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Resolving conflict in our relationships, with marriage counselor Bill Doherty

A talk with Bill Doherty, a relationship therapist (thedohertyapproach.com) and the co-founder of Braver Angels, a political depolarization-aimed group (braverangels.org). A transcript is below.

Topics discussed include: Bill’s approach to couples counseling; thoughts on dealing with the common situation where one partner is much more interested in healing the relationship than the other; the importance of seeing our role in a conflict, and why that can be hard for us; how he got into the depolarization work; the similarities he sees between relationship counseling and political depolarization work; the psychological principles that have informed Braver Angels’ approaches; the value of in-group dissent in lowering animosity; thoughts on what the ask is for people who want to help with depolarization work. 

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. 

This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com

On this episode, i talk to relationship therapist Bill Doherty, who is also the co-founder of the group Braver Angels, which is a non-profit that works on political depolarization and bridge-building endeavors. 

As you may know if you listen to this podcast, I sometimes do episodes about the nature of political polarization and conflict, and I’ve got a book aimed at reducing divides in America titled Defusing American Anger. I was very interested to talk to Bill, as I think it’s interesting and fitting that he’s both a relationship therapist and someone doing political conflict resolution work, as I think there are so many similarities in that area. 

We talk about Bill’s relationship counseling work: what he’s focused on in that area, and how he approaches the common situation where one partner in a relationship wants to get counseling and is leaning in and the other partner is leaning out and isn’t as involved in the process. We talk about the dynamic where we can sometimes induce the very behaviors we dislike in a partner. We talk about how he got into the depolarization-aimed work, and what similarities he sees between couples counseling and depolarization work. Towards the end we discuss the question: what are we trying to get people to do when it comes to depolarization work: what is the ask of citizens who want to help with that problem? 

A little bit more about Bill’s experience: He’s a Professor in the Department of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota where he directs The Minnesota Couples on the Brink Project and The Citizen Professional Center. Clinically, he focuses on couples on the brink of divorce, on relational ethics in the everyday lives of clients, and on political stress in relationships. Following the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, he co-founded Braver Angels, a citizen initiative bringing conservatives and liberals together to counteract political polarization and restore the fraying social fabric in American society. Braver Angels now has volunteers working in all 50 states. His latest book is The Ethical Lives of Clients: Transcending Self-Interest in Psychotherapy, published by the American Psychological Association. Among his awards is the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Family Therapy Academy. 

You can learn more about his therapy work at https://thedohertyapproach.com. His last name is spelled DOHERTY. You can follow Bill on Twitter at @billdoherty You can learn more about the group Braver Angels at braverangels.org. 

If you’re interested in getting a paid Premium subscription to this podcast, go to my website and check that out. You’ll get ad-free access, and be able to collaborate with me on episodes  by seeing questions I plan for guests, and more. 

If you’re new to depolarization-aimed ideas and you’re a politically passionate person, there’s a decent chance you’ll have some objections to the concept of depolarization. There’s a lot to theoretically say about that, but for now I’ll just say that, if you do have such objections, I hope you’re curious to learn more. One of the reasons I wrote my book Defusing American Anger was to overcome some common objections and to show politically passionate people, whether liberal or conservative, why they should want to reduce the toxicity of our divides. And there’s a lot of other work people have done on this topic, and I list a lot of books on this topic at my site american-anger.com. If you want, you can even reach out to me personally via the contact form on my site behavior-podcast.com and send me your objections or other thoughts, and I’m happy to respond, as I think this is such an important topic. 

Okay, here’s the talk with Bill Doherty. Hi, Bill, thanks for coming on the show.

Bill Doherty: Happy to be with you.

Zach: Maybe we could start with a little bit about how you got into the couples counseling work. How did you get into specializing in that?

Bill: Well, for me, and I think for a lot of therapists, this specialty sort of emerges over time with who comes to see you. I started out doing a family systems therapy with adolescents and their parents in Connecticut when I was in graduate school, and then over time I began to realize that a lot of the adolescent’s issues were related to their parent’s relationship and their parent’s marriage. And so the kid would do better and the parents wanted to hang around and try to work on their relationship, so I started to do more couples’ work. And then over time, that’s what people came to see me for. That’s how I ended up specializing in couples.

Zach: Did you feel like… Were there certain things you felt you had a natural affinity for when it came to working out those kinds of issues?

Bill: I’m not sure, actually, it would be easy to say that in retrospect. But I like dealing with more than one person at a time, so I liked family therapy, I liked the couples’ work and so it just sort of evolved over time. And I think I’m pretty good at it but I don’t know that it was some conscious strategy that, “I’m uniquely good at this work so I’ll do it.”

Zach: Mhm. Like a lot of work, you find yourself in it and you go down the path. Yeah.

Bill: Right. Right. And then with adolescents, of course, if you’re not keeping up with where adolescents are, you’re incompetent in that work. So I have never worked with teens and families now without completely retooling.

Zach: Are there certain schools of thought or philosophy that drive your work? For example, I sometimes see people say existential humanism or these kinds of schools of thought. Do you have things in that realm?

Bill: Well, I’m pretty eclectic, as I think most therapists are. But if I had a name and approach, it would be a systems interactional approach. You know, a Family Systems Approach. When people come to me as a couple, they’re coming for the relationship. And so I’m a relationship therapist using systemic ideas for how people communicate, rather than seeing myself as primarily treating two individuals who happen to be in a relationship.

Zach: One thing I’ve been curious about– and sometimes on this podcast I just asked people what I had been curious about– when I watched that show Couples Therapy, I think that’s what it was called, or just reading about couples therapy in general, it sometimes seems like there’s sometimes one partner that’s a little bit more resistant than the other partner to examining their role in that dynamic system as you say. Do you find that often to be the case? Some people might say that’s a more narcissistic trait to not self-examine or to be oblivious to one’s role in a dynamic. I’m curious, do you see that often to be the case, or is it more spread out?

Bill: Yeah. Well, the thing about Couples Therapy is that there’s almost always somebody who is more interested in doing it. There is somebody who proposes it who often convinces the other person, so you have somebody who is more enthusiastic for the work. That’s just a given. What that means is, as a therapist, you have to really induce the other person to really sign on. And I don’t view that as that person’s problem necessarily, it’s just that they may not be as therapy-prone. We live in a psychological age and some people are just more interested in introspection. They read more self-help books, maybe they’ve had individual therapy, and the other person may not be the coin of the realm for them as much. So I just take it for granted that you’ll have different levels of interesting capacity, at least at the beginning, in looking at oneself. I always loathe to use the terms like ‘narcissistic’ or other pejorative labels– which by the way often in the therapy world, terms like narcissistic are used to say you don’t like somebody more than it’s… Well, they’re not cooperating with me like I want, more than they have an actual personality disorder. So I take the approach that I just assume to summarise that people will differ in their interest in looking at themselves and it’s my job to bring everybody along.

Zach: Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I actually have a plan to interview Craig Malkin who’s written a book about some of the more nuanced aspects of narcissism, and like you say, people seem prone to throw it around way too much these days to describe basically like you say, things they don’t like in someone. Yeah. So getting to the work you said or the aspect you said where one person is more interested than the other, that dynamic… And that relates, I think you said you did work that you call discernment therapy which is where one person really doesn’t want to be there in my understanding what that was.

Bill: The specialty I evolved over time was working with what we call mixed agenda couples, and that is when somebody is leaning towards divorce, breakup, and also is really ambivalent about trying couples therapy. The classic leaning out, they’re on the edge, they’re on the brink, not highly motivated at this point to come into therapy and work on solving the problems. They don’t know the problems can be solved, they’re demoralized. And then the other person is usually leaning in. That is somebody who’s saying, “I know we can work on this, I want to stay in the relationship.” Sometimes it’s the leaning-out person has only recently come clean that they’re that much on the brink and then the other spouse goes, “Oh, my goodness, we can make this work. Don’t do anything precipitous here.” That’s a couple who, when they present to traditional couples therapy, tend to fail. They tend to bum out. Because you have somebody who was an eager customer, if you will, for the therapy and the other persons sitting there with their arms folded and saying, “I’m not so sure that this is going to work. I’m not sure I want to stay.” And so the therapist is in this bind because you have somebody who isn’t necessarily signing up for the work that you’ve prepared in your career to offer.

Every experienced therapist has run into these cases, not that uncommon. And so I developed a kind of a pre-therapy approach I call discernment counseling. It’s basically short-term, no more than five sessions, and it’s to help the leaning-out person get clarity and confidence about a direction for the relationship and for both of them to understand what’s happened to the marriage and each person’s contributions to the problems. I won’t go into more details unless you like, but basically, you’re helping them to decide whether to do a full bout of couples therapy at least once everybody’s in, or the leaning out decides to divorce. Or they could just decide on neither. But it’s an approach where you work with them. They both come in together but you see them mostly separately because they’re in very different places. So it’s a very interesting kind of an emergency room or intensive care approach to working with couples on the brink.

Zach: Well, yeah. That relates to a question I was going to ask, which is, it seems kind of obvious if you don’t want to work on your marriage, it would be hard to get you to work on your marriage. Which I guess is what you’re saying there. It’s like getting them to even commit to working on the marriage, it sounds like. Yeah.

Bill: That’s right. That’s right. And it’s interesting we call it discernment counseling rather than therapy because what we’re really emphasizing is when you start this short-term process, you’re not doing therapy, you’re not doing couples therapy. What I mean by couples therapy is that you’re trying to solve problems, you’re trying to get closer, you’re trying to figure out how to make a better life together. That’s what therapy is about; couples therapy. Discernment counseling is figuring out whether that’s possible and whether you’d want to do it.

Zach: This is probably a pretty broad question but for talking about the people that might be a bit, you know, the less introspective people or the people who haven’t examined their role maybe in the marriage equation as much, are there certain tactics you take to help someone like that be willing to examine their role? I get that’s probably a pretty huge question. [chuckles]

Bill: Well, no, it’s a great question. Yeah, a starting point is, do you want to solve the problems in this relationship? How motivated are you to make things better, to get along better, to be closer? If you’re on the brink of divorce, how motivated are you– we’re talking about the leaning in– to make the marriage work? And so people are coming to couples therapy because they have a problem, they’re unhappy with something in the relationship. And so the key is to help them see that it takes two to make an unhappy marriage or to have chronic problems and that it’s in their best interest, if they want things to get better, to take a look in the mirror and to see how they are contributing. I thought a lot about this, I’m glad you asked the question, the first step for some folks who don’t think this way is looking at the unintended effects of what they say or don’t say. So, somebody who says, “Well, I just shut up because I don’t want to make things worse. I don’t do arguments because they don’t go anywhere and so I just kind of stick to myself.” But one of the things I help somebody see is that if you’re in an intimate relationship and you withdraw from connection and conversation, in your own mind, it can be, “I don’t want to make things worse. I don’t want a big fight so I’m going to withdraw.” And I say you kind of see yourself like a turtle, you know? Pulling in your head in your arms and just don’t make things worse. In an intimate relationship, you don’t come across like a turtle when you’re doing that, you come across like a porcupine. Because when you withdraw from somebody in a love relationship, they experience that as punishing. And so all– almost everybody gets that, okay? That’s what I’m saying. It’s the first step in the ladder because it’s saying, “I’m that person that it’s not like I want to be the punishing, but I can see that the unintended effect of that on the other person is that they feel like I’m really hurting them by withdrawing.” And so that’s a beginning of understanding that we have effects on one another that we don’t intend. Now, later on, when somebody gets into the habit of saying, “How am I part of the problem? How am I negatively affecting my spouse or partner?” then people can start to see that maybe in some way, they were angry and getting back at the other person subconsciously. But not just sort of like, “Oh, I stepped on your toe.” No, no, “I was actually kind of mad at you when I walked by your toe” Okay. That’s another level of understanding of one’s own contribution. So it’s a gradual thing but it’s really key to helping people resolve relationship problems that both people look in the mirror.

Zach: Yeah, and self-examination is very hard and being honest with yourself and with other people is very hard. Yeah.

Bill: It is. It is. And I think we live in a culture where it’s most tempting to fault the other person primarily. We’ve mentioned earlier in this interview that you can throw labels around, you know? So if you’re psychologically minded, read self-help books, keep up on the latest stuff, the most tempting thing in the world is to analyze your spouse or partner’s personality problems and where they came from and their family, you know? And get into their head with your astute analysis, which of course is quite self-serving, and it’s much harder to look at one’s own contributions or to have a very simplistic idea. My contribution is that I don’t stand up for myself enough, I’m too nice. “Well, okay, maybe.” But there’s a lot more going on than that.

Zach: Kind of reminds me of when it comes to polarization in general, it’s like a lot of times when we have a conflict we often just pull information in and use it; whatever information we can find to support our emotional judgments. So if we’re in a fight with our spouse, we might pull in all this self-help and psychological information but mainly use it to buttress up our argument about the other person’s deficiencies as opposed to examining the dynamic and our role in the equation and all these things.

Bill: Exactly. And this era we’re in where there’s so much psychological terminology available, I see it more and more than I did earlier in my career how people weaponize psychological terms. Like the narcissistic, or borderline. Oh, here’s another one: your husband doesn’t deal with feelings like you’d like and so maybe he’s on the autism spectrum, maybe he’s got Asperger’s or something like that. Whoa! Okay? That takes me off the hook, then.

Zach: That’s one of the reasons I do this podcast is to examine some of these simplistic mainstream ideas or ways these words are used, and dig into some of the nuances and see the spectrums there and how people reach for these labels a little bit too quickly. What you were saying about seeing each other’s roles in the equation, it reminded me of the… Do you know the book, The Anatomy of Peace, the well-known conflict resolution book?

Bill: I know of it, I have not read it.

Zach: Yeah. One great idea in there or probably a common concept– it is a common concept in conflict resolution, I think– but it emphasized in that book the way that when we’re in a big conflict, we can induce behaviors that we most dislike from the other person or the other side in the conflict, you know? The bad things that we see in those people, the way that we treat them will bring those bad behaviors out of them. And it kind of reminded me what you were saying when we see, you know, there’s various ways in a relationship where we can emphasize or accentuate and induce the very things we dislike. So if someone’s shut down or your partner’s shut down, the way you might treat them might induce them to shut down more. That’s just one example. But-

Bill: Exactly, exactly. This is part of understanding the dynamics and the dances that couples do. What we’re describing here is a demand withdrawal pattern, okay? Where I want something out of you, you feel pressured, you shut down, and then I criticize you for shutting down and then you’re shut down more. And then maybe sometime you blow up and then you feel really guilty about that and maybe I’ll use that on you. Or another common one is an over-functioning under-functioning pattern in a couple where for any number of reasons, somebody has assumed a lot of responsibility, say in child-rearing, and the other person is the third fiddle and this gets pretty old for the person who is doing a whole lot. The other person often hasn’t had to learn some things because there’s their partners doing it all, and so then the over-functioner gets frustrated and they come across like a critic. They come across patronizing, you know, that “I’ll try to teach you something if only you could learn.” And they really emphasize the incapacity of the other person who in turn is frustrated and angry about being treated like they’re a little kid and then they do their own passive-aggressive number.

Or, and this is now the subtleties that happen in relationships when you have a one-up one-down like I was just describing over-functioning and under-functioning under function, then the under-functioner will get back at the other person. I’m thinking about a couple where the wife did everything, the husband had this learned incompetence about child rearing and so on. Well, he in public would get back at her for not keeping up with current affairs. And whatever she expressed an opinion about something, he would suggest that she was really pretty ignorant. So when you have these imbalances in couples that are both participating, the person who seems to be one down, you’d have to look for how they sabotage and how they get back. And then in couples counseling that I do, it’s not that I’m doing this in a way that is in a ‘gotcha’, but it’s like stepping back and saying, “Hey, we’re co-creating this, okay? We each have a role in this and the dance is out of sync and we can rebalance it together.”

Zach: That’s a good segue into the polarization work but before we go to that, I wanted to ask you about the– because I once interviewed Brandi Fink who’s a relationship and relationship researcher and we talked about John Gottman’s work and behavioral indicators of good and bad relationships. For example, talked about the stereotypical eye-rolling which can indicate contempt in a relationship, somebody eye-rolling about someone’s partner. I’m curious, do you have thoughts on that area? For example, John Gottman I think was known for saying something like… I’m not sure if he’s actually said this or if it was just kind of a rumor but there was the perception that one could tell very quickly, based on some of these negative behaviors, what the state of someone’s relationship was. I’m curious, do you think some of that is much more? Is that very simplistic and it’s actually you can’t easily get the indicator of those kinds of things without a lot of work?

Zach: Well, you can get indicators of people’s current feelings about each other. The eye-roll is an indication that at this moment, somebody has some negative feelings about the other person. These are clues for what may be happening right now but in terms of being prognostic indicators– and that’s where the terrible misuse of John Gottman’s work comes in. He would do elaborate assessments of couples, elaborate assessments, and then make some predictions. And the way it gets watered down is that if you hear somebody being contemptuous, that their relationship is doomed because contempt is the most predictive factor in divorce according to his larger research. Well, you’re just getting a snippet of behavior. Even in therapy, the therapists they take on simplistic ideas from research. And then in the first session, they hear people saying that one or both of them had been contemptuous to each other. And then the therapist concludes they can’t make it, they’re going to dissolve. That’s really completely unfounded and dangerous. So I’m very cautious about taking brief samples of behavior. Okay? Brief samples of behavior. We have no context, and then thinking we can make predictions about the future of the relationship. That’s really hogwash.

Zach: No, I’m glad we get on that topic because that’s the kind of simplistic thing I like to examine in this podcast. I think people love the idea that I’m really going to get some deep analysis of people based on these small little behaviors but as you point out, it’s like being angry or contemptuous in the moment. Which is standard for any couple going through some problems, that doesn’t tell you about their deeper levels of commitment to each other or their actual dynamics and such.

Bill: That’s right, let alone their future. That’s where it gets risky as you start to predict the future.

Zach: Glad we got a chance to dimension that. Yeah, let’s talk about the polarization-related work. I only recently found out that you, in addition to the Braver Angels work and being co-founder, I only recently found out that you were doing the Couples Therapy– the marriage counseling– and that made complete sense to me because I’ve always thought the depolarization aimed to work for America or any country is so much similar to Couples Therapy in the sense that I kind of view it as couples therapy for a couple that is stranded on a desert island and can’t break up with each other, right? You have to figure it out. There’s not really any other option as I see it. But maybe you can talk a little bit about how your work led or how you got into the political polarization-related work. How did that come about?

Bill: Yeah, yeah. Just to follow up a little bit on your intro to it, I like to say that Reds and Blues, Conservatives and Liberals in the US are like a married couple who are not getting along. But unlike with a married couple, the divorce is not possible. You can’t have the blues move to Canada, you know? We are stuck with each other and we have this country to run together. And so I really got into this work by happenstance when two colleagues of mine who had worked in the marriage and fatherhood area with David Blankenhorn in New York City and David Lapp in southwest Ohio after the 2016 election, a few days afterwards, they were on the phone and talking about how differently people were feeling about the election in the Upper East Side of Manhattan where you can’t find a Trump voter practically, and Southwest Ohio where it was a hope and change. And they decided on the spur of the moment to get 10 Hillary Clinton voters and 10 Donald Trump voters together for 13 hours over a weekend in early December of 2016 to see if people could talk with each other and not just about each other. And they called me and asked me if I would design and facilitate it. I was a bit daunted by the idea but I had done a lot of community engagement work, I’d started a project at the same time with dealing with police and Black men and so I’m kind of in that space, and so I decided to take it on. It was only really over time after I designed this and facilitated and we decided to keep going– and out of that came Braver Angels– it was only actually over time that I began to realize how I was embedding the Couples Therapy principles in it. It wasn’t that I sat down and said, “Okay, what have I learned from Couples Therapy that I’m going to put into these Red/Blue workshops?” It was more like it was all implicit. I did it, designed it, and then began to conceptualize it.

Zach: Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you see those principles and philosophies overlapping. What psychological and counseling approaches have you added to the Braver Angels curriculum and approach?

Bill: Yeah. Well, a key one is that you don’t set out to try to change somebody. You set out to listen to them to try to understand them on their own terms, to explain yourself in respectful ways, but you don’t set out to convince somebody to change in some fundamental way. If they’re going to change, it’s going to be on their own. And so that respect for those boundaries that people have is really a key one. The second one is to create venues and processes where people can listen and really listen to understand rather than listen to respond and debate. So one of the exercises in our red– we call Red/Blue Workshop, be like a reds and blues– it’s a fishball exercise which has actually been a thing used commonly for 50 years. And that is you flip a coin for who’s going to be in a circle in the middle of the room– you can do this on Zoom as well. And then the other group is on the outer circle– later, they’ll switch roles. And the two questions for the people on the inside are, “Why are your sides values and policies good for the country?” And then the second question is, “What are your reservations or concerns about your own side?” So the first is to say what’s great about being Conservative or Liberal for the country, and the second is, “What’s the downside? What are your reservation concerns?” So, the group in the middle are having this discussion and the group on the outside’s only job is to listen and try to learn how these people in the inside see themselves and to look for anything in common. It gives you a chance for some listening without any response. In fact, the ground rule is you cannot respond verbally or non-verbally, you just sort of take it in. So it gives you this chance in a less pressurized environment than if somebody is talking right at you or to you to really listen. And then the questions, if you notice the questions, that second question is what I call the humility question. It’s where you and I started in this interview. It’s the self-reflection and the self-criticism; what do you see is the downside of your own side? And when people can nail that, when they can express both their enthusiasm for their political perspective and their reservations about it, then it opens up the possibility of people seeing each other beyond their stereotyped images of each other. That kind of thing happens in Couples Therapy as well.

Zach: One of the reasons I wanted to interview you was when I was at the Braver Angels convention recently and I was talking to Sage Snider– I’m pretty sure it was her or another Sage. Yeah, I know she’s a volunteer or worker for Braver Angels. But she had talked about and we got on the subject of psychology and I was saying… I had talked about the concept, which I think is very important, this concept of our group members perceiving another group’s dissent and disagreement. And there’s one study that’s called Exposure to Outgroup Members Criticizing Their Own Group Facilitates Intergroup Openness, and that and other studies show… It was in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict showing how when one group saw the other group’s complexity and how they were not this monolithic, stereotypical, all-the-same group and they had disagreements within their ranks and such, that naturally led to a lowering of anger in the group observing that. And Sage told me, “Oh, that’s like the fishbowl approach that Braver Angels did,” which is one of the things that got me interested in talking to you. Because I think that is such an important concept is it combats the out-group homogeneity effect, which is like seeing the other group is all the same. Right?

Bill: Exactly. And another exercise, in fact, one that we begin the Red/Blue Workshop with is a stereotypes exercise where each group, the reds and blues, go to a separate room with their own facilitator and they come up with and vote on the top four or five negative stereotypes that they think others have of them. False exaggerated views. Reds, for example, think they’re accused of being racist and not compassionate to the poor, anti-immigration, for example. Blues will put on their list that they think we’re all arrogant and elitist, we believe in big government for its own sake, and we’re anti-business. We’re baby killers, you know? We encourage people to just say it really bluntly. So they vote on their top four or five stereotypes that they think others have of them. And then there’s two questions that they answer. One is, “Well, what’s true instead? If you’re not all racist, if you’re not all anti-business on the other side, what’s true instead?”

And then the second question is, is there a kernel of truth in the stereotype? And we say kernels of truth may be true of a sub-group among folks on your side, it may be something from history that’s carried over, it may be in the heated rhetoric of public debate your group comes across this way. Or it may be a blind spot, something that your group doesn’t pay a lot of attention to. So what’s the kernel of truth? And so, boy, when people can name the kernels of truth that the stereotypes come out of nowhere, then they report that there’s somebody who reports out when we all get together to the other group that this is what we think of the stereotypes, this is how we correct the stereotypes. And this is what we say to kernels of truth. Whoa, that really opens things up. And then people in pairs and then in the whole group answer these two questions. What did you learn about how people on the other side see themselves? And did you see anything in common? So, how do they see themselves and anything common? And we have people in red-blue pairs and the whole group answers those questions after having heard this kind of self-disclosure from the other side.

Zach: Yeah, that’s great. Getting people to examine the complexities and how the perceptions each group forms of the other group, that’s really key to overcoming the animosity. Do I understand right that you’ve done that approach for Congress people and other groups, other organizations?

Bill: Yeah, we’ve done versions of this with state legislators, with some members of Congress in what’s called the Problem Solvers Caucus. With legislators, you have to be a little more careful. These are public figures and you can have them saying, “Yeah, well, there’s some racist among us,” or something like that. So we vary these. One of the things we’ve done– this would be actually worth talking about because this isn’t a carryover from a couples therapy and psychotherapy. One of the most powerful exercises we’ve done with elected officials including legislators and members of Congress is a life experiences exercise, where everybody gets four or five minutes to answer this question: What life experiences have influenced your values and beliefs about public policy and public service? What life experiences have influenced your values and beliefs about public policy and public service? Everybody gets a few minutes to take some notes. We encourage them to go deeper than, “You know, when I was elected to my middle school school council, I knew I was destined.” Kind of go a little deeper than that. And every time I’ve done this, it’s very powerful. There are stories of loss, of regaining hope, of people who inspired them, of hurdles transcended. There are often tears and everybody gets their time, and then afterwards, it’s the question of what did you learn from doing this?

I did this with some members of Congress, a Republican member of Congress of the house introduced himself and he said, “I’m as conservative as the day is long!” But he was also pragmatic and he knows people have to work across the aisle. And people shared their stories of hardship that they overcame, including him. It was very powerful. As they said, there were tears. And at the end, when I asked people to summarise what they took from this, he said this great line. He said, “You can’t fight somebody in the same way when you know their heart.” You can’t fight somebody in the same way when you know their heart. That’s what happens in really good couples therapy, people get to understand each other at a deeper level that they experienced in mutual vulnerabilities. They know their hearts even more than they did before. And that can happen across the political divide too.

Zach: Yeah, it seems like you were saying, trying to do this for organizations or politicians, the very nature of politics can get in the way of honesty. And in the way you were saying, it’s like we don’t really expect politicians to really just come out and say, “Here’s what I really feel about the people on my own side,” kind of thing. How do you see the work of Braver Angels, that that introspective and group citizen work depolarization de-escalation work? How do you see that bubbling up to affect broader cultural change?

Bill: Yeah. Well, this is a big part of what we’re thinking about these days. We are increasingly networking with organizations that have big memberships as some big churches, other secular membership organizations to see if we can, with them, create a kind of cultural force– cultural forces have been on the direction of polarization– and see if we can create something that pushes back against it. That’s really a big focus of what we’re doing now is the sort of lateral spread of saying that we have a problem in the country. And this is actually the beginning of change for a couple. The problem isn’t just you, it isn’t just, “I have a problem with you.” Because that’s where we are in our polarized state, the Reds and Blues. The problem is the other side to say, “We have a problem around dissension, division, and we are paralyzed. We can hardly run our governments and our families are hurt by this division.” And so the division, the polarization becomes the problem, not the other side. That’s the kind of cultural seating we’re interested in. And then we work with elected officials increasingly now too. When they do things that are visible like forming a new caucus, and this happened recently in the New Hampshire state legislature where we’ve done considerable work, a caucus that is working on de-polarization, which is going to be getting people together socially as well as creating opportunities for other kinds of connections.

Zach: In my own work in my book Defusing American Anger and on this podcast, I think I’m more aligned with your work because I focus on the grassroots aspect of thinking. I think that in general, the more systemic ways to change the system won’t do much. And that’s not to say that… I think all the work is valuable, but I think there’s some systemic elements that make things really hard to change. For example, trying to pass legislation, the very nature of polarization means that we probably won’t agree on that legislation or whatever it is. Or trying to change things from a political or media standpoint, those systems are naturally polarizing. So I think I’m much more aligned with your work in the sense that I think we do need this cultural change into however it’s done, kind of create this force that bubbles up through the various institutions. But that’s not to say I think systemic changes or attempts to change things are not good, because I think like a lot of big problems, it just takes many people of all sorts working on the problem no matter what their approaches are.

Bill: Exactly. If we put all of our efforts into changing Congress, that’s the hardest one of all, okay? But what we do is since we work at these levels, a value of this limited work we’ve done with Congress or these limited work state legislatures is that when we publicize that, it gives people at the grassroots hope. That’s why I tell that story about that Red/Blue workshop with members of Congress. It’s not transformed Congress, okay? But it gives regular citizens some hope that their leaders, at least some of their leaders see this problem as well. So you have a civility caucus formed in a legislature somewhere, then government can signal the importance of cultural change. That’s how I see that work as part of an overall picture, as you said, but it’s not the driver.

Zach: Right, it’s all related. Because you do the grassroots work and naturally, some people with power and influence will take those ideas and do things with them. So, yeah, it’s all related, theoretically. Do you have any thoughts on, say if you had a lot of power and somebody said, “What would you change in the system?” Maybe the way social media works or some governmental structure. Do you have your own thoughts on what the most powerful levers would be, if you care to share them?

Bill: Well, when you mentioned something that could be in politics, I’ll share what the conservative representative said. This is almost in jest, but there’s a power to it. He said if he was ruling the world, he would have all members of Congress and their families stay in Washington three or four days a week in high-rise apartment buildings [laughs] and socialize with each other and let their kids play with each other. That would be an example of can we have relationships with each other. Because that, at the level of politics, and I see this in legislatures including my own in Minnesota, they never break bread together. In fact, even within their own groups, they don’t. They’re just running and running and running. And so that would be an example of a symbolically important thing as well. And then I would have the social media and the journalists, you know, the cable news folks be willing to take a hard look at the way in which their business model is based on spreading outrage with their outrage machines. It would be tricky to do, but to say, “Hey, we’re contributing to the problem, and what can we do within the limits of First Amendment and so on to not make our money off creating more stereotypes and outrage?”

Bill: Yeah, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. Are there any things you’d like to throw in here that we haven’t touched on?

Bill: The last thing I’d like to say is that I would encourage listeners to do the same thing with their political beliefs and political alliances that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. And that is in an intimate relationship when there are chronic problems, to assume that both parties are contributing to it if not equally in some meaningful way. And to try to take that attitude on. Certainly, my Braver Angels experience has helped me do that much more than I used. To take on a systemic and humble approach to looking at political division and to try to de-stereotype. I guess I’ll end through this one. I borrowed something of John Gottman, and it’s The Four Horsemen of negative communication; stonewalling, contempt, and so on. I’ve done that for Braver Angels. The Four Horsemen of Polarization; stereotyping, dismissing, ridiculing, and contempt. Stereotyping, dismissing, ridiculing, and contempt, The Four Horsemen of Polarization. I am suggesting they reside in each of us, and something each of us can do just as if we’re in a relationship, we can examine our tendency to stereotype, to dismiss, to ridicule, and hold in contempt the 70-plus million people who vote differently from us. That’s something we can all do on our own around this political relationship that is crucial for the future of our country.

Zach: That was one reason I wrote my “Defusing American Anger” book is trying to get… One of the goals there is because I’m on the more liberal side, is trying to get liberals to examine their role in the equation. And part of that is in “The Anatomy of Peace” book, which I thought was a great conflict resolution book. He talks about how we can feel that we’re very right in a conflict, which in any conflict, most people feel that they’re the right ones, right? But even if we feel certain that we’re the right ones, there’s ways that we can be wrong in how we relate to other people and how we view them and how we interact with them. There’s ways to, as the book puts it, for our hearts to be either at war or at peace with people, even when we very much disagree with them. Even when we’re theoretically actually at war with them, our thoughts and views of them can be very different, more generous or more contemptuous. Yeah, I think being willing to examine one’s role in the equation of a relationship, whether that’s a personal relationship or our national relationships, is key to it. Yeah.

Bill: On that point, just one more point that one of the things I’ve learned in my work with Braver Angels is to not assume that a strong policy difference translates to our core values and motivational difference. You may be for charter schools, for de-emphasizing traditional public schools, parent vouchers, support for religious schools that would be more conservative view. And I might be saying, “No, this is going to undermine public education and further fracture the country and jeopardize the educational prospects of children.” One of the things I’ve learned is not to assume that because I think your policies are going to harm children, that you are callous. That you don’t care about children, or in fact that you’re happy to undermine them for the sake of your own ideological or political goals. Then you become a moral monster to me. And how do we actually engage in constructive relationships to try to create policy? And so, not to assume motives underneath strong policy differences is an important thing that I’ve learned.

Zach: Well, this has been great, Bill. Thanks a lot for joining me. I’m a big fan of your work, and thanks from me and the country.

Bill: It was a pleasure and an honor for me to talk with you about all these important things. So, thank you as well.

Bill: That was a talk with Bill Doherty, relationship therapist and co-founder of the political depolarization group, Braver Angels. You can learn more about his therapy work at the thedohertyapproach.com. His last name is D O H E R T Y. You can follow Bill on Twitter @billdoherty, you can learn more about the group Braver Angels at braverangels.org.

Something I think about a good amount is the question: what do we want people to do to help with the mission of depolarization? Let’s say we’ve convinced an American citizen of the importance of reducing our divides, what do we want that person to do? What are the levers we want to pull to help change the culture? 

To me, if I had to boil it down to a single idea, I think it’s this: asking people to criticize and push back on unreasonably divisive rhetoric/behavior amongst people who are politically similar to them (and I specifically focus on ‘politically similar’ here due to how hard it is to influence an outgroup, and due to research showing the benefits of ingroup dissent, like we discussed). There are many ways that such pushback can manifest: for example, informal conversation, posting on social media, all the way up to pundits and politicians pushing back in more official ways, like writing books and legislation, and on to entertainment media, TV and movies and fiction). It will take the form of more people, across the board, in many organizations and walks of life, talking more about the problem of polarization and working on that problem by pushing back against it, in many ways. 

After our talk, I emailed Bill to ask him if he’d agree with that ideas. He said the following: 

I would say two things: a) begin to practice non-judgmental curiosity about the views of people on the other side, trying to see the world as they see it and not as you think they see it; and b) your idea: trying to tone down divisive rhetoric among people who agree with you on the issues. 

So that was cool to get Bill’s thoughts on that. I think it’s an important thing to align on, because it helps us focus a bit more on the practical things we’re trying to do in this area. It can help remind us of what we are asking people for. 

Bill added that Braver Angels has an effective workshop called Depolarizing Within, available on their website. I’ll include a link to that from the entry for this episode on my behavior-podcast.com website. 

This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you’d like to support my work, you can sign up for a premium ad-free subscription to this podcast, and get a few other perks with that. 

If you want to learn more about polarization, and about depolarization efforts, you can check out the site for my book Defusing American Anger, which is at www.american-anger.com. On that site I have a compilation of a lot of books about polarization, so it’s just a generally good resource for people who want to look into the subject more. And I have a lot of past episodes on the topic of polarization dynamics. 

Thanks for listening.

Categories
podcast

Understanding the behavior of people under anesthesia, with Ashita Goel

A talk with anesthesiologist Ashita Goel about her work. Topics include: the sometimes strange behaviors of people under anesthesia; the hypnotic and “truth serum”-like effects of anesthesia; factors in determining drug dosage; the various states one can put people into; why anesthesiologists often seem outgoing and fun; the viral video of the man who woke up from anesthesia and didn’t recognize his wife; and more. 

Episode links:

Categories
podcast

Psychological factors in conspiracy theory beliefs, with Mikey Biddlestone

A talk with psychology researcher Mikey Biddlestone (Twitter: @biddlepsych), who specializes in studying conspiracy theory beliefs, about some psychological factors that can make beliefs in conspiracy theories more likely. We talk about “just world” beliefs (beliefs that the world is largely just and fair) and how those might relate to conspiracy-minded thinking. Other topics discussed: how narcissistic and antisocial personality traits can relate to such beliefs; how we might define what is an unreasonable level of conspiracy-minded thinking; how conspiracy-minded thinking relates to anti-establishment views; how conspiracy-minded thinking ties into political polarization. 

Episode links:

Related resources:

Categories
podcast

Understanding the behavior of autistic people, with Barry Prizant

A talk with Barry Prizant (barryprizant.com), author of the influential book Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism, and co-host of the Uniquely Human podcast (www.uniquelyhuman.com). The focus of our talk is on understanding the experiences and behaviors of autistic people.

Topics discussed include: understanding the underlying causes behind the sometimes seemingly inexplicable behaviors of autistic children; the various types of experiences contained within the label of ‘autism’; the role that sensitivity to sensation and associated anxiety plays in autism; the question of how empathetic autistic people are; the causes of autism. 

Episode links:

Links to ideas or resources mentioned in the talk:

TRANSCRIPT

Zach Elwood:

Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding the people around us, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you like this podcast, please leave me a review or rating on Apple Podcasts, or the platform you listen on: that is hugely appreciated. 

On this episode, I talk to Barry Prizant about autism. Barry is the author of the well known and influential book Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism. He’s also the co-host of the podcast Uniquely Human, where they cover autism-related topics. You can find that podcast at uniquelyhuman.com, and find barry’s main site at barryprizant.com. His last name is spelled PRIZANT. 

Barry’s book is fantastic: I read it years ago and was rereading it recently. Even if you aren’t that interested in autism, and are more just interested in understanding behavior, it’s a great read. A lot of the ideas in the book are related to behavior and reading people: part of the book is focused on better understanding the behaviors of autistic children, because so often people will write off the behaviors of autistic children as lacking meaning and being random, but Barry walks through a lot of examples of digging into the hidden causes and meanings behind various behaviors. And another focus is the difficulty autistic people have with reading neurotypical, so-called “normal” people: the things neurotypical people take for granted are alien and not obvious to autistic people, and a lot of the work autistic people do in their pursuit of communicating better with other people and fitting in more, is about trying to read people better; trying to deduce the things that others may take for granted. 

I think you’ll like this talk a lot. Barry and I talk about the nature of autism; we talk about the huge range of behaviors and experiences that can be found under the label of ‘autism’; we talk about the causes of autism; we talk about the idea that some autistic traits are due to being too sensitive to stimulation and feeling overwhelmed; we talk about some examples from Barry’s book of reading the causes of some verbal and nonverbal behaviors of autistic children; we talk about Ron DeSantis, who some people think is a bit autistic; and along the way I talk a bit about some of my own autistic traits (including my discomfort with making eye contact that I had from a young age); 

In this talk Barry and I reference quite a few books and other resources, and if you’re curious about some of those things, I’ll include links to those resources on the blog post for this episode on my site.

Okay, here’s the talk with Barry Prizant, author of Uniquely Human. Hi, Barry, thanks for coming on the show.

Barry: It’s my pleasure.

Zach: So, a big part of your book Uniquely Human and your work in general is about explaining the importance of asking ‘why’ when people are faced with confusing seemingly random behaviors of autistic people looking for the motivations and the hidden causes behind people’s behavior. And in your book, you include a lot of examples of these kinds of things, which is one of the things I found most interesting about your book from a behavior perspective. And I’m curious, what’s top of mind for you when it comes to some of the stories that you tell about the hidden causes behind autistic people’s behavior?

Barry: Yeah, I believe that one of the great injustices that happens with autistic people is they are misunderstood. So I give lots of examples and I continue to do so when I see people making assumptions about why an autistic child or an autistic adult reacts in a certain way. It’s important to ask what I refer to as the ‘deep why’ because very often there are so many assumptions that are made that are just simply inaccurate; such as a child, for example, being non-compliant. And the example I give in the book is a child that I’m walking with– a young child– outside, and he keeps dropping to the floor on the sidewalk. And it looks like well, he doesn’t want to go for a walk or he’s being uncooperative. When in that situation, it ended up that he has hypersensitive hearing and was hearing a dog in the distance and he was afraid of dogs. And there are just so many more examples I could give both of behavior that is nonverbal as well as the types of speech that is used, especially echolalia, which is the tendency to repeat speech. Sometimes kids will repeat things that they’ve heard and they associated particular meaning with that phrase. For example, many years ago I was working with a child and at the time on television, they had this commercial for a toilet bowl cleaner and it was called Ty-D-Bol. And he would sing the Ty-D-Bol song when he needed to go to the bathroom because he made that association. Some people just thought it was cute, okay? But it was really communicative. Unfortunately, many people on the spectrum develop idiosyncratic ways to communicate that very often have real meaning behind it but are seen as either meaningless or are seen as undesirable ways to communicate, especially when a child is dysregulated or upset.

Zach: One interesting story that I remember from your book is the child who would go around the classroom and would stare in people’s faces and make [duaa] sounds. Can you talk about that story?

Barry: Yeah, yeah. That was a young child, a five-year-old little boy, and he would come up to us and this was something we hadn’t seen before. And he would stare us in the face and say, “Duaa,” while opening his mouth wide and holding it open. And then if we didn’t respond, he’d go “Duaa,” again. So, we didn’t know what to do or what it meant. And this was very early in my career, I was working with a wonderful teacher who said, “Well, let’s call David’s mom up and figure out what’s going on here.” And so she did that during the lunch break and she said, “Oh, he must be getting a cold or feeling a sore throat. Because when I think he’s getting sick, I tell him to come over and open his mouth and do ‘a-ha’ so I could see if his throat is inflamed.” And he was clearly letting us know how he felt because he associated that phrase that his mom had said to him with not feeling well.

Zach: The anecdotes are just really interesting in your book and the ties between the things that children pick up from shows and movies and use that to communicate. You had one where a child liked to greet people with the phrase, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Can you talk a little bit about that one?

Barry: Yeah, that’s one of my most favorite and delightful examples that a parent shared with me. This was a youngster who he was only three, but he had a lot of phrases that people call scripting. Actually, it’s an area of great interest now in my field in speech and language pathology called gestalt language processing. That is processing language and using language as memorized chunks. So he would come up to people, especially if he didn’t know them, and with his cute little posture he would kind of cock his head and say, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” And where that came from was the movie The Wizard of Oz! And if you go to a particular scene, it’s just after Dorothy landed in Munchkinland. After a house crashed in Munchkinland, there’s a little bubble in the air that gets bigger and bigger and bigger and when the bubble bursts, it’s Glinda the Good Witch of the North. And what does she say? She says to Dorothy, “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” So what it seems like this little boy extracted from observing that was this is how you greet people. I mean, it’s a very profound greeting, you know? Here’s this person who comes out of a bubble and then greets Dorothy. And I’ll never forget what his mom said when we said, “Well, we should really help Jimmy maybe say, ‘Hi, I’m Jimmy,’ or ‘Who are you?” And his mom said, “Oh, but he’s so cute when he does that. Do we have to change that?” [chuckles]

Zach: Yeah. And like you said in the book, it really captures so much of the social interaction. When you meet people, you’re communicating and you really want to know, “Are you good or bad? Are you gonna be nice to me or not be nice to me?” You know? Yeah, so I love those anecdotes in the book. And I really like the general theme of asking ‘why’ about people’s behavior, which is just a general good strategy in life about everyone trying to figure out the hidden causes and not jump to conclusions about why people did something basically.

Barry: Well, and I think the bottom line is it’s respectful of other people. We do this all the time in interactions with anybody. We try to understand what their true meaning is, what their intentions are, and of course the neurotypical culture, we put on all these layers of masking and deceit and everything else that goes on. And the one thing that I’ve always enjoyed in my 50-plus year career, especially in my relationships with autistic people, is the sincerity and the honesty. But unfortunately, we went through many many decades of people just trying to make autistic children and adults look normal by changing their behaviour. And if we didn’t understand what somebody was trying to communicate or if it seemed to be idiosyncratic or we were confused, we’d always try to just fix that. And autistic adults are now telling us, “That was wrong. You need to understand… You have to understand my deep why.”

Zach: That can be traumatic and stressful to be forced to repress the natural inclinations and ways of being.

Barry: Absolutely. And if you want to take it to the next step, an area that I’m finding interesting that people are just beginning to talk about in autism culture is should we understand that there is a different culture of communication in autism not being interested in schmoozing and small talk? As you know, for many people, feeling uncomfortable and the social requirement of looking at people in the eye when you’re talking with them. So many autistic people are now saying all of this has been labeled as deficient in the past because it doesn’t fit neurotypical, especially Western culture. And I always like to emphasize, there are many cultures– and I’ve had students from Africa who feel very uncomfortable looking me at the time as a professor in the eye, and they averted gaze. And they would say to me, “It’s a sign of disrespect, I can’t look you in the eye because you are my professor when I’m speaking to you.” So a lot of this is culturally determined. But the point is that many autistic people are now saying, “This is not just random behavior. It’s something that’s common across many autistic people, which defines cultural differences in communication.”

Zach: Yeah, a quick digression there because I was going to get into it a little later, but yeah, I’ve always had problems with eye contact and I once did this video for an ex-girlfriend where she interviewed me for a class project, basically. And because of my lack of eye contact in the video, the teacher was asking her, “Is he from another country or something?” [laughs] He thought it was some cultural thing. So, let’s see. Do you see the autism label as containing a great amount of complexity and many factors and many types of experiences and ways of being in that label? Do you feel like the label itself is kind of flattening a wide range of experiences?

Barry: It’s a great question, and it’s a very complex question because the issue of the label of autism and how it’s applied and whether it’s helpful or whether it’s not helpful really depends upon who’s using the label. Just to give you an example, the formal diagnosis comes from the DSM-5, and that’s the American Psychiatric Association manual for diagnosis. And currently, the label is autism spectrum disorder. Okay? And many people, including myself, feel that in a sense it is very unidimensional because ‘disorder’ implies something that is pathological or wrong. So more people, including myself, are looking at or referring to autism more as a condition. Because condition is a more neutral term. Condition could mean well, there are some things that are helpful and positive and there are some things that are challenging. You know, many people in the past when you heard the word autism– and I’m going back a few decades now– when a family or a parent got a diagnosis for their child, autism meant hopeless child, there’s nothing we can do, so think about putting your child in some kind of institution. I’m talking about three, four or five decades ago right now. Whereas now, in part due to the media but even more so due to so many autistic self-advocates being out there writing books, giving lectures and speaking, we’re trying to change the concept which changes the meaning of the label to this condition that very often results in different patterns of strengths but also different patterns of challenges.

Let me just share a quick story with you. I do a podcast with a colleague who’s autistic, he’s an audio engineer. And we interviewed an Ojibwe autistic woman from the Ojibwe tribe. She lives in Minnesota, so it’s upper central US. She shared with us that in Ojibwe language, there’s no such label as autism, there’s not even a label for disability. And she said people are just respected for who they are and accepted and loved for who they are. And both in terms of their strengths as well as their challenges. And what she said was, “I do accept the fact that in Western, especially US Western culture, the label plays a certain function. You can’t get financial support, whether it’s medical support, whether it’s psychological support or educational support without the diagnosis.” So when we talk about the label and the pros and cons of the label, it really depends upon… You know, I’ve met many people who say, “Well, I’m pretty sure I’m on the spectrum. As an adult, I never got a diagnosis. Should I seek a diagnosis?” And my question then is, “What do you think that would do for you? Would it be helpful? Would it not be helpful for you?” And many people feel… I feel, by the way, I skew towards, “Yes, do it.” Because then you could find your tribe, you could find your community. And it helps other people who are in the know to be more understanding of how you’re reacting and how you’re behaving. But the point is that the label in and of itself, getting back to your question, is very complex simply because people have different meanings for the label and apply it differently.

Let me give you one more example that’s very contemporary. Ron DeSantis, who is one of the Republican candidates challenging Trump, apparently many people who cover him (I’m talking about journalists) they talk about the fact that they think he’s autistic. Okay? And they say that because in informal situations– think about your traditional politician going to a restaurant or a diner in the morning when people are having breakfast and shaking hands with everybody– that he comes across as very uncomfortable. He says things that are a little bit off-topic. And then something strange that I read about, that when he’s not wearing his formal suit and tie, that the combinations of the clothes that he chooses are a little bit idiosyncratic and off. Okay? And by the way, this is based upon an article that was published in Politico about three weeks ago. I was interviewed for that article. The author of the article was saying, “I don’t like the fact that some of my colleagues refer to him, “Oh, he’s just autistic that’s why he reacts that way. Because they only see it as negative. They’re only looking at what they see as negative.” And so the article was about we got to get away from using a descriptor of autism only in reference to negative attributes or what’s perceived as negative attributes. It’s a wonderful article. And basically, it says, “Stop it!” And he said in the article, “I need to tell my colleagues to stop using the word autism to characterize a person who seems to be socially uncomfortable, or who does things in a way we don’t expect a politician to behave.” That’s a really good example of the complexity of the term and who is using it and how it’s being applied.

Zach: You’ll now be hearing an ad. I don’t endorse these ads, and I encourage you to remain skeptical of all ads.

[ad plays]

Zach: Right. It seems like we sometimes culturally just really like labels way too much in the sense that not just labeling other people, but also we like to label ourselves too and that can be sometimes kind of self-limiting too. Maybe the healthier way to look at things is that these are just rough labels that we use to describe certain aspects of human ways of being and they can be very rough and be on the very complex multi-dimensional spectrum that’s really hard to describe, and we’re just trying to give these rough labels to these rough assemblies of traits and behaviors. I think the more people embrace that way of looking at things, the better and healthier it gets.

Barry: Yeah, and one other point that I didn’t make that was inherent in your question is that even autistic people that I’ve known– and I’ve known many, and I collaborate, write with, present with many autistic people– they may focus on different aspects that everybody would agree often occurs in the autistic brain. So some people will talk about sensory sensitivities and how to build stating it is when there are loud noises or a visually complex environment. Other people will talk about the issues they feel challenged by for example in conversation. A young man once said to me, “Entering a conversation that’s free-flowing and open-ended is like stepping onto a minefield for me because I’m afraid I’m going to say something that’s inappropriate and wrong and I won’t even know it.” So even autistic people I find, as well as non-autistic people, sometimes focus on specific aspects of what we know is part of the autistic experience as opposed to other aspects. And that’s their personal experience.

Zach: Yeah, that’s kind of what I was trying to get at, just the tremendous range of experiences. For example, I’ll take myself I’ve always had trouble with eye contact, it almost physically pained me from a young age. But I don’t have a lot of the experiences that other people have that get described as autistic. That’s kind of what I was getting at is just this tremendous range of human experiences that get lumped under this simple descriptor. Yeah.

Barry: And a big point of my book is that it also blends into experiences of neurotypical people. Now, I want to say right up front, I don’t like when people say, “Well, there’s a little bit of autism in all of us.” I think that kind of dismisses the special experiences and challenges. But let me just give you an example in my 35-year relationship with my wife and my marriage. I like more alone time, okay? I don’t like going to parties with people I don’t know, especially if I’m not in the mood at all, to just schmooze. My wife, I like to say she has an overabundance of social genes. She will strike up a conversation with anybody. I mean, in a line at a theatre, a person shopping next to her in a market… Whereas for me, I just prefer to kind of go my own way and go ahead. So very often, she will go out and do things socially. Finally, she gets comfortable with that. [chuckles] And I’ll say, “Listen, [inaudible 00:21:45] mood just to hang out with people I don’t know and try to make like I’m having a phone conversation with them.” So there is some blending. I’m focusing on the social piece here in terms of how reticent you are socially, or how outgoing you are socially. And I think it’s based on our brains. I really think that for my wife, when she engages socially with people and gets to know new people she’s never met and have long conversations, I think her brain’s lighting up like a light bulb. It’s feeding what she loves to do. Whereas for me, I feel a little bit of that mild discomfort and stress. Not to the extent that autistic people report feeling that, but I feel like it’s just not worth my effort right now, or I really need to be in the mood, or I need to have a couple of gin and tonics in me and then maybe I’ll go along with that. [chuckles]

Zach: Yeah, it’s kind of like getting into the spectrum of introversion and extroversion areas.

Barry: Exactly.

Zach: Maybe that’s a good segue into… I was going to ask you obviously a hugely complex question, but do you have your thoughts on what you see as the causes of autism? For example, the biological wiring aspect of it, how do you see those things playing a role?

Barry: Yeah, I always like to begin with the caveat that I’ve not studied the neurology of autism as a researcher and I’m certainly no expert in that area. I do like the metaphor of we’re talking about a brain that’s wired differently and that communicates to different parts of the brain that communicate with each other differently. To help explain, in some cases some of the great strengths– for example an episodic and rote memory for some people on the spectrum, almost photographic memory eidetic imagery. For some people on the spectrum, exceptional ability in music, perfect pitch, which I think is more common in autism than in the general population… I think certainly there are brain-wiring differences. The question is, how does that happen? And of course, you’re very familiar with the fact that it is now accepted that at least for some people, there’s a very strong genetic component. It is not uncommon for me to do a school consultation on let’s say a seven-year-old little boy or little girl, clearly accurate diagnosis of autism. And then the parents come in and the dad not only has some characteristics when I meet with the parents, but in many cases the dad– more dad than mom– the dad will say to me, “I wasn’t so different when I was young and I think I understand why my son does what he does and how he reacts. Do you think I could be on the spectrum?” That’s one of the biggest issues that’s happening right now with all the undiagnosed people, many of whom become self-diagnosed or diagnosed as adults. So I do believe there’s a genetic component, not necessarily on all people on the spectrum, but I think for different reasons there are wiring and brain function differences. And many autistic people describe themselves that way right now. “Well, my brain’s just wired differently.” And some people actually suggest let’s describe it that way to kids. It’s not that you have brain damage, it’s not that there’s something wrong that we need to go in as a neurosurgeon and fix that, let’s just understand that we all have different brains and your brain has a particular pattern of functioning. Which is the underlying premise of the whole concept of neurodiversity.

Zach: A small note here just to give an example of the kinds of theories there are about biological mechanisms involved in causing autism. Some studies have shown some evidence that autism may be caused by a lack of normal pruning of synapses in the brain when young. Basically, a neurotypical non-autistic brain goes through a process of trimming a lot of excess brain synapses. And some research has suggested that that is not happening properly during brain formation in autistic people. It’s an interesting theory because it kind of makes some intuitive sense because it would theoretically help explain being overly sensitive to sensations and maybe an inability to combine so many sensations into a coherent narrative. It might also explain some of the more savant-like traits correlated with autism. There were a couple of studies I saw on this one from 2014 and one from 2021 on this idea, and maybe more that I didn’t see. Also, it was interesting because there was some similar theorizing a while back about improper brain synapse pruning playing a role in schizophrenia. I don’t think much ever ended up happening with that theory, though, from what I know of.

Okay, back to the talk. Kind of related to what you said, there’s a theory that seems pretty controversial that the upswing in autism diagnosis is related to more autistic people maybe having children than in the past. The modern world’s made it easier for more autistic people to find a mate and so forth. And I’ve seen that. I once shared that theory on Twitter and I had people get angry at me because apparently it’s controversial. And to me, it didn’t seem that controversial in the sense that if I had a child and they were autistic, I might be like, “Oh, yeah, I can kind of see how that happened biologically.” And it didn’t seem that controversial to me. I don’t know if you have any takes on that particular theory.

Barry: I don’t know how people responded to your post on Twitter, but I think one of the reasons it might have been controversial to people is one of the major arguments is that there is not a significant uptick in the reality of autistic people. Autistic people have always been here on this Earth in the same numbers as always going way way back. What’s changed is that we are recognizing more subtle characteristics that fit under an autism description. And that, in part, is proven by the fact that we have more late-diagnosed and self-diagnosed people than ever before. And when you say self-diagnosed, many people right away think, “Oh, well, they take one little characteristic. They’re really not autistic, but they call themselves autistic.” Actually, that’s not the case. I believe some research has demonstrated that in people who self-diagnosed as autistic when they go for a clinical diagnosis, 90% of the time it’s accurate. So, that’s possibly part of the controversy. And some of this comes out of the well-known book by Steve Silberman who’s become a good friend of mine over the years, NeuroTribes, where he makes the claim based upon he’s a science writer so he studies the history of science. He says, “I’m not an autism expert but I studied the history of autism and also the pre-history of autism, looking at historical biographies of people who were clearly autistic in the 1600s, 1800s and so forth.” And he put forth, “Autistic people have always been here in the numbers that we have them now and the numbers that we’re seeing.” Another reason by the way, again it’s another rabbit hole we could go down, is that it’s believed that women on the spectrum really have been missed. Because they may actually have a very different presentation than men on the spectrum. And they mask more. They’re more successful at masking their autistic traits. Traditionally it was considered to be a five-to-one ratio or a four-to-one ratio male to female, and now some people are saying maybe more like two to one. And we’re talking about biological because the gender fluidity is a big issue in autism now as well. And some people are saying, “No, we believe it’s one-to-one. There are as many autistic women as there are autistic men.”

Zach: Yeah, I think another aspect of people getting angry about that idea was they felt like it was blaming them like the parents of… Whereas that’s obviously not what it’s saying. It’s not saying that every… You know? There’s no blame involved and it’s not even saying that the parents are autistic, it’s just saying that could be one of many factors involved anyway.

Zach: If I could share another story, and this is from the second edition of my book, because the second edition came out about a year ago and I added a lot more information about adults and new stories. I told the story of John Elder Robison, who many people know is one of the best-known and respected self-advocates in autism and neurodiversity. He wrote the book Look Me in The Eye. I saw him at an autism conference a few years ago and he was standing by a woman who had a baby carriage. He obviously knew the woman and she’s autistic, and she was with her baby. So he was talking with her and he looked into the carriage and said, “Oh, your baby’s so cute. I’m sure she’ll grow up to be a fine young autistic woman.” And I gave that as an example of how the culture is changing. That the last thing any parent wants to hear in the past was, “Oh, your child is autistic.” And this mother was celebrating her autistic… I think the daughter was six or nine months old, I forget exactly what it was. And here’s a well-known brilliant autistic man celebrating with her the fact that she is raising an autistic daughter. Okay? That speaks against what you had said as far as how things are changing. It wouldn’t be blaming. In this case, it’s saying, “Hey, due to your autism, you have this wonderful little daughter who’s going to be autistic.”

Zach: Yeah, I feel like culture is really changing quick these days because of the internet and how connected we are. Everything seems like it’s on a very fast-moving track for whatever changes we could discuss here.

Barry: Very true.

Zach: I wanted to ask you about, you know, there’s often the perception that autistic people can be kind of shut down emotionally or lack empathy or lack these things we think of as normal social emotions, whereas some other research or observations show that actually autistic people can be overwhelmed and too sensitive to these kinds of things. For example, with my eye contact avoidance, I always found it super intense and painful to make eye contact from a young age. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that kind of divergence in the public’s perception versus what’s actually going on with the sensitivity or the empathy and things like that.

Barry: Yeah, that’s a perfect example of getting back to your first question about the ‘deep why’. I definitely fall into the camp unequivocally about autistic people being too sensitive. And to a large extent, it comes from what I’ve learned from autistic people, both in our podcast (we’ve interviewed probably 60 autistic people), my personal relationships, my friendships with autistic people. I see it definitely as a sensitivity to how am I doing. And the issue of self-esteem that I believe you want to talk about as well, it’s been drilled into so many autistic kids that, “You’re screwing up, you’re getting it wrong,” that comes out of self-esteem or it comes out of in terms of the difficulty in social interacting or preferring not to seek out a lot of social interaction, especially with unfamiliar and strange people. I don’t see it as a lack of motivation or a choice to be shut down, only in the sense maybe that ‘this is too difficult for me and I feel more comfortable just not doing that.’ I know many autistic people who are very outgoing. I know autistic kids that I call them little politicians. Because they go up to everybody and they’ll say something like, “Oh, hi, I’m Steven! What’s your name? Hi, I’m Steven, what’s your name?” And usually, those kids have much more of a sense of confidence and of self, if you will. It’s a tough situation but it gets back to the ‘deep why’?

Getting specifically to the issue of empathy, you might be familiar with what is called the ‘double empathy problem’ right now. And that is for so many years people saying autistic people can’t take the emotional perspective of another person, which is what empathy is, and respond empathically. Well, what we’re finding is that autistic people very often do respond empathically but not necessarily the same way that a neurotypical person might. For example, an autistic person might– and again, I’m learning from my friends who are autistic– might feel very upset internally if they see another person in pain or having difficulty. But they don’t know what to do about it. They don’t know how to reach out to help that person in that instance. The double empathy problem is if we can’t, as neurotypical people, empathize and understand the perspective of an autistic person, why do we just focus on their behavior that seems they can’t empathize with other people? So the double empathy problem is, “Wait a second. It goes both ways. We’re not very good at understanding the experience of an autistic person, and they may be not that good at understanding our experience because we come from different cultures and different life experiences.” So I think it’s clearly been pretty much dashed as a generalization that autistic people can’t empathize with others. And some are very highly sensitive to the experiences of other people.

Zach: There’s some presentations of autism that the more catatonic or rocking presentations that I think have made people in the past make assumptions that this person is cut off from the world or they’re lacking in these normal sensations, whereas you can see that those kinds of behaviors as a defense mechanism kind of shutting down to deal with overwhelming sensations and such.

Barry: Exactly. The point you’re raising right now has to do with self-regulation. That very often autistic people will do things in many different strategies when they are feeling overwhelmed, when the neurological system is beginning to ring alarm bells that if a person is sitting there rocking averting gaze, it could be this is my attempt to try to deal with the anxiety or the sensory overwhelm that I’m experiencing right now. And think about this, think about neurotypical people. If you have a neurotypical person who’s feeling very distressed, highly, highly anxious and just unable to cope, you can’t empathize with people under those circumstances. So to the extent that some autistic people may look like they’re engaging in behavior that’s shut down behavior, it actually might be. But it’s not that I don’t want to be with you or empathize with you, it’s that I need to do something to hold myself together so I don’t have a total meltdown and I don’t lose it altogether.

Zach: You’ll now be hearing an ad. I don’t endorse these ads and I encourage you to remain skeptical of all ads.

[ad plays and ends]

Zach: I thought I’d give you some thoughts that I’ve had about autism and maybe you can just shoot some holes in it or give me your thoughts, so I’ll go on a long ramble now. 

Barry: Okay.

Zach: This relates to some things I’ve covered in past podcast episodes because I’m interested in existential psychology. There can be these just fundamental aspects of just being a conscious being in the world that result in a lot of the ways of being that we consider unwell or unhealthy or not normal. We have these, quote, “normal social skills” and part of these social skills is involving a tremendous amount of complexity. We have to keep track of our own minds, we have to keep track of other people’s minds, we have to keep track of how they perceive our minds. We have to juggle all these concepts of various minds, and we also have to have a model of the world that we reside in and we have to place all these minds in it. And just to say that these so called normal social skills that we have can seem so easy to us, and we take them for granted, but they mask so much huge complexity.

And I talked about this in a past episode about AI and consciousness, about the hidden complexity and creating what we would perceive as a thinking, conscious being. There’s just so much hidden complexity I think, personal, I think we’re born with, to some extent, with this wiring that helps us with that, the normal social skills. Then we’re socialized in ways that help us with that, too. You could have normal wiring, but you could have some abnormal socialization as a child that can result in degradation or harming of your normal social instincts and skills. It seems to me that autistic people might be born without some of these wiring in various ways. Just to say that there can be this tremendous amount of ways that these things can go wrong and it can prevent us from forming these normal modeling of this mind over here, my mind, the world, world. And so all these things can go wrong in various ways that can lead us to the symptoms, the ways of being that are classified as autistic. And I’m curious, what are your thoughts on all that?

Barry: Yeah, what you’re actually describing, let me give you another if you will, lens to look at that, which is very consistent with what you said. Ami Klin, who used to be the head of the Autism Research Center at Yale University, he’s now at Emory University, an important person in the field of autism, published a lot initially when Asperger’s was still a diagnosis. And Asperger’s still very active. A number of years ago, I heard Ami describe the basic challenge in autism socially has to do with a lack of social intuition. The neurotypical social brain, to varying degrees, because it varies greatly amongst neurotypical people, has this natural intuition to almost pick up on very subtle social queues, to automatically try to think about what another person is feeling, and it isn’t so conscious. 

So for example, we might be speaking to somebody at a social engagement, and we say something and we notice that the person’s lips tighten up in the corner of their mouth. Right away, we might think, oh, they disagree with what I’m saying? And especially if it’s not a smile, if it’s a tense time tightening. And then we might change what we’re saying or ask them, “Oh, I’m sorry, did I say something that was insulting to you?” Or whatever how we might respond. Whereas many autistic people say, and again, I don’t generalize for everybody, say, I don’t pick up on those very subtle social queues. And it doesn’t come naturally to me to think about what another person is feeling when I’m talking to them. So that could be due to the difference in why hearing of the brain, the social brain. Like I said, my wife just naturally knows how to extend the conversation with a total stranger, where if I’m speaking with a stranger, sometimes I’ll get a little bit, not so much anxious, but like, Okay, well, we’re hitting a dead end. What do I say to keep this going? It becomes cognitive and conscious. And I think what you describe as juggling so many things, different concepts of minds, what’s the context? Many autistic people say that social interaction for them becomes a cognitive exercise. It’s not a socially intuitive exercise. 

Let me just give you some examples from our podcast. Carly Otte, a wonderful woman who I’ve gotten to know personally over the years on the spectrum, she happens to be a bank vice president. She was diagnosed in her late 20s and actually had some very significant mental health issues at that time until she got her diagnosis.She talks about the fact on our podcast about how in a shower in the morning, she will rehearse lines that she needs to say that she thinks she will need to use with certain people throughout the day. So that’s taking what should be, what most neurotypical people believe, should be a very spontaneous natural reaction and social interaction. I’m not talking about a job interview because everybody rehearses and what do I say to that person to impress them to get this job? But she says even for everyday conversations, it has to become a cognitive activity. She needs to think about strategies, learn those strategies, and then apply those strategies. Whereas most neurotypical people will say, “Hey, listen, if I bump into a friend at the supermarket, Hey, how are you doing? How’s your family? What’s going on?” It flows more naturally because it’s intuitive. It’s not that a cognitive exercise. And that makes a lot of sense to me. Again, it’s a different way of being. 

Now, let me give you an example of how it could be very different with an autistic brain in a social interaction. So I was out in LA less than a year ago. And I was having lunch with my friend who actually is a with-author of my book, Uniquely Human, Tom Fields Meyer. And he has an adult son on the spectrum, Ezra. And he actually wrote a book when Ezra was young called Following Ezra. It’s a wonderful book. So Ezra Fields Meyer, and Ezra has a podcast and he loves Disney, he knows everything about Disney. If you tell him your birthday, he will tell you the Disney film that came out closest to your birthday. So he has some savant skills in those areas. So we’re seated outside in a restaurant in Santa Monica, near a corner where there’s a lot of traffic. So I’m having a conversation with both Ezra and his dad, Tom. And then a bus comes by and the bus has a circular on it about maybe the play Frozen or the movie Frozen. And he immediately left the conversation and his brain riveted, “Oh, there’s a poster of Frozen! It’s playing at so and so theater.” And then he started talking about all the characters. So his mind intuitively, almost, went to what was a passion of his and something that he knew a lot about.

And it wasn’t that he was disinterested or avoiding our conversation. It’s just that his brain naturally, almost intuitively, went to something that he loves to talk about and that lights his brain up, if you will. And I think for neurotypical people, that happens in free flowing conversations much, much more easily than it does for autistic people. So I like that concept of social intuition that if we think neurotypicals have more of a social brain, which by the way, has it’s downside in terms of for example, with my wife, I often say I don’t want to get involved in these long conversations with people I’ll never meet again. It’s not relevant to my life and what I want to do right now. So I try to pull her away from that because sometimes it’s a problem that we end up being late for things and other kinds of stuff. So anyway, I like that concept of social intuition, or less of a social intuition, not from a pathology perspective, but from a brain difference perspective.

Zach: Yeah. And I like to think about it in the existential psychology terms of there’s many different ways of experiencing the world. No matter how it comes about, there are understandable ways that a conscious being can experience the world whether it’s whatever causes we could look into. You can understand it as a way of experiencing the world. I can really relate to that. 

The cognitive aspect, from a young age, I don’t relate at all to the whole concept of having rapport with people and all that. Those aspects were totally off the table for me from a young age. My way of being in the world was basically just trying to simulate what people perceived as normal. It definitely felt like a cognitive effort which can lead to all sorts of anxiety and depression. I dropped out of college in my second year, midyear from basically a so called nervous breakdown, but it was basically just extreme anxiety and feeling socially inferior and horrible. Just to say that, yeah, these things can be related. 

Maybe that’s a good segue to someone you had on your podcast who was an autistic therapist, and I can’t remember his name, but he talked about his beliefs that so much of what people view as autistic behaviors were various results results of just being anxious, having high anxiety. I thought he made some really good points about how when anyone is overwhelmed and highly anxious, they can behave in ways that seem autistic. You’ll be unable to act in ways that seem socially normal to other people, shut down or engaging in self soothing behaviors of various sorts. I’m curious if you have more thoughts on that idea that there can be a difficulty in drawing a line between what’s just signs of anxiety and the things we think of as autistic traits. They can feed off each other in various ways and have a feedback mechanism.

Barry: Yes. That professional was Sean Andrew Bitson. Sean is an autistic mental health counselor. What he’s pulling from, not to get too technical here, but is related to what’s called polyvagal theory, and I do believe that there is a big contribution from polyvagal theory. It’s the notion of our neurological system, very often is hyper vigilant, especially when we feel challenged and could put us in fight or flight reactions. And what Sean and I were talking about actually is very much related to our work going back decades. And a theme of my book as well, there’s no such thing as autistic behaviors. That what we’re seeing are human behaviors that are reactions to extreme anxiety. So you gave the rocking example, it might be pacing, it might be self-talk scripting to oneself to try to stay well regulated. That so much of what’s been labeled autistic behaviors are often related to more extreme experiences of anxiety, of fear, of great elation. 

You could see children on their toes jumping up and down and flapping their hands, which many people would consider classical autistic behaviors. And it could be a person is just so excited and so happy, they just don’t know what to do, and that’s how they let out their energy. So I do believe that that is a major contribution. I think in terms of explaining all of autism and the way people react who are autistic, I don’t believe it does that. I believe what it contributes to is more extreme levels of experience that our neurology is reacting to. That in terms of the polyvagal theory is that we do have these neurological alarm bells that go off that put us into fight or flight, but at milder levels that tell us we need to do something to regulate ourselves physiologically and emotionally. And then, by the way, another interesting concept that’s developing, and a number of autistic people are saying this, and that is it’s not so much as an autistic person that I experience emotion the way you experience it, such as happiness and fear. And what I experience is more energy levels. So I know I’m about to have a meltdown when my energy is depleted, when I’m running on fumes. 

So Jacquelyn Fede, who is an autistic psychologist, she works with one of my colleagues in their initiative called Autism Level Up. Jacqueline says, No, the way you describe emotions, I don’t experience that. But I experience different levels of energy, which could be positive energy, which could be negative energy, which could be I just don’t have any energy for this anymore. I’m running on fumes right now. So that’s, again, an example of how an autistic person might experience something differently than a person who’s not autistic, but we try to fit it into the neurotypical paradigm.

Zach: One thing I’ve wondered, is it possible to predict how highly autistic children will turn out? I know of children or hear stories with children who can barely speak, who have horrible temper tantrums, who can’t communicate. I often wonder, how will these people turn out? Is there a lot of variety? Is it hard to predict or do we know enough where examining someone, a child, you can accurately predict what their outcomes will be, whether they’ll lead so called normal social lives and such?

Barry: Your question begs the question of what do we use or what would people who want to predict outcomes, what would they look at in a child? And traditionally in Western culture, it’s been speech and language abilities and cognitive problem solving abilities. Well, one of the great turnarounds that’s happening in autism right now is we’re discovering that many people who are considered to be severely autistic, intellectually disabled, non speaking are ending up, when provided with appropriate ways to communicate, that still might be non speaking. So it could be low-text systems such as spelling boards or picture systems, high-text systems such as using speech generated output on an iPad or a MacBook or an iPhone. We are discovering people who are not only much more intellectually capable, but in some cases, quite brilliant who don’t speak. 

We have interviewed now three people on our podcast. One has not come out yet. Let me just focus on Elizabeth. Elizabeth Bonker is a non speaking autistic person who was considered for many years to be severely intellectually disabled. Given appropriate systems to communicate, she showed how not only bright but brilliant she was, and she was the valedictorian of her college last year. So if our listeners, your listeners, want to look that up, just go on YouTube and Google Elizabeth Bonker, B O N K R valedictorian. And you will see the amazing speech she gave, all of which she programmed into her computer. So we interviewed her. It’ll probably be out next month or the month after we interviewed her a few weeks ago for our podcast. She asked for the questions ahead of time, and she programmed all the answers into her computer. She’s a delightful young woman. She’s in her mid 20s right now. 

Another woman, Jordan Zimmerman, was not only considered severely autistic and severely intellectually disabled, but a profound behavior problem who literally attacked people, trashed environments, was considered so profoundly impacted by her intellectual disability or autism, she was always in highly segregated settings until she was a teenager. And she learned how to communicate through her iPad. And she also recently graduated with a master’s degree in educational philosophy. The bottom line is there are a number of people now, and a few years ago, it was a few dozen. Now there are hundreds of people with an autism diagnosis who are considered to be profoundly disabled by their autism, and in many cases, intellectual disability because they were not speaking, who are proving the world different. As a matter of fact, there’s a film that just came out called Spellers. It just came out a couple of months ago. It’s online and anybody could watch it, which is case studies of six of these people, including Elizabeth Bonker. And it’s turning our heads around. We always knew that a non-speaking person can be much more capable than we thought, but we never really realized how an early picture of a child could change so dramatically once they’re given the capacity to communicate effectively.

Zach: Kind of reminds me of Helen Keller’s book describing how her teacher taught her language and gave her the ability to communicate. And before that, she was just trapped in a dark world where it was very chaotic. You know when we learn ways to communicate, that’s hugely important to people. And if they don’t have the chance to communicate, that can be very traumatic and lead to worse things.

Barry: As a matter of fact, Elizabeth Bonker cites Helen Keller as one of her heroes in her valedictorian speech. 

Zach: Nice. Helen Keller’s book was amazing. I read that pretty recently. Let’s see. I’m curious. Part of the stereotype or cliché about autistic people is that they become very interested or even obsessed with various ideas or pursuits, the Asperger’s thing of becoming very interested and obsessed with various pursuits, do you have thoughts about the causes of that association? For example, there could be the wiring aspect, obviously, for the more savant abilities. But do you think some of it could be because autistic people lack the meaning in social connections and social narratives and such, and so they have more of a drive to find their meaning in pursuits of ideas and concepts and math or whatever it may be. Do you see some connection there in the finding of meaning in non social things?

Barry: Yeah, that’s a great question. From a neurotypical lens, I would say, in addition to finding meaning, it’s finding quality of life. I mean, any person would have a better quality of life if he or she could focus on what’s fascinating to them, what lights their brain up, what rivets their attention. And just to be clear, it’s estimated that the true savant exceptional abilities are present at about 10 to 15 % of autistic individuals, more so than any other condition and more so than in the general population. But certainly, the terms deep interests, special interests, in my book, I refer to these as enthusiasm. And I think it serves a number of functions that in some cases, it might just be highly intellectually satisfying to a person. The same way that may happen to a neurotypical person, but what’s often mentioned in autism is that it might be more restricted to particular topics and particular interests for a person on the spectrum. So I believe it serves the function of emotional regulation, that when we are highly engaged, our mind is immersed in something that’s interesting to us, that’s fascinating. That’s when we’re in the zone. 

The Czechoslovakian psychologist, Csikszentmihalyi, spoke about being in the flow. And the flow is being in this cognitive state where you’re highly, highly focused. Your brain is just clicking with what you’re doing and the activity you’re immersed in. It believes elite athletes get into that zone when they’re doing what they do that’s so good, an artist, a musician. So I do believe that it serves various functions. And a big part of what we do in education and our model, we have a educational framework called the SCERTS model. And a big piece of that is making sure that we put into people’s lives what their special interests are. Be creative, teach academics through, you know, if a person is very interested in aspects of science, teach academics through that. If a person is very interested in cooking and recipes, you could set up whole activities where teaching literacy skills and numeracy skills through that. The other piece of this is that sometimes if something falls outside area of interest for an autistic student, for example, or is just too abstract, that student is not going to learn that just to please the teacher. If it doesn’t light their brain up, they’re going to look for something that does, if you will. So I think that’s another important consideration. 

But I believe, in my experience, we do see those intensive interests more often in autistic individuals than in the neurotypical population. If it is seen in a neurotypical person, then hopefully it’ll be nurtured. It might be a great skill, a great area of knowledge, a great talent. It could be science, it could be the arts. And that’s where we are right now in supporting autistic people, both at the level of leaving school into employment as well as at the level of school. Even at the level of social connection connection, we believe the best way to help, for example, an autistic child who has difficulty connecting with the uncertainty of social interaction, have experiences with friends who have similar interests. Because then they could both the non autistic and the autistic kids could focus intensively on something they both love. And it allows for that what’s referred to as shared attention and joint attention.

Zach: Well, this has been great, Barry. Thanks so much for your work and thanks for coming on to talk about all these things.

Barry: It’s been a pleasure, Zach, and great questions and I’ve really enjoyed it.

Zach: Thank you. That was a talk with Barry Prizant, author of the great book on autism, Uniquely Human, and co-host of the Uniquely Human podcast, which you can find at uniquelyhuman.com. His main site is at barryprizant.com. One area I didn’t get a chance to get into were some questions I have about how some psychological issues might overlap with autistic traits. To take an example from my own life, I had a very bad panic attack my first day of high school. I became extremely self-conscious and anxious that day as I was meeting a bunch of new people. And that panic attack was so painful and disorienting, it kicked off a long period of depression and anxiety for me. And I don’t have much insight into what my personality and inner life were like before that point in time. It’s like I became a completely different person at that moment of the panic attack. It was like suddenly becoming self aware, a real existential crisis of sorts. Suddenly seeing myself from the outside and feeling completely inadequate in dealing with all these other people around me. I don’t remember if, for example, my problem with eye contact was present before that point in time, or if maybe it was present but just not as bad or what. Just to say all these things make me wonder about all the various factors that can be present for these kinds of things. 

Maybe other environmental or psychological factors created the conditions for me to be prone to be highly anxious, and that in turn kicked off or worsened some autistic life conditions and traits I already had. Or is it possible I don’t actually have the biological and brain wiring aspects that some other people with the autism label have? And my own problems are due more to anxiety and depression kinds of things. These things seem really hard to tease apart because, for example, if one has some biological autistic aspects that make it hard to interact with others, that person will often end up being depressed and anxious, and vice versa. If one winds up feeling self-conscious and anxious and depressed for other reasons, more psychological reasons, then one might often end up having traits that seem autistic. 

Anyway, this is just to point out the huge complexity that I see in these things, mainly for the less extreme and more moderate kinds of autistic-seeming traits. And these are reasons why I’m not a big fan of using labels, at least labeling oneself internally. I think labels can be self limiting and oftentimes cover up a huge amount of complexity and uncertainty about things that we just don’t understand. I think there are certain ways of being that we can wind up in from multiple paths just because there are only so many ways to be a functional person in this world. This isn’t to say the autism label isn’t meaningful. I think it’s useful for describing clusters of traits and ways of being, especially when those things are on the more extreme side. I’m just talking about how we think of ourselves internally. 

If you enjoyed this episode, you might like going to my site behavior-podcast.com and listening to other episodes. I have a compilation of mental health and psychology-related episodes there on the site. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. That’s the most appreciated way you can show your appreciation. Leaving ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts or other platforms is also hugely appreciated, too. Thanks for listening. 

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podcast

How does anxious body language affect a job interview?, with Simonne Mastrella

A talk with Simonne Mastrella, author of the research paper Acting Anxious: The Impact of Candidates’ Anxious Nonverbal Behavior on Interview Performance Ratings. Topics discussed include: the design of the study; her findings; whether results differed by gender or by the nature of the job; how perceptions of anxiety and “warmth” are related; and the challenges of using actors to act out behaviors for a study. 

Episode links:

The following information about related research is from Simonne:

This study looked at all the studies that measured interview anxiety and interview anxiety and found that, combined, more anxious interviewees tend to perform worse than less anxious interviewees: Meta-analysis of the relation between interview anxiety and interview performance.

The following studies compared interview anxiety with how people performed on the job and found no relation (so, more anxious interviewees were not necessarily worse performers than less anxious interviewees).

Does interview anxiety predict job performance and does it influence the predictive validity of interviews?

The role of negative evaluation in interview anxiety and social-evaluative workplace anxiety.

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podcast

What do we owe to our fellow citizens (even when we think they’re very wrong)?, with Robert Talisse

A talk with political theorist Robert Talisse, (Twitter: @RobertTalisse) author of the book Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe To The Other Side. His book is one of the best I’ve read about both American polarization and about the challenges of democracy: I highly recommend it. A transcript of this talk is included below.

Topics we talk about include: the nature of democracy and the limits of what it can achieve; separating expected and healthy polarization from unhealthy, toxic polarization; what we owe to our fellow citizens even when we see them as very misguided and even dangerous; how extreme polarization can make our relationships and coalitions even with politically similar people suffer and fall apart. 

Episode links:

Resources related to or mentioned in our talk:

TRANSCRIPT

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

On today’s episode, I talk to philosopher and political theorist Robert Talisse about his book Sustaining Democracy, which has the subtitle What We Owe To the Other Side. In my opinion, this is one of the best books on depolarization I’ve read. 

Talisse’s book tackles a very important question: how can we engage in politics and democracy when we hold our political opponents in such low regard, when we view them as morally bankrupt and even dangerous? 

His book emphasizes the important fact that democracy is hard; it’s not easy. Democracy is basically just majority rule; whoever gets more votes can implement a lot of things that other people will strongly disagree with. 

And Talisse’s book contains one of the best explanations of a lesser known negative aspect of toxic polarization: the fact that it makes political groups less able to form coalitions; it makes more people righteous and overly intolerant of other views, sometimes even views not that far from their own, and makes them overly focused on policing the borders of their group, in ways that make them less able to actually do the work of politics and persuade other people and work with other people. And this aspect of polarization I think can help explain some of the worst outcomes of extreme division: because when a society is extremely fractured, it makes it easier for some relatively small extreme and dangerous group to come in and cease power, because resistance has been weakened. People are worn down and stressed, or just apathetic. This is what extreme polarization does to us: creates the breeding ground for bad people to be able to do bad things. 

In this episode, some topics we discuss include: What is polarization? How do we define the problem of polarization? Robert also believes something that I focus on in my book: that the incentives of a lot of the influential political and media systems around us make it unlikely that those same systems and people will help us reduce our animosity, which to me points to the importance of grass roots approaches of spreading the word about these ideas. 

We talk about some aspects of group psychology that play a role in our divides; for example, the tendency for like minded groups to grow more extreme and hardened in their views over time. We talk about that time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a dress with ‘Tax the Rich’ on it, and Robert gives some thoughts about how us-vs-them polarization dynamics affected the debate about that on the liberal side.  We talk about how our political animosity can make us more likely to start acting in some of the aggressive, biased ways that we dislike about the ‘other side’; how it can make us into hypocrites: forgiving bad things we and our allies do while judging the same behavior very harshly when it’s present on the other side. 

We talk about common objections people have to seeing extreme polarization as a big problem. 

If you enjoy this episode, I recommend checking out some past episodes about political polarization I have in the library. You can find a compilation of the politics-related ones on my website behavior-podcast.com. 

This conversation was recorded a couple months ago. Since Robert and I talked, I’ve released my own book on polarization, which is called Defusing American Anger, and that’s available at www.american-anger.com

A little bit more about Robert Talisse: he’s currently Professor of Philosophy[1] and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is also a Professor of Political Science.

Okay, here’s the talk with Robert Talisse, author of Sustaining Democracy.

Zach: What moved you to write this book? What were your motivations, and what problems were you trying to solve?

Robert Talisse: The book, Sustaining Democracy is the title, is a sequel of sorts to a book I published in 2019 which was called Overdoing Democracy. The thesis of the first book, Overdoing Democracy, is that there are certain virtues of citizenship that can be cultivated only when our social lives are not overrun with politics. So it may sound a little counterintuitive, but nonetheless, I think it’s true that when everything we do together is an expression of, or communication of our politics, we become worse democratic citizens. That was the thesis of Overdoing Democracy. We need to sometimes do things together, we need to carve out space in our lives where we can do things together that are in no way organized around our political objectives. And, you know, I’m an academic philosopher, I work in political philosophy, if some of your listeners know anything about political philosophy or political theory, the thesis that it’s possible to have too much democracy or for democracy to play too large a role in one’s life is pretty counterintuitive [laughs] to say the least. So as I was giving talks, I confronted a lot of the standard objections that I’m sure a lot of the people listening to us can already anticipate, but there was one kind of objection or reaction that really got me thinking.

And it was the kind of reaction that went as follows: Some people would say things like, “Well, okay to Talisse, you’ve convinced me that in order to be a good democratic citizen, I have to make room in my life for cooperative but non-political activities or engagements with fellow citizens.” These would be engagements where we’re not suppressing our political differences, we’re reaching across the aisle, both of those kinds of activities put politics at the center after all, but we’re looking for activities in which the political affiliations or alignments of the other participants are simply beside the point or unknown to me. “Okay,” the challenge would go, “I think you’re right about that.

But when we are doing politics, how are we supposed to do it given that we are already inclined, and so strongly inclined to see our political opposition as fundamentally and often irredeemably benighted, ignorant, bigoted, duped, divested from democracy? Isn’t that a problem that, you know, we still have to do politics? How can we do it given that we have such low regard for our political opponents?” So that got me thinking that maybe there was another book to be written. And so the Sustaining Democracy book is an answer to that question. How is it, or is it we might even ask, is it possible for us to do reasonable and responsible democratic politics, given that cross-partisan animosity, distrust, disgust for the other side is so prevalent in society? And that so much of our social life is already sorted and segregated according to partisan affiliation such that it’s increasingly easy, particularly in the United States but not only in the United States, to avoid contact with anyone who’s not just like you in your day-to-day activities. We can talk more about that later if you like.

And so the thought was maybe under the conditions where the cognitive and affective phenomena that we call polarization are already so high, and that the social world is already so divided into different sectors and quarters according to partisan affiliation, what reason can we have as individuals to try to live up to the democratic ideal of trying to be a partner, even with the people whose political judgment we think is terrible, in the common endeavor of collective self-government as equals? That was the question that drives Sustaining Democracy book– the subtitle– as what we owe to the other side. So it’s a book that’s in part about depolarization and in part about some of the ways in which a proper conceptualization of the problem of polarization shows us that some standard strategies for depolarization are unlikely to succeed, and then tries to make a novel case for thinking that it’s still worth the time of a democratic citizen to attempt to uphold properly civic relations with those who may regard as their political enemies. How’s that sound?

Zach: Yeah. No, that’s great. I think the important part about your book is getting at something that is a very important concept, which I think is that democracy is difficult. It’s always going to be a difficult thing, especially as we become more polarised. And you’re arguing for seeing that and facing that difficulty head-on. Because I think in many people’s minds, it almost seems to me like people become kind of spoiled in their thinking about what democracy is. They think it’s just… Their very version of what the world or what democracy should entail is a continual progress of the things I believe are right, whereas the fundamental reality is that you’re going to have political losses, even losses that you believe are very harmful to society. And that is a fundamental nature of democracy because both sides will have narratives about the other side doing harm, and they will have understandable reasons for why they believe– even if we can very much disagree with them, we can understand the reasons why they can see the other side as doing harm in various ways. And I think that’s why your concepts are so important because I think, you know, democracy is difficult and if we’re going to survive and be a stable society, I think more people have to grapple with that fundamental difficulty. Would you agree with all that?

Robert: Oh, I would agree with all of that. I think that we’re so enamored, and I think rightfully so, with the idea of democracy, with the idea of a self-governing community of equals, with the idea of each person counting for one and none for more than one. However, you know, whatever government of ‘by and for the people’, whatever your favorite sloganized version is of the core of democracy, we’re rightly enamored with it. But even at its best, democracy is not an easy pill to swallow. And let’s just think of it sort of… Well, think of it in this way. Democracy is the proposal that you, Zach, can be forced to live according to rules that you reject, simply because other people like those rules. [laughs]

Zach: Right. It’s a majority makes the rules system. It’s not a magical system.

Robert: That’s right. That’s right. And so the idea that in a democracy, we have to recognize that sometimes the state, the government, the political agencies and institutions that run the country, are required and are bound to enact policy that we think, in our best judgment, and maybe in our informed judgment and maybe we could even be correct, that the government is required under certain conditions to enact policies that we know are unjust. That’s what democracy is. That it forces us to recognize the category of legitimately enacted injustice. Now, within certain bounds [laughs] there’s certain kinds of severe forms of injustice that can never really be legitimately enacted, that’s what the Bill of Rights is supposed to help us discern.

But within those broad constraints about fundamental political rights of human beings and so forth as citizens, there’s still a lot of room for where the government is required to enact policy that enjoys a certain degree of support among the people, even when the people are wrong. And so the thought that’s associated with, you know, Jane Addams and John Dewey that the cure for the ills of democracy is always more democracy is often thought to suggest a further thought that I think is less obviously true. In fact, I think it’s untrue that if we just get democracy right, the world will be sweetness and light. [laughs] That every injustice has as its core the failure of democracy. I just think that’s got to be false because part of what it is for us to live together as political equals is that we have to recognize that our fellow citizens get to make up their own minds about things. [chuckles] And when we politically disagree, maybe with respect to certain kinds of issues it’s no big deal who’s going to be dog catcher or whatever, but when we politically disagree over tax policy or environmental policy or over immigration or over health care, that’s a disagreement about what justice requires.

And so if Zach, you and I disagree on one of those issues, I have to see your view as on the side of injustice and as something less or other than what justice requires. So if you get your way democratically, I have to think, “Well, the world is less just than it would have been had I gotten my way.” And so the thought that democracy is this engine that produces justice just seems to me to be false. And I think that we are giving short shrift to the value of democracy when we don’t recognize the slightly less attractive features of it. Because it seems to me that for all of its flaws, Winston Churchill was right. This is the best there is. [laughs] [crosstalk] Right. Good.

Zach: Well, yeah. And one thing I say to emphasize that point of just how fundamentally we can disagree on even the simplest moral problems, you know, there’s the well-known trolley problem that the philosophical or ethical problem. And you can imagine we can disagree on even the simplest problem of whether– for people that don’t know– whether you pull the lever to divert this train and have it kill, you know, as opposed to killing four or five people, have it kill one person. But you have to make the decision to pull the lever. And we can disagree, you know, people have argued over this for a long time. You can even imagine polarization around that issue where, you know, a version of the trolley problem in politics where liberals were on one side and conservatives were on the other and they very much viewed the other side’s stance as completely immoral and unjust. The fact that we can get so divided on even the simplest issue should give us pause when we form very certain confident views about how evil the other side is.

And getting back to your point about the way I view these polarization problems like you were saying, more and more people focusing on these issues can be unhealthy because it’s almost like a magnifying glass effect where you’re focusing all the social energy in one place and creating this destabilizing and anger emotion-producing thing in one area. And even Ezra Klein talked about this in his book, you know? He ended his polarization book with the point, “we focus too much on these national problems that we have no influence over, and we just are becoming more outraged and throwing energy into this divide. Maybe it would be better if we focused on local things that we could actually influence or things in our community as opposed to adding fuel to this polarization fire.” I’m curious if you’d agree with some of that.

Robert: Well, the Klein book is interesting. It’s written for a particular audience, it’s more of a narrative than-

Zach: -I found a very biassed, personally.

Robert: I can see why one might say that. So, it’s of its kind, it’s a perfectly fine book. One thing I think is important, maybe just to take a step back, I think it’s important to sort of introduce some distinctions when we’re talking about polarization. There’s so much, especially in political commentary and in journalism, there’s so much talk about polarization and it’s being bad. That there’s not a lot or not a similar degree of talk about what it is. And I think that there’s too little talk about what it is and why it’s bad. It’s not hard to come across political theorists, political commentators, politicians even, who talk about polarization in a way that I think betrays or suggests the view that animosity among citizens is always bad to any degree. [laughs] Or disagreement always needs to be resolved in some way that leaves all parties satisfied. That rancor is a sign of a democratic dysfunction. I happen to think all that’s false. [laughs] I think that democracy runs on disagreement and division. I think that, again, part of what it is to respect or to fully acknowledge our political equality is to recognize that adult citizens get to make up their own minds about things and they get to make up their own minds about how they should make up their own minds. So what level of information is required, where the information needs to come from, these are all things that I’m not required as a citizen to defer to anybody else’s judgment about.

Now, what that means is that even when we’re all as citizens trying to do our best as custodians of the public good, it’s very unlikely that our judgments about political matters are going to converge on to some common view. So it seems to me that the late 20th-century and early 21st-century political philosopher John Rawls got something right. Political disagreement over pretty central normative matters is the direct implication of our freedom and equality. It’s not, therefore, a mark of some kind of political failing. In fact, Rawls said, “Consensus is suspicious.” [laughs]

So it seems to me that disagreement is inescapable in a society of free and equal people. It also seems to me that political disagreement is disagreement over pretty important values like justice and freedom, liberty, dignity, respect. And so the idea that if we’re doing democracy correctly or properly, there won’t be heated tones and there won’t be real division and there won’t be real animus strikes me as a mistake. So it seems to me that depolarization– or let me put it slightly differently– the problem of polarization cannot be simply the problem of political divisions and divisiveness and dislike and animus. Some degree of divisiveness and animus and dislike is just a necessary part of politics when you’re aspiring to realize the ideal of a society of free and equal self-governing citizens.

So if polarization is a problem, where is it? What is it? Where does it reside? And I want to suggest that the way to think about the problem of polarization is to say, “Well, polarization is the problem of, or the problem of polarization is better understood as follows: Too much of our political division is driven by cognitive and affective forces that don’t track actual differences of opinion. [laughs] Right? Your listeners might be aware of this, but it’s always worth repeating. Forget about parties and political platforms and party leaders and politicians, forget about them for a second. The American electorate is no more divided over ‘rubber hits the road’ political policy questions than it was in the 1990s. In fact, on a lot of pretty central questions of political public policy, in fact with respect to a lot of the questions of political policy that were the main sites of political division in the ’90s– think about gay marriage in the ’90s, stem cells, you know? The American electorate has actually come closer to consensus. That is, we’re less divided over certain kinds of what were once very divisive issues 30 years ago. We’re less divided now. The problem in American politics at present is not that we have these deep divisions among the citizenry about what the government should be doing, it’s that we believe that we have these deep divisions over what the government should be doing. And on the basis of the perceived or the assumed divisions of that kind, we dislike each other more, we distrust each other more, we walk around with caricatures versions of what the other side thinks and what they believe and how they live, despite the fact. So we dislike each other more but have actually relatively less that divides us at the level of policy. That strikes me as the problem of polarization. So our perceived political divisions are a kind of mirage. How’s that sound to you?

Zach: Yeah, I think we’re largely on the same page because in the book I’m working on and sometimes in the podcast, I spend time… You know, defining the problem is important. And the problem, as you say, is not that we disagree or even strongly disagree, it’s that seeing the role of these negative emotions and how we view the other side and the distorted views… Not just about, because like you said, there can be distorted views about how much the other side disagrees with us that the number of people that held X position. But there’s also distortions around the motivations even for the things that we strongly disagree on, like specific issues. You know, immigration, we can have these worst-case scenario interpretations of what the other side’s stances are about and view them as all those bad as the worst people on that side, etc, etc. So I think it’s very important to define the problem, and one thing I often say to politically passionate people to get them to see the wisdom of these ideas– and I think it’s tough because the word ‘depolarization’ is probably not the best word because I think people interpret that to mean we’re going to depolarize your beliefs and move your beliefs to some moderate state. It’s increasingly seemed to me as not a great word because that’s how people interpret it. So it’s not about changing their beliefs or as you say, their emotional investment in those beliefs and political goals and willing to work hard towards things, it’s about examining the role that these negative emotions play. And I try to tell the politically passionate people, “Can you see how this anger and this dehumanization that this worst-case thinking about the other side helps create the very things we’re angry about?”

And to give an example of that, James Druckman and his colleagues had a study showing how higher levels of partisan animosity before COVID were later linked with more polarised and more extreme COVID stances on either side. Like, they either being really for strong COVID restrictions, or practices or being for super laxed COVID reactions and stances. And this is just to say that it’s helping make the case that our anger can be helping create and polarise the very things we’re angry about, and helping shift our beliefs and people’s beliefs to the outside based on that anger. And I’m curious if you think that’s a persuasive argument to people that are politically passionate.

Robert: Well, I think it’s true. [laughs] Sometimes good philosophical insight does not always run in tandem with what’s persuasive. But one thing just to say about the kind of research is it also looks as if strong partisanship was positively correlated with over or under-estimations of the kind of threat and severity. [laughs]

Zach: Exactly. Yeah.

Robert: So, not only was in favor of the policies, it was-

Zach: It distorts our views of reality.

Robert: That’s good. So yeah, I think that’s right. Now, let me just sort of again make a further distinction given what Zach you were just saying, we can talk about polarization as the pulling apart of the parties or pulling apart of the political units, the political movements, that conservatives, the liberals, the progressives and however you want to characterize it, you know, and the consequent falling out of the common ground between them so that there’s this chasm between the left and the right that doesn’t seem bridgeable without somebody making a rotten compromise or conceding something to evil. There’s that. And maybe some degree of even that kind of divisiveness among political units like parties, some degree of that seems to me to be not only inevitable in a democracy, but maybe a sign of democratic health. After all, when you’ve got the parties that are sharply divided over identifiable issues, makes the job of the citizen figuring out where his or her allegiances lay. Given that, as a voter, the agenda is already set by the time you show up at the voting booth. So again, the parties making salient their differences by sort of focusing on their fundamental disagreements and their dislike for one another make the job of being a voter a little bit easier. Now it’s really clear what party stands where on which issues that I care about? All that stuff becomes very explicit and salient. So some degree of that pulling apart of the two parties so that they stand in clear opposition, in part by each one signalling their dislike of the other side and their opposition to the other side, maybe some degree of that isn’t bad.

But as we were just saying, the affective and cognitive side of polarization– and what I would want to say are sort of distinct phenomena that are called polarization– is where I think the right diagnostic focus is. Because, again, it seems to me that the problem is that our political divisions, including the party divides, are kind of driven by a hallucinated sense of who our fellow citizens are. In fact, it seems to me that the political parties and the candidates and the campaign managers and the pundits kind of benefit from this circumstance. That’s why I don’t think that any solution will be forthcoming from large-scale institutions and political leaders and the parties. They benefit from this imagined illusory division.

But the affective and cognitive phenomena– I just want to say a little bit about that– there’s this well studied robustly documented cognitive phenomenon that’s called belief polarization. Belief polarization is the tendency of members of like-minded groups, particularly when they are in one another’s presence, to become more extreme advocates and more extreme versions of themselves. Let me sort of make that distinction one more time. So we can think of political polarization as this sort of sociological phenomenon of the major parties or major political groups pulling to their ideological poles and letting the common ground fallout between them so that they’re results in a chasm and a lot of frustration and log jams and paralysis at the policy level. Belief polarization is something different. Political polarization is a metric, we might say, of the division between the Right and the Left or the Liberals and Conservatives or the Democrats and the Republicans. Political polarization is a metric of some kind of distance between two things. Belief polarization is not a metric of the distance between two things. Belief polarization is a phenomenon that occurs within a like-minded group. If anything, it’s a metric of the distance between your former and your present self. So, when groups of like-minded people interact, they become more extreme, they become more confident, they become less inclined to see counter-evidence as weighty, they become more inclined to dismiss as biased and unreliable any source of counter-evidence to their view.

And even more importantly, as like-minded groups shift into these more extreme doxastic that is attitudes with respect to their beliefs, they also become more ready to act on the more extreme beliefs that they hold. And something that some of your listeners will be familiar with is the phenomenon called the risky shift. The more extreme and confident we become, the more tolerant of risky behavior we become when the risky behavior can be shown to be in the service of the more radical and confident beliefs we hold. [laughs] So, like-minded groups become more extreme in their beliefs and their cognitive attitudes. But at the same time and for reasons that are not hard to discern, our more extreme selves are also more as effectively negatively disposed towards anybody who’s perceived not to be a member of the group or not to be a member of our like-minded group. So as we become more extreme, we also become more distrustful of, more suspicious of, more likely to attribute negative character traits, negative intellectual traits and untoward motives towards anybody we perceive to be on the outside of our group.

Let me put the package together. Interaction among like-minded people shifts us into adopting more extreme beliefs and cognitive stances towards our commitments that makes us more ready to act on their behalf, but it also is positively tied with escalating negative emotions and negative affect towards anybody who’s perceived to be outside our group. And so, if you’ve been to high school you know what this is, this is just clicks. [laughs] Right? When groups become more extreme and more insular in the ways I just described, they also become more hierarchical. Right? They become more and more reliant on tastemakers within the group to establish what it takes to be a member in good standing of the group. Belief-polarised groups become more reliant on internal slogans and behavioral cues that signal to other members their allyship. They begin to dress alike, they begin to pronounce certain words in the same way. In fact, you can already see this. I’m not sure, Zach, if you’re aware of some of this research about the pronunciation of words having a partisan valence.

Zach: Yeah, I’ve seen this a lot. It shifts a lot of things.

Robert: Yeah. Right. So if you’re listening to somebody on the news and you’re wondering where their partisan affiliation lies, wait for them to say the name of the country I R A Q. [laughs] Iraq or Iraq? I don’t even have to say where the partisan identification lies in that, Iran and Iran. Iran is a clear signal and the pronunciation Iran is a clear signal that you’re dealing with somebody who’s a liberal. So the thought is that these heavily belief-polarised groups become not only more extreme but more insular, more hierarchical, and ultimately, they become increasingly fixated on policing the borders between the in-group and the out-group. And I think that strikes me– maybe Zach you’re on the same wavelength– that strikes me as politically counterproductive. When our political coalitions are subject to internal dynamics that lead the coalition members to become more and more focused on detecting posers and fakers within the group so that they can be expelled, it strikes me as– from the point of view of real politics– it strikes me as just counterproductive.

Zach: Right. Building coalitions, yes.

Robert: Yeah. If you want to be an effective democratic citizen, you got to join a choir. You want the choir to grow. You can’t have it shrink. And so it looks to me like polarization isn’t only a diss… I want to even say it in the Sustaining Democracy book. One of the central pillars of the argument is that the dysfunction of polarization is not properly located within the animosity for the other side, the divisiveness towards the other side, the disgust and distrust with the other side. Those might be problems, too. But part of the problem of polarization is the impact it has on our alliances. It makes less able to be a member of a successful political coalition. Can I just give one real quick example? I have some initial mainly anecdotal data in the form of a couple of online threads.

Zach: Sure.

Robert: Zach, you may remember two years ago or whatever it was the Met Gala where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a dress with a slogan on the back of it. Do you remember the slogan?

Zach: It was something about doing something to the rich or something.

Robert: Tax the rich.

Zach: Oh, right. Yeah.

Robert: Okay. She was wearing this very elegant dress and it had in big red letters and it looked like it was painted too and even spray painted “tax the rich.” For reasons that were incidental, I happened to just be following some social media threads about the Met Gala and all the rest of the night that this was happening, and I saw something very interesting develop with respect to AOC’s dress. And I think it’s a nice illustration of the internal dysfunction, you know, the way polarization undermines our coalitions. So there’s live streaming, there’s all kinds of things, AOC is wearing a dress that says ‘tax the rich’ on the back. And you start seeing people commenting and I love her so much and, you know? Eventually, people on a couple of the threads start posting like, “Yeah, every billionaire! That billionaire is a criminal.” And others would say, “Yeah, Jeff Bezos needs to pay his fair share.” And others would say, “All property is theft.” [laughs] So you started getting different levels or different grades of liberal to progressive to more radically progressive ideas about what the slogan ‘tax the rich’ might mean, ranging from ‘it ought to be a crime to be a billionaire’ to ‘we should have a much more aggressively progressive tax system.’

And I started watching and I’m like, “Well, this is interesting. Because what exactly does tax the rich mean? I guess it’s consistent with a fairly moderate but left argument for progressive taxation. Yeah, Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his fair share, close the loopholes.” You know, this kind of thing. And it could be consistent with more radical doctrines like any earnings above a certain number is just taken back by the state. So I started monitoring this because I thought this was interesting. And what was interesting about it was how quickly the threads devolved, not into sort of disorderly name-calling over the policy. You saw people initially saying things like, “If you think tax the rich just means we need to close the loopholes in the existing tax system, you might as well be Ronald Reagan.” Right?

So there was that kind of initial we’re disagreeing over what the right tax policy is. But that lasted for only a couple of minutes. Ultimately, the threads became a kind of mudslinging about who the real progressives in the discussion were. And that struck me as deeply dysfunctional for a political coalition. The fact that we disagree, we all want something to change and could say the participants in this discussion all wanted something to change about the tax structure, and they wanted changes in the tax structure that moved in a progressive lefty kind of direction, but they gave up on the discussion of what the right tax policy should be and embraced a different discussion, who is the real progressive? And that just looks to me like okay, this is no way to achieve any political goal. It is to succumb so quickly to the tendency to give up on the substantive discussion, and then just try to establish the borders between the authentic progressives and the posers. That’s what polarization does to us.

Zach: That’s what I loved about your book. Yeah, I really liked your focus on the hidden, basically, the less discussed negative aspects of this us-versus-them polarization and how it makes the group’s more fractured and more contentious even amongst people that are quite politically aligned. And you gave a great example, and it’s like we can see this in so many ways on the Left and the Right. People just become more focused on purity. And there was a good article about progressive nonprofits going through chaos in the wake of the George Floyd and anti-racism discussions. It was an intercept and a good article for anyone who wants to look at that. But it was just an example of how even amongst people that are quite politically aligned, we become unable to form coalitions. And politics, for people that actually want to get something done, is about forming coalitions. And I think it’s also related to the saying that perfection being the enemy of the good. You know, your sense of perfection being the enemy of actually getting something practical done, and both sides become more and more fractured in that way and people become less willing to speak up to the more polarised and angry people in their group. Which I think gets back to how I would say us-versus-them animosity helps create some of the very problems that upset us because the more that we give power to the more angry and highly polarised, the more that gives power to the highly polarised on the other side who have a lot of anger and so on and so on. I really liked your focus on that part of it, the internal part of it.

Robert: I appreciate that. Can I just… I want to add one thing. I agree with what you’re just saying. Not only does polarization sort of create the conditions that we tell ourselves with our lamenting and regret, it creates the very conditions that we think are so terrible. I want to suggest one further thought, though. polarization turns us into the kind of people we hate the other side because we imagine they are like that. polarization punctuates within us the character traits that we claim to be the basis of our disgust and animosity towards the other side. Put it this way. polarization encourages in us not only the thought or the idea, but the attitudes, the disposition and practices that are fundamentally organized around the idea that democracy is possible only when everyone is just like me. And that strikes me as a fundamentally anti-democratic idea that there can only be democracy when people are just like I am. It’s fundamentally anti-democratic to think that. But that’s what polarization does. And often, we find ourselves in that heightened state of belief and affective polarization because we’re engaged sincerely in democratic activity. [laughs]

Zach: Yeah, like you say, it’s counterintuitive and a bit… Yeah, it’s hard to examine. It’s hard to solve for a reason because so many of the things, I think, we don’t have analogies for. We have a lot of analogies to the natural world but I feel like this is such a human dynamic that’s very unique that it’s hard for us to understand the complexity of how these dynamics work. It’s something I often think about. Like, if we had better natural-world analogies for this, it might be easier to tackle. But anyway, I know we only got a few minutes left so I want to ask you, when it comes to what we might do about these problems– like say, we could put you and made you king of the US for a while and you were given full rein to to combat this problem. Do you have confident opinions on what we would do at a policy level? Because I know in your book, you do focus on the need for more people to do internal examinations and considerations, which I believe is hugely important to a cultural change. But I’m curious about if you take some specific steps policy-wise.

Robert: Well, I don’t like the framing of being king but… [laughs] I think that we make progress in thinking about polarization and depolarization when we focus on the cognitive and affective aspects of polarization that enables, I think, a pretty solid response that Sustaining Democracy book tries to develop it, to polarization skeptics. polarization skeptics are the people who think that polarization is a false diagnosis because it’s really just a kind of both ciderism or the idea that we need to depolarize is really just a polite way of saying that nobody can really believe anything or that you’ve got to invite the local White supremacists over for coffee and these kinds of things. When you focus on the internal dynamics of polarization and the way in which polarization undermines our capacity to be members of a functional democratic coalition, I think then you get to just a different kind of argument for why we need to start thinking about depolarization, which is that if you want to pursue justice and you want to see justice done, you’ve got to hold the coalition together.

And polarization, forgetting about the people who are your opposition or your obstacles, polarization doesn’t go away when you start ignoring your opposition. It just turns you against your political allies. So, two very quick things. I think it’s important to realize that polarization doesn’t get fixed, it’s not something that can go away. polarization in its cognitive and affective dimensions are just part of our cognitive makeup and affective makeup as the kinds of creatures that we are. So the task is not to fix polarization or to eliminate it or to eradicate polarization, it’s to manage it and to keep it within constraints that render it not so dangerously toxic as current levels of polarization in that affective and cognitive sense or the degree to which that act affective and cognitive sense of polarization has become toxic. We need to contain that and constrain it in certain ways.

Now, I’ve got two pretty counterintuitive suggestions and I don’t know that either of them amounts to much at the level of political policy, although it does suggest certain kinds of policy upshots. First thing to say is that I don’t think that the problem can be fixed at the level of the President and the Senate and the Congress and the law. I don’t think that the problem of polarization is the kind of thing we should count on any existing political institutions or agents to fix. They benefit too much from it. When the citizenry is divided in the way that the US citizenry is divided, it makes the task of a campaign manager and a political strategist a lot easier because it’s so much easier to just talk about and to stoke your allies and your likely voters distrust of the other side. So much easier to do that than to actually lay out the details of policy in ways that can keep your likely voters on board. And so politicians and parties and candidates are the beneficiaries of polarization so we can’t count on them to fix it. Two things– initial thoughts. One is that I think that, as I argue in the first book and what turns out that now is a trilogy– there’s a third book coming. The first book is Overdoing Democracy as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, Zach. And there, I said, “Look, we need to reclaim segments of social space and regions of our social environment for engaging in activities where we’re cooperating with others, but don’t know what their politics are like.” That’s not suppressing political difference, that’s just doing something where politics is beside the point. The fact that I’m sure many listeners have found what I just said puzzling– there could be an activity that I’m engaging with others that’s cooperative and politics is beside the point, what in the world could that be? That that strikes us as a strange thought is, I think, a symptom of the depth of the problem of polarization.

So here’s just one very, very quick example. And again, this is not at the level of large-scale policy but as listeners might be able to discern, although I live in Nashville, I’m not originally from Nashville and not originally from the South, that’s New Jersey you’re hearing in my voice. So when I moved to Nashville in 2001, I don’t know anything about country music or I don’t know anything about country music traditions. I know a little bit more now than I did when I moved from New Jersey. But one of the things my wife and I started doing a little while after we came down to Nashville is that we started investigating, as it were, bluegrass and country music as a sort of American musical traditional idiom. And eventually, I started going every now and then– not regularly anymore since the pandemic, although maybe I’ll start up again– I started going to a bluegrass venue. It’s a dive bar in Nashville that has real top-quality bluegrass. Now, part of what was interesting about that activity is that I go to the venue, I don’t know a lot about the idiom of this style of music, I know some things about music but I don’t know anything about this particular idiom. But because the place is just like you sit down at a table and whoever’s sitting down next to you is just somebody who could be a stranger, I started to get an appreciation for the way in which other attendees at this what turned out to be an open mic kind of bluegrass jam night at this one venue, I’ve got a real appreciation for the kind of command that some people who just happened to be sitting around me these evenings had of the music, where you’ll just be sitting there listening to the guy and a stranger sort of leans over and says, “Oh, you know, the mandolin player’s great grandfather wrote this song.” And you say, “Oh, really?” Like, “Oh, yeah. And the bass player is the guy who performed on Johnny Cash’s song.” Eventually, you realize that there’s a tradition and an idiom. And even further with one or two particular attendees at these events, I started getting the appreciation for their aesthetic sensitivity. Eventually, just by showing up, people will say, “Hey, it’s you again.” You know? I don’t know who these people are, they don’t even know my name, but they recognize me.

And listening to them talk about the aesthetic properties of the music or the way in which the song was performed, or how the performers on the stage did something that was unusual in this particular performance of this particular song, these are things I was totally aesthetically completely insensitive to. I wasn’t able to hear. And I’m a musician! I wasn’t able to really hear some of the nuances that these guys who just happened to be showing up like me were very sensitive to. And I thought this was important for democratic politics for the following reason. We weren’t doing politics, right? No. We were talking about we were experiencing the music. The political theorist in me had all kinds of reasons to think that the particular people I’m thinking about right now probably don’t vote for the same people I vote for in national and local elections. They probably have political views that I don’t accept, who knows? But nonetheless, in the course of interacting with these guys about this music, I was able to perceive their virtues in a way that wasn’t so tightly tethered to my sense of who’s on the right and who’s on the wrong side of the political issues of the day. That is, in talking about this aesthetic form, I was able to appreciate these other people’s perspectives on this music.

And that had the following effect: were I to discover what I suspect might be the case that the particular people I’m thinking of right now are my political foes or on the opposite side of all the things I care about politically. Were I to discover that, I would have a much harder time simply writing them off as human beings. [chuckles] Because I engaged with them in an activity that allowed me to see the ways in which they have values that are legible to me as worthwhile, sensitivity that seems to me to be sophisticated and the product of a kind of intelligence and attentiveness. They care about things. [laughs]

Zach: Right, seeing their humanity.

Robert: Yeah, and seeing them in a context where they could display their virtues in a way that’s not tethered so tightly to their partisan identity. I think that was civically deeply, deeply important. So one of the things I would say then is that insofar as it’s possible at the level of policy to create spaces, social spaces and physical spaces that are suited to that kind of interaction, we should pursue that. Now, let me just put a little bit of meat on the bones. The third book in the trilogy which I’m writing now is about the political value of solitude. Part of the argument there is that our capacities for reflection, for imagination, for thinking about what’s possible in our political world, for thinking about how we can get from where we are to someplace better, these are essential reflective introspective tasks for the democratic citizen that our current political environment or saturated social spaces with politics, our current social environments don’t permit. And so part of the argument there, and this connects up with the thought about the bluegrass bar, is that we need to understand that or start understanding that democracy needs an active citizenry, yes, but democracy also needs a reflective citizenry. And some of the present modes– and indispensable, I would even say– modes of democratic action undermine our reflective capacities.

And so part of the task of better fulfilling the democratic ideal of a self-governing community of political equals is to figure out ways to create more social spaces where people can engage in a kind of solitary reflection. And so on this view, museums and parks become really central democratic institutions. Not amenities, not luxuries that well-off districts in the country might be able to afford, but the idea that there’s a public democratic service that museums and parks and even more importantly public libraries play that makes them democratically essential spaces for people to be alone with their reflection is really, really important. So if I were just to go back to your question, Zach, I’m sorry this is a long-winded way of putting it. If I were somebody in charge of this, I’d say, “Yeah, we need a way to combat the encroachment of commercial interests into the entirety of our social spaces. And we need to find ways to preserve, restore, and create social spaces of a particular kind. Social spaces where people can be alone with their thoughts.”

Zach: Yeah, I liked that part about your book, too, focusing on the internal thought. It really spoke to me because some of the things that I think where I’ve reached good understandings of the problem and what to do about it– and understanding the other another side too, you know, the things that other people think– was just me sitting around thinking about it and giving it thought. I wouldn’t have been able to do that in the heat of debate or reading social media or having conversations. It’s something that only came from going inside and thinking things through. But you saw that that was a really important point. And…

Robert: Well, I appreciate that.

Zach: Yeah, this has been great, Robert. Thanks a lot for your time. And yeah, looking forward to your next book and I’d like to read your first book in the trilogy, too. I haven’t read that one. But thanks a lot for your time. I appreciate it.

Robert: Well, thank you. It was really nice to talk to you and thanks for the invitation.

Zach: That was a talk with Robert Talisse, author of Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side. I highly recommend his book; it’s one of the best books on the subject I’ve read. 

And just a note that my own book Defusing American Anger is out now on ebook and the Kindle store: you can learn more about that at www.american-anger.com

This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. 

Thanks for your interest, and thanks for listening.

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podcast

Analyzing behaviors in aviation security, with Philip Baum

Aviation security professional Philip Baum (www.avsec.com) talks about analyzing behavior for aviation security and risk assessment purposes, and for security purposes in general. Transcript below.

Topics discussed include: looking for deviations from the baseline behaviors normal in an environment; successes of behavioral analysis for security purposes; what can make some of this work controversial; thoughts on what aviation security does wrong. 

Episode links:

Resources related to our talk:

TRANSCRIPT

Zach Elwood:

This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com. And if you like this episode, you’ll probably find a good amount more episodes you like in my back catalog. I have episodes on security and policing, I have episodes on mental health, I have episodes on reading behaviors in sports and games, and more.

On this episode I talk to Philip Baum, an aviation security consultant and trainer. Our talk is focused on behavioral analysis: the studying of human behavior to detect threats. We focus on the aviation industry, but much of what Philip says is applicable to security and threat detection work in general.

Philip has a long resume and you can learn more about him on his website avsec.com: that’s avsec.com, avsec is short for aviation security. I’ll read just a little bit from his website about his history:

He’s a security professional with more than 35 years’ experience, primarily gained in the international civil aviation environment. He started working in the aviation industry in the 1980s, when he joined Trans World Airlines’ security subsidiary at London Heathrow. From Duty Manager at Heathrow, he moved to TWA’s International HQ where he ultimately became Manager Security Training and Auditing. He left, in 1996, to establish his own company, Green Light, through which he serves as a subject matter expert for the Airports Council International (ACI) in the area of Behavioural Analysis, and runs training courses for them. He also designs and delivers the International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) Inflight Security courses.

He devised and developed a security system called Tactical Risk Assessment of People, which is based on non-racial profiling, observational and questioning techniques. He also established, and chairs, the Behavioural Analysis series of conferences, as well as the DISPAX World trade shows on hijacker and unruly airline passenger management.

He served 24 years as the editor-in-chief of Aviation Security International from 1997 until 2021. The general media use Philip’s services when in need of expert comment; he is a regular guest on CNN, Sky News and the BBC.

Philip’s first book was released in 2016: it was called Violence in the Skies: a history of aircraft hijacking and bombing.

Okay, here’s the interview with Philip Baum…

Zach: Hi, Philip, thanks for coming on the show.

Philip Baum: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Zach: So, maybe we could start with you giving a quick summary of your career and what has interested you in this space.

Philip: I guess I started my professional career within the aviation industry, and I’d always had a dream about aviation. I grew up on the flight path into London Heathrow and would watch all of the aircraft flying in on their final approach from my bedroom. But I never wanted to be a pilot, I was always fascinated by both the people that worked within the industry and the people that were travelling. And so perhaps it was no surprise that I eventually found myself working at Heathrow Airport, and in a security capacity. And the programme I found myself working on was a passenger profiling programme. Now some people might think the word ‘profiling’ is a swear word, but it’s not because I’m talking about non-racial profiling. I’m talking about identifying people that might be a risk. And that was something I was very actively involved with throughout the 1990s. In fact, in 1996 when TWA went into chapter 11, I actually left TWA and set up on my own. I set up my own consultancy programme company called Green Light. For the last 27 years, that’s what we’ve been marketing– behavioral analysis, identifying hostile intent, and hopefully developing systems where we can identify the person rather than the item. So we’ve been less concerned about the gun, the grenade, or the bomb, I’m more concerned about the person and what their intent is.

Zach: What are the specific areas of the airport or flight process that you focus on?

Philip: The two areas of aviation security that I’m particularly interested in are in-flight security, so that’s unruly passenger management and hijacking management, but also in the behavioral analysis and what happens at the airport. I guess, ultimately it’s about the people and about identifying people that might be a threat, and identifying the best way to actually manage those threats in the worst-case scenario. So most of my work has been airport based, very much looking at how you can incorporate behavioral detection or what I’m still happy to call passenger profiling into the security operation, because I firmly believe it should be our first line of defence. And I think if we look around the world, we tend to find that everybody wants to use technology. They all want to actually have a system where the computer says, “This person is a threat.” Whereas I think we should be using the best technology of them all, and that is the human brain. Ultimately, it’s what we tell the general public to do. We tell people to see something, say something. And yet somehow for some reason, we feel that when it comes to airport security, we would rather an archway metal detector or an x-ray machine do the job for us. And all of those technologies are great and they have their place, but they need to be used intelligently. And if you look at the history of attacks against aviation– and I have to say I did write the book on it, Violence in the Skies: A History of Aircraft Hijacking and Bombing– through my research for the book, I found that actually before almost each incident, there was somebody saying that they thought that something was wrong. But they often didn’t act on it. And I’m going back and including events like 9/11. You know, there were 11 out of the 18 hijackers who were identified, but people didn’t act appropriately having been concerned about people’s behavior.

Zach: Do you think a part of that would be a factor and there will be people afraid to be wrong and be perceived as culturally or racially insensitive or things like that? Could that be a factor?

Philip: I think there’s no question that people are frightened of reporting. And yet, I find it really bizarre that when it comes to airports and it comes to airport security, for some reason the general public expect everybody to be treated the same. Now, of course, we’d all love everybody to be treated the same and everything to be fair, but unfortunately, security isn’t fair and security can’t be fair. And what really troubles me is the fact that we want everybody to be treated the same way before they get on an aircraft, and yet we accept the fact that when you get off an aircraft at of an international flight, you go through immigration controls. Immigration don’t treat everybody the same and yet every day they find people doing something wrong after they’ve got off an aircraft. At Customs inspections, there’s the green channel or the red channel. And in the green channel, customs officers pick on certain people because of their appearance and their behavior. And every day they find somebody doing something wrong after they’ve got off a flight. So it always begs the question, why aren’t we doing that before people get on a flight? If we allow behavioral analysis to be used in airports, why don’t we use it within the security pre-flight screening process?

Zach: When it comes to the use of behavior, are there certain things that stand out to you as top of mind for, you know… And I don’t know how much of this you can talk about because I don’t know how much is kind of industry secret knowledge that people don’t talk about, but are there things you can talk about when it comes to behavioral analysis and prediction?

Philip: I think the key to it is actually understanding the baseline. And this isn’t only about aviation security, this is in any environment. If you’re at a sports stadium, you have expectations of behavior from different fans, from the players, from the people that work within the sports stadium, from the people that live in the local environment, from the taxi drivers, from all of the other security services that are operating at a given venue… You could do the same in a retail environment, you can do the same on a beach, in a casino, at a health club. Wherever it is, most people that are working there understand the baseline for the environment that they’re working in. And what we’re actually asking people to do is to identify when somebody doesn’t match the baseline. And if somebody doesn’t match the baseline, we’re not accusing them of anything. We’re just saying that that person warrants further inspection. So if it’s at a train station and somebody is actually giving you cause for concern because of their behavior, you’re not going up to arrest them. But you might actually be going up and actually starting a conversation with them. And that can be done in a very customer service-focused manner. It doesn’t have to be accusatory in any way. And actually, you might, through that conversation, elicit information that will help you resolve your causes for concern. Ultimately, the people in public places and in crowded places that we’re likely to end up focusing on more than any other will be people that are on their own. Because the is less leakage of emotion and behavior by somebody that is on their own than people that are with their family members, with their friends and with their colleagues, where you see the normal banter, the normal interaction and normal facial expressions. So somebody on their own, yes, they might be more likely to be– I’m going to use the phrase ‘picked on’– but they might generate greater concern in the eyes of a trained security officer purely because they’re not actually displaying emotions that are present in normal day to day communication.

Zach: Are there other major things that stand out when it comes to behaviors? I’m wondering if there’s maybe some things about, you know, say on the security line if people are acting a certain way? Or can that be really hard to say because, you know, anxiety, people can be anxious for many different reasons and such.

Philip: There is no question that people can be anxious. And listen, I come from the aviation industry, and it is estimated that actually 40% of people that are arriving at an airport have some degree of concern when they arrive at the airport. Whether it’s fear of flying or fear of the process or fear of losing their luggage, or just concerns about time and queues, lines that they might have to wait in. There’s a lot of stress at airports. So we’re not just looking for the normal day-to-day stress that a trained security operative will be able to identify and distinguish that from somebody that might actually have hostile or negative intent. What we’re trying to do is, as I’ve said, identify deviances from normal baseline behaviors and to identify a whole range of different threats. And the fact that we’re looking for a whole range of different threats actually helps address the concerns that people have that we might end up racially profiling people. Because, for example, we’re not only looking for the terrorist threat, we’re not only looking for the criminal that may be the shoplifter, we are also looking for the person with poor mental health that might be a threat to others or indeed to themselves, we’re looking for the insider threat, we’re looking for victims of human trafficking or the traffickers themselves. And obviously, the list of suspicious indicators that you might focus on will vary from location to location and from industry to industry.

And for me, the classic example of behavioral analysis, both working and not working, I can take you back to the Ariana Grande concert which some of your listeners may be familiar with that took place at the Manchester Arena five years ago, where Salman Abedi actually arrived at the arena well after the concert had actually began. And he was carrying a backpack, which is not how people normally come to a pop concert. He arrived late, he was on his own, he sat in a secluded part of the arena kind of out of sight. He was observed for almost an hour and a half by various people, including one security guard who did absolutely nothing. He was seen first of all by members of the general public, and such was their concern that even members of the general public went up and spoke to Salman Abedi and even said to him, “You know what? It looks a bit strange somebody like you arriving here with a backpack sitting in this location. What are you doing here?” And Salman Abedi said, “Well, I’m waiting for somebody.” And the person that saw him wasn’t happy and went to speak to a security guard. And the security guard had said, “Yeah, I’ve already seen him. I’ve already clocked him. I’m already looking at him.” But he didn’t do anything, he waited for somebody else to come. And then the supervisor or a more senior person came along. And the two security guards chatted with each other about what they would do if Salman Abedi were to do something dangerous. And they actually said, “Well, maybe we’ll jump on him.” But they were both clearly concerned. And that security guard in the inquiry following the event, when he was asked, “Why didn’t you do something?” He said, “I thought I would be accused of racial profiling. What if I got it wrong?” And as a result, many people lost their lives and hundreds of people were injured, because Salman Abedi eventually blew himself up despite having been observed by security staff for nearly an hour and a half. And so it shows that people had concerns and therefore behavioral analysis actually does work. But behavioral analysis doesn’t really work unless you’ve also got the mechanism and the operating protocols to make sure that people do act on their concerns, and that we don’t victimize security guards for getting it wrong. And providing they’re not just picking on somebody because of the colour of their skin or their sexuality or some discriminatory factor, providing they’re doing it because they can actually put into words their concerns that here, using the example of Salman Abedi, was a young male with a backpack that was arriving after a concert began, sitting out of sight of most of the people and behaving unusually, not maintaining eye contact with anybody, and his demeanor was not that of somebody that was waiting for a relative to come out of the concert at the end.

Zach: To your point for 9/11, I remember there were examples of people noticing unusual behaviour, and I think that even included people noticing the behaviours of the terrorists long before the attacks when they were doing their test flights and such. Is that… Am I getting that right?

Philip: Yeah. No, there were people that reported. And even if you go to Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber who tried to carry out his attack a few months after the 9/11 attacks, you know, why did Richard Reid not attack El Al the Israeli airline as planned? Because he did a test flight and he was identified as a possible threat to the flight. And he went away and he said, “I know I’m not going to get through the security system. They are going to pick on me.” So he ended up targeting American Airlines. And indeed, what did Richard Reid do? He turned up on the 21st of December 2001, the anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster, and tried to get through the system. He was identified as a possible threat. He was delayed so much at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport that he actually ended up missing the flight, was sent to a hotel at American Airlines’ expense, and the following day he came back and basically the people in charge basically said, “Hey, we gave this guy a hard time yesterday, let’s let him on the flight now.” So there are numerous examples of behavioral analysis working. Now I think there will be some people that will say, “Yeah, 11 out of 18 hijackers on September the 11th were identified. Why didn’t they do anything?” Well, there are various reasons why people don’t do something. Often, it is the time pressure that is put on, particularly the aviation industry, with the desire for on-time performance. Because of course, beyond those 11 hijackers that were identified, there were probably another couple of 100 passengers that were also identified as being a possible threat that day who were not a threat. And it does take time to actually implement a behavioral analysis system, but personally, I think it is far more effective than the routine X-ray screening of all bags and asking everybody to walk through an archway metal detector. Which is, as I say, it’s great theatre, it looks good, and many of these technologies are very useful tools to have. But we need to find a way to make sure that if people have got concerns, people act on those concerns.

Zach: The Ariana Grande bombing made me think of a very minor incident, but it was one that was interesting to me. It was a thing from a few months ago, a basket ballgame in America where an animal rights activist was trying to run onto the basketball court and was immediately caught by a security guard. It was interesting because I think there were things about that person’s behaviour sort of similar to what you were saying where I think these people arrived at their seat late and they didn’t seem interested in the game, I think they were just kind of like looking tense and looking at the court. And so the person suddenly rushed from their seat to the court and it seemed like the security guard had been eyeing them as unusual and immediately caught them basically right after they got out of their seat. I think it was another of those cases where the security guard just was trained to know this is pretty unusual behavior from this person, they seem like they’re planning to do something.

Philip: It’s interesting because I’ve been involved in security operations at a number of major sporting events and indeed, what we are often asked to do is when we see somebody, we’re told to keep an eye on them. And I always have a problem with that because that might be fine from a police law enforcement surveillance perspective where you keep an eye on somebody, but if you’re brought in as the security professional to prevent potentially a suicide bomber actually reaching their target, you don’t keep an eye on somebody, you act. And as soon as you’ve identified that person, you take steps to try to neutralize the threat. Now, that doesn’t mean neutralize the individual, but it does mean neutralize the threat. And that means you need to interact with that person. You don’t wait for them to get to the security checkpoint. Again, I’m thinking about a sports event where you may be having patrols outside the stadium. You don’t wait for the person to get to the ticket counter to challenge them. Because if they were a suicide bomber and they did have suicidal intent, then the moment you challenge them at the security barrier and they detonate their device at that point, you have increased the number of casualties tenfold. You actually want to intercept that individual in advance of the security checkpoint, or indeed potentially, after the security checkpoint. But not at the most crowded densely packed area of your security operation.

Zach: And I guess the seeming ambiguous nature of some of this work is part of what makes it hard because some people, even if you have your list or your training that’s done well, from an outside perspective, the questioning of one person can seem kind of subjective and random to the outside eye even if it’s done in a great way. So I think that… Would you agree that the subjective seeming nature of it can add to the hardship and the reasons that people can often find it controversial even if it’s done well?

Philip: Yeah, I have to agree. Listen, it is subjective by its very nature. And as I said, we have this great desire to treat everybody equally and everybody the same. But let’s face it, that’s not what law enforcement does. The police when they’re going out on patrol, they patrol some areas more than others where there is a greater chance of there being a criminal act perpetrated. The types of technologies we even implement at different locations are proportionate to the type of threat that exists at that location. And if you are trying to secure a premise, you need to act on concerns. You can’t just act because a system alarms or just because somebody sees something on an X-ray monitor. That is poor security. The number of terrorist plots that are identified around the world by law enforcement communities are not identified because we’re keeping every single member of society under surveillance. They’re identified because the security services are focusing their attention on certain areas more than others. And that is an unfortunate necessity of everyday life. That’s what we are paying our security services to do; to keep us secure. And yes, it will mean that some people are possibly picked on when they are completely innocent. And that’s where the training kicks in. Because that’s where you don’t pick on somebody and victimize them, you actually identify somebody that you’ve got cause for concern. And using a customer service approach, you actually try and resolve your concerns. You have the conversation, and you actually try and elicit the information in a customer service manner.

We have to remember that there is no such thing as 100% security. We all know that. I find it amazing that after each, particularly aviation-type incident, the media often sort of say, “How is it possible that somebody could get through airport security?” And I’m sitting there thinking, “Of course, it’s possible that somebody can get through security!” Look at the prisons of the world. Nearly every prison around the world has got a problem with drugs or with small bladed items or cell phones and mobile phones managing to get onto the inside. How do they get inside? Well, they get through using insiders, they get through by using innovative concealment technologies or concealment techniques, possibly internal carries. Because if somebody has got the will to get through a system, they can find the way to do it. And a person hasn’t got to worry about wait times or customer service, they know that they’re already dealing with people that are supposedly the bad guys in society and their friends and family, and yet things get into prisons. So if things can get into prisons, things can get into airports, things can get into sports stadiums, and therefore we cannot just build a system that is based on screening technologies. And we need to supplement that with a human approach to security that yes, it is subjective, but it’s based on common sense. It’s based on the very thing that we asked everybody else in society to do; to report concerns. To see something, to say something. If you see a bag on a bus or on a train, you’re told to report it. Well, the same if you see an individual that is giving you cause for concern. You need to report it. Then it’s down to the training as to how you respond to it.

Zach: Yeah, that gets into something I’ve talked about in a couple previous episodes about behavioral analysis and security and interrogation situations; the line between what’s a controversial use, and what’s a good use of behavior is how certain you’re acting on it. Like you say, it’s like if you’re using it as a reason to just look into something more, that’s not really going to go wrong unless you do something really bad. But the problems come in when practitioners are too certain, you know, and the stories about cops thinking, “Oh, this person’s guilty because they did XYZ behavior.” That’s really where the problems come in. As opposed to just using that as one of many points and just interrogating someone a little bit differently or something.

Philip: Well, listen, I’m really troubled by a lot of the stories that I see in the press, both from United States, Canada, and indeed from my own country from the UK, where we see excess force used by law enforcement. Those are, of course, in the main isolated incidents and they are extremely regrettable. What I do know about law enforcement, and certainly I can speak about it from a British perspective, is that most police officers are actually almost not acting when they should, because they are terrified of being accused of profiling somebody based on their race, religion, color of skin, or sexuality. Which is why when we are teaching them, we’re saying when you’re describing a reason for arrest or for even having a conversation with somebody, you need to be clear in your mind what it is that is giving you cause for concern. It’s not about their ethnicity, it’s not about their gender, but it is about a behavior. So if you are saying that somebody was behaving suspiciously, write down what does suspicious mean in that context? If you say somebody was standing on the corner of the street looking left and right, looking as if they were trying to identify somebody and perhaps carrying out surveillance for a future attack, then you have actually put into words what you were concerned about. And even then, that doesn’t justify immediate use of force, it justifies an intervention of going to have a conversation with that person to find out is that person carrying out hostile reconnaissance for a future attack, or are they simply waiting for their girlfriend or boyfriend or partner to turn up because they’re late? So for every suspicious behaviour, there is a potentially good explanation for it. And we need to make sure that those people that are implementing behavior-detection programmes and reacting to it are trained to have those conversations using a friendly customer service-based approach. Obviously, in certain circumstances, that’s not always going to be possible. There will be people who will immediately respond to law enforcement– even a polite question– in an aggressive way. And that’s where these things can often start to escalate and we can end up in a place that we don’t want to end up in. But at least you need to justify your initial intervention on the basis of behaviors that you’ve witnessed that have given you cause for concern.

Zach: Any specific behaviours you’d like to talk about? Or do you think it’s mainly about the baseline, as you said, and just noticing major deviations from baseline?

Philip: It is about the baseline. I mean, you can come up with– and when I’m running training courses on this, we’ll often do an exercise in trying to develop a suspicious signs lists based on your operational environment. And you can come up with 100 or 150 suspicious indicators if you wish. The trouble is that you might well witness something that isn’t even on that list of 100 or 150 suspicious indicators. And actually, I think-

Zach: And you can’t keep track of all those in any way.

Philip: Yeah. I think actually it is important to actually empower the security operative to be able to use their common sense and to be able to utilise their own words to describe what it is that they are concerned about, rather than simply having a checklist of concerns. Obviously, there are the things that people always talk about. Somebody that is perspiring profusely or shifting their weight from foot to foot. Well, those may be causes for concerns. But if you’re at a sports stadium and you’re supporting your team, you might well be shifting your weight from foot to foot, you might well be perspiring. If you’re going on a Tinder date, you might be waiting for somebody in a restaurant and be very anxious. There are lots of reasons why somebody might not be behaving exactly in accordance with the baseline set. So it’s all about sensitivity and how you react to it. But you would actually have to customize a suspicious signs list for the environment that you’re going to work in. So yeah, I’ve done programme quite recently for a beach security unit. Obviously, if you are seeing somebody with a heavy overcoat– I’m pushing it to the extremes here to really the absolute obvious– somebody sitting on a beach with a backpack and a heavy overcoat over them. Well, obviously, you’re going to be wondering what is that person doing? But it may be a homeless person that carries their life around with them on their back and is simply going down to a beach. But it would certainly warrant further inspection.

Zach: Is there much use of video training of watching footage of actual criminals and people who did bad things, and using that in the training?

Philip: You definitely can use that, particularly if you’re doing training for retail staff that are trying to identify the behaviours of shoplifters. There’s nothing better than actually showing them how people actually shoplift. There are, of course, lots of TV series that actually even help us. I can’t remember what the American version of Border Force is, but I think in every country now, they show you customs inspections of people arriving in a given country. And you are seeing the video footage of the person that is actually picked up, and their behavior whilst they’re questioned whilst their bag is searched, and the description as to why they were actually identified in the first place. Those are all really useful, but the really best way of training people is to take them down to a live operational environment, the environment in which they’re going to work, and talk to them and shadow them.

And you will see that in most environments, 99% of the people are normal law-abiding citizens. And the people that you will focus on are people who are also law-abiding citizens, but actually they’re not necessarily matching baseline expectations at that given time. I’ll give you an example from a sports event that we recently covered, where we were very concerned about an individual’s behaviour outside of sports stadium. And eventually we went and we spoke to the person, and we found out that they were basically an autograph hunter. And that’s all they were doing. It was that they were waiting for their sports personalities to exit the grounds so that they could actually get an autograph. And their behaviour was different to other autograph hunters, but we got the explanation. And so, nine times out of ten or 99 times out of 100, you have the conversation and actually, you realize that there was nothing wrong. But it doesn’t mean that you were wrong to intervene. And that’s where I get really frustrated with security managers, particularly in an airport environment. When somebody sounds the alarm or somebody goes to intercept somebody and then you don’t find anything on them. And if a security manager turns around and says, “See, you were wrong.” That, for me, is a very poorly trained security manager because-

Zach: -being wrong is part of the… Yeah, the part of the optimal strategy means you have to be wrong a good amount of time.

Philip: Absolutely! People are going to be wrong. And you do not penalize somebody for being wrong because all you’re doing is dissuading them from actually sounding the alarm in the future. And anyway, who’s to say that the person that you did identify that wasn’t carrying anything wasn’t doing hostile reconnaissance for a future attack anyway? Exactly as Richard Reid did with his shoe bomb.

Zach: It’s like in poker, playing the most optimal strategy of that or a lot of games requires you to sometimes, you know, a good amount of the time be wrong with your decisions because it’s a game of incomplete information. So any game of incomplete information, you will, by definition, be wrong with the optimal strategy a good percentage of the time.

Philip: And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I mean, the other issue I have with many security managers and supervisors is where there is a screening checkpoint– is if somebody raises their concerns about somebody where the supervisor says, “Well, did you find anything? When you X-rayed their bag, did you find anything?” And the screener says, “No.” Or, “Did they alarm the archway metal detector?” And the screener says, “No.” And then the supervisor says, “Well, let them go then.” Now, for me, that does not make sense. The fact that we did not find something prohibited or restricted in somebody’s bag or on their body does not mean that they do not pose a threat. There is the possibility that they might acquire the weapon or whatever it is they’re going to use after the checkpoint using insiders. There are numerous types of attacks that can be perpetrated without the need for a weapon or explosive device at all where somebody can actually pose a threat using their bare hands.

Zach: One thing I’ve wondered about airport security, are they recording conversations very much and analyzing it for an automatic analysis of scary words like explosion or bomb or things like that. Is that a thing that happens?

Philip: In Hollywood, yes, but not in the real world. [chuckles]

Zach: Gotcha. Okay. That’s good to know. It’s something I’ve always been curious about when having conversations in airports.

Philip: There may be very specific locations where there is some kind of analysis going on, and I certainly think that in the future that we might see that utilized more often in future. But the reality is that, you know, I get exasperated every time I see that somebody’s been arrested because they used the word ‘bomb’ at a security checkpoint. I mean, do you really think that a bomber is going to come along and utilize the word ‘bomb’ at a security checkpoint and actually have a bomb? All I feel is that everybody becomes fixated on that person and ignoring all the people that really could be a threat.

Zach: They’d probably be the least likely. Yeah.

Philip: It’s the same with this whole nonsense over the liquids, aerosols, and gels. I mean, talk about a distraction where you’ve got screeners that are almost excited because they found 125 mils of toothpaste or a bottle of perfume or a bottle of water. And that’s what the screeners are looking for. Because they know they’ll find bottles of water and tubes of toothpaste. For me, that is just a huge distraction from actually focusing on trying to marry up the bag, the contents of the bag, and the person that is carrying the bag. And that can be in a retail setting, in an airport setting, at a sports stadium, or in any environment. It’s about building a picture of the entire person that you’ve got in front of you.

Zach: I know you focus on unruly passenger behaviour, and I know that there’s reports and statistics showing that that has gone up in recent years. Can you talk a little bit about how bad that problem is? Has it really gone up as much as people say? And maybe what do you see as some of the causes there? I know that’s a lot of questions I just asked, but…

Philip: Well, there’s a lot of problem with statistics, isn’t there? That they reveal interesting facts, but they also disguise interesting facts. What we do know is that there are more incidents being reported now than ever before. But maybe there aren’t actually more incidents, maybe the people are just reporting them more than they did in the past because that’s what crew members are being encouraged to do. And because of our greater use of social media, there are more incidents that are hitting the headlines because there is video footage recorded on board aircraft that simply people weren’t doing 10 years ago or 15 years ago. But there is no question there is a problem with unruly passengers. And I think what we’re seeing is a gradual breakdown of discipline in society, where people feel more entitled. And I know I sound like some extreme right-wing activist here but I am extremely concerned. Even though I think I’m politically very moderate, I am extremely concerned about the fact that people on both sides of the political spectrum are becoming more and more extreme and more and more opinionated, and some of those opinions then turn into arguments, and often, arguments that have severe implications for public safety. Whether it’s on an aircraft or a sports stadium. We are seeing a greater number of people since the pandemic– and there’s no question that the pandemic had a hugely detrimental impact on people’s mental health, we’ve seen a surge in the number of people having to report poor mental health over the last few years.

And the fact, you know, an aircraft cabin reflects society. You have got people now flying in greater numbers that have poor mental health. And sometimes if you combine that with use of alcohol, use of antidepressants, depriving people of sleep, fear of flying or whatever, that you get this sort of potentially dangerous cocktail that is put together that results in people acting extremely unreasonably. But the airline industry itself also needs to hold its hands up and say, “Some of the ways that we do treat people is actually unacceptable. Some of the stresses that we do put people through is unacceptable.” I’m not saying that it’s done maliciously, it’s not done with negative intent. But as the customer, there are probably times where we all feel that what we’re being subjected to is unacceptable behaviour on behalf of the airline or the airport or the security services. And often, that’s just the result of insufficient staffing, or sufficient staffing but insufficient training, and it’s just a multitude of different factors that all combined together that can, in the wrong combination, have really serious consequences.

Zach: Yeah. And to your point, it’s completely not surprising to me that there would be more incidents. Even if the reporting might be also, as you say, the reporting can be exaggerated for the same reasons, the incidents themselves can be on the upswing because people are just more sensitive to threats and insults and such. But the kind of definition of extreme polarisation which a lot of countries are going through these days, it just makes sense that more people are on edge, more people are willing to say something insulting to people, you know? It’s not surprising to me that we have a pretty good upswing, and then combined with the stress of COVID and such.

Philip: You know, whether we’re in Europe or when we as Europeans are looking at things on your side of the pond, we’re seeing a greater polarisation of political opinions. And that simply reflects society, and that impacts people’s behaviour as well in places like the aircraft cabin.

Zach: So there’s, as you’ve talked a little bit about, there’s kind of a cat and mouse aspect to all the security work in the sense that most people trying to do bad things will be aware, or at least the more professional ones will be aware of the security approaches. And the more aware people are of the security approaches, the less effective those approaches are. How do you see the, you know, when it comes to specific things that the aviation security industry focuses on, how do we balance that risk? Is there maybe a rule of not talking about the specific strategies too much publicly and these kinds of things?

Philip: No, I don’t think there is really. I think that people do talk about their strategies. I find it amazing that the airport screening process is so predictable. We are so transparent about what is going to happen to people. I often wonder why, for example, does an X-ray manufacturer have to have its name on the side of the X-ray machine?

Zach: [chuckles] That’s a good point.

Philip: I mean, let’s face it. You’re not going to sell another X-ray machine to another airport because the name’s on the side of it. It’s not really about the brand at that point, so why have we got it there? Why are we telling the people with negative intent that you’re using a certain manufacturer or system that they can then go away, go online, look up the angle at which the X-ray beam hits the bag, and therefore plan their attack around that? Why are we doing that? Why isn’t it just a black box that you put your bag in on one side and it comes out the other side?

Zach: Are there other aspects of security that strike you as a little bit too obvious and repetitive in that aspect?

Philip: Well, I feel that a lot of what we do is– I’ve said it before– I feel a lot of what we do is theatre. It’s deterrent. But if you actually go to the real world, we do know that the terrorist fraternity out there understands the limitations of the security checkpoint, and they know what works and what doesn’t work. They know what type of devices won’t make it through a security checkpoint and which ones will. And we often, I don’t think, treat the enemy with sufficient respect. That’s why ultimately, the aviation system has always been reactive. We’ve always waited for an attack to happen and then we patch the hole. For example, before Richard Reid, we knew that there was a problem with shoes. But we didn’t do anything about it because nobody had actually tried to conceal a bomb in their shoes. We didn’t deploy common body scanners until Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab went through with his underpants bomb. We didn’t lock cockpit doors and we didn’t restrict box cutters until September the 11th. And there are so many things that you think, “Why does it take an event to happen in order for us to actually implement effective security measures?” And I know people don’t like to hear about the Israeli security system because they get bored of hearing about how amazing the Israeli system is, but the reality is the Israeli system had an attack in 1968 and then they implemented a whole series of measures that pretty much ensured the security of El Al aircraft and other Israeli aircraft ever since. There were a couple of incidents in the early 1970s but once their profiling system was implemented, that was it. Now, you can’t transplant the Israeli system and put it into the United States or the United Kingdom because the scale of the aviation industry is so much greater in the United States or in Europe than it is in Israel. And the tolerance that people have got for more invasive security is much lower. But you can use elements of it. You can deploy common sense. We know that, for example, the terrorists out there are planning attacks that are going to be based on chemical and biological weapons. That’s not a shock, that’s nothing new, I’m not breaching any security by saying that. We know that that is out there. What measures are in place at airports to prevent a chemical or biological weapon attack? Well, I think your listeners probably know what the answer is, I don’t need to put it into words. The reality is we’re waiting for that type of attack to happen before we implement a measure to actually prevent it. But there is a measure that can prevent it. And actually, it is based on behavioural analysis and behaviour detection. And that means making hard decisions about people. That you’re not going to resolve whether or not somebody can get onto a flight or get into a sports stadium simply on whether you detect a threat item in their bag or on their person, it means that you’re going to possibly prevent somebody going into a sports stadium, to a rock concert, to a shopping mall, to a theatre, to an airport, or getting on a bus because you’ve got sufficient concerns about them. And you’re actually going to say, “It may not be fair to that person, but our primary objective here has got to be to safeguard lives and to do what we need to do.” We just need to make sure that the people that are doing it are trained to act sensitively and to be able to question people appropriately, because in 99.9% of cases where concern arises, then you will be able to resolve those concerns by having a friendly conversation with an individual.

Zach: And I think most people are okay with the idea of if me or other people being occasionally inconvenienced is what it takes to save a lot of people, then that is a fair trade-off. I think most people would-

Philip: I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, there is the occasional person that will say, “Why are you focusing on me? Do I look like a terrorist?” First of all, I’ve got no idea what a terrorist looks like and nobody can tell you what a terrorist looks like. But we’re not even only looking for terrorists, are we? We’re looking for anybody that could be a problem, and somebody that could be used by a terrorist, and somebody that could be trafficked, and somebody that is a trafficker as I’ve said before. We’re looking for a host of different people that are out there. And providing we do implement security sensitively, I think we can be far more effective than we are at the moment. And I think we should be actually getting rid of elements of the security system to make the whole system actually more user-friendly and customer service friendly. I think that actually even having the checkpoint… I mean, this was something that was sort of born about 25 years ago, the whole concept of centralized screening in an airport where everybody is screened at the same place, I feel that was detrimental to effective passenger profiling or behavioural analysis. It was so much better than when we used to do it at the gate. Because at the gate, you could have a flight that was departing to Shreveport, Louisiana, and another flight that was going to Cancun in Mexico, and another flight that was going to London Heathrow, and another flight that was going to Reykjavik, Iceland, and you will know that the behaviours of people going on those four different flights will be completely different and that what they will be carrying will be completely different. And you would have a relatively small group of people that you will be able to analyze. But we moved away from that model of screening at the gates and moved it to a big centralized screening area, not because it was better security, but because it was cheaper and because it was better to put all of your resources in one place. And we have to recognize that security does cost. We know from 9/11 and other major terrorist events that short-term savings actually result in long-term huge expense.

Zach: This has been great, Philip. Thanks for your time and I really appreciate you coming on.

Philip: My pleasure.

Zach: That was aviation security professional, Philip Baum. You can learn more about his work at his website Avsec, that’s avsec.com.

This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. If you enjoyed this episode, check out the back catalog of episodes on my website www.behavior-podcast.com. Some of the more popular episodes I’ve done have been about reading human behavior for security- and criminal investigation- related applications. 

Thanks for listening.

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Reading poker tells in a hand from the WSOP Ladies Event, with Lara Eisenberg

A talk with poker player Lara Eisenberg, who won the 2021 World Series of Poker Ladies Event, and who got 2nd place in a 2022 World Poker Tour event for $481,000. Topics we talk about include: how her thoughts about poker tells have changed over time; some specific behaviors from a poker hand from the Ladies Event; some behavioral patterns she noticed in herself; the anxiety involved in bluffing; and skydiving, which Lara has done competitively. 

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The illusions of memory and self, with Anne Wilson

A talk with social psychologist Anne Wilson (annewilsonpsychlab.com) about memory and how we define who we are. Topics discussed include: the nature of self; the nature of memory; the fallibility of our memories; the theory of temporal self appraisal (which is about how we experience ourselves as being close to or far away in time from different versions of ourselves); false memories; the role creative storytelling plays in constructing our views of self and the world; and political polarization. 

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My book Defusing American Anger is out

A short update about my book Defusing American Anger being released, and a few other small notes. You can get the book at www.american-anger.com.

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podcast

The fear and loneliness of leaving one’s cult, with Calvin Wayman

A talk with Calvin Wayman (Twitter: @calwayman), who was raised in a fundamentalist Mormon cult, with four mothers and 44 siblings. This world was everything and everyone he’d known. At the age of 30, he left that world, and was as a result suddenly isolated from everything that had previously given his life meaning.

We talk about that experience with a focus on the existential feelings of isolation and loneliness that accompanied it. Topics discussed include: how he began to question his world; factors he sees as present that made him someone willing to question things; Plato’s allegory of the cave; The Matrix and our willingness to take the “red pill”; how his community and family reacted to his decision; the human desire for certainty; and more.

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On psychopaths and ‘dark empaths’, with dark traits expert Nadja Heym

A talk with Nadja Heym, a psychology researcher who specializes in dark traits, like psychopathy, narcissism, and sadism, and who has researched so-called “dark empaths”: people with dark traits who have a good amount of empathy. We delve into some nuance in the area of psychopathy.

Topics discussed include: How she defines psychopathic traits; The misuse of the term “psychopath” (and related misuse of other terms like “narcissist”); Can we say from a brain scan if a brain is “psychopathic”?; “Bad seed”-like concepts of how psychopaths arise; Can an environment (like a highly competitive job) make someone have more psychopathic traits?; What are “dark empaths”? 

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