times I’ve actually been able to track. To a missing person [00:31:00] was in an urban environment. It was, there was an apartment complex and a lady had dementia and she wandered off from this apartment complex.

And somebody in a, a third story, um, apartment as you just mentioned, pointed out, Hey, I think I saw her walking in here in between these two buildings yesterday. And so we went to that location in between the buildings and basically there was a small, like a one acre or less patch of woods behind this apartment complex.

And then, um, further beyond that was this big chain link fence and a, and a divided highway beyond that. But in, within that one acre area, um, I picked up on a, a line of disturbance. So it was just sign leaves were scuffed up and looked a little bit out of place. And. Followed that and ended up at a, a canine team, and they said, yeah, we had, we had come along this way last night when we were, when we first responded to this [00:32:00] report.

So I eliminate that one. I go back to that starting point. I pick up another set of disturbances that was the next likely line or next obvious line, and followed that about 50 yards and ended up finding the lady, um, leaning up against the tree. Those were conditions where that worked. And there, there are plenty more stories of, hey, look around for tracks or sign but can’t find any.

And, and so we put that tool on the tool belt and and use other tools to find that person.

Zach: So when it comes to tracking the people who don’t want to be found, I’d imagine that’s pretty hard. And I imagine you don’t want to give. You know, that much tricks of the trade away, but are you willing to talk a little bit about how difficult that is to track people who don’t wanna be found?

Rob: Yeah. Kind of in that gray area there. Um, there are those people that I mentioned that are vast majority of, um, people that aren’t trying to be found, aren’t. Aren’t we lost? And, and [00:33:00] trying to, to rescue themselves basically. So, uh, a lot of those people with dementia and, and others might actually be in evasive, so they might actually Oh, right.

Try to get away from searching. Or children that think they’re in trouble or, or other things. So, um, it’s really, I guess I was thinking

Zach: more about, uh, yeah, I was thinking more about like criminally evasive is what I meant to.

Rob: Um, volunteer search and rescue resources don’t get involved in many criminal cases.

They’re, we have to approach every search as if it’s a crime scene, so that if we later find out there was foul play, then um, we’ve preserved evidence accordingly and, and. Um, that’s part of our teaching. But as far as, um, people that don’t want to be found, again, the, the earth doesn’t care who steps on it, whether it’s, um, a five-year-old child or a 80-year-old grandparent or somebody that doesn’t want to be found.

If they step on the ground, they’re [00:34:00] gonna disturb that ground. Anytime somebody goes from point A to point B, they have to leave two things behind. They have to leave scent and they have to touch the ground. Nobody levitates and nobody’s an exception to that rule. So any resource that is trained to find either or both of those clues, the scent, which is typically the canine resources and the visual clues, which is us, then those are gonna be the.

Best resources that can follow that trail from that point last seen to the person, whether they want to be found or not. So there, there are techniques that we use that overlap regardless of whether the person wants to be found or they’re evasive and, and yeah, it gets more difficult, but, uh, it can still be done for sure.

And yeah, like you said, I, I do hesitate to talk a lot about. How things are done looking for evasive persons. ’cause we just have to call in the question why, why do people [00:35:00] wanna know about that? And it’s exciting. I understand. I get that. Um, but also to, to help those that are, uh, in the good, I gotta pause it right there.

Zach: Yeah. Like a magician does wanna, that they don’t, they don’t wanna violate the, um, you know. The guild Uhto. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, that made me wonder, when you talk about dogs, uh, I mean, is it fair to say that dogs are pretty much always involved in these kind of searches?

Rob: Um, I wouldn’t say always. Uh, there’s no resource that’s involved in everything, but that’s the most common resource to go to.

They’re, their canines are trained in a variety of, of, um, specialties, whether it’s. Um, looking for a particular object or explosive detection or drug detection or people detection. Um, you can, you can train a variety of breeds of dogs to look for

Zach: a variety of things. Mm-hmm. Uh, well maybe let, let’s go on to, uh, you know, when many people think of sign [00:36:00] cutting, a big application of that is, uh, is border patrol, uh, tracking people across the borders illegally?

Is that, is that something you’ve. Worked on yourself or, or is that mainly something you do for training or?

Rob: Yeah. Uh, I am in Virginia, so I, I don’t have access to the borders either Canadian or Mexican. Um, so I, I don’t work, that’s just not something I do. But I do know that border patrol agents are heavily practiced in, in tracking and, and, um, that is one of the biggest tools on their tool belt.

Zach: Do you do training of, you know, government, uh, or. Law enforcement for, for those purposes, for, for tracking? Uh, yes I do. And your book is used widely and. In the law enforcement world. Right? Is that fair to say?

Rob: Um, uh, since I’m not specifically myself, I’m not a law enforcement officer, and, and so I’m not tied into the law enforcement world a lot.

I know, um, there are a number of people that, that applaud the [00:37:00] book and, and use it, and I’m just, I’m not sure how widely it is. Uh uh, but so yeah, I’ve taught a number of agencies and in Virginia, so I wear a couple hats as an instructor. I started out. Um, teaching and continue to teach the present day for the Department of Emergency Management.

Um, and then, uh, started teaching for them in 1998 and continue to teach as a lead tracking instructor for Search and Rescue in Virginia. I. And I wrote my book for, as a textbook for that class. Uh, and then a few years after starting that job, I, I started my own school, um, to venture out beyond Virginia and have taught around the world, um, a number of search and rescue and law enforcement and other government agencies in, uh, in tracking.

Zach: Well, great. This has been great. Is there any. Other than you wanna mention that you were, you were hoping to, to fit in that we haven’t touched on?

Rob: Uh, one of the good tracks we had just, [00:38:00] uh, another success that we had and there was, um, multidisciplinary in that, um, it was a, a search for a person that was evasive, that didn’t wanna be found, that ran.

He was, he was, um, high on who knows what drugs and, and when, um, he had injured himself. And when a. A friend said, Hey, let me take you to hospital. He is like, no, the police are after me. They’ll be at the hospital. He just, he takes off into the woods. And so, um, we get called in to assist with the search for this person by the sheriff’s office and, and working with the sheriff’s office and investigators.

We put several teams out, which included our search and rescue resources and fire department resources, uh, and the deputies, investigators themselves and. One of, uh, while at the, um, this individual was staying at a, a friend’s house and, um, I went to that house to look around for tracks to a, um, basically a due inventory [00:39:00] elimination, which is inventory is looking at all the tracks that I can find in the area.

And elimination is eliminating the known, so eliminating those that were made by the people that live in the house. I can look at their shoes and eliminate those tread patterns. Look at responding deputies, tread patterns. And, and get rid of all those. And by age and process of deduction, I find a track, uh, that I think was made by the person we’re looking for.

And just a few minutes later, um, a team member of mine calls in that, Hey, about a hundred yards away, they’ve found the other tracks. And I go over. To where they’re looking and they’re in grass and wet and there’s no tread detail, but there’s a trail of sign of basically bent over vegetation going down into the woods.

So I follow that down and end up finding the guy’s cell phone and um, call the investigators over and. Um, while they’re coming over to collect that. I also find the guy’s watch, [00:40:00] and another one of my team members finds a shoe that belongs to ’em, which is kind of good news, bad news because hey, we got the shoe and I can confirm.

Sure enough, that was consistent with the tread pad, with the track pattern that I had found. But now he means he is not wearing that shoe, at least. Um, and maybe not both. Either one of them. And coincidentally, about that time also a team that was further beyond this find some barefoot tracks. So I go down and measure those tracks, and those are consistent with everything we’ve been finding.

So we basically point resources in that direction. And each team, we had four teams out, and each team is coming up with, uh, a barefoot track and or an article of clothing. And so, um, we send teams further on down. So basically we’re leapfrogging, we’re, I’m following these tracks and sending teams ahead and teams find additional barefoot tracks.

And all of a sudden this guy totally changes direction. Instead of going down this creek bed, he [00:41:00] turns up a ridge into rending and thick vegetation and, um, mountain Laurel and all that good stuff. And, and it’s. Hours and hours later or two or three o’clock in the morning, we’re down on hands and knees looking at leaves that are just bent and it’s just sign at this point.

And it could be deer, it could be bear. Um, and this guy is going off the side ridge and coming back up on the ridge and, and we continue going up on the ridge and. Um, about four o’clock in the morning to put my light up ahead of me and see this log without any bark on it. And I realized that’s actually the guy’s leg.

He’s down to his underwear and, and just cold as all can be. But, um, but we got him and, uh. And that’s the success of one of several successes of tracking, which, which makes it all worthwhile. All that frustration and, and, um, difficulty and the training and the practice and, um, that’s, that’s what

Zach: it’s all about.[00:42:00]

I imagine. It must be, uh, it must be exciting. Uh, yeah, that’s, it must, it must keep you very engaged in, in the work, I’d imagine. Yeah. Yes, it does. It’s very rewarding. A small edit here. I’m cutting ahead to where Rob talks about how he initially got interested in tracking

Rob: in addition to human tracking. So back in 1995, I took my first tracking class that got me hooked on tracking period, and that was through search and Rescue.

And there is also an introduction to animal tracking in that, uh, which in, uh. The importance of knowing your environment, knowing the local, as you mentioned before, the floor and fauna. Um, so especially the fauna in the area and what kind of sign they can leave behind. Um, so I just got interested in tracking any animal, humans or four-legged or whatnot.

And, and, um, eventually got, uh. Exposed to or introduced to a program called Cyber Tracker Conservation, um, which is actually a program that assesses people’s knowledge and skills and animal tracking and, and, [00:43:00] um, those skills basically have helped me tremendously in the search and rescue tracking and the human tracking to know what animal tracks and sign look like, especially the sign, I mean, the tracks.

And if a deer track is in the mud, it’s obviously not human. But when a deer walks through that mountain laurel that rend and leaves, they can leave disturbances fairly similar to what humans leave behind. And, and there’ve been more than one occasion that trailing a human have had to eliminate what people come up and say, Hey, I’ve got a barefoot track here.

And no, they’re. Their toes in a pad, but that’s actually a black bear, not a human barefoot. So distinguishing those kinds of things in subtle, uh, or difficult conditions is very helpful also. Uh, but that’s another program. The Cyber Tracker Conservation Program is, is, uh, an amazing worldwide, uh, entity.

Zach: That was Rob Speeden and his website [email protected]. And again, he’s the author of a book called [00:44:00] Foundations for Awareness Sign Cutting and Tracking. This has been the People Who Read People Podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about the [email protected]. If you like the podcast, please give me a rating or review on iTunes or on whatever platform you’d listen on or share an episode you like on social media.

That’s also very much appreciated. I make no money on this podcast and spend a good amount of time on it. So many forms of appreciation are appreciated by me. If you happen to play poker or know people who do, you might enjoy checking out my work on poker behavior, also known as poker Tells. You can find [email protected].

Thanks for listening.

A talk with researcher Emily Kubin (twitter: @emily_kubin) about her work reviewing more than 100 studies on how social media may be affecting political polarization. Transcript is below.

Their paper is called “The role of (social) media in political polarization: a systematic review.” We discuss her research, why polarization is a problem in the first place, why people can be resistant to thinking that polarization is a problem, the two different types of polarization (affective and ideological), our psychology tendency to become us-versus-them in our thinking, her own opinions on what social media is doing to us, and the mechanisms by which social media may be amplifying polarization.

Episode links:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcasts

Related resources:

• Emily Kubin’s Google Scholar page
• Emily Kubin’s work she mentioned: Personal experiences bridge moral and political divides better than facts
• Zach Elwood’s piece on social media’s inherent effects on polarization
• If you liked this episode, please check out the other People Who Read People episodes on related topics (like this one on how Facebook increases polarization).

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding the people around us and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. 

On today’s episode, recorded October 12th 2021, I talk to Emily Kubin about her research into the effects of social media on political polarization. 

When some people hear about the problem of polarization, think something like: “one political group is way worse than the other so it makes sense that we’re polarized and therefore polarization is not a problem”. If you’re someone who thinks something like that, I recommend you listen to this episode. Because, in my opinion, and in the opinion of many people who study these things, our us-versus-them polarization is the root cause of the problems we’re facing in the United States and in many other divided and dysfunctional countries, and many people in both political groups, including people like you and me, play a role in amplifying those divides. Many people have a defensive reaction to thinking about polarization and their potential role in it, which goes something like “the other side is much worse so why should I have to think about my behavior or my group’s behavior” But it’s possible to recognize how we can be contributing to our problems while still believing one group is worse than the other. In other words, we can attempt to change our behavior and the people on our side’s behavior to help solve our problems and that doesn’t require us to take the blame for the problem; it just requires us to recognize how these dynamics are happening. 

I really can’t overstate how important I think the issues we’ll be discussing are. I don’t view these issues as distant, abstract academic topics; they are vitally important topics, in my opinion quite literally the most important topics, because extreme polarization can be deadly and destructive on its own, can and has destroyed many countries, but also because us being very polarized prevents us from solving other very serious and scary problems. 

Emily Kubin and Christian Von Sikorski’s paper is titled “The Role of (Social) Media in Political Polarization: A Systematic Review.”For that research they examined 121 studies on the role of social media in shaping political polarization. 

 I’ll read the abstract of that paper:

“Rising political polarization is, in part, attributed to the fragmentation of news media and the spread of misinformation on social media. Previous reviews have yet to assess the full breadth of research on media and polarization. We systematically examine 94 articles (121 studies) that assess the role of (social) media in shaping political polarization. Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, we find an increase in research over the past 10 years and consistently find that pro-attitudinal media exacerbates polarization. We find a hyperfocus on analyses of Twitter and American samples and a lack of research exploring ways (social) media can depolarize. Additionally, we find ideological and affective polarization are not clearly defined, nor consistently measured. Recommendations for future research are provided.” end quote

You can follow Emily on Twitter at @emily_kubin, and you can find her research by searching online for ‘emily kubin research’. 

I’ve spent a good amount of time on this podcast interviewing people about political polarization psychology and about how social media may be impacting that. If this topic interests you, I recommend skimming back through past episodes to see topics related to this.

I’ve also done my own work on this topic. Last year I researched and wrote a piece about the inherent ways in which social media may be amplifying our divides. My focus on inherent aspects was a purposeful contrast to a focus on product features, which gets most of the attention; a good example of the focus on product features was in the documentary The Social Dilemma. I think the focus on product features is attractive in many ways, because it gives us clear villains, and it’s also fairly optimistic in that it assumes the problem is simply badly made products and not something more intrinsic and harder to combat. But I think this focus is a mistake and a blind spot and I think it detracts us from understanding the root causes of the problem. That piece I wrote contains some ideas that, as far as I know, I’m the first person to write about. For example, I reference a 1950s study that showed how writing things down publicly makes us more stubborn and less likely to change our minds, and I think this is one of the fundamental ways in which internet communication may be making us less flexible and more defensive and argumentative. You can find that piece of mine on my Medium blog; search for ‘zachary elwood medium social media. 

A few months ago, I talked to a high school class about these topics, and I think we need more schools working these ideas into their curriculum; we need more awareness from a young age of how these tools that now play such a huge role in our lives may be screwing us up in various ways.  

Okay, sorry about all the self-promotion, let’s get back to my guest Emily Kubin:  Emily is currently a PhD student in the Political Psychology & Communication Lab at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Landau, Germany. She is also a research affiliate at the Center for Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Emily’s studies focus on political communication. Specifically, she focuses on how political opponents view and interact with one another, and the role media plays in opponents’ perceptions of one another. She places a special focus on studying strategies that political opponents (and the media) can use to reduce affective polarization. 

Here’s my interview with Emily Kubin:

Zach: Hi, Emily. Thanks for coming on. 

Emily: Thank you for having me. 

Zach: So you’ve clearly reviewed a lot of work about social media effects on political polarisation and you’ve clearly had to think deeply about all the work out there on the subject. And I realise that your research was not about reaching some sort of definitive conclusion all these topics, but I think a lot of people would be very curious if we’re talking about effective polarisation, emotional us-versus-them polarisation. Are you willing to say what your personal take is on how much of an effect social media is having on effective polarisation?

Emily: So of course as a scientist, it’s very difficult to say X causes Y. Right? We tend to talk about correlations rather than causations. I’ve looked through a great depth of literature on this specific subject and what we are consistently seeing is this kind of relationship between the use of social media and the contents of social media, and increasing levels of effective polarisation. Especially in terms of the connection between Facebook as a social media platform and Twitter. These two major social media networks seem to be frequently cited as places where people are becoming increasingly more effectively polarised.

Zach: Are there certain studies that stand out to you as you were reviewing the literature and studies? Are there certain things that stand out as being the most important ones in the field?

Emily: Well, what I would say is the most interesting research out there is focusing on the extent to which we’re actually incentivized to be polarising on social media platforms. So there’s a variety of studies that actually highlight that politicians when they are saying polarising things or being very polarising on social media platforms, they get more reach, more spread, and therefore they might actually be more incentivized to be saying polarising things. If I am a politician and I want people to hear from me, I want them to know my name, I want them to have my name pop up on their newsfeed, then social media is a great place to be spreading my polarising content to get access to the public.

Zach: Yeah, I think that kind of gets into something I’m interested in, and it’s the inherent ways that social media and internet communication act on us; which I think often the product choices get so much attention like what buttons are used and what are the specific algorithms and rules. But I think to me, if the internet was just a series of very simple forums like Reddit or something, I think we’d still be dealing with a lot of the same effects because there is this inherent aspect to the internet and our communication in general of like, we want to be noticed, we want to get attention– negative messages get more attention than positive messages, that kind of thing. And I’m curious did some of the work that you review talk about some of these inherent aspects of internet communication?

Emily: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the content that we see that gets spread the most are things that are the most outrageous, the most upsetting and cause the most strong emotional reactions. And these things tend to also be very polarising things. So when we see an outrageous post, these things are liked more, reacted to more. And it could be in terms of people reacting in a good way of saying, “This is right, I agree with this. This is great,” and also people reacting like, “This is disgusting. This is horrible. How could you share this or think this way?” So on the internet, the things that are are going to cause those strongest emotional reactions are also the things that are going to spread the furthest and fastest. And yeah, those are the things that are the most polarising often.

Zach: A small edit here. I’m going to skip to a part of the interview where Emily talks about some of the methods they used to review the many studies that accumulated.

Emily: And then now let’s say we have our collection and in the case of this review, we had 94 articles in total that we analysed. Now the next step is to say, “Well, how do we collect this massive amount of knowledge and data and find something that we can actually present to the public of what we know in the literature.” And so what we decided to do was start to categorise the study. So for example some studies will focus on media content like what kind of content is on social media platforms or news media, etc? And so they’re just focusing on what is the actual text that people will read. Another area of categorization could be like your selective exposure. So if I’m selectively exposing myself to to like-minded media, how does that impact the extent to which I’m polarised? Then the third is focusing in on media effects. So these are often much more like experiments, and they are manipulating different types of media and seeing if there’s differences in outcomes for polarisation. We can start breaking these down into different types of research, and then once you do that you can then look and see if there’s systematic patterns.

Zach: A small note here due to an audio glitch, Emily says that one thing they’re looking for in the studies is what they measure whether it is polarisation on actual issues and policies, or whether it’s polarisation on how the subjects perceive people who were politically different from them. And those are two very different measurements.

Emily: What’s really interesting is that even researchers that study this stuff don’t seem to be very good at making those distinctions either. Of course the researchers usually or should know the distinction between the two, but when they talk about it in their work, they don’t always make this clear distinction of like, “We’re going to be focusing on effective polarisation,” or “We’re going to be focusing on ideological polarisation.” And the reason that that can be a problem is that it makes it– for people that aren’t as familiar with this topic– it makes this information a lot less clear. Even if you’re as a psychologist that’s studying social psychology but maybe you don’t study politics and policy, you might not know that there’s these two different forms of political polarisation and what they’re called and the antecedents and consequences of these things. And so when you read a paper that’s just talking about political polarisation overall and not making a clear distinction, the nuance gets a little lost. And this is kind of a critique that we’re making a literature on that.

Zach: Yeah, I think a big part of what came across to me in reading your paper was encouraging other scientists to think about these factors and the different categories helps make the research more consistent so you can get a better sense over time. Because as you say, this is a super hard area to study because it’s such a dynamic and changing world and there’s so many factors involved. And I think people don’t understand how complex these things are to study too is another issue. Yeah. 

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. 

Zach: The point about some studies not making the distinction between the effect of an ideological polarisation, I’m curious, sometimes when I read some psychological studies, I’m just thinking this seems really dumb. And I’m wondering were there moments you had when you were reviewing studies and thinking like, “This just seems really bad for a number of reasons and maybe we shouldn’t include it” or do you make that decision ahead of time like, “This is included because it’s peer reviewed or whatever and it’s going to be included no matter what dots you have on it later on,” if that makes sense.

Emily: So we at the very beginning had a very strict criteria of what would be included and what wouldn’t be. We had very clear rules set out that it had to focus specifically on social media or traditional media and the effect of that media on polarisation, or the relationship between these two things. And that’s a very specific criteria to have and so for us, it wasn’t difficult later on to then be like, “Should this actually be included or not because for us, the rules have been very clear from the beginning.” And so what that allowed us to do is then see places where maybe researchers kind of went a little wrong with their research, I would argue, or maybe didn’t do things in the most ideal way. But it didn’t make us question should this be included or not. Of course it should be included, it was very relevant. But what they did wasn’t ideal. I think the place where we saw this the most was in terms of measurement of polarisation specifically. This was really a place where I was kind of shocked. And we originally actually hadn’t been planning on looking at measurement and then decided maybe this would be interesting to see if there’s differences in how researchers are measuring polarisation. And what we found was that relatively consistently, people or researchers I should say are measuring ideological polarisation, which again is this polarisation on policy stances so like the extent to which I’m pro or anti-gun, for example. They measure that… It’s comparative across studies. Most studies are doing something relatively similar to other studies, the only distinction is that some will measure on a specific policy stance. So for example, like to what extent are you pro or anti-gun or based on where participants place themselves on the ideological spectrum and how liberal or conservative you are. 

So those are slightly different things, I would argue. However, these are fair and reasonable ways to measure ideological polarisation. What was really interesting was how effective polarisation was being measured. Of course there’s plenty of people that consistently were measuring it in similar ways in terms of like how warm people feel towards their political opponents was a very standard measure. However, there were some that were a little strange. For example, one paper measured effective polarisation by assessing how strong you feel the leader is of the opposing political party. I would argue that that is not measuring how much animosity I have towards the out group or how much love I have for my in group. I was pretty shocked by this, but I think that highlighting this and finding this distinction is something that’s interesting and important to note that of course it’s a match or a criteria, but it was a surprising finding and it suggests that maybe in the future researchers should be more cognizant of this, and especially with effective polarisation be more consistent in their measurement.

Zach: Yeah, there just seems to be so many factors here. If anyone has looked into it even a little bit, for example trying to measure ideological polarisation by rating, you know, how liberal or conservative you perceive yourself as, that very easily overlaps with feelings and affective polarisation in terms of like, one might perceive oneself as conservative or even have more conservative views because of the feelings. You know, there can be an overlap between these two things and very much in the way that feelings can affect the issues and ramp up the issues. The reason that we can be so irate about the issues can be in an underlying way about the feelings. Because in a less polarised environment, for example, something that could just be a normal political discussion or disagreement suddenly turns and feels like a life and death high stakes thing on the issues. There’s very much this overlap which I think gets at the reason why these things can be hard to separate in people’s minds and also hard to separate for studies.

Emily: Absolutely. Also, something that I would like to note that I think is very interesting is that there’s some new research coming out not necessarily related to my review that suggests that people actually aren’t that ideologically polarised in the US, they don’t disagree that much on policy preferences, but they think that they do. And they have this meta perception that they do, and that this meta perception is related to how much they dislike the outgroup or dislike their political opponents. So it’s like we might even actually have a forecasting error in terms of predicting how different we are from our opponents, and this forecasting error is actually related to how much we’re disliking political opponents. I find that quite interesting and it suggests that there is a distinction between ideological and effective polarisation. And of course they can be related, but now there’s starting to be some evidence that perhaps how effectively polarised you are doesn’t necessarily predict how ideologically polarised you are.

Zach: Yeah, I think the problem I’ve encountered in trying to talk about these things is there’s the feeling that just by saying that there’s a way that both sides are ramping up emotions, for some people it seems to be saying, “Oh, you’re making a both sides argument.” And clearly one side is worse but I think the key to me is acknowledging you can keep thinking one side is worse while also seeing how the emotion makes things worse, like has an amplifying effect on everything. And I think that’s a distinction that can be hard to make because some people hear, “Oh, you’re talking about polarisation. You’re trying to blame both sides.” Yeah, that’s what keeps coming up to me when I have these conversations.

Emily: Yeah, that’s a very interesting insight that is something I hadn’t really thought about that much. But I think that often people are very tied to their convictions about politics and so as soon as they feel in any way blamed or attacked– which both sides probably are feeling when we talk about polarisation– it becomes a very visceral reaction where they feel like it’s unacceptable to be questioning the status quo in terms of levels of polarisation in the society.

Zach: Right. And I think that gets at the hardship, I mean, that’s a project I’m working on now as actually trying to put these things in ways that talk about the problem and get around that instinctual pushback that people have. Because on both sides, clearly if you’re emotional, you have those feelings of, “Why would I ever need to examine my behaviour or my sides behaviour when the other side is clearly much worse?” Right. And so-

Emily: Also, I’m sorry to interrupt but not just that they’re worse, but also ‘I’m right. So of course I have a right to be this angry and this upset and this emotional and not even listen to the other side because I know I’m right. So there’s no point.” [laughs]

Zach: Right. And yeah, some of the illusory aspects of polarisation and the way that we tend to think of the other side as bad for all of these different consistent across-the-board stances, when actually the other side is much more varied in their opinions that we think and we have people that believe some of those things on “our side” you know? Things like that. There’s these illusory natures of nature of polarisation that can exist.

Emily: Yeah, we tend to view the outgroup as very homogenous and like-minded and they all have these very similar and extreme attitudes. And in the reality, that’s not the case. Many more people are actually more moderate but people don’t recognise this or don’t see this. And I think that that can drive affective polarisation further.

Zach: Right, that gets back to the ideological where we have more in common. Multiple studies and surveys have shown that we have much more in common ideologically than we believe. Also, another factor that I think is a big thing here is a lot of people don’t distinguish between the leaders and the citizens in the sense that I can believe… They kind of lump them all on the same homogenous group, like you were saying, the homogeneity. But in reality, we should be able to say, “I can believe this leader is doing bad things and speaking in bad ways and acting divisively and acting ignorantly. And I can also believe that citizens can be fooled or misled in various ways or disagree on various things without them being as bad as that leader.” I think that’s a big distinction, too, that the lack of perceiving that is a key factor in driving polarisation. And perceiving the other side as a monolithic, homogeneous group.

Emily: Yeah. There’s also a lot of evidence of political elites being much more ideologically polarised than average citizens. And so when people are lumping the political elites like politicians, for example, into the same exact category as average citizens, of course people are going to think that the other side is very extreme and polarising. And potentially when they think this then they also could arguably believe that they’re bad for the country, bad for the future of the US. And this is where you see all this intense political strife because there is argument and fighting over the future of America.

Zach: Can you talk a little bit about how you see the distinction between social media effects and, you know, clearly we have polarisation dynamics that can occur just based on our human nature that clearly have been taking place in our country, for example, for decades. I’m curious how you see social media playing into all these other factors like our inherent tendency to do this or TV news, media, things like that.

Emily: Polarization has been increasing even before the rise of social media. So we have become increasingly polarised, but I would argue that social media has exacerbated this effect. So of course we shouldn’t be saying that everything that’s wrong with the US and politics is caused by Facebook. However, I don’t think that they’ve helped and I think that they’ve exacerbated the problem. My understanding of the role of media in polarisation has become one of which it’s very cyclical. So it could be, for example, that the Americans are becoming politically polarised for some unknown reason but this trend is starting to happen. And then they choose to access media markets and social media platforms that follow their own worldviews. This is something in psychology that would make sense. Like, psychologically we want to find information that agrees with our world views. So we do this, and then therefore the media markets are trying to cater towards us because in the end, all they want is to be successful and get more viewership and more money, etc. And so they start gearing their content towards the information that their user base is wanting to hear. Or they’re designing their social media platforms in a way that allows these echo chambers to occur. So now these echo chambers or these media platforms are becoming… Partisan media platforms are rising and now this media is making the population even more polarised, which then reinforces them wanting to find more like-minded information. And then the cycle continues and continues and continues. I think that this is kind of where we are at now where these complex dynamics are occurring, where we’re kind of being reinforced with our belief systems by media, but we’re also reinforcing media to do things to make us even more polarised.

Zach: A lot of articles or texts that you read about these subjects try to act as if, you know, try to find some magic bullet for the cause of these things. And clearly, to me, it’s about our human nature. It’s that we are prone to these ingroup versus outgroup tendencies, and clearly there’s all these different ways because we’re social creatures, we are affected by all these different ways we communicate. So all these ways we communicate, whether it’s TV news, whether it’s social media, whether it’s the fact that we sort ourselves into more and more groups and have those in-person conversations, they’re all just various ways to amplify or in some cases defuse our natural tendencies to get at each other’s throats in various ways. And I think Peter Coleman, the well-known mediator and conflict resolution guy who wrote a book about polarisation recently called The Way Out, I think he put it pretty well where he was talking about how people try to find what’s causing this exactly. And it’s like, “No, it’s a bunch of things causing it in various ways. And human interaction is complex, and clearly in different countries it will behave in different ways for cultural or random environmental reasons or whatever.” And I’m curious, do you agree with that that… It sounds like that’s what you were saying as we’re just dealing with all these different ways that affect us.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s very easy to say, “Oh, this is all Facebook’s fault.” [laughs] But I don’t think that that is actually the full answer. Of course, there’s plenty of concerns about how Facebook has handled these kinds of things and whether or not they should have foreseen certain things happening on their platform that have clearly made polarisation worse. However, a lot of the factors are driven by things outside of Facebook’s control. First of all, we can think one thing is government regulation on the internet. We haven’t had updated regulation since 1996 and this clearly has caused a lot of problems. But there’s also a lot of psychological reasons, as you were saying, in terms of our own need to find people that are a part of our ingroup in this tribalism that we now are involved with in politics. And we’re motivated and driven to access information that is going to be agreeing with our worldviews and not be exposed to things that disagree or question what we think. And in the current media environment, this is the perfect grounds for which we can find this information, find whatever information we want that would agree with our view. It’s like we kind of select the facts that we want to choose and build our own realities around this. So of course the psychological processes are playing a huge role as well in this era of political polarisation.

Zach: Yeah, we tend to think of… This is a point that Elizaveta Friesem who I interviewed for the podcast made in her book which is called Media Is Us, we tend to think of media as something out there, something that’s affecting us like something that is something external. But her point is we need to start thinking of media. It’s just us, it’s manifestations of our human nature, right? It’s like the same dynamics that we can get into with no technology or no advanced technology are the same dynamics that can occur in various ways with these various technologies, whether the technology is books or TV news or social media. It’s like the media is us. And I think that’s a really important way to view the world. It’s like, these things that are happening are fundamentally about us as humans.

Emily: Yeah, we’re actually very entangled with media. I definitely agree with the sentiment.

Zach: Another person I interviewed for the podcast was political scientist David Karp and he made the same point you are making. Clearly there are reasons to be angry at Facebook and other social media platforms and don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of anger about Facebook in particular about their arrogance and things that they’ve done. But I think the point you were making and the point he made too is fundamentally there’s a failure of legislation there because we’ve been so gridlocked and not able to pass legislation around these super powerful platforms, you know? And ironically, that’s the gridlock in Congress. It’s due to polarisation so there’s maybe some circular effects there. It’s like we can’t manage or legislate these platforms that are causing and amplifying polarisation because we’re so polarised.

Emily: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. [laughs] I never thought of it that way.

Zach: It’s all related. Anything you feel that we haven’t touched on that you’d like to talk about your work– interesting things about your work?

Emily: Yeah. One of the biggest takeaways that we found in our review is that there’s actually very little research on how media can depolarize people. I think we’re kind of in a moment where we’re all like, “Okay, we’re in this horrible political situation, how can we make this better?” And that’s where I am turning my focus to in my research in the coming years; finding ways that instead of having media be the place where hostility intensifies and polarisation gets worse, we use it as an avenue or a strategy or a tool to actually bridge divides between political opponents. Yeah, a lot of research is not focusing on this yet, however, in the coming years I hope to start to integrate psychological research that we already have started to establish on interventions between political opponents into actual effective interventions in media. I think this is important because we already know that people are not motivated to hear from their policy opponents, they have animosity towards them, they are unmotivated to engage with those they disagree with. And this means that they’re not going to be having these day-to-day interactions with policy opponents or political opponents to help shape their perceptions of their opponents. Rather, I would argue a lot of people are building their perceptions of political opponents through what they see online, through social media, through the news, etc. And this is suggesting that media can be a powerful place for perception building of our opponents. And so I think that we should meet people where they are, which is online and media, and try to find effective solutions to maybe make them like their opponents a little bit more.

Zach: Yeah. And your paper, that was a really good sense that stood out to me and I’ll read it in a second but I think it gets at one of the fundamental mechanisms for thinking about how social media is affecting us and the way it is amplifying polarisation. I’ll read this sentence from your paper, “Given that people are unwilling to engage in day-to-day interactions with their political adversaries, many build their impressions of opponents via the media, meaning social media is increasingly shaping how we perceive the political environment.” And I think that’s a key point. Would you agree that if we had to pinpoint one of the fundamental mechanisms, do you feel like that’s the way it’s acting?

Emily: Yeah, exactly. Because first of all we know as we already said earlier, that social media is the place where outrageous content gets spread. So this is the place where if I’m a Democrat, let’s say, and you’re gonna see a Republican, you’re going to see a Republican doing something extreme, outrageous, maybe violent, or very stereotypical but with a negative light to this. Something that’s very out there. And you’re gonna see this online and you’re also not going to have many interactions in your day-to-day life to compare it to to say, “Okay, well, maybe what I saw online was kind of extreme and out there, but not every Republican is like this.” Right now in the current political climate that we see, people are not really building these perceptions in their day-to-day interactions, and therefore they’re not having this moderating effect where they realise that their policy opponents or their political opponents are not that different from them in actuality. And instead, they’re just seeing this extreme content online which makes them feel like, “Wow, the Republicans or the Democrats, they’re very extreme. They’re really out there.” And that’s further reinforcing this polarisation. But I argue that maybe because this mechanism occurs, that perhaps we can flip the switch and actually depolarize people as well.

Zach: Yeah, I think it’s getting at the root cause because, you know, it’s that our psychological tendency to perceive the other group as homogenous. And so when we see these extreme statements by the other side by the more extreme and unreasonable, people on the other side drives our perception of that group as a whole, which in turn informs the statements we make about the other group, which in turn drives how they perceive us, etc, etc. And in part, a big part of that I think too is the way that insults drive group identity. And that was another person I interviewed for the podcast who was Karina Korostelina, I interviewed her about her book about how insults and perceptions of insults and threats drive group identity, drive group anger, and I think that’s a big part of it, too. We perceive the other group as increasingly threatening to us as these dynamics ramp up. And I think that’s… Yeah, so I think that statement in your paper really gets to the core of how these things are affecting our worldview.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that probably is kind of explaining why people believe that they’re more ideologically polarised than they actually are. Because they’re just seeing all of this extreme content from the other side.

Zach: And from our own side, too. It’s like that kind of drives us to think the more extreme views are more prevalent than they are. 

Emily: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That’s absolutely true.

Zach: Yes, I’m curious. There’s work by Levi Boxell and his team showing how older Americans are more polarised than younger Americans. And one of the conclusions that people make around that study is that that shows that older Americans, because they presumably consume less social media, this shows that social media can be playing that bigger role. I’m curious what you think of that study and how you see it as fitting in.

Emily: Yeah, so this is definitely a place where we can implement that correlation does not mean causation. Of course, I think that it’s very persuasive evidence to suggest, “Oh, social media must not have a big influence. It’s the people that use social media the least are the ones that are the most polarised.” However, I would counter that this is actually much more complex than that. There’s a lot of other factors that can be complicating and shaping this relationship. So it could be that when people are young and they’re exposed to social media, it has a polarising effect. And it’s still as important to think about how the social media is polarising people. It could also be that for older people, the reason that they’re more polarised could be something completely different and has nothing to do with the effect of social media potentially. It could be because they choose to watch traditional news media to a greater degree than younger people, and perhaps that’s what’s polarising them to a greater degree. It could also be their own dispositions. For example, as people get older, they tend to become more concerned with threat. And this could have psychologically differential effects on how people are reacting and responding to political information. So I don’t have a direct answer of what that could be but I think we have to think about this as a very complicated situation and not make very simple conclusions based on an association.

Zach: Right, and I interviewed Levi Boxell and that was an interesting conversation because his work kind of pushed back on or questioned the idea that social media played an effect. But as you say and as I talked about in that podcast with him, I was pushing back and saying well, that doesn’t mean that social media is not a significant amplifier of things for various reasons. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways– some of the ways you mentioned. And one other way is that social media can play an indirect role in society by making young people more extreme in their behaviours, and then older people perceiving that that behaviour and social media takes get picked up as news. So you could be watching Fox News and see they often highlight things that are related to social media or even theoretically caused by social media. And that can have an indirect way of affecting older people. But that’s just one example. But as you say, they can be two different dimensions acting simultaneously, and one doesn’t necessarily impact the other. 

Emily: Yeah. 

Zach: Yeah. I’m really surprised that more… When I look at the papers and research on this, I’m surprised there isn’t more work about the methods by which these tools can be used to reduce polarisation and depolarize people. So I think it’s great that you’re working on that. Are there certain things that stand out to you as, you know… Like, say you suddenly took charge of Facebook, are there certain things that you would change immediately that you think would have a big effect?

Emily: Well, I think if I was hired by Facebook, they wouldn’t be very happy with me because I think that the focus I would have is less about finances, only in what’s best for the bottom line. But I think that one of the biggest things is the spread of outrageous content, and also as the spread of misinformation. These things spread as well, if not better than true information and not less outrageous content. So I guess what I would suggest for social media is to kind of use our psychology to find solutions for these things. If we know that people are going to be most likely to react to outrageous content or most likely to share something that’s misinformation about COVID vaccines or something, we should not be incentivizing the platform to further promote these posts. I actually was watching a documentary recently and they were discussing what WhatsApp is doing to– which is owned by Facebook– to reduce the spread of misinformation. And now they’ve changed the rules so that in WhatsApp groups of 20 people or so, you can only forward messages to up to five groups; I think it is. But then if you do the math on this, if everyone from every group is continuing to share to a bunch of other groups, even if it’s only five groups at a time instead of the unlimited amount that had been previously, you can get to 3 million people in a matter of a few terms. So I think that this situation is very complex and difficult. Even when we put barriers and walls up to try to minimise these effects or disincentivize Facebook from allowing outrageous content to be promoted more, I don’t really have a clear answer, actually. I think it’s something that’s complicated. [laughs]

Zach: Well, sure. I think the problem is even tougher than a lot of people think, because in terms of trying to categorise what counts as outrageous content or bad content is clearly a line that no one can agree on. And I think that’s the fundamental problem we’re dealing with. Also, the problem is that even if you had rules that you thought were quite reasonable, it’s very hard to apply that across a huge platform where people are making millions of posts a day. How do you programmatically enforce that? I think there’s several things that even just at a conceptual definition of the problem part and then in implementation, it’s vastly confusing. And that’s part of what bugs me about Facebook and these other groups. It’s the arrogance and just rolling these things out in. You know, we apparently are partially deranged by these technologies but then they roll them out in places where you can completely foresee that there would be very bad effects in a population that was already prone to group versus group violence. You know, these kinds of things. And that’s what really gets me about the arrogance of these platforms just thinking like, “Hey, it’ll all be fine. We don’t have any real responsibility for thinking about the implications of this stuff.”

Emily: Pulling back a moment a little bit to determining which content should and should not be shared or promoted or whatever, there’s a lot of ethical questions about that, too, of who decides? And this is another layer of complexity to this situation that makes very difficult situation. The work that I’ve been more focused on rather than actually shifting platform dynamics is focusing in on the content that reduces political polarisation. So it’s like, “What does somebody have to say in a social media post to reduce your animosity towards them, for example?” And with that, it’s a little bit more straightforward because you’re not dealing with all of the complexities of the social media platforms and the moving dynamics of all of them and how to handle the infrastructure of this. And basically, one pathway that we found that seems to be effective– this isn’t published yet, I want to be clear about that. We’re still in preparation and data collection- But it seems that when people highlight their own personal experiences that drive their opposing political views– so for example, if I say I disagree with you on gun policy because I’ve had a harmful personal experience with guns, I was hurt by a gun or I could have been hurt if I hadn’t had a gun to protect myself, for example, and that experience has driven my my attitudes towards gun policy, it makes you much more willing to respect me and to be tolerant of me. This reduces dehumanisation. It has a lot of benefits for the ways that the left and right engage with one another. And what’s interesting is that this strategy is much more effective than if political opponents share facts with each other. So if I tell you that I base my views on gun policies based on data and statistics, you respect me less than if I share because of my own harmful firsthand experiences.

Zach: Yes, getting back to the hidden role of how powerful emotions are in all of this, we tend to think of these things as being about issues or facts. It’s like the emotional part of this, the narrative part of this is a much bigger thing than people tend to realise. 

Emily: Also, I think given the rise of misinformation on social media and now throughout society, it’s made it much easier for us to doubt and question data and statistics. We actually show in some of our published work that personal experiences are seen as more true than facts. Even if those facts are from real statistics from real reports, that is still seen as less true than a personal experience. And we’re living in a reality where facts actually don’t matter and people take them with a grain of salt. And I think that that’s troubling, but also very interesting.

Zach: Yeah, this kind of gets into cutting ourselves a break more. I mean, because we’re talking about how animosity and emotion drive these things. And I think if we’re going to get over these things, I don’t see us solving these things with technology. I see us, whether we fail or not, whether we fail or succeed, we’re going to succeed by maturing as a people. One way or another, we have to get used to what these efficient forms of communication do to us, and we have to be able to cut people slack more and realise that for example, we do live in a confusing world where you go online and you can see all sorts of things at the touch of a button. We have to start realising that other people are just responding to various things in their environment. They’re the people they’re with and the media they consume. And I see that as it kind of has to start or be implemented at a personal growth level or at some level. And maybe that’ll happen naturally where we just start getting used to these things and realise that we’re deranging ourselves in some way. But I don’t know, I’m not very optimistic about that. I just see it as something has to change as a people. Sort of like some people criticised books back in the day for deranging people with all these new ideas and such, and it’s like part of that is a true observation but we also need to get used to these technologies and realise how they’re affecting us. I guess that’s what I’m saying. Yeah.

Emily: Yeah, we have to learn how to work alongside them rather than work against them. [laughs]

Zach: Yeah, and I think that’s why your research and other people’s similar work is so important. We need to get those ideas out to people in the mainstream. I feel like so much mainstream coverage of these things is not focusing on these issues. It’s like they’ll make a point about people’s anger about the issues and about specific issues, but they never tie it back to these things that many people know are the root cause and going on under the surface. And I think getting people in news organisations and such and politicians more aware of how we can bring people together by addressing how all this stuff is happening and not looking at it so much as an us-versus-them problem but as just a people problem, I think that’s kind of key to where we need to go and that’s why I’m interested in these areas. I’m just so disappointed by politicians, by journalists who don’t make these connections who don’t make an effort to look under the surface of what’s happening.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like when we recognise that the polarisation issue isn’t because they’re wrong and I’m right, but rather that this is how our psyches work and the system that is set up is making it the perfect breeding ground for polarisation, I think that it could make us feel more like we’re united together trying to confront an issue as a team rather than this tribalism.

Zach: Totally. No, that’s great. Yeah. And so I want to thank you for your work on this and I wish more people were doing similar work and getting out there. So yeah, thanks again and thanks for the talk.

Emily: Yeah, thank you so much.

Zach: That was Emily Kubin. You can follow her on Twitter @emily_kubin. My name is Zachary Elwood, you can follow me on Twitter at @apokerplayer.

If you found the ideas in this podcast important, please consider sharing it with your friends and family. I think these ideas are important; that’s why I focus on them. I think these are super important ideas that are at the core of our dysfunction and what seems to be our escalating path of destruction. And I focus on these things because I am disappointed that more leaders and journalists don’t focus on helping spread the word about these problems. These are not complex ideas; they are ideas anyone can understand, and getting more people to think about them may hold the key to us solving our problems.  

And just a reminder that I have quite a few other episodes about political polarization psychology and about social media effects. And just a reminder about the piece I wrote about social media, which you can find by searching online for “zachary elwood social media medium” 

If you want to show some appreciation for my work, there are a couple things you can do: 

Please leave a rating and review on iTunes, which is the most popular podcast platform. 

If you’d like to show me some financial support, I have a Patreon at patreon.com/zachelwood. I also have a paypal; if you want my paypal email address or just want to send me a message, you can reach me at www.behavior-podcast.com. 

Thanks for listening.

A conversation with Ben Tyler, professional musician, about how understanding behavior and psychology have played a role in his musical career. Ben’s own music project is called Small Skies (Twitter: @smallskies), and he has worked and toured with many other bands. Specific topics include: what cues and signals from other musicians is he making use of when playing jazz and other music?, Does being skilled at musical improvization result in being more flexible in life in general?

Episode links:

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If you pay a lot of attention to politics, but doing so makes you miserable, this might be one you want to listen to. I talk with Christopher Freiman (Twitter @cafreiman), political philosopher and author of the book Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics. For many people, voting and paying attention to politics is a moral duty, a responsibility you have as a citizen of a democracy. But Freiman makes a strong case for why paying attention to politics is not a good use of our time, if our goal is to maximize the good we do in the world. And we talk about how our collective anger about politics makes us miserable and also drives us-versus-them polarization, which may be the root cause of our societal and governmental dysfunction.

Chris sometimes writes at 200proofliberals.blogspot.com and he teaches at William and Mary College.

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Topics discussed:

• Addressing common objects to political abstention, such as: it’s a privileged, entitled stance to ignore politics; that it’s dangerous to encourage people to not vote, and more.
• How the act of voting, due to how unlikely your vote is to matter, may be perceived as a lost opportunity compared to doing other charitable acts.
• How us-versus-them in-group-versus-out-group dynamics tend to give us distorted views of political issues and of our political opponents.
• How effective altruism concepts encourage people to think more about maximizing their effect for the time or money they donate.

A talk with Jennifer Cohn (Twitter @jennycohn1), election integrity advocate, about American election security. Since 2016, Jennifer has been warning that our elections are insecure in many ways; you can read some of her writings on this topic on Medium. Her stance hasn’t changed but, after Biden won and Trump claimed that the election was rigged, it’s been understandably harder for her to get Democrats and liberal-leaning people and media interested in talking much about this problem.

I wanted to talk to Jennifer about how our politically polarized environment has changed things, how it’s affected her attempts to get attention for this problem, and how it’s changed her messaging. So there were some psychological aspects I was curious about, but I also just thought it’d be interesting to learn more about election security issues.

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Topics discussed: 

• How has Biden winning and Trump claiming the election was illegitimate affected our chances of improving election security?
• What kinds of problems does she see with the election process? 
• The difference between voter fraud (individuals voting) and more large-scale hacking/rigging attempts.
• What were some signs of suspicious activity she saw in the 2016 election?
• How do her concerns about election security differ from Trump and friends’ stated concerns? 
• How credible were Trump and friends’ claims of election tampering? 
• Is it possible to imagine an alternate reality where Trump won in 2020 and liberals/Democrats largely didn’t accept the election?

Elizaveta Friesem (www.elizavetafriesem.com) thinks and writes about media and our relationship to it. Her recently published book is Media Is Us and it examines the idea that media is not something “out there” but more something that is part of us, something that happens internally, similar to any other human communication. And perhaps this means that acting as if “media” (of whatever sort) is to blame for various problems we have is a simplistic way to view the world. And maybe it’s also a tempting way to see the world as it lets us humans off the hook for being responsible for what we believe and share.

Elizaveta opens her book with something we can all probably relate to: she shared an angry take on social media (in this case, about a Dove soap ad that was accused of being racist), but it turned out to be a bad take, based on something that was wrong and taken out of context. So we talk about that story, and how that phenomenon seems so common, with social media aiding so many people in over-reacting to bad or distorted or outright false information. We also talk about power dynamics in society, and how power is defined. And we talk about the power of empathy and understanding others. 

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TRANSCRIPT

Zach Elwood: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding human behavior, whether that’s reading your opponents at tennis or poker or board games, or about understanding the political motivations of people, or about understanding humanity in general. You can learn more about this podcast at www.behavior-podcast.com. If you want to get on my email list, I don’t have anything automatic set up yet on the site, but feel free to send me an email from that contact form and I’ll put you on it. I’m actually starting to work on a book about healing American divides and about how we have a lot more in common than we tend to think and how our main problem is our us-versus-them animosity and not as much about the issues as we think. So if you’d like to be kept in the loop on that, send me a line. 

On today’s episode, recorded August 5th, 2021, I interview Elizaveta Friesem. Elizaveta wrote a book called “Media Is Us,” which recently came out. You can learn more about her work at http://www.elizavetafriesem.com

Elizaveta opens her book with something we can all probably relate to: she shared something on social media, but it turned out to be a bad take, based on something that was taken out of context.  I don’t know about you but this has happened to me many times and I’ve learned to be very careful about the things I see and share online; I’ve just been bitten too many times and I’ve believed and shared too many bad, distorted takes, so I’m much more careful. And that carefulness, that sense of personal responsibility for how we consume media, is what Elizaveta’s book is partially about. 

We tend to think of “media” as something out there, as something that affects us, as something that can do something to us, as something we have to be cautious of lest we fall pray to bad media. Or if we don’t feel that about ourselves, we tend to think that’s true for other people: we have to police what they get ahold of, lest they, in their ignorance, fall pray to it. 

Elizabeta’s book examines how we perhaps should not think about media as objects or systems that are “out there”, but should instead think of media as something that happens inside of us. Reading a book or watching TV is essentially the same process as talking to someone or talking internally to ourselves; it’s all just various forms of communication, of spreading or reinforcing ideas. Hence the book title “Media Is Us.” That may seem kind of obvious or a semantic point at first but if you really think about the implications of that, it might be very important. For example, it might mean teaching people to have more responsibility for what they consume, for the conclusions they reach, instead of a focus on eliminating bad media. And maybe if we started thinking more like that in society, with more focus on our own responsibility and less focus on blaming certain technologies or certain outlets, it would eventually lead to less division and more alignment on a common reality. 

And Elizaveta’s book is also about avoiding blame, about recognizing how amazingly complex humans are, and how amazingly complex human relationships and communication is. And when you really recognize how complex things are, how many factors there are in these areas, it’s hard to blame people, it’s hard to get angry. And so Elizaveta’s book is about more than media, it’s about life, it’s about how we view the world and other people, it’s about everything really. 

A little more about Elizaveta: she’s an editor of the Journal of Media Literacy Education and she currently teaches courses at Columbia College Chicago. She’s passionate about using empathy to heal ideological and cultural divides, and her current work explores how media literacy education can be enriched through principles of nonviolent communication.  

The anecdote Elizaveta opens her book with is about her seeing angry takes on social media about a Dove Soap ad that many people thought was racist. If you google ‘racist Dove soap ad’, you can find more about this ad, it was from 2017. But basically the gist was that there was a section of the ad that showed a black woman removing her shirt to reveal a different woman, a white woman, there. And many people were drawing parallels between that ad and old racist ads that associated black skin with dirtiness. And Elizaveta did vet this angry take a bit; she saw respected news outlets talking about this. A Washington Post article, for example, reads “A Dove ad showed a black woman turning herself white. The backlash is growing.” A Time magazine article read “Dove’s ‘Racist’ Ad Isn’t the First Time the Company Was Criticized for Being Offensive”. You get the idea. And it was these well known outlets sharing these takes that induced Elizaveta to share it online.

We’ll pick up the story from when Elizaveta is talking about her decision to share her own angry take online.

Elizaveta Friesem: So I went to Google and I wrote ‘Dove ad’. I even wrote ‘Dove racist ad’ because obviously there are a lot of ads. So I thought, “Well, let’s see what comes up.” And lots of things came up. Lots of articles, blogs, and people were clearly writing about it big time. And some sources were trustworthy sources or something that I considered trustworthy back then. And I was like, “Well, if everybody’s saying that, I guess they looked into it and I shouldn’t look into it any further. [chuckles] So I guess there’s a problem.” So I shared it on my Facebook wall and I wrote, “Oh, my God, how come it’s so bad, it’s still happening?” So I shared that and I made this post public. And I was kind of surprised because maybe like an hour later, I had three people who I didn’t know, so three strangers responded to that. Normally, I don’t have strangers responding to my public posts. And all of them were critical of my interpretation. Two were kind of very succinct, sarcastic, sort of like, “If this ad exists, it must be racist.” [chuckles] Or something like that. And I was like, “Yeah, whatever. They probably don’t know, they don’t care.” And then the third one was a little longer and that one made me pause. It said, “Well, did you see the whole thing? Because that White woman actually also takes off her shirt and then turns into a different woman who has darker skin again?”

And my mind was actually blown up at that moment. [laughs] I was like, “Oh, my God, did I just miss something?” Because I was sure that every media outlet that I looked at– and I didn’t do comprehensive research, but I looked at a few– and they had this screenshot of putting together the picture of a Black woman taking her shirt, and then a picture of a White woman. Like, next to each other, two pictures. So it seems like they’re just that, right? So this third comment revealed to me that, “Whoa, there’s another person there?” So I started reading more and I realized that yeah, there’s a third person. And maybe her skin was not as dark as the first woman, but it was still darker than the second woman. And she looked more Hispanic, I guess. And her hair was definitely dark black even. Right? And then I read more and more and at that point I started feeling really, really bad. I was so embarrassed. [laughs]

Zach: Right. There was a lot more context. It was just a small piece of the ad and taken out of context and looked bad, but they were just switching between many people basically.

Elizaveta: Yeah.

Zach: Yeah. I thought that was a great introduction because I think it gets things that happen so often these days. I mean, it happens to me so often. And I see people overreacting to so many things online that are just, you know, the latest outrage of the day where the next day you look into it and get the full context and it’s just people overreacting to something that was either deliberately or accidentally taken out of context and shared. People getting the immediate view… You know, I’m a video film major and I actually worked as a forensic video analyst for legal and law enforcement for a very short time. And the thing I know about video and audio is even when it’s real, it’s so easy to take things out of context. And for something to be shown at an angle that that looks bad, like for real videos, I think your intro was great, I thought. Because I think it’s something that we can all relate to. Like, anyone who’s a little bit critical and thinking about how they use social media has probably lived through that multiple times at this point and hopefully, has become more skeptical as we have over time. So if you had to give the one-minute elevator pitch to someone about your book and why you wrote it, what would you say?

Elizaveta: Well, I guess I would say that I wanted to provide a different perspective on media. And part of my background is media studies and media literacy so I’ve read a lot of books and articles about media. And I taught classes about media and communication and I realized that something’s missing. So that’s why I felt that I wanted to write this book. So in this book, I talk about how media is seen as something that has appeared recently– fairly recently. I mean, the last 150 years, recently, if you took the whole history of humanity, right? And it’s something enabled by the latest technologies, right? And so the idea is that media did not exist before and now it exists and it creates a lot of problems for us human beings. And I see a lot of people from different walks of life talking about media and being concerned media. Scholars, educators, parents, politicians, a lot of people say that media is something we should be concerned about that it can cause troubles and negatively impact our lives, essentially.

As I’ve been thinking about that, I realized that the question that I want to ask is, “Do we really understand what media is?” Because in all the books and articles that I’ve read, there was surprisingly little space for definitions of media. It was just taken for granted. And most of the time, there were just presented with huge lists or small lists. Like a sample of lists of, smartphones, social networks, films, commercials, video games, or media industry as people working in the media industry. And all the time it was… So, media was presented indirectly as something different from the person doing the writing, and something worse than that person or something that can cause harm to that person or other people similar to the person doing the writing or thinking in this piece of publication, whatnot.

So I felt that I was not satisfied with that. And I felt that really in order to better understand media, we cannot see it as something separate from ourselves. It is important to talk about latest technologies, it is important to consider new cultural forms and how they have changed our lives. But if we only look at those differences, we are missing a lot. Because there are also important tendencies that have existed through ages that are not new and that can be connected to something deeper within us. So when we start connecting questions about media to those deeper inquiries, we actually turn it into questions about ourselves. So my book argues that in order to make sense of the modern media, we should actually explore some deeper fundamental principles of human communication, and essentially, what it means to be human. So yeah, the book starts almost like a media studies and media literacy exploration, but then it turns really philosophical.

And then I talk about how ideally, this whole exploration will help us better understand ourselves and others. So it’s not just about understanding media literally. Like, “Let’s look at this movie and analyze what the author wanted to say or what can happen if somebody watches it.” It’s not just that, it’s way bigger than that for me. And so when we understand ourselves and others, we can enhance our awareness and self-awareness and enhance our empathy. So that’s a big part of my journey and my exploration in that book. And then engage in collaboration that would replace polarisation based on blame. And so as you can see, I use a conversation about media to start a really ambitious discussion here about polarisation and all this stuff.

Zach: Well, yeah, that’s what surprised me. I expected your book to be about media theory, and then it gets into the broader philosophical discussions of what power is, how we relate to each other, you know? And I think you’re right in the sense that it spoke to me because you, to me, you can’t talk about any of these things without talking about our humanity and how we relate to each other. Media is how we relate to each other. I mean, that it is what it is. It’s another form of us relating. Like when we read a book, we’re relating to the person that wrote that or we’re injecting these thoughts into our mind. And it made me think of, you know, to write a modern completely helpful media literacy thing would require– as yours does– it requires talking about the psychology of humans and how they relate.

And that’s what I thought was great about your book and really spoke to me because you’re digging into the complexity and the interconnectedness of everything in a very holistic sense. It’s like, you can’t examine one piece of any situation without realizing how hard it is to separate that piece from everything around it, you know? That really speaks to me and that’s what I see in the world. Sort of the distortions of social media like your Dove ad experience, it’s like we’re seeing one thing and overreacting to one thing, and not trying to understand how this thing is connected to so many things. I mean, let alone the distortion– there’s the distortion element. But even if we think we’re seeing it completely, we’re not realizing just how connected everything is. Yeah. So I thought it was great.

Elizaveta: When you talked about social media right now, I was thinking about how I wrote this book to counter this view that ‘it’s just media’, like films or social networks that distort the way we see the world, and that’s the reason why we don’t understand what’s really going on and why we fight. So when I least– I provided this list of five fundamental principles of communication and I talk about how people just by virtue of being human, when they communicate, they create the world around them in their mind. And what I mean is that– just to give you a simple example– is well, you think you turn on news and there’s somebody there who decided what story to tell and how to tell it and how to make a video for the story and from what angle to shoot and whom to interview. So they create the way you see the story, right?

But you don’t think about how, say, you go to work and then something happens to you, you talk with your colleagues, you have a fight with a boss or whatnot. And then you go home and then you tell the story to your spouse, and the exact same thing happens! You choose how to tell the story. You choose words, you choose the angle, you choose what to tell, you choose how to tell. So it’s not just something connected with technology. It doesn’t come from technology, it comes from us being human. [chuckles] So it’s important to do all this thinking when we’re watching the news, but it’s also important to do the same kind of thinking when we are talking to each other and telling each other how we see the world and how we see things. And at that point is, “Yeah, everything is connected exactly how you said it.”

Zach: You push back on the idea in the book that the perception that a lot of people have is there’s these entities out there that are all powerful and call the shots and we cannot compete with them, but you go into the ‘which really comes first? The ‘chicken or the egg’ thing. For example, you talk about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News and how his power is perceived. And it’s really hard. You make the case and I agree and I’ve seen other work that supports it so it’s really hard to make a case. Is he actually the powerful one, or is he the chicken or the egg? Because you can also examine how it’s society, it’s the people that desire that, and he’s just given them what they want or leading the cart. I recently interviewed Kevin Arceneaux, he had co-authored a book called Changing Minds Or Changing Channels, which was about the effects of political news TV and cable TV. And his research showed that contrary to most people’s opinions, most people were already polarised before watching these polarised TV news outlets like Fox News or CNN, I guess– on the liberal side, basically. But it supports the ideas that you talk about, that it’s hard to separate the chicken from the egg in that sense of which came first.

Elizaveta: I do talk about power. I dedicate a whole chapter to the issue of power, and I think it’s super important and super complicated. And this is actually a part of my book that I guess I’m most worried about how people will interpret that. Because I tried to be very careful in the book. Believe me, I thought about it for so long and rewrote different parts so many times to express this idea that I don’t want to say that, say, with the example of Rupert Murdoch, right? You see him as so powerful, and people who watch channels or read newspapers that his companies produce, so you see this people as powerless. Right? So I don’t want to say, “Let’s flip this so he’s actually powerless and they are powerful.” I’m not actually talking about that, because this is an interpretation that I would like to avoid. I’m actually talking about how the topic of power is so complicated that it shouldn’t be seen through a binary or through this “either you have power or you don’t have,” or “the world is divided into those who have power and those who don’t have power.” And actually, I introduced a whole new theory of power that I called Theory of Micro and Macro Power. Basically, the idea is that one thing happens– when we look at relationships or interactions between specific individuals. It’s very easy if you take a pair of individuals to see a specific situation. A specific place and time and pair of individuals. It’s super easy to say who has power over whom. Say, a parent tells a child, “Go to your room,” or “Eat those vegetables,” or a boss tells his employee, “Do this report,” and stuff like that. But then when you start zooming out of this very specific sort of snapshot of power and start seeing this relationship in the context of other relationships, because each of the people in this peer is connected to so many other people. And each one of those other people are connected to other people. That has become so complicated that our mind is exploding trying to understand all that. But the more you’re zooming out, the more you’re seeing how the person who is powerful in this specific situation, they are also influenced by other things that seem to be out of their control when they’re influenced by those things that does make this powerful person not powerful. So since Rupert Murdoch does have power, he does have so many people working for him and he does create all those media outlets and programs and-

Zach: He could definitely make better decisions and that would have big impacts.

Elizaveta: Yeah, it does matter. I don’t want to say that it doesn’t matter and that he doesn’t have power, but also it would be wrong to say that he’s sort of-

Zach: -in a vacuum.

Elizaveta: Yes, his power exists in a vacuum. Like, he just has it and that’s it. And so prior to this interview, I was thinking how to describe it in a way that would sort of make more sense. And I came up with this metaphor that I actually didn’t use in the book but I think I would use it somewhere, that I think about society as a game. And in this game, this game is not perfect by far. This game has certain rules but some people break these rules and some people cheat and some people keep winning and some people keep losing, and there are issues with this game. Serious issues. So I agree with that. But what I don’t agree with is when some people say, “Well, look at the people who keep winning. They are the ones who control the game. They can fix it, they can fix the rules.” That’s what I don’t agree with because I say, “Well, I don’t think that they can just fix the rules. They maybe bend the rules and they know how to use the rules to cheat the system, but they didn’t create those rules.” And that’s the thing. Because all of us are playing this game, all of us are creating those rules-

Zach: As we go. Yeah.

Elizaveta: As we go, yes.

Zach: To take a topical example, your book is always pointing back to the complexity. For example, a cop committing excessive force against a citizen. In that context, people would say, “Well, they have more power than the citizen.” But then a little bit later, that citizen could sue them and destroy their life and that cop could face serious repercussions. So it’s like the power dynamics are always shifting. Obviously, in some contexts where there’s not those kinds of recources or there’s less social dynamics like that, some people can get away with more. But yeah, your point is just pointing back to the fact that these dynamics are so complex and nuanced.

Elizaveta: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That’s a good example.

Zach: Yeah. One thing that strikes me is whether on both on the left or the right across the political spectrum, it seems like so many people have such high expectations for media, you know? There’s this sense of holding them to this standard that to me is just not realistic. Because media is just, as you would say in your book, media is just people. It’s just people trying to accomplish different things. I mean, news organizations get things wrong, they make mistakes, they’re trying to sell papers, you know? I almost feel like part of the problem is people having too high expectations for media and expecting them to do a great job all the time, when really we could just be happy if they mostly do a somewhat decent job.

Elizaveta: Yeah. Well, that’s the wording that I actually… I’ve tried to be very careful with this kind of wording in my book because I didn’t want to say, “Well…” Going back to the Murdoch example. So you say Murdoch is a problem, but look at yourself. You’re probably part of the problem. And why I had the next chapter after the chapter about power, it was all about blame and how it’s not helpful. Right? Because the whole point of the book is not to say, “Well, let’s not blame them, let’s blame them or us or, you know?” [chuckles] Right? So it shouldn’t be about blame at all, it should be about recognizing how complicated it is and learning to help each other instead of just trying to undermine each other by saying that, “Well, you are the problem.” [chuckles]

Zach: Just a note here, I took out some of the interview here, and now I’m going to come back to me clarifying a question where I was asking her about how optimistic or pessimistic she is about our current highly polarised situation. To clarify, that was my question. It’s like, can we get enough people– just enough people thinking in these ways to avoid self destruction? That’s the part where I’m a little bit more pessimistic about. Obviously, we don’t need everyone thinking that way. We just need enough people trying to combat the Us versus Them dynamics. But yeah, that was more of what I would say.

Elizaveta: Well, I think if we– you and I, and at least I’m sure I know there are other people out there who agree with that– but if we want to avoid self distraction, I think it’s better for our own sake to think that something can be done. Because otherwise, it’s just so sad that we won’t do anything.

Zach: Yeah, I think that’s the point too. It’s like even if you’re listening to this thinking, “Well, obviously, I don’t have much power, other people have more power than me and news outlets have more power to me.” Even if you believe that, we only have control over our own behavior and our own activity and our own actions. So if you do see how your own behavior can be playing a role in society– which I don’t see how you can dispute that– and if you believe that we’re on the cusp, theoretically, of very bad things and you believe that these Us versus Them dynamics are bad, then I would say we only have control over ourselves. So still, you can make the case to think about all these things and think about how you might be contributing to the dynamics with your own behavior. Because that’s the thing that… I got interested in this stuff because a couple of years ago, I was like anybody else. I was just posting whatever insults or random things popping into my mind about the other group. If I had a witty thing to say or a cutting insult, I would post it. And always operated on the assumption that someone’s in charge and someone out there is going to bring us together or save the day or something. But then seeing how things have progressed, I realized that no, there isn’t some system out there or some power, as you say. The power is spread out amongst all of us. That, to me, that’s what changed my behavior and thinking about how my own behaviors may be contributing to these things. And I think understanding how it is so holistic and interconnected helps you want to change your behavior. It’s not some empathy saintly thing, and I think that’s another misunderstanding. We’re not trying to use empathy because we think it’s the good or the right thing or some saintly thing to do, it’s more like once you see how interconnected everything is, you really can’t help but act in a way that focuses on empathy and understanding multiple points of view. Because it is the truth that everything is just so interconnected and everybody’s behaviors, you know, what you post online has an effect on the dynamics of the whole system. That’s what changed my behavior. And I think for some people, they go through that journey of making mistakes like the Dove ad that you talked about, and they start realizing, “Oh, wait. I’m contributing to this.” To make this specific point, reacting to the Dove ad has the impact of the other side seeing this overreaction, and that influences them in various ways and so these dynamics are constantly bouncing back and forth. Like conservatives seeing liberals overreact and get pretty crazy way about something minor makes them think like, “Oh, that side is completely unreasonable. They overreact, their reactions to other things are similar to the overreactions there.” So it has this dynamic of accentuating the Us versus Them dynamics. Anything you want to add to that before I move on?

Elizaveta: Yeah. I guess I want to stress again this idea that I would like people to not to think, “Oh, I’m a part of a problem,” but rather, “I can be part of a solution.” Right?

Zach: You’re avoiding blame.

Elizaveta: Yeah. Cuz it’s so complicated that I don’t want to blame any… I think it’s not fair to blame anybody for contributing to this very complex dynamics that’s in the grand scheme of things. That’s what makes our society imperfect, right? So I agree that if we look at a specific case of, say, abuse or mistreatment, we can say, “Well, here’s a person who abused that person or those people, and we should fix that.” But at the same time, we shouldn’t think that doing that or punishing that person will fix the whole problem. Because there are so many other things behind that.

Zach: Yeah. And to take it probably to a philosophical step, I don’t believe that free will is likely. And that makes me see the world in a very holistic way because at the end of the day, I think we’re all just humans having a very mysterious experience of things happening to us and things happening that were based on the moment before the past, you know, all these factors around us. You know, I’m not different from anyone else. And I think that gets to what you’re talking about avoiding blame. Because I don’t blame anyone, I see it all as so complex. And who’s to say I’m right with my point of view? What good would it do for me to preach at someone? Because I don’t really know exactly what’s going on either.

Elizaveta: Yeah. I mean, you can say you are no different in some ways, but you’re all different in other ways. Right. And that’s what makes our society so wonderful, and that’s what actually should bring us hope. It’s that because people are different– I mean, it creates a lot of problems because then they start arguing– but they can actually generate solutions together by working together than if it’s just one person and they’re just stuck in their ways and they keep making mistakes. Historically, we know situations when one person or a group of people got an opportunity to use their thinking to modify a whole way of life of a whole country. Right? And that was no good, right? So that’s why it’s good that we’re different and we should tap into that difference, right? But at the same time, acknowledging that we have a lot of things in common. [chuckles]

Zach: Yeah. And by ‘not different from other people’ I just mean I’m not different in the sense of… I’m a human like everyone else and the only thing that makes me different… We all are different in various ways, but the only thing that makes me different is my different experiences and my different physical brain or whatever, you know, these various factors. We’ll probably getting too broad and philosophical here. [Elizaveta chuckles] But I did want to ask you, when it comes to empathy and when it comes to seeing other people’s points of view– which I think is very important even just for strategic reasons, like if you want to accomplish your goals it’s very powerful to understand other people’s points of view– and I wanted to ask, you know, sometimes I get pushback or there’s pushback in general on the idea of empathy because I think people can perceive it as, you know, we could perceive it as submissive. You know, if you tell some liberal people to think about a Trump supporter’s point of view, for example, they’ll have a reaction of acting like that’s weak and that’s submissive and ‘why is it on us to do this?’ I wonder have you heard those kinds of objections, and what’s your responses to objections like that?

Elizaveta: Well, I’ve definitely heard those kinds of objections. And maybe not to people objecting to my own work, but I witnessed conversations or maybe tried saying something along the lines of like, “Well, let’s try to understand them.” And I think it’s not just the idea that if you use empathy, you’re submissive and weak. It’s also the idea that if you’re trying to understand the other side, it means you’re also accepting excusing their behavior to some extent. Actually, I watched a podcast video by this really interesting person called Robert Wright. He has a channel called Meaning of Life. And in this in this video, he used a very interesting term that spoke so much to me. And the term was ‘explain/excuse conflation.’ So, people feel like if you’re trying to explain somebody’s behavior, you’re essentially excusing it automatically. And he’s saying, “No, that’s not the same.” And I write it in other words in my book that we can understand other people’s behavior without accepting this behavior. And I think as you said, actually, this kind of empathy is beneficial for us. So we’re not doing it for them, although you can see how it can also benefit the person you’r empathizing with like, but it benefits us. Because when we understand somebody’s behavior, we can better react to the behavior or be prepared for this behavior. Or if we see somebody make a mistake and if we try and understand their reason and go with explanations beyond ‘well, this person’s just stupid,’ then we start seeing how this actually has some parallels to what we might do and we can actually be more careful at what we are doing. It’s actually completely opposite to excusing their behavior. [chuckles]It’s actually just becoming more careful with our own behavior because we see it represented in somebody else and we are not happy about it. So yeah, it can be really beneficial for us if done correctly. I think that empathy is not something that we should just uncritically put on the pedestal and say, “Oh, it’s just empathy, empathy, empathy everywhere.” Although I feel like I do that sometimes. But it also needs to be practiced in a certain way. Like, say if we are empathizing with us of easy empathy and just empathizing with somebody who you already feel we should empathize with, this is easier. Right? It’s so much more difficult to empathize with somebody who we dislike. [laughs]

Zach: That’s the hard thing.

Elizaveta: Right? Yeah. And there’s a whole difference between cognitive and emotional empathy that’s really interesting to understand.

Zach: I think you hit the nail on the head there. Yeah. I’m glad you brought up the point that yeah, it’s exactly that about the conflation of, you know, people feel that acknowledging that you can see the other side’s point of view is saying that they have a point or that they’re right. And I see this every day because I spent a good amount of my time on Facebook and Twitter or even just in person showing people how you can have a different point of view on the opposite political side– to be specific, to show how there’s some conservative points of view. Showing those points of view to a liberal audience and showing how this doesn’t make you a monster, it just means you’re looking at it this way. Or there’s people even on your own side that can look at things this way. And I think when I try to do those things, often people focus on the issue itself, but what I’m interested in is the meta issue of how you can see those issues from different points of view. And I feel like that’s what people get stuck on. They’re focused on discussing the actual issue and showing who’s right or wrong, but I’m just saying, “Well, can you at least see the different point of view and how you could see it in a different way?” I think that’s where people really get bogged down. And they do feel that acknowledging that there might be that point of view that another person or a neighbor or a fellow citizen could have, or even they themselves could theoretically have, can drive some cognitive dissonance and make them angry. I’ve had this almost every day because I’ll post thoughts about how you can look at things from different perspectives. And I interviewed Michael Macy and he did research on showing the way our political stances grouped together are pretty random and probably arbitrary in the sense that they were kind of led by early movers and in a chaos theory kind of way. And we tend to make these narratives around like, “Oh, there’s a reason that these groups of stances are grouped together for a political party,” but really, it might be pretty arbitrary. For example, you can imagine if Trump had come out when COVID started with really strong and strict mandates, you know? With our polarisation being what it is, you can imagine Liberals taking a stance against that and being like, “This is draconian. These lockdowns are influencing communities of color and poor communities, we need to not be so draconian.” And you can see how the lines might have been drawn in a different way just based on initial conditions. There’d be a pushback to those things in a liberal framing. And I think that interview with Michael Macy and his work really opened my eyes to thinking about things in that way. Like, the things we tend to even just assume or make sense coherently are a lot of the times just us making these post hoc justifications of why the narrative makes sense, you know? And I think seeing that is related to your work, too, because it’s looking at the world and seeing this nuance and seeing how things could easily be different and seeing how it’s really hard to separate things or even say how things are, you know? And I think it’s a form of humility, really. These things are very hard to understand.

Elizaveta: Yeah.

Zach: Well, thanks a lot for coming on, Elizaveta.

Elizaveta: Thank you so much for having me again.

Zach: That was Elizaveta Friesem. You can learn more about her work at her website, elizavetafriesem.com. I’m Zachary Elwood. If you want to learn more about this podcast, check out my website behavior-podcast.com.