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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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Does our anger at the “other side” help create the very things we’re angry about?

When trying to convince people of the problem of polarization and the necessity for depolarization endeavors, a common objection from politically passionate people goes, “But the other side is horrible, so polarization makes sense.” In this episode, I talk about what is probably the primary counterpoint to that objection: that us-vs-them anger, in a non-obvious way, can help create the very things we’re angry about. For this reason, if one wants to defeat extreme views on the other side (or on both sides), the way to achieve that goal is to take a depolarizing, anger-reducing, de-escalating approach. 

Transcript below.

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TRANSCRIPT

This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about better understanding other people and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com; there are also transcripts and links to related materials on that site.   

As I’m recording this today, there are a lot of birds chirping outside, so apologies for the bird noises. 

If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you probably know I sometimes tackle topics related to political polarization. And I’m currently working on a book on this topic, with the working title Defusing American Anger: Why We Hate Each Other And What We Can Do About It. 

When it comes to depolarization endeavors, I think it’s very important to try to overcome common objections. And one of the most common objections I hear is: “but the other side is so horrible, so it makes sense to be polarized.” Some people even think we need to be more polarized, to combat the obvious threat and danger of the other side. 

I have a number of counterpoints to that. One is to point out that people engaged in depolarization efforts aren’t trying to change anyone’s political beliefs, which I think is often what people think. And I think this gets into some of the ambiguity in the term ‘polarization’; because there is ideological polarization, which is about beliefs, and then there is affective polarization, also known as emotional polarization, also known as us-vs-them polarization, which is what I like to call it. 

So when people hear that I and others are working on “depolarization” they can think that we’re trying to change their beliefs, when what we’re really saying is: we are trying to reduce the anger. Or more accurately, we are trying to reduce the expressions of anger — the hateful insults and threats, the angry language — because we can see that those things are what drive our divides. One can have any range of political beliefs, even beliefs many would view as extreme, while seeing the wisdom of taking a depolarizing, de-escalating approach. 

But the main counterpoint I’d make to people who perceive one group as hugely bad and dangerous is this: our us-vs-them anger helps create the very things many of us are angry about. Our us-vs-them anger is not some side event going on while we fight over the issues; it is actually the main event. Because that immense anger can actually shift our beliefs, and make us more extreme in our beliefs, and make us less willing to negotiate. Put in more technical, academic terms: our emotional polarization can create ideological polarization. 

And research helps make this case. One of the most important studies on this, in my opinion, was one by James Druckman and his colleagues; that paper was titled Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America. It showed how political animosity pre-covid was tied later to more polarized, extreme covid-related beliefs and behaviors. I’m going to read some excerpts from my depolarization book in a bit, and I mention Druckman’s work in there. 

One reason I wanted to create this episode was to create something that I could point people to. I wanted something I could share when people say “the other side is horrible so polarization makes sense.” And if you care about this cause, maybe you could share this episode with your audience, and explain why it’s important. Or maybe when you find someone making those objections, that polarization is okay, you could share this episode with them. 

Another reason I wanted to talk about this topic was to see if people knew about research related to this. I’ve actually been a bit surprised how hard it’s been to find work related to the idea that emotional polarization amplifies ideological polarization. To me, it’s such an important concept, because it helps make the case to politically passionate people why depolarization efforts are so important. So if anyone has thoughts on this topic, or knows of related resources, I’d greatly appreciate you reaching out via the contact form of my site behavior-podcast.com. 

Okay so next I’ll read a couple excerpts from my manuscript, and just please keep in mind this is from an early version of the book, so it is still pretty rough and unpolished. 

We tend to think that our stances and the other group’s stances are things that exist on their own, apart from us. We tend to perceive that the other side is, suddenly and out of the blue, becoming more extreme and more detached from reality. But understanding polarization dynamics lets us see how our dislike of the other side contributes to creating the very things we dislike. 

As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, put it in a 2022 talk on the Braver Angels podcast: “Culture wars are different than real wars: the more you attack the other side, the more you strengthen it.”

There’s plenty of evidence that our stances on issues can be affected by our us-versus-them feelings. Our dislike of the other group, our fear of them and anger at them, can make us form more extreme and hardened positions on issues. And this is a hugely important point because it helps us see that our us-versus-them anger is often creating the very things we’re angry about. 

This gets back to the feedback loop involved in these dynamics. Our dislike of the other group makes us form more extreme positions, which increases the other side’s dislike and makes them form more extreme positions, which makes us dislike them more, and so on. 

A 2020 paper by James Druckman and colleagues was titled Affective polarization, local contexts and public opinion in America. In that work, they showed how people’s political animosity influenced later stances on covid. The more us-versus-them animosity people had, the more likely they were to have more extreme stances on how to respond to covid: either being for an extensive response to covid, or being for very little response. Importantly, that research showed that us-versus-them animosity came before the covid stances, showing that emotion influenced beliefs (and not the other way around). 

Via email correspondence, Druckman summarized his views on how our us-versus-them emotions can affect our political beliefs: 

Our theory is that as affective polarization increases for someone, they become more likely to align their beliefs with those of party elites. Party elites tend to be more ideologically polarized and thus the more affectively polarized people follow those cues, and that leads them to become more polarized on issues (as was the case with COVID-19 policies). 

In other work, we find this holds across various policy domains, support for political compromise, and norms. For example, those who are more affectively polarized are more likely to oppose checks and balances when their party holds power but then flip to support them when their party is in the opposition. It is similar to policies; they are more protective of their policy and thus become more extreme. 

End quote

So in short, we can see that political animosity, either directly or indirectly, is likely influencing our beliefs.. 

And we can see how this dynamic may be playing out for many issues we fight over. The more we dislike the other side, the more we’ll have an instinctual urge to align against the other side’s stance. 

And each group’s divisive rhetoric will play a role here. When liberals say things like, “Conservative stances on immigration are due to racism,” it’s understandable how it would be that conservatives might feel even more emotionally committed to their anti-immigration stances. Their dislike of liberals will manifest as more committed stances against immigration. 

When conservatives say things like “Liberals want to increase immigration because they want to destroy America” or “because they want to get more votes,” some liberals will feel various pressures to be more committed to pro-immigration stances. 

And we can see real-world evidence of this playing out for various stances. To take one example: A 2020 Pew Research survey showed that back in 2015, roughly 65% of Democrats agreed with the statement “immigrants strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” In 2020, that number had risen to about 86%, a rise of about 20 percentage points. We can see this dramatic change in liberal-side views as being a direct result of perceptions that Trump and the GOP were being insulting and threatening to immigrants. We can understand it as liberal-side beliefs being shifted due to a growing perception of the other side’s moral badness. 

To be clear: this is not to say that having positive feelings about immigrants is an extreme belief. It’s just meant to be an example of how our us-vs-them emotions can shift our beliefs. And we can imagine how related beliefs could be shifted in ways that some would view as extreme: for example, we can imagine that dynamic being at play with an increasing number of Democrats saying they’d be for open borders policies or having no border control at all. On the other side, we could also imagine that emotional dynamic being at play for increasing support for a border wall. 

We define ourselves by what our in-group is like, but also by what a perceived out-group is like. We define ourselves partly by the ways in which we are not like a disliked outgroup. This helps explain why it can seem that we can become angrily polarized over anything, especially things that aren’t yet associated with one party or the other: all it takes is one group taking a stance on something, and the other group can have a reflexive instinct to criticize that stance and align against that stance. 

When we’re polarized, there’s a natural feedback cycle that causes things to keep getting worse. And this helps explain why we will naturally keep finding ourselves polarized over new issues, like covid. For my podcast, I interviewed Michael Macy, who with his colleagues worked on a paper titled Opinion cascades and the unpredictability of partisan polarization. In that work, they studied how we can polarize randomly on issues that aren’t yet tied to a political party. Similar to how in many complex systems, slightly different initial conditions can lead to vastly different results later on, early conditions, including early opinion-holders and influencers, can influence a political party to be aligned with one or another stance on an issue. These early choices have a cascading effect, meaning that, for some issues, the political parties could hold reversed positions if things had gone a bit differently. 

Research also shows how the more we view a stance on an issue in moral terms, the less willing we are to negotiate. One study that talks about this was from 2022 and was titled Moral Frames Are Persuasive and Moralize Attitudes; Nonmoral Frames Are Persuasive and De-Moralize Attitudes. That study found that quote “the use of moral frames can increase and entrench moral divides rather than bridge them.” end quote. This isn’t surprising: the more we see something as a moral disagreement, the less likely we are to want to budge on that issue. And the more we perceive the other political group as alien and monstrous and evil, as an entire group, the more of a moral framing all disagreements on issues will have, no matter the issue. So we become more gridlocked and unable to negotiate, and the resentment over that lack of negotiation grows and feeds back into our us-vs-them anger. 

Fathali M. Moghaddam is a psychologist and conflict researcher, and author of the book Mutual Radicalization: How Groups and Nations Drive Each Other to Extremes. In that book, he writes that mutual radicalization occurs when quote “two groups take increasingly extreme positions opposing one another, reacting against real or imagined threats, moving further and further apart in points of view, mobilizing their resources to launch attacks, and finally attempting to weaken and destroy each other.” end quote. Here’s another excerpt from his book on how entrenched and malleable us-versus-them feelings are: 

This work on mutual radicalization highlights a destructive process that can become self-perpetuating, self-contained, and independent from ideology and other characteristics of groups. Irrespective of whether the groups and nations involved are capitalist or communist, Muslim or Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or some other religion, or what their ethnic or gender mix and other characteristics are, once they become entangled in mutual radicalization they can be sucked into a spiraling and ever more destructive process. 

Although individually those entrapped in this process might include highly insightful individuals who can recognize that the collective is going down the wrong path, the sheer force of mutual radicalization often overrides their objections and pushes them along to conform, obey, and speed toward a destructive end. In mutual radicalization collective pressures override individual intelligence.

End quote.

We often fight over which political group has grown more extreme. People on both sides will try to make the case for why one side or the other has grown more extreme in the recent past. But the fact is that there is no one measure of extremity or radicalization. As extreme polarization grows, each group will adjust their stances in big ways on some issues and not so much on other issues. All this complexity means that it’s possible for each group to form narratives about the other side’s growing extremity and have points to back those claims up. 

If you’re someone who thinks that dangerous people with extreme beliefs are hurting America—whether you see that as an issue on both sides, or almost entirely on one side—the way you defeat those people and ideas may be, counter-intuitively, by reducing our collective us-versus-them anger. Because it’s our collective anger that gives power to the most polarized people and views. 

For my podcast, I interviewed conflict resolution expert Guy Burgess, and one thing he said was, “The idea is to see yourself as others see you. Once you do that, then you get a sense of what makes others so mad at you and willing to fight so hard. And you can then start asking questions about, well, do I really need to do those things? Or maybe if we did it this way, I wouldn’t provoke so much opposition but I’d still get the things that I really care about.” end quote.

And again, this is not to say we shouldn’t have passionate stances about things that are important to us: we’re talking about the unreasonable levels of animosity we can have and express towards our fellow citizens. That animosity is the problem.  

Us-versus-them polarization is a powerful, self-reinforcing dynamic: a kind of self-sustaining perpetual anger machine. Like a nuclear reaction or a hurricane forming in warm waters, once set in motion, all the elements are there for the process to ramp up and spiral out of control. 

In Robert Talisse’s book Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe To The Other Side, he writes about the indirect dysfunction caused by us-vs-them polarization. One less obvious problem is that the more polarized and angry we grow, the less able we become to work even with people who used to be or could be our political allies. We can see this dynamic playing out with people in both parties becoming more antagonistic and argumentative with each other. The most polarized people are focused on purity and ridding their side of the impure and the not properly polarized. We can see it playing out, for example, in many progressive-leaning organizations that have become dysfunctional due to internal divisions and fights, something written about in a 2022 Intercept article titled How Meltdowns Brought Progressive Groups to a Standstill. The angrier we become, the more intolerant we become of dissent, and the more we harshly judge even people who are largely politically aligned with us. In this way, more us-vs-them anger makes people less likely to achieve the normal political goals of persuading people and forming large coalitions. It results in a general maddening and meanness, across the board. 

And just a note here that if you’re interested in these topics, I highly recommend Robert Talisse’s book Sustaining Democracy. It’s the best book aimed at American depolarization I’ve yet read. 

Let me skip to another related excerpt from the book: 

In a polarized society, people in both groups often have blind spots for seeing how their side is contributing. When the other side seems so egregiously wrong, the bad behaviors of people on our side can seem minor by comparison. Either that, or we genuinely don’t see how our group contributes. 

Reading this, you’ve likely had some thoughts like, “I’ll concede that there are a few people on my side who add to our divides, but clearly, the other side is much, much worse, so thinking about how my side contributes strikes me as a bit pointless, and maybe even dangerous.”

When asked to examine how the left might be adding to our divides, some liberals will object that this is making a false equivalency or that it’s a “both sides” argument. They’re saying it’s wrong to speak as if the two groups contribute similarly. But this can be seen as a defensive reaction to avoid the real issue. Acknowledging the flaws of your group is not making a false equivalency or a “both sides” argument: you can see how your group has issues while thinking the other group is worse—even much worse.  

People who study polarization understand that in every polarized nation, both groups in conflict almost always play a significant role in amplifying the divides. 

Even in the case of Nazi Germany, a situation where most people would perceive one group as much worse than the other group (to put it lightly), there was significant violence and aggression from the far left at that time that contributed to the nation’s collective us-versus-them narratives and anger.

The following is from a piece about post-World War I Germany from History.com: 

Against this background, Germany had to create a new government and try to reinstitute law and order. But the ministers and politicians of the newly established Weimar Republic had formidable enemies: their own people. The new republic saw pitched battles between increasingly polarized left and right-wing groups. The early government was seized by left-wing revolutionaries, and communist uprisings roiled the streets.

In response, private armies called Freikorps fought back. These groups were funded by former officers of the German army, which was now under severe restrictions in terms of both size and scope because of the Treaty of Versailles. The paramilitary groups came and went as political crises erupted. They were staffed by a vast group of discontented men, from former soldiers who were indignant at Germany’s surrender to young men who were angry at being unemployed. Eventually, as many as 1.5 million German men would join a Freikorps group. They represented a growing tide of nationalism and right-wing extremism that would erupt into political chaos and eventually lead to the rise of the Nazi Party.

The new government lacked authority, so it leaned on the Freikorps to fight its battles. The country was plagued with wave after wave of violence, both from workers’ groups on the left and increasingly combative right-wing groups who resented what they saw as Germany’s complete abdication to the international community’s demands after the war. And the Freikorps and other paramilitary groups were in the middle of the often bloody fray—legitimized and bolstered by a government so weak it gave them free rein to terrorize whom they pleased. [end quote]

(And as a quick note here, to be completely clear: this example I chose is not meant to compare current American political groups with those in WW2 Germany.) 

This example was chosen to make the case that, ven in situations where most people would judge one side to be much worse than the other, both groups will almost always have played a role in amplifying the divides. Some will perceive this point as akin to victim-blaming or making excuses for an aggressive group’s attacks, but it’s not. It’s simply recognizing how human conflicts almost always work. It’s recognizing how the roots of our us-versus-them anger form and grow. 

The 2006 book The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict, written by C. Terry Warner and The Arbinger Institute, examines the hidden emotional forces that can help drive conflicts. It explains how, in conflicts—whether a marital fight or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—people on both sides can contribute, sometimes without even realizing it. That’s because when a conflict begins, we stop seeing the opposing side’s humanity and increasingly see them as objects. Even if we believe we’re simply trying to achieve correct and rational goals, if our “hearts are at war” with the people on the other side, those negative emotions change how we speak and behave. And soon, that animosity plays a bigger role than the issues we initially were arguing over. This starts a cycle where our negative emotions induce equivalent negative emotions on the other side. To quote from The Anatomy of Peace: “We begin provoking in others the very things we say we hate.”

Okay, that’s the end of me reading excerpts from my work-in-progress book, which is currently titled Defusing American Anger. 

Again, if you like what I’m doing with this work, you can sign up for a premium membership to my podcast at behavior-podcast.com, and that will also get you a free copy of my book when it’s ready. Aside from that, I’d highly appreciate you sharing this podcast with others. Consider sending this specific episode to people who you think might appreciate learning more about polarization dynamics and why depolarization is an important goal.  

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Reading situations and opponents in racecar driving, with Andy Lally

A talk with racecar driver Andy Lally, who specializes in endurance GT (sportcar) racing. Topics we talk about include: What’s the breakdown in skill versus chance in an average race? What are the considerations when trying to pass other drivers, or trying to prevent drivers from passing? Where’s the boundary between acceptable behavior versus behavior that people would consider too-aggressive and dangerous? What are some spots where Andy was proud of his decisions? What it’s like being a vegan in an industry where that’s pretty rare?

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Facial expressions and their connection to personality, with Herman Ilgen

A talk with Herman Ilgen, who’s been a negotiator for more than 30 years and who is the founder of the Institute for Nonverbal Strategy Analysis (INSA). Ilgen has researched how facial expression patterns may be connected to personality traits. His paper was titled “Personal Nonverbal Repertoires in facial displays and their relation to individual differences in social and emotional styles.” Topics discussed include: what led him to do that work; what the findings were; how one might make practical use of the findings; and various thoughts on nonverbal behavior and on negotiation strategies.

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Us-vs-them anger in a small town, with Rebecca Schillenback

Credit Casey Martin, Ithaca Voice

In the small town of Caroline in central New York state, there seems to be a war going on. A large sign in the town reads, “There’s a war in the valley, time to pick a side.” The divide is over proposed zoning laws. Rebecca Schillenback is a resident who wrote a letter to the local paper objecting to the war-like us-vs-them rhetoric she sees her neighbors using. I talk to Rebecca about: the nature of this divide and the roots of the emotions; how it relates to our national us-vs-them divides; and her Quaker faith and its role in her attempt to reduce anger. 

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Improving sexual satisfaction in long-term relationships, with Jessica Maxwell

A talk with psychologist Jessica Maxwell (www.jessmaxwell.com) about her research on sexual relationships. We talk about “growth” versus “destiny” views about sex: in other words, whether someone sees sexual satisfaction as something one must work on, or if one sees it as largely an issue of destiny–something that’s either present or it’s not. Other topics include: the role of media in affecting our views on sex; how boredom and lack of novelty can hurt sexual satisfaction; performance-related anxiety; how porn might be affecting people’s ideas of sex; thoughts on scheduled date nights versus more spontaneous attempts at romance; sleeping in separate bedrooms. 

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The role of nonverbal behavior in competitive situations, with Philip Furley

A talk with Philip Furley, who has done a lot of research on behavior and psychology in sports. A transcript is below. Topics discussed include: how an athlete’s body language can influence teammates, opponents, and even judges; behaviors and strategies of penalty kickers and goalkeepers in soccer; some specific behaviors from the recent World Cup; collective displays of team unity (like the “Haka”); the difficulties of finding behavioral patterns in sports; thoughts on making practical use of Furley’s research findings.

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding people better. To learn more about it, go to behavior-podcast.com. 

In this episode, I talk to Philip Furley, who’s done a wide range of interesting sports psychology-related research. He’s done so much interesting research related to the role of nonverbal behavior in sports, it was honestly hard to decide which topics to focus on and which questions to ask. Here are some of the topics we talk about. 

  • We talk about positive and negative body language in sports and what effects that can have on one’s teammates
  • We talk about celebratory body language and how that can influence the perceptions of other people, including judges
  • We talk about some behaviors and strategies of penalty kickers and goalkeepers in soccer
  • We talk about some specific behaviors from the recent World Cup games
  • We talk about the challenges in finding general behavioral patterns in sports. 
  • We talk about anxiety and the role it can play in sports 

And along the way, Furley and I talk about various ways someone might make practical use of his research findings

I want to give a big thank you to Alan Crawley, who I’ve previously interviewed on this podcast and who goes by the online handle Sin Verba. It was Alan’s idea for me to ask Furley for an interview, and Alan also came up with most of the questions you’ll hear me ask, because he’s much more familiar with Furley’s work than I am, and also because he’s a lot more familiar with the game of soccer. So thank you for all that, Alan. If you’re interested in learning more about nonverbal behavior, I highly recommend checking out that talk I did with Alan; it was one of the more popular episodes of mine lately. And if you’re interested in sports-related psychology specifically, just a note that I’ve done quite a few sports-related and game-related episodes in the past. 

Okay here’s the talk with Philip Furley…

Hi, Philip. Thanks for coming on.

Philip: Hi, thanks for having me.

Zach: So maybe we could start with talking about your interests a bit. What is it that’s driven the various kinds of research you’ve done in the sports field and elsewhere?

Philip: Yeah. Okay, I didn’t really get into the stuff we’re gonna be talking about till a bit later in my scientific career. I started off my PhD in 2009. That was more on cognitive topics like how you can control your attention in various sports settings. And then in Germany, after you finish your PhD, if you want to become a professor you have to do something called the Habilitation. And there I got very interested the social psychology of sports, and that’s when I started to research into this nonverbal behavior and nonverbal communication, body language stuff. What I noticed is a lot of people talk about that in applied settings; sport commentators. But then when I had a look and reviewed the literature, not that much research had been actually done in the field of sports. I mean, it was a very mainstream topic in general psychology, but within the field of sport not that much research had been done, which was a good starting point for me to get started in this field of research.

Zach: One of your areas of research has been the body language of players, sports team players, and how that can affect their teammates or opponent players, for example, by communicating confidence or lack of confidence. Can you summarise? I know that’s probably a big ask, but can you summarise your views about the role of body language plays in sports?

Philip: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. It’s hard to quantify it. There are several things we were interested in our research; first of all, the first thing is how body language is affected by various situations in sports like for example the current score line, how it is going at the moment for the team, for the player, and if other people can recognize this just based on the body language. And then in turn, how this again might affect other players, opponents, spectators, and then again in the long run, how that might again come back to affect sports performance. These were sort of the questions that we were looking into. And we’ve got some answers to these questions, but what we find very clearly is that nonverbal behavior, the body language, the facial expressions, they are very much affected by various things that are going on in sports.

One thing we had a look in a lot of different situations… So, players change their body language if they’re currently doing well, if they’re leading, or if they’re currently trailing. This is something that we’ve always found in all the experiments we’ve done. We’ve had to look at that in soccer, in tennis, in table tennis, in handball and all sorts of different contexts. And this is something that we can clearly show. The body language is affected by how it’s going so if you are not doing so well, this shows in your body language, and if you’re doing well, this also shows again in your body language. And people– observers– who are not especially trained in drawing inferences from nonverbal behavior body language can make accurate inferences. If you show them brief video recordings or photos, they can say, “Okay, this guy is leading, this guy’s trailing,” and also by how much they are trailing. Someone finds quite a contingency between the nonverbal behavior and the current scoreline. In further experiments, we could also show that this can have an effect on other players. For example, if you put athletes in hypothetical scenario and tell them to look at this player and how likely they are gonna play well or play poorly against this player, then they are a lot more confident playing against somebody whose body language is from images where they’re currently trailing, as opposed to where they’re currently leading. To give you one example of a line of research we’ve been doing…

Zach: To take a specific example, in one of your studies on baseball, you discovered the importance of holding your head high. Could you talk a little bit about that specific finding?

Philip: Yeah, this was an experiment we did with actors. They use the so-called point light technique there that we just put markers on joints of people and then we manipulated the body language they were doing. This was a follow up experiment from the research that I’d been talking about before. And then if we manipulate the body language to resemble the body language of a trailing athlete, that sort of looks a bit more submissive as opposed to dominant, then you could clearly tell that the observers form very different impressions. So if you showed these point light images to observers, also to athletes, then they had a negative image of the athlete that was sort of looking downwards, that was sort of collapsed, didn’t have a lot of body tension. And they were also a lot more confident to be interacting with this athlete. For example if it was a pitcher, then they were a lot more confident that they would be able to hit the ball to hit a good strike at the baseball.

Zach: One thing I’ve wondered is how would you implement this in a real-world setting. So let’s say you were a basketball coach, let’s say, and your team had been losing for a while in the game, if you could give advice to the team, would you suggest that they change their body language? And how would you suggest they do it? Would you suggest maybe they just avoid expressing negative or losing appearing emotions or gestures? Or would you suggest they maybe fake some nonverbal confidence and things like this?

Philip: Yeah, exactly. It’s not an easy question to answer and one doesn’t want to encourage unnatural and bit freaky gestures and body language. What you do find in a lot of our research is that the body language is sort of automatically affected by what’s going on. And you can get sort of into a downward circle that it’s going poorly, and this shows in your body language. And then this might affect your teammates and boost the confidence of your opponents. This is something that we can simulate in the experimental research that we’ve been doing. And of course, applied work, wants to look how you can interfere in a way with this negative cycle. So being aware of what’s going on is of course a first important step. And then I think it’s important to sort of… If you notice that things are going poorly and you’re losing tension and this shows in your expressions, then it’s maybe important to take a deep breath, step back and refocus; maybe use some positive self-talk to get out of this vicious circle if you want [that you sort of say, okay.] Kind of a fresh start, gather yourself, and then maybe take a deep breath and try to get into a more positive posture. Because for knows, there are all these feedback loops. It’s not a one-way street so that only that their situation affects your nonverbal behavior, but also the other way round. There’s feedback from your body and if you sort of intervene here and try to adopt an upright posture, chin up, and gaze up, then I think you can have positive influences on your body language. But it’s not that trivial. This is something that you do have to probably work on, that you do have to train. You have to notice when something like that is occurring, and then try to sort of break out of this and get re-refocused.

Zach: Right, like you were saying some people would think, “Oh, I’m going to fake having really positive body language or whatever,” and I think what you’re pointing to, it would be strange to fake that. It would come across as artificial so that they’d be avoiding the obvious… You know, it’s almost like taking the advice of having a positive mindset and that will naturally leak out to your body language, I would think so.

Philip: No, exactly. And simplistic messages like that is something that I don’t go for. I know this is something difficult that’s on my mind, my goal as a scientist is trying to understand what’s going on and then giving some helpful advice that might actually help. So we’ve also looked into the question whether you can distinguish between post expressions, post body language, exaggerated body language, and body language that’s actually affected by circumstances in sports. And people are very good at detecting these differences, which would speak against sort of just trying to fake it and act too dominant, too confident.

Zach: Right, that makes sense. Do you have a sense of how big an effect we’re talking? I think that’d be a lot of people’s question. You know, it’s probably like in the scheme of things. It’s a smaller percentage, but still that can be significant. Because in a lot of games, you are talking about a very close game. So I’m curious, do you have a sense of, you know, the difference between a team with very bad beaten body language who really lets it show, versus a team that’s more cognizant of these things? Do you have a rough guess of how big of a percentage it would matter?

Philip: Yeah. I’m not gonna give you a percentage, I don’t think I can sort of answer that with the methods that we have in science. I mean, you see all these messages that a lot of the stuff that’s communicated is most of it nonverbal. I’m not really sure how they came up with these percentages, so I can’t really speak to a percentage. As you were was saying, I think it’s very important. It’s one of these many variables that has an influence. And they’re not isolated, they belong to the whole toolbox. And I think this is one that hasn’t been addressed enough by research, and that applied coaches and sports psychologists can do a lot with. So they’re considered very important, but sort of in combination with different things. You have to get into the right state, this is likely gonna affect your body language and nonverbal behavior in a positive way. And if you notice that if you’re in a good state but your body language can still be improved, this is something else you can work on. This is another thing that you should pay attention to.

Zach: Apart from the nonverbal, have you done any research or seen any research about the role of verbal encouragements or how people talk to each other? Has that been part of your work?

Philip: Not really so much of my research. Recently, we were asked to contribute a chapter on communication and a big part of that was nonverbal communication. And yes, obviously what people say to you, what coaches say to one has a big impact. It also matters how they state things in a calm, not-too-agitative way. These are things that have been studied, but not so much by me and my students.

Zach: You had done some research on surfing and how surfers’ body language can influence observers and judges. Could you give a talk a little bit about what you found with that research?

Philip: Yeah, this was more of an applied question, not so much the basic research I had been talking about before. I’m very interested in in the sport of surfing, I got into surfing myself when I was going to school in San Diego. I’m not very good at surfing but I started to follow it quite actively. the contests’ broadcasted out here in Germany via the internet, and so I’ve been following it quite a bit as a spectator. And one question that arose there was that it’s always one to three surfaces who are competing against each other. And then the two best waves they serve are scored by a judging panel, and then they get points for the waves. What then often happens is that a surfer gets a first good wave, and the other surfer has already two good waves so he needs another score to beat the other surfer to progress in the heat. This is kind of the format that exists. And then they’ve got a limited amount of time that they have to get the two best waves in a heat. And then the scenario actually always occurs that one surfer needs a certain score to beat the other surfer. What you then often see is that the time runs out so the surfers take off on a wave, and then at the end of the wave they show some very interesting nonverbal behavior in the surfing situation– they call them claims– they show some victorious nonverbal behavior like punching and doing fist pumps and this kind of stuff, and they do that towards the judging panel. And something that they always said in this commentary is that these nonverbal celebrations affected the judging panel. That they didn’t really judge the performance, but how they thought they did.

This was a question that I thought we could answer very well with some methods that we’ve been using. So we had a whole lot of video material from surfing contests, and then we could do have this video material judged. We could judge the actual performance and then we could see how much the judging was affected if you showed this additional victorious nonverbal behavior at the end. And we got quite clear answers. We even did a good experimental setup and we could clearly show that both lay people when judging the performance of surfers, they judged more favorably if the surfer celebrated their performance with a certain nonverbal [unintelligible 00:18:08]. But it was quite interesting that also experienced surf judges judged about half a point– which is quite a lot in surfing– better than all these victorious nonverbal behaviors after the wave, in comparison to just seeing that performance without the nonverbal behavior at the end.

Zach: Yeah, that seems pretty huge. And getting back to their question of is it a good strategy to deceptively do these things, it would seem in this case that it would be a good strategy with the caveat, of course, like the other things we were talking about where at a certain point if you’re known for somebody that’s always behaving triumphantly, everybody will know that about you so it would get out that you were often doing that. But it seems like in the context of a specific event, there wouldn’t be much reason to not try to act more confidently and triumphantly after your…

Philip: Yeah. No, I agree sort of up to a point, exactly. Because in these videos, the surfers actually did do something well that they thought they should celebrate. And then the comparison was showing this or not showing this. So the message would be if you do well, I think it’s beneficial to show this. But if you’re doing poorly, I think judges will notice and spectators would pick up on that and you might get a bit of a weird reputation.

Zach: Right, you’re a phony. Yeah, you’re just a faker. You got to use it within reason, basically. You have to use it judgmentally where like, ‘You could have actually been proud of that.’

Philip: Exactly, that’s what I would say. That’s a good way of summing it up. So if you’ve done something good, it helps. It can help to show that to people around you who are watching, but within limits. If you’ve done sort of okay or not so well, it wouldn’t be advisable to try to fake it.

Zach: Yeah, then you just get viral videos of yourself doing very bad performances and celebrating. Right?

Philip: And could end careers, I think. [laughs]

Zach: What about when it comes to some of the similar kind of displays that some teams do? For example, the New Zealand Rugby team does the haka, and there’s other teams that do collective exhibitions of unity; hugging themselves, chanting before a match and things like this. Have you done research on how those things affect or intimidate rivals or affect performance?

Philip: Yeah, not directly. I mean, some research touches into that. I think the haka is a very good example. It’s very impressive and it’s something that’s grown culturally in the natives of New Zealand. Things like that have a long tradition in all sorts of cultures with two effects, with two intentions. First of all, to psych one up oneself, to sort of get the team ready. It’s a pre-performance ritual that gets you pumped up, ready to perform, ready to fight in these matches. On the other hand, it has the effect to try to intimidate scare the opponent. And if it’s something that’s grown with these cultures with the All Blacks in New Zealand, it really is very impressive and I’ve got no doubt that it has intended effects and that it does help the team. But again, I don’t think it’s enough to say, “Okay, New Zealand does that, we should start this as a team ourselves.” It has to be authentic, it has to be believable, it has to suit the team that’s showing it. And there’s all kinds of research showing that pre-performance routines can increase arousal, can increase performance. So I think teams are well advised to try to train something like that to, to engage in things like that. And if it’s something like the haka, it’s likely that it could also have the effect of scaring the opponent, intimidating the opponent, lowering their confidence. And we’ve done some research, or there has been some research that has shown that the way that for example, tennis plays into the court does affect confidence levels of the opponent if they come in very confidently. Also from my own sporting experience, I can remember looking at some teams, looking at some plays and thinking, “Oh god, how am I supposed to beat them?”

Zach: [chuckles] What do you think the intimidation– because it seems like there can be a few different routes of intimidation there. I mean, one of them is just feeling like, “Oh, the other team gets along better. They’re tighter knit.” And that can be intimidating. Do you think that this kind of social perception that they’re closer and have more in common, is that part of the intimidation?

Philip: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point. I would believe so. There’s some very interesting research; I always wanted to try to sort of do something in sports with that that actually shows that things like having rituals where teams move together, that this increases team cohesion. That if they do engage in something like the haka, moving very synchronously, this in fact does lead to a bigger belonging to the team. Sort of less ‘me’ and less ‘I’ in team.

Zach: Like brainwashing. Kind of like group cohesion, actually. Yeah.

Philip: Yeah. I think it’s quite likely. I don’t think it’s been been shown but I think it’s a very feasible hypothesis that this would increase team cohesion. Again, if people actually feel that sort of, ‘I’m really proud of this team, I’ll do everything to help this team,’ I’m pretty sure opponents will notice that as teams that are very close together, functioning very well as a team. Opponents are bound to observe that.

Zach: So, you’ve gotten a good amount of attention for your football-related work, aka soccer-related work. Maybe you could give a summary of the most important work as you see that you’ve done the area of football.

Philip: Football, of course, is something that’s very big in Germany. Often the actual sport isn’t what I’m so interested in, but sort of using it to test theories in psychology. We’ve done a lot of research on football penalties, but mainly because this is a very good situation I find to study body language, study nonverbal behavior. First of all, it’s quite static. Environments are very controlled environments; two players playing against each other, but you can monitor both the goalkeeper and the penalty taker very closely. You can see what’s their facial expressions, the body language, and it’s got a very clear outcome. It’s a very easy-to-study environment, much easier than studying 11 on 11 soccer. So this is one of the reasons we’ve done so much research here. So we’ve looked at several things, so maybe I’ll stick with work on nonverbal behavior that we’ve done on body language. Here, in combined work with some other European scientists, we were able to identify one kind of nonverbal behavior that’s clearly related with being not so successful that shows that you’re anxious. And this is something that we’ve called ‘hastening and hiding’ behavior. You can see that quite often in situations where a lot of pressure is on the performer, and they show behavior of sort of trying to get out of this situation as quickly as possible. In the soccer penalty kick situation, you can see first of all before very important shots like in penalty shootouts when you have to score in order to keep your your team in the shootout, you find that you can monitor this hasting and hiding behavior. This usually shows in the penalty taker. When he’s placed the ball on the spot, he turns his back towards the goalkeeper and walks back and then turns around again. So he turns his back towards the goalkeeper, which we say he’s sort of hiding a bit in front of the goalkeeper, and then the hastening comes. That when the referee blows the whistle– so there’s always a signal in the penalty situation– then the player sees that a bit like starting shot in 100-meter dash, and they immediately initiate the run-up. And both of these behaviors-

Zach: So that’s hastening, as opposed to taking their time with the shot.

Philip: Exactly. Then sort of waiting a bit, looking at the goalkeeper… And you can find that both turning this back and initiating a run up immediately when the referee blows the whistle, this is associated with poor performance. We’ve also done more research that this creates negative impressions in observers, in goalkeepers, and has various ways of negatively affecting the performance. But maybe this hastening and hiding, we haven’t only looked at that in the penalty kick situations. We can find quite a few sporting situations like free throws in basketball, performance in darts has always been in these self-paced situations. This hastening usually leads to more negative performance. These are the two behaviors that you could show across a whole bunch of penalty takers, that this seems to be a general pattern that is negatively associated with performance. Often, you find that players show individual things that distinguish only within that player between when they’re performing successfully, as opposed to performing better. So we don’t find very many general behaviors that always are associated with negative performance. It’s something that’s quite individual, so it makes more sense studying that within a person. This is something that we are doing at the moment because we have been successful finding a facial expression of success, finding a body posture of success, or body posture of failure. This is something that seems to be quite individual and something that we couldn’t find. So in science, you’re always looking for these general laws, but this seems to be something that’s quite individual.

Zach: Yeah, I guess it gets into, you know, these things are often so much more complex. Like, there’s multiple ways to be anxious, there’s an anxiety that can cause you to rush something and then there’s the anxiety that can cause you to prolong something. There’s different ways it can play out.

Philip: Completely. This is something that was a bit frustrating at the beginning because that’s something that we were looking for. But just as you were saying, there are these well-known videos, at least in Europe with Zinedine Zidane actually throwing up before important penalty but then scoring an amazing penalty. Which is clearly a sign that he was feeling very anxious but he still could pull it together and perform well. So it’s not as easy as I would like to have it sometimes, that you can find, “Okay, this kind of behavior is going to lead to that.” That’s something that we haven’t found.

Zach:Yeah, that’s actually something I was talking about with Alan Crowley who helped me write these questions who researched some of these questions and was more familiar with your work. We were talking about some athletes, some high performers of any of area of sports or otherwise will be more likely to be very calm under pressure, but then there’s some people that the anxiety is what drives them to perform well. So the spectrum, like you said, it’s not easy to pinpoint like, what mental state will lead to what success or failure. But I’m curious, do you have a sense? Because I would guess that the people that are more unnaturally calm under pressure would be more likely to be overrepresented in high-performing sports, or athletes. But I’m curious, do you think that bears out? Or do you think there’s just as many people in sports who are successful that are anxious and driven by the anxiety?

Philip: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think it would be very similar to the normal population. At least this is something that one hears from applied sports psychologists that a lot of very high perfomers, they sort of dreaded very much important performances coming up. But they can still do very well in these situations. They do feel the nerves, they do feel this arousal anxiety, but can somehow keep it together. And some people in some situations can’t. I don’t think it’s something that elite athletes would be different to the normal population. Obviously, the ones that are the absolute best, they are at the absolute top because they succeed in the situations when it matters the most. But it’s hard to pinpoint by ‘that is the case’.

Zach: So when it comes to the hastening and hiding behaviors of, let’s say, penalty kickers, I’m curious, would that be a situation where you would advise avoiding those behaviors? Or is it maybe another case of where you know, those people are anxious so they’re probably going to have the outcomes of anxiety no matter how they pretend to perform?

Philip: Yeah. I mean, those are things that you also see a lot less now. The first person who actually spoke about that was Norwegian sports psychologist Geir Jordet who we’ve also done some research together with, we sort of followed up on his work. He also works with several national teams and since this has been published about 10 years ago, it’s become a lot less than you can see that in the top penalty shootout. So people seem to become aware of that and this is something that they train, that they try to avoid that this is something that is not beneficial to performance. So it makes sense to try to build that into your pre-shot routines, don’t show this behavior so you can control these things, and like that, you sort of have things you can focus your attention on when you’re in a very stressful situation that you can’t control and that have been shown to be negatively linked to performance.

Zach: So would that mean in the case of hastening, would that mean that players are no longer rushing as much and they’re taking their time more than they did before? And is that helping their performance?

Philip: Yes, this is something that you do see that people in these high-pressure situations, they do work on routines, that they’ve got a planned concept in their mind that they focus their attention on. And the good thing about that is that it focuses their limited attentional capacity on something that they can control. Put the ball down, face the goalkeeper, take five step back backwards, referee blows the whistle, take three deep breaths, and then strike the ball in a certain corner. These are things you can control as the positive aspect that you don’t sort of focus on what might happen when I miss the shot, on various ruminations, and it also helps to control these aspects of your nonverbal behavior. So it’s likely to have beneficial effects in these situations.

Zach: When it comes to goalkeepers, one paper suggested that staying in the middle is the optimum strategy, another article suggested that goalkeepers should distract shooters, and I think you suggested that waiting longer to react may be helpful. In your opinion, when it comes to goalkeeper strategies, do you have opinions on that area?

Philip: Yeah. Those are all strategies that have been published in good journals. I mean, that’s always what happens. Experiments, they focus on one or two variables, and then maybe lead to a recommendation that doesn’t take all the variables in play into account during an actual match. Staying in the middle, that’s, I think, a study of [Michael Bailey] a couple of years ago that shows that in the soccer penalty situation, goalkeepers show something like action bias. Because not acting in a situation like that would be something that is socially not wanted, so they tend to always jump into one corner. And that’s why penalty takers can exploit this by shooting in the middle, and you can increase your chances by waiting in the middle. So this can be a strategy that is helpful in some situations. It should certainly be part of the goalkeepers’ repertoire. You should not always dive, but sometimes also stand in the middle. I think that would be good advice. Then there’s a lot of other research. For example, we did some research that shows that drawing attention from the penalty taker towards yourself by waving your arms or doing some kind of behavior draws attention towards you. And then there are studies that show that when attention is fixed onto the goalkeeper, then the aiming behavior, the shots are also tended to be placed a little bit closer to the goalkeeper. So strategy where you draw attention of the penalty taker. Then it makes sense to wait a bit longer because it’s not so likely that a very accurate penalty is gonna happen right next to the goal posts, then you can increase your chances by waiting a bit longer and then trying to save the penalty like that. There’s also other research that was done that was initiated by Rich Masters who’s now in New Zealand, that could show goalkeepers can also stand a bit off centre, sort of they can move themselves a tiny bit off centre, so that it’s hardly perceivable by the penalty taker. And then they can’t really say that the goalkeeper’s off centre, but they implicit notice something. And yeah, statistically significant they shoot more towards the corner with more place, and then the goalkeeper exploiting that and the diving to that corner can be a good strategy.

Zach: That’s interesting.

Philip: So there are all these indications from research which goalkeepers can try to exploit in their behaviour. One important thing that one has to look at and we’ve also done some research in this area is that there’s two different strategies penalty takers usually take. The goalkeeper-dependent one, looking what the goalkeeper is doing and then shoot to another corner. Or the goalkeeper-independent one, sort of pre-determining where you’re going to shoot and strike the ball as hard as you can. And if you hit it properly, then the chances of the goalkeeper are not so good. So the goalkeeper has to try to identify which strategy the penalty taker is likely to take. First of all by studying this penalty taker, which is his preferred strategy? And then their behavioral cues that indicate which strategies he’s going to take. For example, run up speed, his run. If he runs up a bit slowly, then it’s more likely he’s going to do the keeper-dependent strategy. I mean, this is all something that goes very fast. But these are little bits of information that can sort of help to increase the chances of saving a penalty kick. So if you see that penalty taker is gonna take a keeper-dependent strategy, then it’s advisable to wait as long as possibly, get him nervous so the goalkeeper’s not deciding, and then trying to react to that. These are pieces of information that you can use and if you know a penalty taker usually takes a keeper-independent strategy, then you can try to do this off-centre technique. Stand a bit away from the middle, and then research shows he’s more likely to shoot to the open corner and then jump as hard as you can to the other corner. Like that, you might be able to increase your chances a bit.

Zach: Yeah. Regarding that, I wanted to read a quote from apparently the only goalkeeper that stopped a penalty from Messi during the World Cup. Actually, I’m not sure how you pronounce his name. Szczęsny, maybe. He said, “Now, I can say that I knew where Messi would shoot. But at the time, I wasn’t so sure. Leo looks at the keeper on some penalties and hits hard on others. I knew that if he was going to hit hard, it would be more to my left. I saw that he was not stopping so I went, I sensed, I defended.” End quote. So he had studied Messi and discovered a bit of a pattern there. But that was just interesting for being related to what you were saying about studying when you can, if you think there’s a pattern there.

Philip: Yeah, and I think that’s a nice anecdote, sort of speaking to that. I think you can find individual cues within a player that would point to likely behaviors he’s going to adopt. Like the one that the Polish goalkeeper recognized in penalties run up. And I think it makes sense studying videos of individual players and then trying to determine patterns in what they’re likely going to do. This makes a lot more sense than having a general strategy over all players. I think these nonverbal cues are much more likely tells if you study individual players. There’s also this nice story that I talk sometimes about when I’m lecturing on this to my students. I think it’s in the biography of Andre Agassi who said he found a tell in the serve of Boris Becker who usually pointed his tongue out before he served the ball. If he pointed the tongue out straight, then the serve was much more likely to go straight. Then when he pointed the tongue out sort of an angle, then he would more serve to the outside. And I think that’s also quite a nice example of how individual players study the mimics, the nonverbal behavior of opponents and can find patterns. But for years, researchers have found very little patterns that always point to a behavioral outcome following a certain number of verbal behavior.

Zach: Yeah, it’s complicated. I’ll throw in there too that I did a previous episode, I interviewed tennis coach Carlos Garfia and we talked a bit about that Andre Agassi-Boris Becker tell. I’ll just throw that in there. But yeah, it’s difficult because there’s so much variety and a lot of cases the practical approach is just to play the most very optimal approach, because all the factors that can kind of break down and you’re left with just, “Well, I should just do the best strategy for this moment, regardless of what the other person is doing or what I think.”

Philip: Yeah.

Zach: So there was a recent controversy over Argentina goalkeeper Martinez during the World Cup. What’s your opinion about– if you know about it– what’s your opinion about his verbal and nonverbal methods of distracting Netherlands and France’s penalty shooters.

Philip: He got a lot of bad press about it and players certainly liked him less. On the other hand, the main goal is to be successful, he was very successful. But this is something that I don’t like to see. It’s borderline unfair what he did, I think. He used behavior that was at the limits of what’s allowed.

Zach: What was he doing?

Philip: Well, he was trying to distract the penalty takers every chance he got. I mean, he did what I was talking about before. Sort of getting the attention of the penalty takers, trying to bring them out of their routines, and very vivid behavior that…

Zach: Was it offensive behavior, or was it…

Philip: It wasn’t actually offensive behavior. It wasn’t showing gestures that are actually offensive, not allowed, that have to be sanctioned. But it was the whole time at the border of what is allowed. Also, of course, when they received the award he was also behaving badly. In general, he performed extraordinarily well, but he’ll only be remembered for this bad behavior that he showed there. It would have been nicer to win without that, I would say.

Zach: It reminds me. In poker, there’s what they call angle shooting, which is a term for things that are not technically illegal in the game but are perceived as immoral by a good number of people and outside the realm of proper game. It sounds like it was in this kind of grey area of, “Yeah, sure. It’s allowed and you might do okay with it,” but people are going to frown on you and look down on you a bit.

Philip: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That’s what it was. It was not gentleman-like behavior. And this is something that, obviously, sport is very competitive also at the highest level, but you don’t want people wining like that. I also don’t think that was the reason they won, but it was sort of a negative… I don’t know the English word. It had a negative connotation attached to it.

Zach: So in one of your 2016 study, you found that when the nonverbal behavior of the referee is perceived by viewers as less confident when they decide a foul, for example, players were more likely to argue with the referee in contrast with when he called a clear foul when is his body language is more confident. That would seem to say, maybe it would make sense to teach referees to have some confidence in their calls, but like we’ve been talking about, that could backfire because if you do that on a clearly wrong or close call, you might lose respect from people. Do you have thoughts on the practical benefits of that research?

Philip: Yeah. There was several experiments we did in this paper. The first we wanted to check, we thought referees would be a good group to do research on because they actually get trained in this facet of nonverbal communication. They get seminars and nonverbal behavior experts come to them trying to teach them to communicate their decisions in a confident manner. Part of this research was looking into, “Okay, how successful is this coaching?” And then what we did there is we recorded or we took television recordings of referees, and we knew of course the situations that they were communicating and so we could distinguish situations that were absolutely clear, so we tested that and situations that were not so clear. And what we did then, we had people rate the body language of the coaches. And there we found quite clear patterns that when they were communicating ambiguous decisions, difficult situations, the body language was less confident. Sort of speaking in the direction that we do have this automatic tendency when we are not so sure about something, that this shows in our facial expressions and this shows in our body language. This is something that people are equipped with and this comes with the evolution of people. We do communicate how we feeling inside even if you don’t want to. This was the instance of that in this first line of research.

What we then did is recreated a hypothetical scenario, again, then showed different videos of referees who’d just given a yellow card or red card or given a penalty. And then told players, “Okay, this was a 50/50 situation, how likely would you be to contest the call of the referee?” There, you could clearly see if a referee on one of these videos was communicating an ambiguous situation but the people in our study of course didn’t know, they were a lot more likely to argue, to debate with the referee; showing that, okay, we do have this natural tendency of showing how we are feeling inside and this can have negative consequences on the playing field so the referee might be more likely to lose control of the game. Again, I don’t think there are quick fixes for that, I think it’s interesting to understand that, and I do think that referees are well advised to work on this and I’m sure they do. And yeah, but does have to find ways of then interacting with the players even if you are not sure in this situation, by trying to communicate it in a confident manner, but also being authentic and then trying to create understanding in the players– maybe telling them, talking to them why you decided like that. Being human too. I mean, people come with this tendency that they do show that in their body language.

Zach: It gets back to the theme we’ve been talking about a few times where it’s like, you can use some of this knowledge to your benefit in various ways, but you also have to be aware that using it badly will have repercussions for you.

Philip: Yes. Yes. Exactly, because humans aren’t perfect. I mean, referees are getting assistance now from technology, which I think is a good idea. That you can’t see everything that’s going on the pitch, and then if you have methods of reinsuring yourself as a video assistant referee and things like that, that’s beneficial. That will help the referee and they won’t be so often in situations where they made a call that might have been wrong but then they can correct it later. This is likely to cause less friction on the playing field.

Zach: Would you like to talk about any other important work that you’ve done in sports behavior, or do you think we’ve covered a good amount of it there?

Philip: Yeah, I think we’ve talked about very interesting work. I can maybe talk a bit more about ongoing work that we are also doing. We also trying to use a lot of technology now to automatically trace facial behavior during sports competitions and trying to find contingencies between that, and working on automated ways of detecting certain behavioral patterns like posture during game situations. This is something that’s interesting that’s also a lot of fun, but we are still quite at the beginning of that. Also here, for example, I think you mentioned that you also have a poker background. Is that correct?

Zach: Yeah, I used to play for a living and I’m most well known for my books on poker tells and poker behavior. Yeah.

Philip: Exactly. We’ve also played around with that, for example. I mean, there’s so much interesting material you can use in this research. We fuse these facial emotion recognitions on thousands of images from poker players for example when they’ve got a strong hand and when they’ve got a weak hand. I haven’t found any contingencies there that there might be something that’s associated over the players when they are bluffing, in comparison to when they have a good hand from this facial recognition software. This is something that we’ve looked into. We’ve also tried to find facial patterns, for example if a penalty taker scores a penalty or misses a penalty. Also there, we haven’t found much.

Zach: How can people keep up with what you’re doing now?

Philip: I always try to publish the book that I’m doing. That’s always slow, scientific publishing always takes quite a bit of time. I upload all my studies on ResearchGate, at least if the journalists don’t get rid of the articles again due to copyright things. But people can also always send me an email if they’re interested in the research and I can send them copies of the papers.

Zach: If you do ever want any help on the poker-related research, I’ve written some critiques of past poker studies and I’ve also helped people who have done poker behaviour-related studies. So just throwing that out there if you ever just want some help on anything, let me know.

Philip: Yeah, that’d be actually really interesting because as I was saying at the moment was more playing around. We’ve got interested students who wanted to do that and it’s quite easy to get some of the footage. Yeah, I’d be very interested and I’m always looking for interesting avenues for new research.

Zach: Yeah, and one more. I’ve always been surprised that there aren’t more studies involving in poker, because it’s such an interesting and very formal environment to study some very specific behaviors. I think one of the reasons is it’s hard to set up the game and to do your own setup of a game is difficult, it has a few factors there. But yeah, I think it’s a great opportunity for studying very specific situations.

Philip: Yeah, especially the nonverbal behaviour. [chuckles] This is something of course that you link very much with poker. But I find great is that nowadays you’ve got all this video footage. And if you set that up… Well, it’s actually all there and we’ve got tools for analyzing facial behavior, we’ve got tools for analyzing body language. And it’s just interesting to gain a more systematic understanding. At the moment I’m quite confident that you don’t have these universal tells or something. But you can find interesting patterns within an individual depending on the situation.

Zach: I will say– do not want to get too much off on a tangent– but I will say the big challenge with using the footage that’s out there is that one of the most important places to find poker tells is when someone has made a significant bet. And in televised poker footage, the usual editing or directing approach is to cut away from the person who has just bet. So that’s one of the most frustrating things for me as someone who’s made videos. They always cut away at the most interesting part when you want to study the person who’s just made a significant bet, you know? Anyway, it’s not to get off on a tangent, but…

Philip: No, no, that’s good.

Zach: There can be challenges there. I actually said that in my Poker Tells video course because I use a lot of televised footage in that. And I say, “It’s frustrating because I would have a lot of things to show you here, but I can’t because they always cut away from the players.” Anyway, this has been great, Phillip. Thanks for coming on and I really appreciate you taking the time.

Philip: Yeah, thank you very much. It was a lot of fun. And yeah, very good questions.

Zach: That was sports psychology researcher Philip Furley.

This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com. If you enjoyed this episode, just a note that I’ve done quite a few sports-related and game-related episodes. I’ve done talks on reading behavior in American football, in tennis, in mixed martial arts, and a couple episodes on poker tells. 

Thanks again to Alan Crawley, also known as Sin Verba, for his research and help with this episode. 

If you enjoy this podcast, go to my website behavior-podcast.com for some ideas on how you can show your support. There’s an option to subscribe to an ad-free version. Please consider sharing episodes with people you know; that’s one of the most appreciated things you can do fo rme, just sharing episodes you like. 

Ok thanks for listening.

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podcast

Why are we so gullible?, with Brian Dunning

A talk with Brian Dunning, who you might call a professional skeptic. He has been doing the Skeptoid podcast since 2006, and is the creator of multiple books and video projects aimed at promoting critical thinking and skepticism. We talk about the reasons why we’re so often drawn to pseudoscience, bullshit, and no/low-evidence ideas in general. I also ask him what he thinks about a range of things, including chiropractic work, acupuncture, UFOs, eye movement desensitization therapy (EMDT), the placebo effect, and more. 

Listen to the episode:

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Related podcast episodes of mine:

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podcast

How big a problem are hate crimes in the U.S.?, with Wilfred Reilly

Wilfred Reilly is a political scientist, Kentucky State University professor, and author of the 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax. I wanted to talk to Reilly about the nature of hate crimes in America. One reason I wanted to discuss this is because our perceptions of hate crimes, and racism more generally, are a factor in our us-versus-them polarization, and so examining nuance in this area can be helpful for depolarization purposes. Transcript below.

Topics discussed include: how hate crimes are tracked; why it can be hard to get a clear picture of hate crime numbers; the logic of ‘hate crime’ as a legal designation; irresponsible media coverage of racism-related issues; the motivations of people who fake hate crimes; distorted perceptions of American hate crimes and racism; how distorted perceptions can amplify polarization; and what it’s like working on these topics while teaching at a historically black college. 

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Resources related to or mentioned in our talk:

TRANSCRIPT

Zachary Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding others, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com, and you can subscribe to the podcast there, too. 

On today’s episode, I’ll be talking to Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist who’s the author of a book called Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War. In that book, he examines many instances of hate crime hoaxes, with a focus on, as he sees it, the liberal leaning media’s irresponsible coverage of these things. He sees the media coverage as helping create divisive, untrue narratives, and as contributing to support for the far right. 

I’ll read the first paragraph of his book, as it gives a sense of his views and of why he’s passionate about this topic: 

Authors of books that lean right are often accused of “hating” someone, or everyone. To the contrary! I am a proud Black man, and this book is both a pro-American and a profoundly pro-Black work of social science. I write it with the intention of lancing a boil. One major issue poisoning relations between whites and people of color (POC) in America today, and to a lesser extent relations between the two sexes and our nation’s social classes, is an ongoing epidemic of patently false claims of oppression. Making outrageous claims of oppression—”Baseball is racist”; “The math SAT is culturally biased!”—is arguably the main thing the modern activist Left does, and the backlash against such patently absurd contentions is largely responsible for the rise of the even more god-awful alt-right. End quote

A little later in the book he writes: Bigotry does exist. But that fact is no justification for false claims of oppressive violence, which are rife: complete hoaxes make up a sizable percentage of all widely reported hate crimes. 

I’ll read another few sentences from a 2019 article in Commentary magazine he wrote: 

Our nation is not racked with hate crimes. When people in positions of power or visibility say that it is, they should be rebuked for it. […] It’s difficult to think of a more compelling task for American scholars than to point out the dangerous lies behind this invented crisis.  

If you’re politically liberal, there’s a good chance you’ll disagree with some of what Reilly has to say. But I think this is an important topic and I hope you’ll listen to this episode. I was reading Reilly’s work as research for my depolarization book, because, when it comes to depolarization work, trying to correct our distorted perceptions is a big part of that work. And Reilly is correct that many of us do have some very distorted perceptions about the state of this country, and about “the other side.” And he’s right that the media is often irresponsible in their coverage of race-related topics. That’s something I’m currently writing about in my depolarization book, and it’s something I’ve tackled in past episodes: for example, see the episode titled “Are a majority of Americans actually racist?” One can believe all of that while still believing racism and hate crimes exist and are problems: Reilly’s work is attempting to show that it’s not as big a problem as some people believe it is, and arguing that it’s important that journalists and the media take a more nuanced and responsible approach to these topics. 

I’d also say: even if you wholeheartedly disagree with a lot that Reilly says, hearing his points will help you better understand conservative points of view, and that alone is worthwhile and depolarizing. Hearing Reilly’s points will help you understand why many conservatives perceive liberals as being hysterical and divisive on issues of race, and you can understand that perspective even while disagreeing with it. When hearing the points Reilly makes, some liberals will have an instinctive reaction in thinking that such views are due to malicious motives of some sort and I think this is related to some basic polarization dynamics: we have an instinctive urge to get upset and judge people harshly when they say things that don’t align with narratives that are sacred to us or our group. But I think it’s important to attempt to see the rational and well meaning concerns that are driving people’s beliefs on these issues. When we see their perspective, we better understand their frustration and anger, and we can better engage with their ideas. 

I’ll give a specific example of hate-crime-focused news coverage I noticed that struck me as very bad and irresponsible. A 2021 CNN article was titled As attacks against Asian Americans spike, advocates call for action to protect communities. That article discussed four incidents and, from a quick read of the headline and the article, you’d probably get the impression that these incidents were linked to bigotry in some way. But after doing some research on the incidents in that article, I found that none of those incidents were known to be linked to bigotry or anti-Asian sentiment. Here are some of the stories it included: 

  • A Thai man was pushed down by a young man in San Francisco. The police later said that they didn’t believe the attack was racially motivated; they thought the young man was having some sort of mental episode. 
  • A 64-year-old Asian woman was robbed in San Francisco. This seemed to be a typical robbery; at least from what I could find, there was no evidence it was related to race. 
  • In New York City, a Filipino man was slashed across the face after objecting to the man pushing his bag. The offender was never caught, and there’s no evidence the attack was racially motivated. 
  • A 91-year-old Asian man was pushed to the ground by a man who had also been caught pushing down several other elderly people. He had psychiatric problems, and was charged with elder abuse. 

People of all races are randomly attacked in big cities on a regular basis, some of it due to mental illness and some of it due to crime, and it’s possible that some of the attacks categorized as anti-Asian hate crimes are not any different than some of those kinds of attacks. It’s also possible that the more attention is drawn to hate crimes, the more the media and citizens are likely to filter things through that lens. For example, people may hear about a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes and then, if they experience or witness non-hate-related violence, they may be more likely to perceive it and report it as a hate crime. So there can seem to be a lot of nuance and feedback cycles in these areas. 

I could give many more examples of this kind of thing, and Reilly includes many examples in his Hate Crime Hoax book. Hopefully you can see why these kinds of media behaviors strike people as irresponsible and divisive. Hopefully you can see why people like Reilly can see it as an important endeavor to try to bring more nuance to these areas. The left talks a lot about fear mongering by the Right, but it’s possible for people to perceive a lot of fear mongering from liberal-leaning media also. 

One reason I think this is such an important topic for depolarization purposes is that, for many liberals, they will name race-related violence as one of the things that make them so concerned about Trump and conservatives. People are very scared, and fear for their safety and other people’s safety, and they blame Trump and conservatives for that. For example, they see a link between the rhetoric of conservatives and the mass killings done by far right extremists, like the 2022 Buffalo New York shooting where 10 black people were killed, or the shooting in El Paso, Texas where 23 people were killed. Or they are afraid of various forms of lesser bigotry-caused violence, like people being attacked randomly in the street. And this fear and anger can be hard to get past. It can be an obstacle to people seeing the value of depolarization work. And so, for the purposes of depolarization, I think it’s important to examine that fear and ask: how much is that fear really justified? Because in this area, as in many areas, there’s a lot of nuance, and many distorted perceptions. And so reducing fear and examining nuance is one of the ways we aid depolarization. 

A little bit more about Wilfred Reilly: he teaches at Kentucky State University, which is a historically black college; towards the end of the podcast I talk to him about what kind of reaction he gets for his work at his school. He’s also the author of the book Taboo, in which he argues that certain race, gender, and class issues can no longer be discussed in mainstream American society. One interesting detail about Reilly I’ll read from Wikipedia: 

On April 21, 2016, Reilly participated in a regionally televised debate against alt-right personality Jared Taylor. Reilly argued for the social value of diversity, contending that it makes life “more interesting, civilized, and fun,” and using published research to point out that mono-racial societies (like Bosnia and Somalia) are often no more peaceful or less conflicted than multi-racial societies, due to the greater prevalence of tribal in-fighting within them.

Reilly did that debate as part of demonstrating his philosophy of debating ideas openly, and not trying to shut down debate. 

Reilly is active on Twitter, too, if you want to keep up with him there. 

Just a heads up before we start: this podcast has some ads. If you want to subscribe and get an ad-free version of this podcast, and get a few other features like collaborating on upcoming episodes, getting a free copy of my depolarization book, and more, you can learn more about that by going to behavior-podcast.com/premium. Aside from any benefits, you’ll be supporting me in making this podcast better, and in promoting it, so if you’ve thought my work on this podcast has been interesting or important and you’ve enjoyed all the free content I’ve put out, maybe you’d consider signing up. 

Okay here’s the talk with Wilfred Reilly…

Zachary Elwood: Okay, here’s the talk with Wilfred Reilly. Hi, Will, thanks for coming on the show.

Wilfred Reilly: Glad to be here.

Zach: Maybe we can start with one of the things I’ve experienced in trying to research the hate crime topic for my depolarization book. I’ve just had a problem trying to even understand how hate crime statistics and reports are compiled, and you just see such a range of different stats and interpretations of the stats used by people from across the political spectrum. Some people say they’re under counted, some people say they’re over counted, and it just seems really hard to get to the bottom of what’s going on there. Maybe you can talk a little bit about, for somebody who wonders how do we get accurate data about those statistics, what would you say to people seeking that information?

Wilfred: Well, I’d say that’s a problem with crime stats in general. As you probably know, there are two primary data pools when it comes to American crime data. There’s the FBI itself, which is, if I recall the initialism correctly, the UCR. But that’s a database where police departments, especially in large cities, report the number of crimes and number of felony crimes and so on that occur in their area to a central storing house that’s run by the Federales. There are a lot of problems with this, though. The first is that cities definitely try to play games with this data. I mean, as we’ve seen murder increase recently, we’ve seen very large cities like Chicago just sort of be behind the ball with their FBI data for a particular year. But a bigger issue is just that the majority of crimes aren’t reported. It’s important to keep this in mind. And this isn’t really something where my political position, which is kind of center right, comes into play at all. It’s just a reality. If you’re talking about sexual assaults or rapes, for example, there are a decent number of false accusations but there’s also the reality that only one accusation in three or whatever it is– a feminist scholar would probably have a better grasp on that– is reported at all. The FBI stats are one of the tools you can use when you look into crime data.

The better data warehouse is what’s called the BJS, the Bureau of Justice Statistics annual reports. And that, really, I think is some of the better social science out there. What they do is take pretty well-trained, usually same-race interviewers, and have them reach out and contact about 160,000 people and just ask about their experience with crime. Worded not like, “Did someone try to kill you?” but, “Were you in a situation where X, Y, and Z happened this year?” It’s introduced upfront as the goal of this is to reduce crime in the USA, the response rate is in the ’90s across all racial groups, but kind of getting to the point what the BJS annually finds is that there are about twice as many crimes as those that are officially reported to the PDs and then to the FBI. And you can play a lot of games with this data. For example, we’ve seen the claim that Black men are 6% of the country but make up 60% of the violent crime. That’s essentially just bullshit. That comes from a one-year UCR figure where a lot of big cities reported and a lot of smaller cities in poor, White communities frankly didn’t. So for one point, I believe it was 60.4% of the reported violent crimes in that database had a Black perp. But if you expand out to the BJS and you look at the total number from that enormous sample of 160 or whatever thousand, they can calculate the actual crime rate throughout the United States. I mean, you’re never going to get a better survey sample than that. And if you actually look at all of the violent crimes that occurred or likely occurred in a typical year, that number is going to be something like 10 million. When I broke down that data for one of my books, the Black crime rate was two to 2.5 times the White crime rate, but there was no one ethnic group that made up a giant majority of criminals or anything like that. So you can dig into these multiple data resources and on either side of this debate, you can cite to something that looks very professional and say, “This is the crime data.”

And there’s a lot more of this in social science than people like to admit. There’s an entire book called The Attitudinal Model that just makes the point that if you’re a judge, a professor, what they call a solo leader, there are generally going to be sources on your side. And that’s how a lot of these debates continue for decades. But in the hate crimes space, all of the same problems arise first of all. A large number of crimes are not reported. I’d call that the first problem with crime data, much crime is not reported. Second, as I famously said in the book, a number of the reports are fake or at least they’re overstatements. This is also a problem with data in a number of cases, men reporting domestic violence and this kind of thing. So you have these two problems upfront. But in terms of what you do to get the data, it’s the same as any other crime data compilation. I mean, a lower order local police department will gain knowledge of a case involving, say, a Black guy and a White guy involved in a violent brawl that has the potential characteristics of a hate crime, they’ll investigate that and they’ll decide whether to press hate crime charges. And if a hate crime is reported at that level, it is passed on– without further verification, by the way. But it is passed on to the FBI, to the central governmental database as this is a situation where a hate crime has occurred. So, criminal data collection at the simplest level, unless you’re doing very high-end BJS stuff, is just the police arresting a guy, charging him with a particular crime, and as the case moves forward, sending that up to the Feebies as an example of crime X or a robbery. That is how you get that data.

Zach: Yeah, it seems like for this and for so much of the things we talked about, there’s just so much ambiguity in the data itself, which lends itself to people making a wide range of arguments as you say. Yeah. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the factors that make some of this data ambiguous. And one thing that comes to mind is just the nature of categorising something as a hate crime. Have you seen a lot of that vary in different regions or different police departments, like what even constitutes a hate crime and how do we define that?

Wilfred: Absolutely. One of my first articles on this, this wasn’t quite an academic journal piece but it ran in Quizlet about 10 pages long, but I actually looked at this remarkable surge that they’ve had in hate crimes in the city of Seattle in Washington. And the way this was presented in the media is hate crime is out of control, there’s something going on out there maybe, diverse gentrifiers of all backgrounds are being attacked by working class locals. There was a lot of discussion of this. What had actually happened is that the city had hired someone in a position that I think you can honestly call hate crimes commissar. And they had put a great deal of focus into sort of clarifying this is a hate crime, and if you encounter any situation with these characteristics, we want at least an initial hate crime prosecution. I forget the exact numbers but there had been hundreds of hate crimes reported in this one city as versus the entire state of Florida, for example, I had about a third as many. I’m actually pulling up the article right now. So when I looked into these hate crimes, what I found was very much not gangs of Klansmen roving around beating up Black dudes, or even Black guys New Panthers or something like that attacking Whites or attacking Jews. Most of the hate crime perpetrators were just crazy homeless people. I’m not going to use the racial words, but if some bum frankly was like– hopefully that’s not an offensive term– but was like, “Get out of the road, you bleep bleep whatever,” that might be in that one city pursued as a hate offence. So when you looked at the data set for the hate crime defendants, 25% of them were drug or alcohol addicts, 40% of them– again, that could be off by a bit, but were quote-unquote “living unhoused, they’ve gone beyond homeless as a PC term out there. So they were taking this so seriously, that they were arresting crazy people for any incident where a racial slur was used during a fight outdoors, for example.

Zach: Small note here. It’s been a recent tendency for some people on the left to act as if mental problems won’t influence someone to say racist things, as if we can morally judge mentally ill people who say racist or sexist things. But this is quite clearly wrong, and not just wrong, but a wrongness that exacerbates the stigma of mental illness and mental episodes. I examine this topic in a couple of past episodes. In one incident, a clearly mentally ill woman in California said some bigoted things and was caught on video and that video went viral. In my interview with Rob Tarzwell about his emergency room psychiatric work, he said that this woman was almost certainly suffering from mental illness and said that that can cause someone to say all sorts of antisocial things, things set to shock, saying taboo things and things like that. For that incident in California, there was actually a protest that people held because of that woman’s behaviour, which we can see is related to some of the same hysteria that Reilly is referring to in this episode. Okay, back to the talk.

Wilfred: And then there were other states that have a much more Matthew Shepard-James Byrd let’s-be-serious-about-this approach to hate crime. So again, we’re getting into these core problems with criminal data. I mean, number one is just, do people report? In Black or poor White communities, are people going to the cops like that? Number two is if they do report if you’re looking at domestics or a number of other areas, are they lying? Now, obviously, you want to take the victim very seriously at first but we found that in the hate crime space. And then number three, I guess would be how hard is the police department trying. How broadly are they casting their net? And generally, when you see hundreds of hate offences– on a college campus, they’re called Bias Incident Reports, BIRs– when you see hundreds of big cars within, you know, Oberlin, you kind of start wondering is there really that much hate there? Or are you just taking everything possible to create jobs for the office on point? So yes, the policing approach also dramatically affects the numbers. If I can say one more thing there about how we got the hoaxes, that itself is also pretty contested. There are people, and I’m actually not one of these guys who’s very critical of everyone that disagrees with him, but there are people like Barry Levin that are solid social scientists. They will argue that there are very few hate crime hoaxes. And they’re not lying. But what they’re doing is using this very technical definition where a claim is made and it goes to the feds– the police, then it goes to the feds. And then it turns out that the exact person who claimed they were attacked is revealed conclusively to have been a liar and the feds and the police, as I understand, both update their databases.

So when you go through that, like step 1, 2, 3, yeah, sure, there aren’t very many such cases. What I found for hate crime hoax is that there are a massive number of cases where the following pattern occurs, which is that an incident is reported nationally or internationally as an act of hate. For example, there’s a news found on a college campus. And then it turns out absolutely conclusively, I didn’t put maybe cases in the book, that there was no hate there at all. That one of several things could have happened, the original victim could have just made this up as a sort of prank or to gain attention. Two, someone else could have made this up as a prank or to gain attention. Or three, nothing happened at all. For example, a construction site left a GI rope hanging over a tree. I mean, you can have that debate. Like, is [00:22:09 unintelligible] is that a narrative collapsed? Does that fit my broad definition of a hoax and so on? But what we can say conclusively, and I didn’t count that as a hoax, but what we can say conclusively is that it didn’t happen. Anyway, step three in my book, the collapse also has to be documented in a national or regional news media source. I could have doubled the list if I’d go on with college kids contacting me and saying, “Hey, we all know this didn’t happen. This was the Pikes, the fraternity playing a prank.” But when you get into a hate crime, it’s just reported to the police, reported to the feds. And a hate crime hoax, if you’re using a narrow definition, is reported to the police, reported to the feds, proven to be a hoax by the person who initially made the claim, and then admitted as that by the police and by the feds. If you just look at the broader level of absolutely collapsed and usually the original victim did it, there were hundreds of these within a pretty narrow window.

Zach: Yeah, and what you were saying with the places reporting being more likely to report hate crimes and it just seems like there’s so many factors involved in that too. For example, when Trump was elected, it seems like more people were going to filter things through the lens of racism, for example, homeless people saying racial slurs or something in the past that might have passed without comment. Or we would say oh, they have some problems and now people would be more likely to view that as a serious threat that needed to be handled. So, just in that sense. And the ambiguity also of, say, somebody attacks their wife’s lover and yells a racial slur in the process. Is that qualified? Would people categorize that as a hate crime? I think many people would say that’s just a crime with a side of bigotry or something, but some people might disagree and classify that as a hate crime. Is that part of it too? Does a racial slur being present… Would some people categorize that as a hate crime?

Wilfred: Yeah, that was one of the specific issues that came up in Seattle. For me if I had to think about this– and I don’t really think the idea of hate crimes makes all that much sense. I mean, I have the standard kind of just over-the-Republican-line male view, which is that there aren’t that many crimes of love. If you beat someone up because you think lawyers are shysters, you don’t like poor Whites or you don’t like dentists or Democrats or whatever, that’s not a hate crime at all. If you beat someone up because they’re White, regardless of income, or because they’re Black, then that’s a hate crime. I don’t really see that is being worse than the first set of attacks that are political, for example, or that might involve sexual violence against women. But yeah, if you’re going to have the category at all, I guess the most logical cut off would be a crime primarily motivated by hate. Not where someone’s race played a tertiary role, but where you’re attacking the person because they’re Black. But yeah, you can expand on all of this. A legal statute would say something like considerable role for race orientation etc, and you could take that as you wish. That’s up to you, or that’s up to the decision maker who’s making that call. So yeah, we see wildly variant numbers when it comes to the range of potential hate offences that are actually treated in practice as hate crimes. I think it’s fair to say that.

The other point you made, which is almost funny, is about a big orange Julius Caesar Donald Trump. During the Trump administration, there was a frantic attempt to link Trump to rises in racial tension. Which actually rose at least there sharply under Mr. Obama when he started coming out and saying, “My son would look like Trayvon. You can think that Obama was a better more coherent president, although I don’t necessarily, but you can’t really say he improved race relations. But there was a real focus on Trump being the guy at fault. One of the worst pieces of social science I’ve ever seen, at least in terms of how the media presented it, was a study that was invariably presented as hate crimes increased 206% after Trump rallies. This ran in the Washington Post. The idea was that counties that had had a Trump rally had seen this massive surge of 200% in these violent incidents, Blacks and Whites fighting, and that’s what Trump was, he brought that kind of evil. And when I actually looked at the methods for this, and the author’s themselves aren’t even necessarily at fault, but what they had found was that counties that hosted Trump rallies saw a 2% increase in hate crime and counties that didn’t saw a 1% increase in hate crime. And since two is 200% of one, the press was able to spin this into there’s a 200% surge wherever that that orange bastard goes, if that makes sense. So, you saw a lot of things like that.

There was another claim, I think this is 2017 in the second year Trump was in power, hate crimes increased by more than a thousand. But when I and other researchers started looking at that, I still haven’t broken this down county by county to see if this explains the entire change, but what became apparent pretty rapidly is that as police departments and the feds started formalising their their violence numbers in response to BLM and in response to a government inquest, that particular year you also saw a thousand more police departments report hate crimes in the first place. So again, tell me if I need to clarify any of this, but there was an increase of a thousand hate crimes. There was also an increase of a thousand reporting departments. So, each department would have had to report one hate crime to explain the entire increase. I personally offhand would say Trump was probably correlated with a 2% increase in racial tensions or something like that, but there’s a big difference between saying that kind of minor negative and saying what people actually did. Like, “He almost brought us a race war,” and this kind of just complete nonsense.

Zach: Getting back to that hate crime as a designation, I’ve even seen progressive philosophy or writing about why the hate crime designation is not a good one for reasons of, you know, people who are more poor and have more disadvantages are more likely to be charged with hate crime designations. For example, like the example you brought up of homeless people who have mental issues who are more likely to say things like that, or just poor people in general who may be more prone to those kinds of things for lack of education and things like that and so they’re more likely to have more adverse judicial punishments and things like this. And getting back to the idea of… It’s not clear to me that the hate crime definition should exist, it seems like a very debatable argument. I just wanted to throw that in there.

Wilfred: Yeah, I’d agree with that. One of the things that was really surprising when I looked at who commits hate crimes– and this data is easily available online. I mean, if you just Google USA hate crimes 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, you get an FBI publication containing either online or hardcopy breakdowns of all of those years. So there’s nothing that you or I are saying here that’s contested. But when I looked started looking at who commits hate crimes, I suppose I’d been bamboozled a little bit by the media even after my research on interracial crime and Black Lives Matter, and I expected it to be mostly kind of trench coat White guys and maybe fraternity through gamer demographic. That’s not at all the case, actually. The two groups most likely to offend in the hate crime space were Blacks and then I think Samoans, Pacific Islanders. Blacks were very heavily over represented. We make up about 12% of the country, we make up well over 20% of the hate criminals, usually 25-plus. So there are a lot of hate crimes against Blacks in the limited sense that there are a lot of hate crimes at all. I mean, there were fewer than 7000 hate crimes in a typical year. Again, if you go through those BJS index reports, there are about 20 million serious crimes of violent and serious property crimes in a typical year. So hate crime is not a massive arena of crime, we get along fairly well. But of the hate crimes that do occur, there quite a few against Blacks, sometimes almost 2000 in a year. But it’s worth remembering that they’re also almost a thousand against Whites, there were 700 in the most recent year on record, and they’re about 1200 against Jews. So the attacks on the two Caucasian populations are generally about as common as frequent as the attacks on the Black community, and then you get both Whites and Blacks attacking gays and so on down the line.

For hate crime to make sense, if you’re really trying to crack down on that old devil of White supremacy or something like that, you would have to be pursuing mostly Klansmen and people in that space. In fact, yeah, if you’re a young Black guy and you’re involved in a racial conflict with a Latin gay, or you’re offended by a gay guy in your neighborhood– not that that’s an acceptable excuse but you launch an attack there– you are very likely also going to get the hate crime enhancement. I would say that virtually any criminal law is going to disadvantage poor people. Because poor people are younger, broker, they have worse lawyers, and they’re more likely to be criminals. So this again is the kind of help that we often see from the left. I mean, I grew up in a working class community where it’s this stupid shit like, “Let’s take the cops off the streets because they’re sometimes abusive.” Well, yeah, but if you take the cops off the streets, then the neighbourhoods are run by gangbangers. Similarly, if you enhance the penalties for certain crimes, selling certain varieties of drug and hate crime and so on, you might reel in some serious pushers or the occasional White guy who comes to those areas to do violence. But you’re also taking a whole bunch of young poor men and throwing them in jail for a really long period of time. I mean, a hate crime enhancement can make a misdemeanor fight into a serious felony.

Zach: Right. When I mentioned the progressive arguments I’d seen against the hate crime designation, that was part of the two with how disadvantaged racial minorities are also. Getting into the ambiguity caused by the purposeful hoaxes, what did you see as the main emotions and goals for the people that had done these pretty blatant hoaxes like the ones on college campuses that you talked about a lot? What did you see? How did you make sense of those cases and why people were doing that?

Wilfred: Well, one of the most notable things about what you just said is that if you go to a reputable website that looks at this, like www.fakehatecrimes.org– I think my own datasets even better but again there are multiple datasets containing hundreds of these– what you’ll find is that on the first 10 or 12 pages of the site, more than a third of the cases– and I found a slightly higher figure myself– take place on a collegiate campus; a college, university, dormitory, prep school, that kind of thing. So that in and of itself is telling when we get into motivation. Overall, I think there are two basic categories of motivation for something like this. One is just the ordinary mundane reasons that ‘MFs commit crimes’. It’s the phrase that came into my mind. But insurance money, that kind of thing. I mean, in Chicago, the famous Velvet Rope Ultra Lounge case where a guy burnt down this after-hours bisexual nightclub that was really popular and wrote these slurs like fag throughout the building, he did that simply to collect a check. Owing people money in the nightlife business in Chicago is not always a good idea, he wanted to get an insurance payout, okay. But what we more often see in the college campus cases is– although I don’t know if this guy was tied into anyone negative, he just wanted money– but in the college campus cases, I think what you’re seeing is the power of victimization that we’ve given to people and especially to these kids. So in a lot of these cases where something happened, I’m thinking of the UChicago hoax where a graduate student named Derek Caquelin claimed that an entire hacker group which he called the UChicago Electronic Army was sort of chasing him around campus threatening him every time he logged onto his machine with anal rape and abuse because it was campus activism, the goal of that was very specific. As I recall, they wanted a Chicano Student Centre. There were editorials and a collegiate but still widely read paper about this. There often were parades through campus, you know, hate has no home here.

So I think that because we’ve created this idea where it’s good to be a victim, you know, we want the bi-part perspective to be a big part of this meeting and this kind of college stuff, it’s very encouraging to try to speed forward and debate by providing quote-unquote some evidence of what Oberlin view is really like. And we’ve seen large-scale examples of this. Like the University of Missouri, about four or five years back there were all these student protests going on. And people were claiming these crazy things; the president hit one of the protesters with a car probably for racial reasons, there was a swastika written in human shit on the wall of one of the bathrooms… Although that one actually is the most debatably possible of them. But just on and on down the line, there were five or six of these crazy claims that Ku Klux Klan had been spotted on campus in full warrior fig. The specific purpose there was a series of demands as Missouri approached its 150th anniversary or something of that nature. So the college campus cases are almost always “Look at me and look at what this place is really like, and then let’s build a Black center.”

Zach: One motivating thing there for the hoaxes and just in general the hoaxes kind of tied to the victimization thing, I guess, it seems like there can be a belief that if someone’s a true believer that we live in a brutally racist society, then it becomes more acceptable in someone’s mind to draw attention to that by faking it. It’s like if you really believe that it’s true, then more and more options become available to you in the service of making that known even if you have to fake, if that makes sense.

Wilfred: Yeah, I think that’s pretty much exactly correct. One of the things I found to be notable writing about college pretty often for the past couple of years, I’ve worked with people in The College Fix and I don’t know if I’ve submitted an article there, but I’ve written about The 1619 Project, my next book’s about education, it’s a pretty serious book. So down the line, conservatives often tend to think that the people in the campus world are just kind of shrieking, hyperbolic, narcissistic liars. You think of your most emotionally abusive lover is a much younger person, they’re just making this up for gain. That’s true for some people. But I also think that a lot of people truly believe this stuff. I mean, you’ve been reading Ibram Kendi since the eighth grade if you attend any well ranked school in the USA.

Zach: A small note here. I think this is a very important point that Reilly makes. In my depolarization book I’m working on, one of the things I focus on is how polarization makes many of us suspect that people on the other side are being deceptive about their beliefs, that they’re not being genuine. Because we become less and less able to understand the other side, they become more and more alien and weird and creepy to us, and so we become more likely to basically think they couldn’t possibly believe these things. So therefore, we’re more likely to call people liars and deceivers and cynical manipulators. And that in turn makes the other side more angry, who are then more likely to do similar things to us and so on. So I believe that unless we’re quite sure someone is lying, we should take people at their word and try to act as if they really do believe what they’re saying they believe. Okay, back to the talk.

Wilfred: So I think that when I’ve talked to people in these situations, a starting assumption is well, of course, there must be some subsurface violence here at Yale. You know, the campus is named after a slave master, people will say. The problem with that, of course, is that in fact there almost never is. The American upper middle class is one of the most successfully integrated groups of people in the world. Interracial crime for both Blacks and Whites is a tiny percent of crime. We commit more of it, by the way, it’s 70% or 80% Black on White. But in an enormously rare thing, the person most likely to kill you is your wife. So going through a normal life, you’re not going to encounter any of this stuff. A great phrase I heard once talking about one of my cases is it must be tempting to create some. I mean, you’ve talked all the time about these revolutionary crises, of course, they don’t exist. Well, what are you going to do about that? Are you just going to admit that you’re a well-adjusted upper-class Black woman from Cleveland and go major in business? Well, not always. What you frequently see is a couple people that probably test pretty high on dark triad making something happen. And then you see the rest of the campus almost joyously falling in line behind that. Like, “Yes, this still occasionally happens, my degree wasn’t a total waste of money,” and now we get to fight it together. You know, our beautiful POC and our White allies and our strong leadership community. But again, the reality, when a very high profile hate incident occurs on our campus, I would say there’s virtually no chance in many cases that it is real. This is very different from like, I could have a serious conversation about what percentage of actual hate crimes or ass kickings outside country bars are real. I think that there’d be some real points made from the other side there. But when you look at these incidents involving prep school and college students, I mean, Covington Catholic, although that wasn’t exactly a crime, but Yasmin Seweid and the torn hijab, people following a Black student at Bowling Green and tossing rocks, all of the nooses, there have been dozens found over the past decade. You know, [key ???] in college with the death threats, Wisconsin Parkside with the signposts with the names of all the Black students, Drake University, Duke University, Goucher College, literally none of that turned out to be real. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence taken from a mischosen selection of schools. I think that there’s not a great deal of racial violence at top 1000 colleges, and essentially, you’ve got a moral people making it up.

Zach: In your book, you talked about your views that overly pessimistic liberal side ideas about race and racism are holding Black people back and you talk about the kids at your college and those views holding them back. Can you talk a little bit about how you see that happening and maybe why progressive people should care about that?

Wilfred: We hear a lot about QAnon, or have recently, and I’m using that as a general term for these wild beliefs on the right. Yeah, I’m on the right but I don’t believe Venezuelan voting machines stole the fucking election, excuse the language, all this crazy stuff. But I’ve noticed as I do research that there’s just as much BlueAnon. And a couple of academics on my side of the aisle were able to actually get that term into a few dictionaries this past year. But just crazy beliefs that are very widely shared among left-wingers and particularly minorities that are really damaging to a friendly national conversation. Just to give one example, and I’ll say this in one sentence so I might be misrepresenting the data a tiny bit, but the average liberal believes that about 10,000 unarmed Black men are killed annually by cops. This comes out of a very well done large end study from skeptic research center that dropped seven or nine months ago by now. But what they found is that among people who identified not even as leftist but just as very liberal, ordinary strong liberals, I think it was 27% of them believe that the number of unarmed brothers that are killed annually by police– no, it’s 38%– believe that the number of unarmed brothers that are killed annually by police is about a thousand. Another 15% believe that the number of unarmed Black men killed annually by police is about 10,000. And then you’ve got eight or 9% that believe it’s substantially more than that. If you average those figures together, you’d have to have a range of between five and 10,000, the individuals that are unarmed that are Black, the average lefty thinks are killed by cops. This continued, by the way, for just standard liberals, which is like everyone over to the center, the center-left people. In that category, 26.6% of people thought the annual toll was about a thousand. 7% thought it was about 10,000 and 7% thought it was more than that. To put this in context, in the year in question if you’re talking about like 2020-2021 where they’re getting the data, the total number of unarmed Black people shot by the police was 17. So it’s these wild misstatements of the level of danger in society. And I will note that for a specific group, which is upper middle-class liberals, especially women, this goes well beyond racial issues. 41% of liberals and leftist think that if you get COVID, you’re just going to be hospitalized. To put this in proper form, your risk of being taken into the hospital as an inpatient is 50-plus percent. That’s 41% of them.

Zach: A note here. I’m pretty sure Reilly is referring here to a 2021 Gallup survey that found that 41% of Democrats believe that unvaccinated people had a 50% chance of being hospitalized if they got COVID, which, of course, is extremely distorted. The chance of being hospitalized is significantly less than 1%. Back to the talk.

Wilfred: And this just goes on and on. 60% of very liberals, I don’t want to confuse them with liberals, think that Russia directly hacked the 2016 election. You can talk about Trump’s election denial, and I don’t I have no brief for that at all, but you’ve got to remember Hillary Clinton also said the election was illegitimate in a primetime speech, and 60% of her followers believe her. But anyway, what do attitudes like this, especially the racial attitudes, do? They have the effect that you would predict. If you’re just looking at this logically, if you’re looking at that belief in 10,000 killed every year or some of these beliefs about the evils of Whites, many people that are very mainstream on the left… A Professor Crump comes to mind, a lot of the staff of The Root comes to mind. He doesn’t have serious writing that I won’t throw Ibram Kendi in there but some of the things he said, Whites are aliens, come pretty close. A lot of people in the mainstream absolutely accepted left believe things that are crazier than anyone on the right, except actual alt-rightists believe. And this is just sort of ignored. A total double standard is just accepted. But what effect does that have? For example, I’ve asked large classes of students in what are normally feeder fields like political science, would you become a cop or a prosecutor? I mean, you’d enter just a bit below the detective level or you’d get a free path through law school. 95% of people will say no, because this is an oppressive system. And these are kids I love by the way. That this is an oppressive system that’s holding us down, that’s killing 10,000 of us every year. So belief in this kind of nonsense which has been spread very, very widely by the mainstream left is extremely problematic.

Zach: When you correct some of people’s distorted views on some of these statistics, do you see some changes in in beliefs just from that? Or do you feel like the emotions and the narratives in other ways are so constructed from other things that even correcting some of the core statistics is not enough to change people’s feelings?

Wilfred: Well, I think that when I really get in there, especially with young men, and start spitting facts… One of the things I’ll do is pull up the Washington Post database of police shootings, and we’re talking about policing, and say, “Look, Blacks are a little overrepresented. We make up 14% of the population, we make up 23% of the shooting victims in year X” You can view that gap as due to racism if you want to, I view it as due to higher crime rates quite bluntly. I mean, we’ve already explored the Black crime rate is twice the White crime rate. But even if that’s true… I mean, you’re in Kentucky, you have a whole bunch of Appalachian friends. 70% or 80% of the people that are killed by police are White or Hispanic Caucasians, you can’t deny that. And people will be like, “Yeah, yeah.” And then you’ll say, “Name one,” and no one ever can. So I think when you make these hard-bodied points like 80% of the people shot by the cops aren’t Black, there’s not a lot of denial. I mean, people will defend themselves. They’ll say, “Well, maybe those cases are slightly different.” And actually if you look at the data, that’s arguably true. But people will then start moving toward a more centrist normal position. Yeah. There are also, by the way, just crazy beliefs on the left that are very difficult to change. Like 26% of brothers or Black men believe that AIDS was created in a lab to kill Black people. I’ve never been able to make anyone change that belief. Again, we talk a lot about crazy beliefs on the right. I’ve found crazy belief to be far more entrenched on the left, but it is far more socially accepted. If you said something that’s at that Marjorie Taylor Greene level that’s equivalent to the stuff that I hear all the time about how the first Jews were Black and so on, if you said the world is 6000 years old, you’re going to be laughed off the stage. If, on the other hand, you recommend Hebrews to Negroes on a prominent social platform as a bunch of people dead after the Kyrie Irving issue, nothing will happen. Anyway, extremism is a problem. But I think that extremism in this racial space helped along by these public like racial meltdowns like, “But what about Trayvon Martin? What about Michael Brown? What about Jacob Blake? What about Amy Cooper?” It causes some siloing and it makes it harder to talk to people. Yeah.

Zach: It seems like we started out talking about the amount of data and the ambiguity in the data, just the fact that there are so much data to choose from lends itself to people being able to create whatever narratives they want, right? Like, in a country of 330 million people with a 300-year history, you can pick and choose all sorts of things to make a narrative about. You can make a positive narrative, you can make all sorts of negative narratives. Do you see that as… That’s part of the core problem, I feel like, when it comes to polarisation dynamics in general is just how easy it is for us to pick and choose the things to form whatever narrative we want.

Wilfred: Yeah, I think cherry-picking is a problem, obviously. Yeah, I think so. But I think there are different levels to this. It is true that there are many negative episodes of American history to put it mildly. And if you’re Black or native, that could lead you to a greater level of hostility toward the country that wouldn’t be common for Whites. Even there, I don’t necessarily think that makes sense. The United States of America basically engaged in slavery and in semi-genocidal war when those were universal human practices. That doesn’t excuse them, but also at a certain level, ultimate morality is probably not real. That’s one of the basic arguments of modern philosophy, you discuss that in the church house. But if you’re talking about the behavior of nations and in particular era of time, you can predict how all nations in that era of time would behave. The great Indian tribes, Mexico, our European rivals, the African coastal states, all behaved as we did in this period. So I think that the basic fact that the USA engaged in conquest when everyone did, the right of conquest wasn’t repealed as law. That was the international rule until 1954. I mean, Haile Selassie had some things to say about that and so on. That doesn’t really cause me any great moral pain.

But nonetheless, you can definitely come up with a negative of American history where you apply modern morality to things that really did happen and say, “Well, that’s bad.” I don’t really know what to do about that, I think that’s a problem in diverse societies. What you really have to do there is sit down and talk and work out what the narrative is going to be going forward. Who writes the history books? But I think the issue with a lot of this is that what we’re talking about that’s causing hostility on the left, and for that matter in the alt right, is storylines that aren’t real at all. The idea that the majority of people believe that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed Black men are killed every year by police is a huge cause of racial tensions. But it’s just not true. The total number of people killed every year by the police is a bit under a thousand. Of those, about 250 will be Black, of those, about 17 will be unarmed, of those, about eight will be unarmed and shot by White cops. That’s the real issue. So I definitely think it’s hard to get through siloing and get everyone to the table but I think that the prevalence of bullshit in our society makes that more difficult. Many people believe things that just are not true. And this is true on the right as well. Apparently there’s a widespread belief that immigrants have a higher crime rate than American groups like Southern Whites or Blacks, and that’s not true at all. So I think that a first step would be to try to use media and academia to say things that are essentially correct. And you can pick a narrative from among the correct things, but that gives you considerably less range to go crazy than the ability to pick a narrative from any set of real or made-up facts ever would have.

Zach: One thing I was curious about was your teaching at Kentucky State University, which is a historically Black college, and I was just curious what kind of reaction responses does your work get in that environment.

Wilfred: Well, I’m asked that constantly and I think people have an image of kind of Peter Boghossian at Portland where people are throwing explosives at the door and so on. No. Actually, I haven’t had that reaction. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m seen as a cool guy. I consider myself kind of nerdy but I’ll go to the gym, play basketball, run laps. I golf a bit. I get along with my colleagues, my colleagues are genuinely pretty nice. I don’t know if it’s because there’s a broader range of thought that’s acceptable in successful Black institutions. Again, Kentucky State is a state university. Again, top couple hundred college, pretty good educational value, good college. But almost all of the leadership team is Black. The most recent president, Chris Brown, the guy who hired me into my executive role focusing on teaching, that was a strong Black man, his replacement as president has been. So if you’ve got an executive council that’s entirely Black guys who are probably worth in the low seven figures, it’s a little harder to blame the White man for things. So the fact that two or three of the Black guys in the room will be Republicans or Libertarians, that’s not really taken as bizarre at all. The people that are most frenzied about this kind of thing in my experience are purple-haired Antifa White girls. And I think there’s a lot there. Do many of those people come from families that they view as guilty of historical sin? Is there a sense of youthful rebellion? Probably. And you don’t get any of that with a 55-year-old Jamaican-American college president.

So, I haven’t seen a lot of issues maybe because I’m socially normal, which is not universal among academics, maybe because I’m in a Black school so I’m considered like a somewhat heterodox Black executive, as versus being a White standout in a White institution that’s far left. But I think another thing is also just that most people aren’t that crazy. When we talk about higher education, we tend to talk about a few bespoke schools that no one really attends like Brown University and the Claremont Colleges, these are great schools. But I mean, small student bodies even relative to Northern Kentucky, generally coastal locations. And I’m pretty sure that if you went to the Claremont Colleges and you’re a moderate Republican, you’d have a lot of issues. But it’s worth remembering that there’s a whole heartland of these institutions. Like all of the historically Black colleges, there are I think 137, I don’t want to get that figure wrong. But I mean, all of the A&Ms like Texas A&M, Florida A&M, the agricultural and mechanicals which are designed to teach the country’s best engineers, very STEM focus, all the military academies going beyond West Point to the Citadel and so on, all the community colleges, I mean, that’s where a lot of bright young people that don’t want to put up with full campus drama end up making a solid 60 a year go into the conferences. So I think if you’re in any of those settings, you’re probably experiencing a lot less of the craziness than you’d be experiencing at… What’s the joking school in Animal House?

Zach: I can’t remember.

Wilfred: Let’s call it Mary Shelley university. If you go to Mary Shelley University and teach in the humanities, it’s like anything else. It’s like joining the Marines, you’re going to be surrounded by a bunch of aggressive male bros. If you go into that environment as a conservative, you should really reconsider what a social fit that’s going to be for you. But going into certainly the coaching side of academia, but more specifically going into academia itself in any of the five categories of colleges I just gave, I don’t necessarily think that’s going to have the same level of intense pressure. Someone might ask you as part of a 200-page application to write a six-sentence diversity statement. That’s about the level that we’re talking about here.

Zach: All right, this has been great. Well, thanks for coming on. I appreciate your time.

Wilfred: Sure. Thanks for having me.

Zach: That was Wilfred Reilly, author of the book Hate Crime Hoax and the book Taboo. If you want some links to resources discussed in this podcast, including Wilfred’s books, you can check out the entry for this episode at my site behavior-podcast.com. This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I hope you’ll check out some of the other political polarization-related episodes in the back catalog. You can find a link to all the politics-related episodes on my site www.behavior-podcast.com. 

And just a reminder you can subscribe to this podcast at www.behavior-podcast.com/premium. 

Thanks for your time and interest.

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About this podcast: why I do it and why I think it’s important

This is all about the People Who Read People podcast. Topics discussed include: what led to me starting this podcast; what my goals with it were and how they’ve changed over time; my approach to who I interview and the questions I ask; why I focus on polarization-related topics and why I think that’s important; details on audience numbers and financial stuff.

Episode links:

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podcast

Examining American antisemitism, with James Kirchick

A talk with journalist and author James Kirchick (jameskirchick.com) about antisemitism. Topics discussed include: the origins of various varieties of American antisemitism, controversial statements about Jewish people from Kanye West and Whoopi Goldberg; Donald Trump; Israel; George Soros; Louis Farrakhan; Black Hebrew Israelites; the term “globalist”, and more.

For a follow-up episode about antisemitism, see this talk I had with Yakov Hirsch.

Transcript is below.

Episode links:

Resources that are related or that were mentioned:

TRANSCRIPT

Zachary Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach 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 episode I talk to journalist and author Jamie Kirchick about antisemitism. In 2017, Kirchick had a piece in Commentary magazine titled The New Jew-Hatred: Right and Left. In that piece, he described antisemitism coming from both the political right and the left, as he saw it. 

One reason I wanted to talk about this is that antisemitism is in the news a lot recently, with Kanye West making antisemitic statements, and him saying that black people are the real jews, and with him bringing a strange white supremacist troll over to Trump’s place to have dinner together, amongst other strange things he’s said and done. Also not too long ago Whoopi Goldberg said on the show The View basically that Hitler and the Nazis trying to commit genocide against the Jewish People wasn’t about race, and was a case of “white people fighting other white people.” So I wanted to examine some of these things and talk about where some of those ideas come from 

Another reason I wanted to do this talk is that I see it as tying in to political polarization topics. In the last few weeks I’ve seen a lot of liberal-side rhetoric about how Trump and Republicans are anti-semitic, that there is a huge problem on the right with this. And I think a lot of those takes are taking the most pessimistic, worst-case framings one can make, and in doing that, they’re adding to our divides. Aren’t there many Jewish conservatives and Trump voters? Wouldn’t many people view the Republicans as the more pro-Israel party? What do those people see? Why is it that some people see antisemitism as a bigger problem on the left than the right? 

So I thought talking to Kirchick might give some people some different perspectives on these things. I thought listening to his takes might help us see why some conservatives perceive liberals as rather hysterical on the topic of antisemitism, and as also being somewhat hypocritical. And, to be clear, you don’t have to agree with all of Kirchick’s points, but seeing how one can have such views can help us better understand our fellow citizens. As with many of the interviews I do, the value I see is not in reaching some definitive, accurate view on any specific stance; it’s not about establishing who’s right and who’s wrong. There’s very few things I myself have confident beliefs about. To me the value of these talks is in seeing the wide variety of views that rational and well meaning people can reach on these matters. That seeing of other perspectives is much more important to me than feeling I’ve got the right views, or any answers. Because seeing how others can see things differently, and examining the nuance present on any specific subject, is inherently depolarizing and inherently anger-reducing. Especially when our country is very polarized and we have a tendency to consume simplistic narratives from our preferred bubbles: not just simplistic narratives of what’s right or wrong, but simplistic narratives of what the people on the other side are actually like and what they actually believe. And the more we attempt to see others’ points of view, the more sane and respectful and functional our public conversation will become. 

In this episode, we talk about Trump, we talk about Kanye West, we talk about Whoopi Goldberg’s controversial statements, we talk about antisemitism on the left and the right, we talk about criticisms of Israel, we talk about George Soros, and we talk about the term ‘globalist’ and how that word is used. 

A little bit more about Jamie Kirchick: 

He’s a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail.

A widely published journalist, Jamie has reported from over 40 countries, and his reportage, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Spectator, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and Rolling Stone, among many other publications. His first book, “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age,” was published by Yale University Press in 2017. 

In 2022, he had a new book published titled Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which was an instant New York Times bestseller. A New York Times review called it “ a sprawling and enthralling history of how the gay subculture in Washington, D.C., long in shadow, emerged into the klieg lights.”

You can follow Jamie on Twitter at @jkirchick.

Okay, here’s the interview with journalist Jamie Kirchick. 

Hi, Jamie, thanks for coming on the show.

James: Thanks for having me.

Zach: Maybe we can start with defining antisemitism as you see it. How much of it do you see as a focus on Jewishness as a race versus Jewishness as a religion? Are there other factors you would put in there?

James: Well, I guess there’s very different varieties of it. Judeophobia would probably be a better term for the hatred or bigotry of Jews based on their religious faith. And that probably requires a maybe deeper understanding of Jewish texts and whatnot that I think a lot of people who we would view as anti-Semites might not have. Whereas anti-semitism, I think is broadly a racist conception. It’s the hatred of Jews based on their peoplehood and their belief that they constitute a separate and distinct race, and prejudice against them based upon that. I guess that’s how I would define it. It’s interesting you asked that question because I feel like we don’t see that question asked a lot in these conversations. And I think so much of the reason why this is a controversial topic is because no one ever really defines it, or it seems that so much of the controversy revolves around what is and what isn’t anti-semitism.

Zach: Right. Yeah, it kind of strikes me in other areas of things that can cause big divides often. There’s a failure to even define the concepts we’re talking about like CRT or whatever it is. Do you see it as maybe hard to define sometimes because it does overlap so much with these conspiracy theories of, you know, the Illuminati or these other powerful forces controlling things behind the scenes, which I think people on the far left or far right political spectrum can have these kinds of conspiracy theories and maybe that helps explain why it can be hard to disentangle sometimes.

James: Yeah. Well, anti-Semitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory. It’s really sort of the oldest one. I mean, if you think of conspiracy theories as being modern phenomenon, I think anti-semitism is probably the oldest if there are conspiracy theories. And it seems that all the conspiracy theories go back to antisemitism. They all basically, you know, if you’re talking about shadowy elite secret people in power orchestrating things from behind a kind of dark curtain or whatnot, it’s hard not to end up with the Jews in some way. And I often find that some people might even be repeating antisemitic tropes without often even knowing that they’re antisemitic. I do think that there are people who are genuinely surprised when they hear that, they might not even know it. For instance, the ease with which people– this is separate from conspiracism– but the ease with which people throw around Holocaust analogies, I often think that they’re not consciously antisemitic, but what they’re doing is in effect antisemitic. Comparing your opponents to Nazis is something that so many people do these days, right? Or likening the treatment that one suffers, whether it’s under COVID regulations. On the right, you’ll see people do that, or people on the left might complain about police powers acting like the Gestapo or something. In both cases, I often think that most people who make these claims don’t really realise what they’re doing, it’s just become such a part of our political vernacular. It’s the reductio ad Hitlerum tendency, and oftentimes that can be labelled antisemitic but I’m not really sure it is. It’s totally distasteful and inappropriate.

Zach: Because it downplays the importance of-

James: It downplays the holocaust. And it also just raises the stakes in our political discussions to the point where you can’t have a civil conversation. I mean, if you’re comparing lockdown policies to the Warsaw Ghetto, it’s hard to really move on from there and have a meaningful conversation. I don’t think that the person making that accusation is antisemitic. In fact, often they’re putting themselves in the place of the Jews. So if anything, they are trying and they’re very stupid in a historical way to identify with the plight of the Jews. Of course, it’s minimizing with what the Holocaust was, but I don’t think it’s right to call those people necessarily antisemitic. Some of them might be, but I don’t think that that’s… That is not what’s keeping me awake at night when it comes to antisemitism.

L: Yeah. And your 2017 piece that I read that initially made me contact you, you talked about antisemitism as you saw it on the right and the left. One thing you did which I thought was really responsible was giving your opinion about how the United States is actually very Jewish appreciative and how it’s not as big a problem as some people say. Maybe you could give your summary of your opinion of how big a problem do you see it as in the United States, and do you see it as having grown recently?

James: Yeah, with what’s happened in those five years. [laughs] But in terms of the United States, no country in the world has been better to its Jewish population or better place for Jews to thrive than the United States. And there’s really no argument about that, I don’t think. Of course, one could argue Israel might be an exception but that’s a special case. Israel was only created in 1948 but Jews have prospered in the United States like nowhere else if you just look at how successful they’ve been in professions and culture and politics and philanthropy and just becoming a part of the American tapestry. There’s obviously antisemitism in America and there has been. It was not that long ago that Jews were victimized by quotas, right? You couldn’t get into… There was a limit placed on the number of Jews who were allowed into elite schools and universities, and there were neighborhoods that were not open to Jews. But this pales in comparison to what Jews had to suffer pretty much anywhere else in the world. Certainly from the countries where most American Jews trace their lineage, which is Europe. And Jews came to America for good reasons. They were subjected to all sorts of discrimination and second-class citizenship and worse, obviously, in places like the former Soviet Union Russia– Imperial Russia– so they came to America seeking a better life and they achieved it. And I feel enormously fortunate to have been an American Jew born in 1983. I mean, there’s really no better.. That’s really kind of a golden age.

So, that article was published in 2017 and I do think things have gotten worse for Jews. Not nearly to the point where anyone should be thinking about packing their bags, but Donald Trump obviously unleashed a lot of ugly things in this country. And I’m gonna say this, I don’t think he is himself an anti-Semite. Even knowing we’re recording this podcast a week or two after he sat down to lunch or dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, I don’t think that’s because he’s an anti-Semite. I think his vanity and his narcissism is world historical that he’ll break bread with people who flatter him. Even if they’re Nazis! That’s how pathetic this guy is. He’s not doing this because he seeks to hurt Jews. I mean, his daughter is Jewish, he has Jewish grandchildren, I don’t believe that he is himself an anti-Semite. It’s not excusing his behavior, it’s reprehensible, and the man clearly has no business being a dogcatcher or let alone President of the United States.

But put that aside, whether he is or isn’t an anti-Semite, I find it a waste of time and this is something that whatever I say I’m gonna get attacked by the people who hate him and think he’s Hitler, or I’m gonna get attacked by the Trump supporters who think he’s done better things for the Jews than Cyrus the Great. It’s indisputable that a lot of far right legitimate open proud anti-Semites flock to him and like him, and I saw that in 2015 when he was running for president. I wrote an article which I still stand by. I said, “Donald Trump is the candidate of the mob and the mob always comes for the Jews. He is a candidate of conspiracy theories, he’s the candidate of mindless populism.” Populism in itself is not necessarily always bad, there are good aspects of populism. I don’t think he represented a lot of bad aspects of populism. So he kind of opened a Pandora’s box and a lot of nasty shit came out, and I hold him responsible for that and I’ve held him responsible for that before he had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.

Zach: Yeah, before we move on from that point about that dinner, the Kanye dinner, I’m with you in the sense that I really think if anybody really flattered Trump, he would basically do anything they want, really. And I think people underestimate how easy it would be for Kanye to be like, “Hey, Trump, I really want to have dinner with you and I’m bringing this guy,” and not even maybe tell him until they got there. There’s all sorts of ways this can play out and I think Trump is so desperate to appeal to the Black vote and such too, he would probably have done many things that Kanye asked him to do. So I think people underestimate those kinds of factors, like you say his ego and how far flattery gets people with him. These kinds of things.

James: Yeah, I said from the beginning, Trump isn’t a fascist, he’s a golfer. And it’s just reading him incorrectly to imagine this kind of devious plan.

Zach: Well, sort of like you say too, like we’re saying with the Holocaust and people making Holocaust analogies, and I think the analogies that Trump is this raving anti-Semite or this racist in general, these exaggerated claims don’t help. There’s plenty of things to actually focus on that we legitimately know, and the more exaggerated claims just rile up the tensions and to me, they create the very things we’re angry about.

James: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s fair and I think our country has suffered a lot because of not only Donald Trump, but the way in which the Left has basically used him to validate their own transgressions and their own overreach and their own liberal behaviour. We could look at what’s going on Twitter right now and what’s being revealed now that Twitter was basically running censorship campaigns against conservatives for years. And they did that because Donald Trump existed. And Donald Trump’s existence has basically been used by the left to validate all sorts of things that I think are destructive and bad for our country. But that’s a separate podcast, probably. But I will say there’s been the Right and there’s been absolutely marked increase in antisemitic activity and the prominence of anti-Semites on the Right with the rise of the alt Right, and just with the whole Donald Trump [gestalt]. It’s been bad for the Jews. And I say that in spite of what I do think are some really important geopolitical advances that he made with the Abraham accords. Great. With recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, great. With pushing back on Iran and reneging on the Iran deal and killing Qasem Soleimani also great. I don’t believe that just because I’m pro Israel, that I therefore have to praise Donald Trump as a wonderful person. I can hold two ideas in my head. And a lot of conservative Trump-supporting Jews don’t seem to agree with me. They think that because he did these wonderful things for Israel, you have to shut up and praise him as the best president ever for Jews, maybe since Harry Truman recognised the State of Israel.

I just don’t buy that. I don’t buy that when it comes to anything political. I think for myself and I’m able to criticise and compliment at the same time. And it shouldn’t be difficult for people but it too often is today, unfortunately. And then of course there’s been increasing antisemitism on the Left. We now have for the first time a small but very vocal antisemitic caucus in the House of Representatives among the squad. We’re talking about a handful of representatives, but they regularly make antisemitic statements. And that is not something that’s really existed in living memory, for me at least, and it’s really hard to remember when that happened. And the kind of spinelessness of Democratic leaders to really condemn and call this out, there have been Democrats who have called out Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and there’s a few others, but it’s been mostly crickets and that’s disappointing.

Of course, and then the anti Semitism on campuses, which just gets worse and worse every year and the stories just pile up you can’t even keep track of them with all the sorts of boycotts and cancellations of antisemitism under the guise of anti Zionism. I think that there isn’t a distinction between the two. I think they are one and the same one and we can talk about that if you want. But on the Left, it’s less.. The Left wing anti Semitism I find more insidious and obnoxious because at least the Right-wing anti-Semites tell you as Jews that they hate you. They’re very open about it and unapologetic. When I was criticizing Donald Trump in 2016, I would get all sorts of blatantly antisemitic messages on Twitter, in my email, on Facebook; people doctoring cartoons with me in a gas chamber and Donald Trump pulling the lever, lots of Pepe the Frog tweets and all that kind of crap.

Whereas the Left, it’s always this very erudite, you know? “Of course we don’t hate Jews! Hating anyone is not… We don’t hate anyone, that’s something that only right-wingers do. Knuckle dragging right-wingers hate people, we just oppose this racist colonialist occupier and its supporters in America who have dual loyalties– who aren’t really loyal to this country. They’re Israel firsters and whatnot.” That’s how Left-wing antisemitism carries itself. And there’s a third form of antisemitism which frankly we don’t see that much in the United States, and that’s the Islamic kind or the Islamists kind. That’s much more prevalent in Europe where they have large– it depends on the country if we’re looking at France, for instance, and England to an extent– you know, large, not-well-assimilated Muslim communities who basically imported this antisemitism from the Arab Muslim world. And that’s why you see these Jewish institutions and Jewish leaders and whatnot living under armed protection. Which, unfortunately, is actually increasingly happening in the United States now too, Jewish institutions in the United States, synagogues, Jewish day schools and whatnot are also getting armed security, which is a really unfortunate development but unnecessary one.

Zach: Getting back to the liberal side academic antisemitism, as you see it, you also talked about seeing Jews as white or white adjacent views too, which I think that’s maybe a separate category or subcategory or maybe are related to some of the campus anti-Semitism as you viewed it. And maybe you can describe a little bit of that argument.

James: Yeah. So as American discourse and society or the salience of race is increasing in our conversation, I actually think it matters less and less, right? Like in terms of your life chances, in terms of your economic station, in terms of the kind of everyday discrimination one faces as an American. I actually think race is less salient. There’s more intermarriage, the Black middle class is growing, the number of actual police shootings of unarmed Black men has actually gone down, okay? All those statistics, I think, are moving in the right direction. Unfortunately, we have this intellectual conversation and this discourse where race seems like it’s never been more prevalent. And there’s this new terms, intersectionality, which is basically inverting a racial hierarchy with Whites at the bottom and non Whites at the top. And there’s various levels even within that non-White category, there’s a hierarchy.

And it’s unclear where Asians lie in this, right? Asians are considered White adjacent according to some woke people. Hispanics are also dangerously becoming White adjacent, and that’s purely based on the fact that they’re increasingly voting for Republicans. There’s nothing to do with anything else but that fact. And so because we have this discourse now where Whiteness, and Whites and white people are considered all to be inherently racist, they all carry implicit bias, they are all responsible for the historical injustices that were committed by white people of generations before, they’ve inherited this guilt to say that Jews are White, and to constantly make this point over and over again that Jews are complicit with whiteness. While I agree that I as an Ashkenazi Jew, I present as White. Yes, I am not going to be stopped by a police officer for driving while Black, I’m not going to suffer from that kind of discrimination. Okay. I’m not going to be followed around in a department store by a sales clerk in the way that Black people often wrongly are. I’m not going to suffer that. But that’s not the purpose of what this discourse is. I think this constant harping on White Jews ‘white Jews this, White Jews that’ is to basically rob Jews of any kind of minority status, any kind of history that they’ve endured of past oppression and suffering and discrimination, and to just group them with this bad group; the bad group is the Whites with a capital W. And so I see as a very kind of provocative hostile act, frankly, that is meant to divide and is meant to demonize Jews, it is meant to identify them as part of an oppressor class, and I think that it is in some sense antisemitic. Yeah, I do.

Zach: One of the things that seem to play a role there is this kind of binary view that differences in racial outcomes are solely due to racism, it almost seems like there’s this binary which leaves a lot of the factors that can be involved out of the picture, you know? Like what happened in the past and how that-

James: Yeah, and what’s the flip side of that if Jews are so successful far beyond their 2% of the population? How do we explain that at one point a third of Yale was Jewish, and the Ivy League schools were disproportionately Jewish? Listen to what Ye is saying, right? Or listen to what people say about Hollywood or the publishing industry, what can that mean? It can only mean that if the disparate outcomes are only explainable by these invidious explanations, then it must mean that the Jews must have done something wrong to get to where they are. They must have cheated out other people. How else can we explain this enormous, disproportionate presence of Jews in certain institutions and certain professions? So yeah, the whole equity agenda I think is antisemitic and racist, but particularly antisemitic because there is no group that I think has more disproportionate presence where the difference between their percentage of the population and their presence in certain institutions is more disproportionate than Jews.

There is, it’s true. There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood. Yeah, there are. Why is that? Is it because they’re all meeting on Friday nights to kind of help each other out? Is there some sort of surreptitious, nefarious agenda going on? Or are there other explanations for it? I mean, why is the NBA so heavily African American? You know, not everything has some evil nefarious explanation behind it. But when you argue that there is, and as the Ibram X Kendis of the world say, that unless… He basically says that every institution and every outcome has to be almost exactly proportionate to… Isn’t that what he’s basically saying? So that’s arguing for a return to quotas. That’s an argument for a return to the 1940s, at least for Jews it is. Its argument for return to the 1940s when the number of Jews in institutions there was a ceiling placed on that. And I mean, that’s not something… That’s antisemitism, I don’t know what else to call that. And now it’s anti Asian.

Zach: Right. I think it gets back to this whole concept which I think is driving a lot of this, is that any differences in outcome are due to racism or White supremacy. And there’s so many factors. I mean, you can believe that Black people and other groups have had a hard time and that has affected them in many ways, just like for example Appalachian coal miners can have a hard time and we don’t say it’s because they’re lacking in some fundamental way, we can just recognize that there’s all these factors present. But to boil it all down to, you know, there’s racism in the society to explain these things is just such a simplification and that makes people look for, you know, “Where’s the racism? It must be coming from the people that are perceived as having more power, and are they oppressors and stuff?” And then that creates its own animosity.

A note here, these are hard things to talk about in passing as it’s easy to mistake people’s stances, and easy for people talking about these things to be misunderstood. If you want to do your own research into these topics more, I’d recommend a few books. Ibrahim X Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist is where many of the most prominent anti-racism ideas come from. So that’s probably the key book for understanding some of the most common anti-racism arguments. And then as a rejoinder to that. You could read John McWhorter’s Woke Racism, which goes through various criticisms of those types of ideas and makes the argument that many of the anti-racism arguments are simplistic and divisive. Another book that might be pertinent to the topic of this episode is David Bernstein’s book Woke Antisemitism, which is similar to John McWhorter’s book, but from a Jewish perspective.

Okay, back to the talk. I want to get back to your views on Kanye West and what Whoopi Goldberg said on The View and some things like that, but one thing you said that I want to focus on more which I think of all the things you’ve said, it’s probably something that many liberals might find fault with is when it comes to criticism of Israel, how do you draw the line between what is valid criticism that anyone can make about a country or anybody doing bad things as they see it versus antisemitism?

James: I actually have a pretty… I think I have a pretty strict definition of this. I don’t think that, you know, there are some people who would say that criticizing Israel for actions that you wouldn’t criticize another country of or another democracy of… A lot of defenders of Israel would say that that’s antisemitic. And I’m not willing to go that far. I think there are lots of people that might be misguided, but they do hold Israel to a higher standard. That’s not always necessarily antisemitic. Most Jews I know would hold Israel to a higher standard. They expect more of Israel than they do of even Britain or France or other exemplary human-rights-respecting democracies. And it pains them that Israel is often in these situations due to its geography and its history, where it is engaged in constant military activity. I mean, it’s been militarily occupying a large population of Arabs since 1967 for 55 years, that’s a long time. So it’s going to do things that… It’s going to do things that a country does when it’s engaged in military actions, and there are always going to be mistakes, there are always going to be innocent people who are harmed, and there’s occasionally gonna be atrocities. Even great democracies commit atrocities because humans are infallible and they make mistakes, and everyone is capable of evil. Every individual is capable of evil.

And a country is no more than the sum of its citizens. And I don’t sit here and claim that Israelis or Jews are any more moral as individuals than any other people. What I would say is that I think the sort of obsessive criticism of Israel that we see in some quarters mostly on the Left– the obsession with Israel, with this relatively small country– I think assigning to it, describing it in almost demonic fashion… If you’re comparing… Again, this is actually where I would say that Hitler and Nazi comparisons are antisemitic. If you are comparing the actions of the Jewish state to what the Nazis did to the Jews, at the very least you are being extremely insensitive and unnecessarily provocative at the very least. I mean, in most cases I would say that that’s antisemitism to compare the treatment of the Palestinians or even the citizens of the Gaza Strip to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

There are lots of things that you could say about how the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are treated, but to deliberately choose that comparison, that analogy, that I would say is anti-semitic. I think singling out Israel is also antisemitic. Like when you look at the amount of time that is spent at the United Nations on Israel in the Human Rights committees where there are real egregious abuses of human rights; Cuba, North Korea, it’s a joke for those countries. For the Arab world, by the way. There’s no Arab Muslim country which can hold a candle to Israel when it comes to not only rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech and whatnot, but the treatment of its minority citizens. I mean, Arabs in Israel are treated better than Arabs in any Arab-ruled country. So to single Israel out– and I’m not saying to criticize Israel, I’m saying the singling out of Israel, right? The boycotting of Israel, the fact that Israel is targeted and is the subject of more resolutions in these committees, the fact that you have these academics who choose only to boycott Israel… If they were so concerned with human rights, there are lots of other countries in the world that are much, much worse in terms of their human rights practices than Israel.

There’s no argument about that, right? So when you see a group of academics in Britain decide that they’re going to boycott Israeli scholars, that to me is blatant antisemitism. What else is it that’s making them choose this country that just happens to be the world’s only Jewish country? Why else are they doing it? I think that’s de facto antisemitism. So singling out Israel… If Israel is doing something singularly bad, fine, then you can single them out. But they’re not. Okay, at least in these conversations about human rights practices and whatnot. So that I think is antisemitic. But look, Israel has a very vigorous free press and you can read extremely critical things of all aspects of the Israeli government and society and culture in the Israeli press. And any Israeli would… You know, there’s the old joke ‘Two Jews, three opinions,’ it’s even more pronounced in Israel. So it has a very vibrant civil society where all sorts of criticisms are aired. And by the way, Israelis love to throw Nazi analogies back and forth at each other. Okay? And maybe there’s a kind of special dispensation we can give them because they’re Jews and whatever. But yeah, that’s where I would say the legitimate criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism.

Zach: Do you think some of these things have a feedback mechanism of once they get started, it’s hard to stop them in the sense that there can be elements of peer pressure of people just not being aware of the complexity of Israel? That’s one thing that strikes me there as one I’ve tried to dig into. The things that have happened in Israel and what the narratives really were, it’s really hard to… It would take me I feel like a lifetime of research to really fully understood it but yet people have these simplistic ideas of like, “Oh, look what’s happening over there. Something bad happened, Israel must be at fault,” and leaving out all the context of the history and what led up to that. So I’m curious if you see some of these things having a life of their own once they get into these established and people are like, “Oh, they’re saying this, I’ll say it too” kind of thing.

James: Yes. I just think there’s a lot of peer pressure particularly among young people in college campuses and in certain spaces, where it’s very fashionable to embrace the cause of the underdog, and for the first 25 years of its existence or 20 years, you could say until 1967 really, Israel was the underdog and Israel had the support of the global Left and had the support of the Soviet Union in 1948. And it had the support of most socialists and other people on the left around the world. And that began to change in 1967 once Israel won a defensive war that was waged by its Arab neighbors to destroy it, and found itself in possession and in control of territories where Palestinians were residing. And that’s how the Occupation began. And so yes, Israel is absolutely of course responsible for the way it treats the citizens under its control in those territories. But I do believe that there’s a level of complexity to this conversation that many of Israel’s critics don’t appreciate, or many I should say, the ones who sort of joined the bandwagon, right? The ones who would post memes of likening Palestinian children to children in the Warsaw Ghetto. I don’t think that those people who do that are really historically aware. And I think that they are often, I mean, the people who are liking those posts on Facebook are ignorant. The ones who are posting and the ones who are actively spreading those memes and those messages I think are anti-Semites.

Zach: Maybe we can go to some specific instances, for example, when Whoopi Goldberg on The View basically said that the Holocaust was basically White people fighting with themselves when it came to Jewish people being killed in World War Two. Maybe you could talk about how you see that as playing into some of the liberal side philosophies arguments about race and seeing Jewish people as White, things like that.

James: Yeah. Again, I think it’s partly ignorance and it’s partly this very American-centric view of the world where our main cleavage is the race question. That’s the main societal cleavage in this country. And it’s taking that prism– the kind of White versus non-White or the Black and White issue in the United States– and thinking that every other issue in the world should be seen through that prism. That’s just wrong. Again, this would sound sort of… Maybe I’m playing into it by talking this way, but the Jews were like the Blacks of Nazi Germany. Okay? If that helps Whoopi Goldberg understand. So yes, they have the same skin tone as Aryan or however they call themselves in terms of the master race. They have the same skin tone, but they were not viewed the same way and they were not treated the same way clearly. Because 6 million of them were murdered. And by the way, they viewed Eastern Europeans and Slavs as subhuman races. Again, if you held up their hands– the hand of a German and that of a Pole or Slovak or Romanian or a Russian, their skin tone would be the same, Whoopi. But that’s not how the Nazis viewed things. You know, was she acting from some deeply thought antisemitic impulse? I don’t think so. I think she’s just extremely ignorant and it’s also very self-centred. It’s this belief that the world revolves around America and the American race issue.

I’ll just give another example of this in a different context. I was at a dinner a couple of nights ago with a group of Ukrainian Members of Parliament who were visiting from Ukraine and it was a dinner with a group of American journalists. And the whole night, everyone was talking about… It was mostly these young women, they were all women, they were presenting their case and what their country has been going through with the Russian invasion and how terrible it’s been. And at the end, there was a someone at the dinner table– we all gave our two minute spiel– and there’s one young man who got up and said that he could relate to it as an African American because African Americans are fighting the same sort of existential struggle for their survival that you Ukrainian people are. And I’m just thinking to myself, I’m like, “Come on! These women are in a country right now where apartment buildings are being blown to bits from the sky by Russian bombers.” Like, literally there’s a campaign of genocide is arguable. It’s arguable that the Russians are committing genocide in Ukraine right now. I don’t know what the latest death toll is, it’s in the tens of thousands if not higher. And you listen to Vladimir Putin, he sounds Hitlerian in the way he talks about Ukrainians. “Okay, this is a fake made up country and it needs to cease to exist.” And he’s sounding like Hitler talking about the people to his East, or the Jews for that matter. To compare the plight of what Ukrainians are going through right now with that of African Americans, I think is just minimizing what Ukrainians are going through. And it’s also just incredibly self-centered. Not everything revolves around the American racial issue, and not everything should be seen through that prism.

Zach: Yeah, I think there’s so many of these simplistic narratives that, as you say, seldom get challenged and these us-versus-them narratives that-

James: Of course, no one. Yes, of course, no one in that room by the way a couple of nights ago. It was a very fancy restaurant in Washington, DC. I could maybe suspect that other people agreed with me that this was an absurd thing to be saying and almost insulting to the women who were there. But of course, no one was going to pipe up and say, “Hey, you know what? This is kind of a stupid comparison. This is really stupid and shallow analogy, maybe you shouldn’t be making it and you’re insulting our guests.” Of course, no one’s gonna say that. And there are a whole lot of things that people don’t say when it comes to these sorts of issues.

Zach: Yeah, I’m somebody who works on depolarization and one of my big beliefs is that we all need to speak up more when we hear unhelpful and divisive narratives and viewpoints on our side– specific on our side– but that’s the nature of polarization that makes people unlikely to challenge people on their side and that’s the very way it works; it’s just people are unwilling to challenge things on their side so their side becomes more and more unreasonable etc. When it comes to Kanye, I’m curious what you think and I’ll give my brief thing and you can maybe play off of that. I see Kanye as having… I think he has some personality disorder in the way he behaves, but I can also see that some of his views he’s also imbibing through the culture on the far Left and far Right, in my opinion, in various ways and just swimming in these weird waters and he’s saying weird things because he’s got some issues. But I’m curious what your take on it is?

James: Well, look, I’m not a psychiatrist but I do think he clearly has some mental problem– I’ve heard bipolarism mentioned. And so I don’t know how much we can attribute to that.

Zach: A small note here. If you’re interested in the connection between mental health and saying offensive things, I’ve examined that in some previous episodes. The reason I delved into that topic previously was that I saw a lot of liberal side overreactions to various viral videos of people who were saying racist or offensive things, and some of these people were quite clearly suffering from mental issues. At one point, there was even a protest staged in California based on the ravings of a clearly mentally unwell woman. And on the Left, even now with Kanye, there is often a framing that having mental problems or personality disorders aren’t a factor in people saying antisocial or racist things. And this is clearly not true. Some mental issues or personality disorders will result in people saying horrible antisocial things. If you’re interested to learn more about that, check out those previous episodes. One was titled Factors Involved in Offensive Speech, and another one was a talk with Rob Rob Tarzwell about his emergency room psychiatric work. Okay, back to the talk.

James: in terms of the content of what he’s saying, look, it’s coming really heavily from… It’s not the far left, it’s coming from… Sorry, it’s not really the far left or the far right, it’s Louis Farrakhan. It’s black nationalism. And this is the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about, which is the prevalence of antisemitic thinking among African Americans. It’s higher than among the general population significantly so. I just saw a poll that said only 44% of African Americans responded yes when asked if Kanye West’s remarks are antisemitic. Which means that a majority either don’t know or do not think that what he said was anti-Semitic. But in terms of the content of what he’s saying, like the Jews who claim to be Jews are fake Jews, you know, Blacks are the real Jews, that’s the Black Hebrews. Your listeners might not know this but there was the largest antisemitic demonstration since Charlottesville happened just a couple of weeks ago in Brooklyn. Two or 300 Black Hebrews were marching in support of Kyrie Irving, another very prominent Black celebrity who’s made blatantly antisemitic remarks that was not covered in the media. We’re still hearing about Charlottesville five years after it happened. We hear about that a lot. It’s very much imprinted upon the American mind. And rightly so. But there was hardly any coverage of a similar-sized antisemitic demonstration because the people who were the villains in the story, it’s inconvenient, right? And so the mainstream media and basically our sensemaking institutions and the culture, you know, academia and all these institutions, they don’t want to confront this. And that’s why you just don’t really hear about it because it’s a very inconvenient and uncomfortable topic to discuss.

Zach: And a good number of hate crimes and even murders of Jewish people have been by the Black Hebrew Israelite type of people. Is that true?

James: Yeah, or just random assailants. You look at New York City where, you know, I’m not visibly Jewish. I’m not orthodox, I’m not wearing a yarmulke, I’m not wearing long sideburns pious. But among that segment of the Jewish population, yeah, it’s quite dangerous. And there’s been a huge spike in violence against them. And it’s almost exclusively from African Americans, you know, non-White assailants basically are the main perpetrators of that violence. Again, that’s a subject that you will not really see covered outside of the Jewish press and the conservative press. It’s something that the mainstream media does not want to touch because it doesn’t fit into this narrative that they’ve been crafting since 2015-2016 that the rise of Donald Trump and White supremacy is the central evil of our time. You’ve even seen this when there was this spate of anti-Asian attacks about two years ago. Much, if not the majority of it, was also perpetrated by African Americans. We were being told that this was the fault of White supremacy and there was just no logical… People were saying this in full view. There was video evidence of these attacks that were happening and yet they would constantly say that it’s still– I don’t even know how they rationalized it– that this was still somehow the fault of White supremacy.

Zach: Another example that often is brought up of antisemitism is the George Soros memes and insults and such, and in my own research of delving into some of the darker parts of the internet, I went into some pro-Trump Facebook groups and interestingly to me or surprisingly maybe to me, the amount of hate that I saw for George Soros was just off the charts compared to other people. Hillary Clinton and Obama and all these people got a lot of hate too but the amount of visceral death wishes and this kind of thing were just off the charts for George Soros. And I’m curious how much of the anti-George Soros speech and language and rhetoric from conservatives do you view as antisemitic? Because in some ways, I can see some of it has been similar to what we talked about with criticism of Israel where some of the people doing this would not view… They view it as, “Oh, there’s a powerful person with money giving money to liberal causes so I hate them,” kind of thing. But I’m curious what your take on where you see the boundaries of that is, or how much of it do you see as being antisemitic?

James: Well, I’m not a fan of really vitriol or hateful unhinged criticism and commentary in general so I don’t like it. When it comes to George Soros, look, the man is the biggest funder of the Democratic Party and he has been. And generally of liberal progressive causes. It should be fair to criticize him. And I think liberals and progressives, many of whom are very quick by the way to deny any antisemitism in their own ranks and are very quick to defend people whom I consider to be anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar, they get very, very, very sensitive about criticizing George Soros who by the way does not really even identify as Jewish. He’s been open about that. He identifies as a Jew, but he doesn’t give any money to Jewish philanthropies or any causes, he very much sees himself as a citizen of the world, he’s cosmopolitan, he kind of despises what he views as this grubby particularism of Jews. But that’s his decision and that doesn’t mean that he should therefore be subjected to antisemitic attacks. But it is an interesting side note. But when Marco Rubio or other conservatives criticize or they use the term ‘Soros-backed prosecutors’ to describe some of these progressive very Left-wing prosecutors in various cities across the country who are letting criminals out of jail and not prosecuting them for various crimes or reducing their sentences and removing cash bail and whatnot when they refer to these individuals as Soros-backed prosecutors…

There was a huge controversy about this in August and this was deemed antisemitic, you know, merely to point out the fact that George Soros is funding to the tune of tens of millions of dollars prosecutors who are public officials who are pursuing very controversial policies. That, to me, is ridiculous. Look, if George Soros is being discussed in terms that are the same that the Left uses to describe the Koch brothers, then I don’t see how that can be antisemitic. By the way, they’re describing the Koch brothers as these shadowy actors who are destroying the country and whatnot. That’s fine. That’s political rhetoric. They’re allowed to do that. I don’t think that when people on the Right– or not just the Right– when other people criticize George Soros in similar fashion, that is ipso facto an example of antisemitism in the United States, that is.

It’s a somewhat different conversation when you’re talking about Hungary, which has a different history than the United States in a very different context. And there’s a very different relationship between the Jews and that governments and Jews and non-Jews in Hungary. This is a country that largely collaborated in the extinction of its own Jewish population during the Holocaust. And when the leaders of that country decide to make George Soros this Emmanuel Goldstein-type boogeyman, when Viktor Orbán gives a speech and he says that the country’s enemies are not loyal, they’re not patriotic, they speculate with money, they’re internationalists, they’re globalists… to me, that’s crossing a line. Because there is a baggage and there is a context and there’s a history in Hungary that getting back to where this conversation started, is not the history of the United States. It is in many ways the opposite of the history United States. It’s the reason why Jews left places like Hungary in the last century and even earlier to come to the United States.

So I think there’s a kind of naivete among a lot of American right-wingers and conservatives. You actually ask them and a lot of them don’t even know he’s Jewish. I’m not trying to play defense for the Right here, because there are some people on the Right who know exactly what they’re doing. They know exactly they’re playing into Jewish tropes, and they use those anti-Jewish antisemitic tropes. But there are lots of conservatives who they’re just watching Fox News or they’re listening to talk radio. And yeah, “George Soros is the biggest donor to the Democrats and progressive causes. Of course, we’re not gonna like him.” And they use intemperate language to describe him but you know what? I don’t see liberals being very nice when they talk about Mitch McConnell or the Koch brothers or Peter Thiel or the Big Bad Bboogie Man who writes checks to conservative causes. So I’d like it if we were all a little more restrained in how we talk about our fellow Americans, but in the absence of that, I’m not so quick to just rush and say any intemperate criticism of George Soros. Even saying that he’s evil, okay? That’s not necessarily antisemitic.

Zach: Another thing you made me think of is the focus on the word ‘globalist’ and some people treat that as code for Jewish. I’ve seen that a lot and I’m honestly kind of perplexed by that sometimes because back in the day I read Jerry Mander book, The Case Against Globalism early on and he’s Jewish, and I just wonder how you see that word being used.

James: I think it can be, it depends on the context. All this stuff is contextual and I think-

Zach: It’s complex. Yeah.

James: Yeah. Well, you say no question but a lot of people don’t see it that way and they make these categorical judgments. And they’re not willing to abide any nuance or apply it in a case-by-case basis. I first came across the term globalist when I was researching the Ron Paul newsletters, which was a story that I broke for The New Republic in 2008. Ron Paul published all these newsletters dating back to the 1970s where he was railing against his usual bugbears like fiat money and the Federal Reserve and big budgets, big government spending, deficit spending. But there was also a lot of Right-wing, pro-militia, racist conspiracy theory stuff in there, too. And he was using this word globalist a lot. Then I looked into it more and it seemed that it was really kind of popularised with the John Birch Society, which was a far right– it still exists– was founded as a far-right anti-communist organization and definitely was antisemitic. And William F. Buckley Jr. sort of famously kicked them out of the conservative movement in the 1960s, if you will. So the word definitely has antisemitic intonations or associations if you will, but it is not always everywhere.

So I think that if you’re talking against free trade deals and international agreements and you want the United States out of the United Nations and you want the United States out of NATO, you know, come home America, and you’re just a kind of isolationist… You know, have isolationists been antisemitic in the past? Yeah, Charles Lindbergh the leader of the America First Movement was an anti-Semite. But not everyone in the America First Movement was anti-Semitic. And I don’t think that someone who poses international trade deals or American involvement in the world is necessarily anti-Semitic. There’s a lot of overlap because it often comes back to, “Well, why is it that the United States has these big defense budgets and is involved in all these wars and international conflicts?” It’s because they’re trying to support or defend the State of Israel. And why are they supporting or defending the State of Israel? Oh, it’s because of these neocons in Washington with all their money.

So that’s why there’s a lot of overlap between the isolationist community and the antisemitic community, but I have friends who are more libertarian inclined who just don’t believe that the United States should play a global leadership role, and they want out of all these institutions. And they’re not antisemitic, and they’re not driven to this position because they have some kind of conspiratorial view of what the Israel lobby is kind of hoodwinking the American people. They don’t share that. Again, there’s context, you know? Sometimes globalist can be used in an antisemitic context, sometimes not. I don’t think Donald Trump or necessarily even Steve Bannon who was the one– I think Bannon was the one who really inserted that word into Trump’s speeches and whatnot– I don’t think that they’re being motivated by an antisemitic impulse there. I think it is this genuine American nationalism that has a very long pedigree in this country, you can trace it all the way back to Andrew Jackson and maybe even earlier. And you know, these guys would say that they traced it all the way back to George Washington who opposed entangling alliances with other countries. So this is a real aspect of American foreign policy thinking. And while it has attracted anti-Semites under its banner, it is not inherently antisemitic.

Zach: One question I’ve sometimes wondered is, do you think that Jewish people’s not believing in an afterlife is a factor in them seeming to as a group be very hard workers?

James: It is a good question. And I’m not a very religious Jew so I’m probably not the right person to be asking, but I have gotten the sense just growing up. You know, I am a Jew and I was Bar Mitzvahed and I had a somewhat Jewish education growing up, but very much culturally Jewish, you could say. And I definitely got the impression that there was the sense that, you know, like the Catholic kids could go confess whenever they committed a sin. They could go confess and get absorbed by the priests. And there was this afterlife, right? That that’s what ultimately as Christians they were ultimately striving for, a place in this afterlife. And we didn’t get any of that. [laughs] That’s not how Jews live. It’s like, there’s this world, and you gotta make this world better and you have to succeed in this world, and you have to treat people good in this world. You can’t keep on committing a sin every week and getting absolved and going back and doing it again. So I think there was this kind of cultural sense that maybe the Christians had it easier, right? Or maybe non-Jews. I don’t know about the Muslim tradition here, or other religious traditions. But growing up in America, Christianity is obviously the predominant culture. And yeah, just this sense that we didn’t believe in heaven. You don’t hear that in the synagogue, you know, all this talk about the afterlife and trying to win a place in heaven. It’s just not a part of… It was not a part of my Jewish upbringing, whether or not that has– on a larger scale– whether or not that has anything to do with Jewish success.

I definitely think it has a lot to do with the Jewish philanthropic drive, the Jewish priority on learning. You know, you just see the enormous amount of support that Jewish philanthropies and charities do, individual Jews are extremely philanthropic with non-Jewish causes too. Right? I mean, David Geffen’s name is everywhere. There’s all these Jewish philanthropists. I think it does have something to do with that. Yes.

Zach: Yeah. It’s just interesting to me because it’s something that I’ve often wondered and I’ve just never seen anything written about it. And I kind of wondered if it might be viewed as insensitive to talk about, but it just seems to me like you say, it’s ‘I want to get my rewards in this life. I don’t have a second life to fall back on, I have here and now.’

James: Yeah. No, I think it’s a fair question to ask.

Zach: Do you want to mention anything else? Maybe anything that you thought we missed, or else go into what you’re working on these days.

James: Well, I published a book this past summer, which doesn’t really have anything to do with what we’ve talked about today. But it’s about another minority. It’s called Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, and it’s about the role of homosexuality in American high politics from World War Two to the end of the Cold War when to be a homosexual in Washington was really the most dangerous thing you could possibly be. Even more dangerous than being a communist. That book was published in the summer, it was a New York Times bestseller, it was just named to the list of the top 100 notable books of the year by the Times. And I am back to journalism, writing for Tablet and Air Mail and [Colette] and other places that I write for, and thinking about a next book but not settled on one yet.

Zach: Congrats on the book’s success, that’s great.

James: Thank you.

Zach: And yeah, thanks a lot for coming on, and thanks for giving your opinions.

James: Thanks for having me.

Zach: That was journalist and author, Jamie Kirchick. You can learn more about him on his website, jameskirchick.com. You can follow him on Twitter @jkirchick.

That was journalist and author Jamie Kirchick. You can learn more about him on his website JamesKirchick.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @jkirchick. 

I wanted to mention some people and resources who contributed to my research for this episode. I read some of David Bernstein’s book Woke Antisemitism, which makes the case that some common liberal-side antiracism approaches are divisive and can lead to antisemitic views. Bernstein has long been an influential person in Jewish organizations and he shares his experiences seeing the new antiracism ideas grow in influence over the last couple decades and how he’s seen those ideas affect Jewish organizations and affect people’s perspectives on Jews and Israel. 

I also wanted to thank Marshall Herskovitz, who I follow on Twitter and who is also someone interested in depolarization, for talking to me a bit on this topic. 

I also read some of a book titled The Enduring, Invisible, and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness, which was a series of antiracism essays, and a couple of those essays were by Jewish people considering their so-called whiteness. 

This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me Zach Elwood. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com. Remember that you can subscribe to it and get ad-free episodes, amongst a few other features. But mainly you’d be helping me work more on this podcast and help promote it to others, so if you enjoy my work or think it’s important, that’s the main way you can show your appreciation. 

Okay thanks for listening. 

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podcast

Is liberal bias impeding U.S. depolarization and conflict resolution efforts?, with Guy Burgess

A talk with conflict resolution specialist Guy Burgess, who, along with his wife Heidi Burgess, run the project www.beyondintractability.org. Guy and Heidi wrote a paper in 2022 titled “Applying conflict resolution insights to the hyper‐polarized, society‐wide conflicts threatening liberal democracies.“

A transcript of this talk is below. I talk with Guy about: how conflict resolution principles might be applied to U.S. polarization problems; the importance of addressing liberal-side contributions to polarization; the common objections people can have to seeing polarization as a problem that both sides must tackle; how some in the conflict resolution space may be hindered from helping by their own liberal bias and polarization; the Burgesses’ ideas for what society must do to reduce polarization to more healthy levels, and more.

Episode links:

Resources related to or mentioned in the talk:

TRANSCRIPT 

Note that this transcript will contain errors. 

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

As you probably know if you’ve listened to this podcast before, I often focus on polarization- and depolarization-related topics. In this episode, I talk to conflict resolution specialist Guy Burgess about the problem of American polarization, with a focus on liberal-side contributions to the problem.

And to be clear up front: if you’re politically liberal, thinking about how liberals are contributing to our divides does not mean you have to believe that both political groups contribute equally to the problem of polarization. In other words, you can continue thinking that one side is much worse than the other side while also working on understanding what drives our divides and thinking about ways we can reduce those divides.

And the reason I sometimes focus on liberal-side contributions is because I think it’s something that liberals don’t like to talk about, and many liberals have a blind spot about what those contributions even are. And if we’re going to solve our very serious problems, we need many more people to be willing to take open, honest looks at our polarization problems and be willing to do the hard work of trying to solve those problems. And I’d also say that it’s especially important for liberals to think about these things because we can only influence our own group; we can only influence people who are similar to us; our righteous judgments of the other side and desires that they improve themselves have no real influence on them. Research shows change of a group must come from within, so we need more people, both conservatives and liberals, thinking about these things and thinking about how they can make their own political groups less toxic.

I learned about Guy Burgess because a friend of mine who works in mediation and conflict resolution, Eleanor Bravo, sent me a paper that Guy and his wife Heidi had written titled Applying conflict resolution insights to the hyper‐polarized, society‐wide conflicts threatening liberal democracies.

And one of the things that stood out to me in that paper was that Guy and Heidi briefly discussed liberal-side contributions. I’ll quote one of the more pertinent lines from the paper: they wrote that the objective of the left seems to be to quote “cancel and drive from the public square anyone who has ever expressed the slightest doubt about the merits of any aspect of the progressive agenda.” end quote.

They also mention conservative-side contributions in the paper, but the thing that is noteworthy about this is that it’s rare to see conflict resolution and peacekeeping organizations and experts be willing to even discuss liberal-side contributions. And the reason for this probably isn’t that surprising: many of the people who work in those fields are politically liberal and thus may have their own blind spots and biases, and even apart from that they can face peer pressure from their colleagues to not talk about such things in their papers and public discussions.

And if you’re new to my podcast and haven’t heard me cover these topics in past episodes, and are wondering ‘Wait, what’s he talking about; how are liberals contributing to our divides?’, I think you should listen to this talk, and also listen to some of my past episodes on this topic. You might also like a book I started reading recently called Beyond Contempt, by Erica Etelson. Etelson is a dedicated progressive, and her book focuses on the ways in which liberals speak in dismissive and insulting ways about conservatives and how that riles up conservative anger and contributes to the very things liberals are upset about. If you’re curious to learn more about the topic of liberal-side contributions to our divides, I’ll include some relevant resources in the blog post for this episode, which you can find at behavior-podcast.com.

If you’re someone who scoffs at the idea that liberals need to do more to work towards healing our divides, I’d ask you to question your certainty around that. Is your scoffing at that idea much different than the conservatives who would scoff at that idea, who would insist that the problem is entirely the fault of the left, and that their side doesn’t have to do anything to fix the problem? Are you willing to examine the reasons why many experts in conflict resolution, including some politically liberal people, think it’s important to discuss liberal-side contributions to our divides? Are you willing to examine why it is that some people, including some liberals, have written articles and books about the ways in which liberals contribute?

Are you willing to examine why it is that Guy and Heidi Burgess can express frustration with some of their colleagues in the conflict resolution space for, to paraphrase here, often acting more like liberal activists than conflict resolution professionals?

If you’re someone who scoffs at the idea of depolarization, I hope you take some time to think about these ideas and learn more about these ideas, because it’s a very important topic, perhaps the most important topic of all. And it may be that more of us need to recognize the importance of this topic and attempt to rise above our emotional and reactive stances on these things if we’re going to avoid worst-case scenarios.

So a little bit about Guy Burgess: he’s a conflict resolution specialist who, along with his wife, Heidi Burgess, operate the project Beyond Intractability, which you can find at beyondintractability.org. Guy and Heidi have a long and respected career of working on conflict resolution, and are well known in the conflict resolution space. It’s impossible for me to boil down their work in a quick way, but I’ll give a few of the highlights:

  • They founded the Conflict Information Consortium in 1988 at the University of Colorado.
  • They created a knowledge base they called Beyond Intractability, which was focused on tools for resolving very entrenched, so-called intractable, conflicts.
  • They wrote the book Justice Without Violence, and the book Encyclopedia of Conflict Resolution.

And just a note: these are very hard topics to talk about. Whenever I do these polarization-related interviews, I always wish I’d said some things differently, or feel I missed a vital point, or feel that my suboptimal wording will likely cause some people to misunderstand me. Aside from my own mistakes, the polarized nature of our society means that some people will be filtering any of these discussions through a very pessimistic lens, looking for any small misstep or thing they disagree with as an indicator that the whole concept of depolarization is faulty and oblivious. These are extremely hard conversations to have; and I think the hardness of them, the risk of offending our friends and family and colleagues, the risk of being perceived as foolish and naive, is a major reason people avoid these conversations, on both sides. We become more scared of offending our side, more scared of helping the other side, or even of just being perceived by others as being not sufficiently pure or moral. But I think more of us need to see the value in having these conversations, and see that accomplishing very important things, like healing divides that pose existential threats to a country or society, requires a lot more people to make themselves uncomfortable. It requires more bravery, more patience, more long-term thinking, and more cutting of slack to the people around us.

If there’s something in this talk that offends you, or a major point you think that is being missed in these discussions, maybe you’d take the time to write to me about your thoughts. You can do that at my site behavior-podcast.com using the contact form. I’ll actually be spending the entire next month working on my depolarization book so I would appreciate any thoughts you’d care to share.

Zach: Okay, here’s the talk with Guy Burgess.

Hi Guy, thanks for coming on the show.

Guy Burgess: Thank you. I’m looking forward to this.

Zach: Let’s start out with a little bit about your background. What are the most relevant parts of your career that you think puts you in a good place to have ideas about how to reduce American polarization if you could give a summary of, I know it’s a long career but maybe summarize the high points.

Guy Burgess: First of all, I should say that pretty much everything that I’ve done going way back to graduate school days which were in the ’70s, a long, long time ago, I’ve done with my wife and partner Heidi Burgess and we’ve been working as a team for a very long time. And some folks think that’s our most persuasive conflict resolution credential. The other thing, we both have PhDs in sociology but we’ve never worked in a disciplinary department. Our careers have been spent entirely in interdisciplinary settings and we’ve worked really at the intersection of research, teaching and practice. We’ve engaged in a variety of conflict resolution efforts of one sort or another as practitioners. Done spent a lot of years teaching and probably most of our time doing research and trying to compile and bring together what the conflict and conflict related fields collectively know about how to deal with our most difficult problems.

So the biggest thing that happened in our career and this goes back to the late ’80s, we received a major grant from the Hewlett Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation supported us for over 20 years. And they were at the time establishing a series of university based conflict resolution research centers. And we were the only one between Northwestern and Stanford in each of these centers and they eventually got to be 10 or 15 of them, specialized in different things. And what we chose to specialize on was intractable conflict. And this goes back to the late ’80s. And that was a time when an organization called the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution, which was the precursor to the Association for Conflict Resolution that exists today, put out a manual on how to deal with public policy dispute resolution. And this was a time during the first great energy crisis in the ’70s and early ’80s where the problem was not climate change.

The problem was political restrictions in the global energy supply. And there were proposals to build giant energy facilities all over the country and they were extremely controversial. And there were lots of conflicts about that and we were involved in those. But at any rate, what Spider did was they put out a manual and it had, the first half of it was how to identify really intractable conflicts that as a mediator you should stay away from because you don’t stand a prayer of being able to get through these without some sort of terrible blow up. And we thought that it would be good to have an organization that’s specialized in trying to understand and deal with these intractable conflicts. And the other thing that we specialized in, again, under the support of the Hewlett Foundation was using these new technologies of computers and telecommunications and all.

This was a time that actually was before the IBM PC when we first started exchanging information about how to deal with conflict electronically. It was on five and a quarter inch floppy discs. And we’ve tried to improve that over the years as the technologies improve. And the other thing that’s exceptional about our career is that since we never really worked in a practitioner organization or a tenure track faculty position, that we’ve been generalists. And we are a society of specialists and everybody knows a lot about a narrow field in dispute resolution. It’s a particular kind of mediation perhaps. And there are very few people who have a chance to spend their career looking at what lots of different people in different fields are doing and trying to fit it all together. So what we did under a support from the Hewlett Foundation is we build a series of knowledge bases that are increasingly sophisticated and they’re full of lots and lots of information and we’ve never been able to quite find the perfect way of organizing it all.

And we’ve never had anywhere near as much money as a task like this really needs. But we’ve still been able to pull together an awful lot of insights from lots and lots of very different people. And when we first started this, we thought that there would be lots of different views on how to deal with conflict. And while that’s certainly true, what we really found is that there are lots of people working on different aspects of conflict from different perspectives. And if you start putting them together, it gives you a very different view of the overall situation. So one of the essays that we have is builds on the old metaphor of the blind men and the elephant where you have all of these blind men approaching the elephant and one encounters the leg and decides it’s like a tree and one encounters the soft, fussy tail and thinks it’s nice and somebody else runs into the tusk and so on and so forth.

But what we’re giggling with is a giant monster in terms of intractable conflict that really is threatening pretty much everything that we care about. And it’s so big and in many ways we all have our own versions of blindfolds on that. We can only understand parts of it. And it’s hard to get an image of what the whole big thing is and how to deal with it. So what we’ve been focused on with our knowledge based systems and the of theory of how to try to organize this is how do we combine what we collectively know into a strategy for dealing with a problem that’s as big and complex as intractable conflict and what we’re calling in our latest effort, the hyper polarization problem.

Zach: I first learned about your work through a paper recently. It was called Applying Conflict Resolution Insights to the Hyper Polarized Society-wide Conflicts, threatening Liberal Democracies. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the goals with that. What were you trying to communicate and what were the most important points, would you say?

Guy Burgess: Well, what we did with that paper and we don’t write many academic papers and academic papers tend to be very full of jargon written for narrow audiences. And there are a lot of problems with them. And the fact they tend to be insanely expensive and only people at universities with access to libraries can really access them. But the conflict resolution quarterly was starting something different and they were going to start publishing a different kind of article. They called them feature articles and the idea was to raise questions that the field of conflict resolution and more broadly peace building ought to be talking about, thinking about. And they invited us to write such an article and we’d been a bit frustrated, I think you could say, on how little the conflict resolution community was doing to help society address these hyper polarized conflicts that are tearing us apart.

And so we decided to write an article that was a bit of a challenge to the field to do more that also outlined a strategy, again, for trying to bring together our different areas of expertise into a comprehensive effort. So that’s what we wrote. And I’ll talk a little bit more about the key points of that article. But we also set up on our website, which is beyondintractability.org and online discussion. So we now have a lengthy series of articles that have been written in response to our article and responses to those articles. And we’re continuing to encourage people to contribute their ideas to this discussion. We have a sub stack newsletter that comes out with summaries on the latest things that we receive to the discussion every week or so. And that’s been really very exciting and we’re getting a lot of people to start grappling with this problem.

We tried something similar a couple years ago. We tried to push something we called the Constructive Conflict Initiative. And there what we argued was that the conflict problem is as serious and difficult a threat to humanity as something like climate change or infectious diseases as we’ve recently discovered. And in that, I tell the story of how as a young PhD just out of graduate school, I had a chance to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And this was 10, 15 years before Wikipedia thinks the climate change movement started. And at that time, there were a few scientists who were studying climate, and these are guys who were accustomed to writing very scientific papers and going to very scientific conferences and talking to people in pretty much the same field. And they knew lots about atmospheric physics and chemistry and all of that.

And they just discovered that we are in the process of dramatically altering the global climate system, and that they needed to tell the world that fundamental changes in every element of society need to be made or we’re facing what over the next century or so could be a real catastrophe. This was when they were just starting to say, “Okay, how do we take this understanding of climate problems and turn it into a global political movement?” And in the next 25 years or so, they developed it to the point where they won a Nobel Peace Prize for it. And that was 15 years ago or something. And we’re still a long way from having addressed the problem but I think that there are a similarly small number of people who understand and they’re working in relatively isolated fields looking at human interactions in one’s way or another. How really far we are from being able to build the kind of global collaborative system that we need to deal with the problems that we face and that we need to start thinking about how to change all this. And we over time are going to have to mobilize something comparable in scope to the climate change response. Five years ago, we had real trouble persuading people that that was the case. And with this latest effort, that’s a lot more people are understanding this and are willing to start engaging the problem which is very encouraging really.

Zach: Yeah. What stood out to me reading your paper and your other work was just how similar it was to my thoughts in terms of seeing polarization, extreme polarization as the most significant threat we’re facing in the sense that if we can’t solve this problem, we can’t solve the other problems. And aside from even the conflict it represents, it’s just a distraction from solving other very serious problems. And also the fact that you talk about liberal contributions and how people on the liberal side need to do more which I think is something I talk about a good amount in this podcast and it’s been disappointing to me to see how that seems to be something liberals even educated academic people and conflict resolution people seem to really avoid talking about the contributions there or what liberals can do.

And I think it makes sense in the sense that it’s understandable that polarization is so hard to get around so that these are often liberal people who are either themselves pretty polarized, pretty biased or else they feel pressured to avoid talking about those things. And sometimes I’ve even had conversations with people I’ve interviewed where they’ll be more willing to talk about those things off the record and not really want to talk about it on the record. So I’m curious, do you see, when it comes to trying to find these multiply or very massively parallel efforts to try to reduce polarization, do you see the obstacle there as just getting people to even recognize polarization as a problem worth reducing?

Guy Burgess: That’s certainly a issue and there’s a sense in which, well no, I’m back up a little bit. Well, one of the most lively parts of this discussion that we’ve been having really reveals the deep tension between the peace building worldview or a conflict resolution worldview and a progressive worldview of social justice. And at the extreme we had been having an exchange with one of our colleagues who was really torn. And on the one hand he hears the argument that we are at the beginning stages or maybe not even the beginning stages, maybe the mid stages, the transition from a democracy to some sort of terrible authoritarian rule. And that if we talk in conciliatory terms and try to understand the other side and empathize and try to really diffuse the conflict, what we’re really doing is playing into the hands of the authoritarian wannabes who are going to make the same transition that we saw in Nazi Germany and take over the society.

And then we’re going to be in really big trouble. And the argument here is that the threat is so severe that we need to mobilize all of the resources available in the society. And that includes the conflict resolution and peace building field to the task of fighting systemic oppression and these authoritarian trends in our society. And at the other hand, you have those and a lot of this comes from people who have been instrumental in trying to help war torn societies, reconcile their differences and recover. And they see that even in society’s plagued by terrible authoritarian strong man rule, there’s also an underlying conflict. And there are fundamental, reasonable, substantive important differences between various elements of the society that play into the conflict and make authoritarianism possible. And this is what you might call the divide and conquer syndrome. And this goes way back thousands of years in human history where people have tried to deliberately divide societies as a way of gaining control.

And so at one end or one side, you have that. And then the other side, and what we’ve been trying to talk up is the notion that we need to reframe conflict from the conflicts we face. Right now we think of them in us versus then terms and we tune in to the news every morning and we anxiously look to see whether our side, whether it’s progressive or conservative, won some points yesterday in the news or whether they lost. And everything is reduced to what at least one fellow called political hobbyism where it’s a spectator sport and you keep rooting for the home team and it gets all sort of silly like that. And we certainly have seen that, in fact, in many ways the recent election is kind of the end of the season of one season of this us versus them political contest and we’re just embarking on the next one. And a lot of the news coverage is sometimes it’s called horse race coverage, who’s ahead, who’s behind?

Zach: A small note here, people have been writing books for decades about how the so-called horse race coverage of politics has undermined democracy and increased our divides. On the liberal side, outlets like Fox News get a lot of the attention for increasing divides but it’s possible to have a view that a lot of mainstream media increases our divides. An early book I read on this topic was from 1997, it was titled Breaking the News, how the Media Undermined American Democracy. That book and other books and papers from around that time talked about how covering politics and elections like sports as a game of wins and losses of victories and humiliations, instead of focusing on the ideas and the issues made people perceive politics to be like sports. If you have many media outlets treating politics basically like a sports game, it’s not surprising that it will trigger people’s us versus them emotions. The same emotions that can make people so angry and emotional about sports. This is just to say, when one starts to dig into the large monster that is polarization, one can find plenty of factors and plenty of blame to spread around our society. Okay, back to the talk.

Guy Burgess: But what we’ve been trying to talk up is that we reframe the conflict, so it’s not us versus them but that there are, we focus instead on a series of complex and destructive conflict dynamics that make it difficult for large and diverse societies to live together in peace and mutually supportive ways. And that we need to systematically understand those dynamics and find ways of correcting them. Now if you can reframe things that way, what you do is you take people from being opposed to one another to cooperating on the same task of trying to control these destructive conflict dynamics. And so that’s, I think, a way to look at things. And then as you do this, then you raise the question and it’s hard for both liberals and conservatives to see this sometimes is that these dynamics bend your mind in a sense that you wind up doing things and believing things that you wouldn’t ordinarily do and believe because of these pressures. And so we can go into a little more detail on what these things are but you mentioned a massively parallel peace building or problem solving idea. And basically what it focuses on is trying to get a lot of different organizations doing different things to go after different dynamics in a way that collectively can attack a large portion of them enough to alter the trends in society.

Zach: Yeah. And to give a couple examples here, I mean some of the things that you’ll hear liberal people say in pushing that against depolarization framings or goals, you might hear the quote from Desmond Tutu that goes, if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. That’s one thing you sometimes hear. Another one in a similar vein is we are tolerant of anything except intolerance. And I think maybe you could talk a little bit about more about what those arguments are missing. For example, the one thing that stands out is that sometimes that relies over a huge amount of complexity. For example, you can find some of the left activist framings of things very arguable and subjective that where even people on their own side will disagree with them about the harms being done or how exactly to find the problems.

I think that one of the things we see and it’s just a natural thing of polarization, I think, where both sides have these righteous and very certain framings of things that they don’t like to hear people disagree with. I think there’s that on the left where even though we can find a lot of complexity and nuance on any specific subject, you often hear these big statements of how there cannot be any negotiation or any negotiation is itself a harm. And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe that discussion that’s come up.

Guy Burgess: Yeah, well that’s absolutely critical and it’s a very difficult one to work through. A couple of the things that we’ve been talking about that address this, one paper that we just posted to this discussion is something I call the QED syndrome. And when I was in high school, I learned in geometry class that I’m supposed to write QED at the bottom of any proof. And when I prove something like, “Hey, that’s a real fact.” Now I can rely on this going forward. And it seems to me that this same principle applies to a lot of society’s big conflicts that from one line of reasoning, you will work through something and come to a conclusion and say, “Aha, this is absolutely it.” The example that I use in the articles about climate change, there’s some folks that look at a particular line of evidence and come to the conclusion that climate is an emergency.

And if we don’t drop absolutely everything and subordinate pretty much every other human concern at redoing the energy system, we’re going to be facing a new retrievable catastrophe. Once you decide that you believe that, then a whole series of decisions flow from that. And then you start thinking that anybody who disagrees with that is part of the problem and they have to be opposed. And you think of it in us versus them terms. Likewise, you will have groups that with a different line of evidence conclude that it’s all just a scam designed to sell solar collectors and electric vehicles. You’ll find other folks that argue and this is a stronger argument. I think that the situation is serious but not as serious as it’s sometimes made out to be. And that we do have more time to respond and we do have time to think things through carefully and make sure that what we’re doing will in fact work and to preserve the economic viability of the society which are ultimately going to need in order to be able to adapt to inevitable climate changes.

So there are a whole series of different arguments and I can have a longer list there. The same sort of thing applies to social justice issues. You can come up with a line of reasoning that convinces you that racism is behind everything and it explains all that there is in society. And then there are a whole series of other arguments. But once you get to this QED point where you’ve decided that you really have got it all figured out, then you quit thinking about other competing arguments. You decide that they’re disinformation. And the truth is the world that we live in is so complex that there are a lot of these and there are different lines of reasoning that take you to somewhat different conclusions. And the only way that we’re ever really going to solve the problems is by really engaging these debates and trying to look at the strengths and weaknesses of them and trying to combine what people learn from different perspectives. So part of the argument is that going back to the destructive dynamics, a lot of the dynamics that the Democrats claim afflict the left also afflict the right, also afflict the left. And so you need to look at those as well. Going a little too far in too many directions here. Why don’t we stop there and let you pose? And these are huge questions.

Zach: Oh, yeah. It’s so hard to talk about. And that’s part of the problem with these things is just such a monster as you say. Getting back to you, talking about the motivated reasoning, this filtering of everything through these specific narratives that we’ve built up. The more emotional and angry and fearful we are, the more motivated reasoning we have that’s motivated by these emotions we have as opposed to stepping back and being like, “Well, is the righteous narrative I’ve crafted the actual truth? Can I see how well meaning and rational people might be able to have a different perspective on these things even people on my own side?” And I think it gets back to that reframing you talked about where as opposed to viewing things like an us versus them framing, you can continue working towards the things you want to work towards while trying to speak in depolarizing and persuasive ways.

And I would argue that that’s actually a much more effective way to achieve the things you want to achieve on both sides. Both sides have a better chance of I think persuading and reaching their goals as opposed to creating this us versus them war where really nobody wins really and you have the possibility for societal and democracy destruction and such. Wasn’t really a question there but let me continue on. Let’s see. One of the things you talk about in your paper are the bad faith actors, the people who deliberately inflame tensions for their own profit or ego, other things. And one thing that strikes me in that area is the more polarized the society becomes, the harder it can become to distinguish the bad faith actors from the true believers.

And polarization itself leads us to perceive the other side with more paranoia and distrust leads us to viewing some of the true believers on the other side as being disingenuous and liars because we literally just can’t understand how people can believe those things. And so I think that points to maybe being cautious in general even while we work towards depolarizing, being cautious about assuming some people are bad faith. And I’m curious if you have any thoughts on the hardships of distinguishing bad faith actors from true believers who may still be deliberately polarizing but are actual true believers.

Guy Burgess: Yeah. I think the bad faith actor sections, I think one of the major contributions that really came out of that paper that we tend to think of things and hyper polarize. That is two polls. There’s the left and the right Republicans and Democrats in this country and something comparable in other countries. But I think it makes a lot of sense to think in terms of three sets of actors. There’s grassroots citizens on the left and the right and there are a variety of kinds of bad faith actors who are folks who have figured out how to profit from our conflicts and they amplify them but they don’t really care about one side or the other. It’s the conflict that’s in their best interest. Now, some of these folks are divide and conquer authoritarian wannabes. There’s a great book on The Dictator’s Handbook that basically is the time tested strategy for seizing dictatorial control of a society. And a lot of it implies this kind of deliberate inflaming of conflict. But there’s also in our society, and this I think is a big part of the problem, the structure of the media tends to reward those who provide more inflammatory content. One of the features of the internet is that as we’ve moved essentially all political reporting and opinion pieces onto the internet, there is very detailed tracking not only of who reads things but how long they spend reading it, who they share to others, how much they are engaged by it.

And you have news outlets that have figured out that the only way in which they can remain financially viable is by building and retaining a large audience. And you do that by giving your audience what it wants to hear and what people like to hear is they, well, and this goes back to some of the psychological vulnerabilities, the destructive conflict dynamics that we need to figure out ways to control. But one of these is worst case bias and this is a deeply embedded psychological bias. There are studies that show that the fear part of the brain is literally wired ahead of the hope part of the brain. And things that are scary or threatening will get our attention way ahead of things that are hopeful and promising. So one of the ways in which media outlets get our attention is by sending us scary stories.

But scary stories are most attractive when they are a coupled with an account of how this was a narrow, a scary encounter but we’re going to win. And you feel self-righteous and you feel like if you keep staying in the course, you’re going get through this all right. So you get that kind of material spread on both the left and the right. This is in editorial papers and you can look over time at how there have even been studies that have looked at how the content of headlines over time has gotten more and more inflammatory. How major news sources on the left and the right increasingly focus on a relatively narrow audience and tell them what they want to hear. Those audiences stick with a cluster of similar news stories. They come to regard any other view as disinformation or worse.

The algorithms that drive social media are basically take this and amplify it tremendously. The thing about broadcast news or newspapers is that you have to write one thing that goes to thousands or millions of people and it has to seem sort of reasonable to millions of people. The thing about social media is that you can tailor your propaganda or your bias news reporting to very precisely to what a particular individual is likely to fall for or find attractive. And that information is never seen by the larger community. There’s no real way to tell what’s going on. We now have very sophisticated algorithms. I was just reading an article on how TikTok is especially scary in this regard to really psychoanalyze people with an astonishing degree of sophistication and figure out using these artificial intelligence driven algorithms exactly what bits of information will inflame the reader to get whatever opinion it is that you want.

And so this kind of micro targeting is a whole new level of propaganda. The other thing that’s scary is that some of this is quite intentional. Some of it is being pursued by hostile foreign powers to an unknown degree. Some of it is being pursued by political campaigns that feel really compelled to use every available trick to try to win over votes from the other side. It’s all hidden and dark and you don’t know who’s paying for it or what their motives are. And it’s a big part of what’s pushing us ever further apart. And so a big part of conflict resolution or efforts to try to diffuse all of this, is figuring out how to control this kind of inflammatory media dynamic.

Zach: A small note here. Regarding social media, a lot of the attention in this area tends to focus on the ways in which social media companies try to get our attention and arouse our emotion. A lot of the focus is on product decisions, in other words. But in the previous episode of this podcast, I focus on the ways in which social media and internet communication generally may have some inherent properties that amplifier divides in bad thinking. And maybe the inherent aspects are much more the problem than are the product decisions. For example, we behave worse to each other when we’re distant from each other and the internet is a form of communication at a distance. For another example, research shows that we’re less likely to change our minds when we write down our beliefs. And the internet induces us to write down our beliefs on a wide range of topics.

So it could be making us more hardened and stubborn in our beliefs. So if that topic interests you, you might like that old episode. Okay. Back to the talk. One thing we’ve talked about it a little bit, but maybe we could focus on it a little bit more. The obstacles that, the mostly liberal conflict resolution and peace building group of people have in tackling polarization. One thing you say in the paper is one cannot bridge the left right divisions while advocating for a progressive agenda with which the conflict field is largely aligned. Our interventions cannot succeed if we also advocate for values and policies that are contributing to hyperpolarization. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how possible do you see it as that these things will be effective because as you say, to get more people to think about these things the people that will help spread these messages. It seems a pretty big obstacle that they’re suffering from, in my opinion, suffering from the same polarization and peer pressure that tends to affect polarized societies generally.

Guy Burgess: Well, there are a couple of things here. One, I think it’s important to distinguish neutral peace building roles from ad social justice advocacy. And social justice can be defined differently depending on the community one belongs to. And one of the debates we’ve had in this discussion is whether or not this peace building role is even legitimate. And we argue that you certainly need peace builders to try to find some way to get parties to diffuse all of this. The other thing that we argue for is something we call, and there’s a big section on our website focused to this, something we call constructive advocacy or constructive conflict. And there are a lot of things that the conflict resolution field insights that come out of the field about ways people hear and respond to opposing ideas, how escalation and polarization dynamics work, what leads people to misunderstand one another, how you can communicate in ways that actually do promote understanding.

So the idea is to help people understand advocacy strategies that because they’re based in a more sophisticated understanding of conflict dynamics are more likely to work and less likely to inflame opposition and drive the escalation spiral. An awful lot of the things people do as part of their advocacy efforts really wind up making things worse. It’s great fun to have a snarky reply that puts down the other side but that’s what inflames opposition. And if you approach people in a more respectful way, you can still, well, basically it’s a chance of arguing your case without provoking the kind of backlash that’s counterproductive. So there are a whole series of ideas on how to be more effective advocates but that’s a fundamentally different role than the neutral mediator peace building role. And we need both of these.

Zach: Yeah, and it feels really connected to me too, the more I have thought about it. I was reading Erica Edison’s book beyond contempt about basically how liberals can be more persuasive in the arguments and also take a depolarizing approach. And I was thinking of her book as mainly a depolarization related book but to her it would be a book about how to actually accomplish your goals more effectively. And the more I thought about it, those things are so intertwined. I mean, to me they’re basically the same. And, and it doesn’t matter which side you’re talking about, these are just ways to actually accomplish your goals more effectively. And in the process you are actually taking a depolarizing approach. And maybe that’s a good segue into this question I had.

The thing that strikes me is that it’s a very important concept that I feel is often overlooked. It seems like the more polarized we become, the more we tend to forget what the role of a democracy is. That the role of a democracy is not to achieve some paradise of whatever sort any specific person envisions. The point isn’t to create a place where everything is right as we envision it. The point is merely to resolve differences of opinions without political violence. And I think for many people, as we become more polarized, that they become increasingly intolerant of the idea of not getting their way because they perceive things in such largely good versus evil ways. I think we need to remind ourselves that what the nature of democracy is and that we will have political losses and that we will have things that happen that we think are very wrong and so will the other side. d I think, I’m curious what you think of that as far as like something to focus on. Something to keep in mind as people work on these problems. Because I think at the end of the day, we do have to face the fact that the reality that we live in a world that people can believe vastly different things than us and have their own complex reasons for believing those things and we have to keep that in mind.

Guy Burgess: Now, one of the most important ideas and well, one of the other articles in this discussion focuses on vision. And if we don’t have a sense of where we want to go, it’s going to be awfully hard to get there. And one of the things we’ve done over the years with our students is ask them to describe, offer their vision of what a peaceful society looks like. And almost always they come back with a description of what society would look like if everybody finally agreed that their side had it right and that their vision for the future prevailed and nobody disagreed with it. That’s the sort of advocate’s dream is that the other side will finally decide that they were right all along and everything will be fine. But what we really need is a vision of not how one image of social justice will prevail but an image of how to build a society in which we have diverse communities with different images of social justice and how they can coexist and tolerate one another and still able to work together on areas of common interest.

And that’s a very different image. The democratic vision is something that underlies and makes possible a diverse society. Without it, the diversity will wind up tearing itself apart. And that’s sort of what we’re looking at the moment. So that’s one way of looking at it. Another thing that we talk about is something we call pragmatic empathy or I sometimes use the phrase bridge building or not bridge building, mirror building. The idea is to see yourself as others see you. And once you do that, then you get a sense of what makes others so mad at you and willing to fight so hard. And you can then start asking questions about, well, do I really need to do those things? Or maybe if we did it this way, I wouldn’t provoke so much opposition but I’d still get the things that I really care about.

And once you make that kind of jump, then our chances of working through our problems are a whole lot better, I think. And offer one example of this that I was thinking about this morning actually, and this goes to I think the core of the left’s contribution to the problem and maybe can help people understand this a little better. But right now we have an elaborate legal structure that has emerged to protect what you might call protected classes. These are groups that liberals have progressively over the last several decades argued are being unfairly discriminated against by society whether it’s on racial grounds or gender or any of these things. That civil rights laws have been expanded to protect those groups. And that we’ve now reached the point where anything that’s seen as threatening or well, that I guess the next point is we add to this a whole set of harassment kind of rules where now embodied in title and a lot of other legislation, there are rules that if people make you feel bad for whatever your identity is, that’s actionable.

And there are all these stories of people getting fired or otherwise canceled for doing things that members of such protected groups feel infringe upon their rights. And that all seems absolutely fine and there’s lots of very good reasons behind a lot of this, but it gets to the point where it’s so pervasive that it’s inspired a huge backlash. And a way to think about this and to try to understand it for folks on the left is imagine that we had another society that was, say, predominantly ruled by traditional Christian values. And when you apply for a job, you had to write an essay that says how much you support traditional Christian views on issues like sex and morality and family structure, or that when you went to publish a book, you had your manuscript went through sensitivity readers that would review it and see if there was anything that traditional Christians found objectionable. You could tell the story for quite a while. But the truth is that there are similar institutions enforcing progressive views on these issues and that’s what makes the right mad. And had that situation been reversed, had there been conservative leaning institutions enforcing things in the same sort of way, that would’ve inspired a similar response on the left.

Zach: A note here. One very good book about the unreasonableness and badness of some of these kinds of things is titled The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. That book was written by Robert Boyers, a politically liberal university professor who edit Salmagundi, a respected literary magazine. If you’re someone who doubts that these things are problems, I’d highly recommend checking out that book. At the very least, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of what it is that rational and well-meaning people can see as very big problems in this area. Back to the talk.

Guy Burgess: And what you need to do is to craft some sort of middle ground where you have a set of principles that apply equally to people regardless of their beliefs. So for instance, you can’t wear political branded clothes to work. That’s different from saying you can wear a Black Lives Matter hat but not a MAGA hat. I think that if we would recognize this kind of tension and try to find a mutually acceptable set of principles that would protect folks on both the left and the right, we’d really go a long way towards defusing our current problems. There’d still be these bad faith actors that will try to undermine something like that. I mean, there’s got to be a way to push back against that.

Zach: Yeah. It reminds me of, I was listening to a depolarization aim talk the other day that involved Erica Etelson and she had a great quote, which was something like: liberals often have a delusion that if you can prevent people from talking about something that they aren’t thinking it, or that you prevent them from thinking about it. But the more we act as if we can’t talk about certain things, the more the people that want to talk about those things will find that information elsewhere including from some extreme people if those are the only people talking about an issue. So it gets to that point of, we need to acknowledge that people do want to talk about these things, that they don’t always accept the liberal explanations of certain things or the liberal framings of things. And the more we can try to talk about that and not treat those people as outcasts, depending on the topic of course.

Guy Burgess: Now one of the lines I use is that we need a more diverse diversity. The basic principles that the left has articulated on how to make a diverse society work are by and large pretty solid. It just needs to be extended beyond the liberal coalition. You could make a similar phrase, we need a more intersectional intersectionality that extends the same sort of respect for differences outside of the liberal coalition as well as within.

Zach: Yeah. You see that a lot with liberal writing off of racial minority conservative views and such and acting like those, it tends to be those views are disrespected or treated as not legitimate views or something. Those kinds of things. Yeah. Maybe you’d like to talk about what are you working on these days. Do you want to talk about any projects that you have in store right now?

Guy Burgess: Well, the next big thing that we’re working on, and this goes back to this notion of massively parallel approaches to problem, that maybe should back up a little bit. There’s a important distinction to be made between what are called complicated systems. And this is what people are really good at. When you build tools, they’re complicated. You understand how they work, they’re blueprints. It could be an airplane, could be something really complicated, computers, the internet, but these are all things that somebody’s designed, somebody has the plans for. You get quick feedback if it doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work, you get out and you fix it and you know what it’s supposed to do. And people are very good at that sort of thing. And then there’s complex systems and complex systems evolve. They’re not designed. They’re better thought of in terms of organic metaphors, ecological metaphors that includes society where you have lots and lots of different people doing different things for different reason, interacting in a complex ecosystem in ways that push the aggregate of society in one direction or another.

Now we tend to think that the way you fix the hyperpolarization problem, as you treat it like a complicated system, you come up with a plan and a set of institutional changes, and if you do this, this, and this, then everything will be better. And it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. What instead you have is you have this vast gigantic society and with lots of different people trying to do things that in their own way and for their own reasons, they think will make not only their lives better, but with a certain degree of altruism, the community’s lives better. So the solution to the hyperpolarization problem is not to have somebody with the great peace plan. And there are lots and lots of books out there where people say, “Okay, this is the way we fix it.” But instead what we want to do is to identify a very broad range of things that me doing to control these bad faith actors to deal with the inherent vulnerabilities of human society that make us more prone to polarization and conflict to deal with a whole set of objective problems like climate change.

And so what we imagine and this goes back to how today’s modern computing systems have gotten so unbelievably sophisticated, is that they don’t have one super smart processor. What they have is lots and lots of little processors working in massively parallel ways that do big things. So what we’re trying to first of all do is build a catalog of the broad categories of things that need doing to make democracy work. And here we try to focus on democracy, not as a set of political institutions, but the dispute handling system. And it picks up a lot of the insights of the conflict field like a dispute handling system needs to promote mutual understanding across the society. It needs to control escalation. It needs to be able to objectively analyze problems. It needs a common vision that everybody can support. It needs collaborative problem solving, all of these things.

And so what we’re doing is trying to identify things in each of these categories that could contribute to a healthier society. Then we’ve been involved in organizations like the Bridge Alliance, which is an alliance of something like 200 different organizations with something like 5 million members that are all trying to work on helping to depolarize our society in different ways and that they’re affiliated with other groups that are trying to do things in other ways and basically build a catalog of all of the different things that people are trying to do to make things better and to help people identify them, identify where the gaps are, identify, “Hey, this was a great idea, worked in Kentucky, we could do this in Colorado.” So it becomes a matchmaking kind of thing. And sometimes talk of the Google Maps approach to conflict resolution or complex conflict resolution.

And what Google does is they have a map and if you turn on the traffic layer, it highlights all of the places where the transportation system isn’t working. And it will highlight sometimes that there’s actual construction going on to fix these. But the idea in extending this is we need a map of all of the places in which the conflict system that runs our society isn’t working. And then you extend the Google Map metaphor by adding the highway idea. So the idea is that you get people to look at the big picture, find places where things aren’t going right and then adopt or take responsibility for fixing one of them. And that’s ultimately the way that we do big things. That’s the only way humans have ever done big things is you take a giant problem and you break it down into pieces, you get people to volunteer to work on those pieces, and sometimes they have to raise the money to do that and do it.

One of the, I have a slideshow on this on the website that looks at the example of open source software. Our system runs on what’s called a lamp server, Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Those are all open source programming languages. And we use Drupal which is a content management system. And in Drupal it’s fascinating. You can go into the sort of back end of the system and see who volunteered to write every line of code basically in this entire incredibly sophisticated program. And you have this continuing process where people will say, “Well, this program isn’t working right here, I’m going to take responsibility for fixing that.” And they fix it and they upgrade the system and everybody gets a copy of the new upgraded thing. And that’s how the internet works. This open source stuff has a vastly larger share of the internet than the closed source proprietary stuff. And we need to do something like that with the conflict problem. So what we’re trying to do is to start to build the catalog of the things that need doing and the things that people are doing to work on all that.

Zach: Yeah, that’s great. The work I do on the podcast and then in this depolarization, book I’m working on, one of the things I emphasize is I don’t think I have answers. I’m more just somebody who wants other people to think more about these things that I’ve read about and think about. And I think to solve the problem, like you’re saying, we need to reach some critical mass of people even recognizing what the problem is and working on the problem. But I think yeah, we’re pretty far away from that because I think the challenge is that polarization just creates, naturally creates an environment where even discussing the problem of polarization is difficult. And that’s the core problem we face. And yeah, thanks a lot for your time, Guy. This has been great and I appreciate your work and thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Guy Burgess: Well, thank you. I enjoyed the conversation and we should stay in touch and certainly the kinds of things that you’re doing are just one of the- and an important element of this massively parallel approach.

Zach: That was conflict resolution specialist Guy Burgess. You can learn more and his and Heidi’s work at BeyondIntractability.org. Their recent paper, the one that led to me wanting to interview either Guy or Heidi, was titled Applying conflict resolution insights to the hyper‐polarized, society‐wide conflicts threatening liberal democracies. And just a reminder that on their website they include discussions about their work and about their ideas, if you’d like to see some of those debates. 

In my opinion, it’s very important for everyone, liberals and conservatives, to think more about what they can do on their side to help reduce polarization, and to speak out when they see people on their side behaving in unreasonable and divisive ways. The reason for that is simple: we only can influence our own group; we can’t influence the other group. If we want to solve this problem, we have to focus more on our group, and less on the other group. And that’s something backed up by group psychology research; I recently wrote a piece laying out the arguments and research behind that; you can find it on my Medium blog, which you can find by searching for ‘zachary elwood polarization medium’. 

If you enjoyed this talk, I think you’d enjoy checking out the other past episodes I’ve done on polarization. A popular recent one was a talk with Matthew Hornsey about group psychology and persuasion. For other polarization-related talks, go to my site www.behavior-podcast.com. 

If you have enjoyed this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Helping me get more listeners is the main way you can encourage me to work more on this podcast. I also appreciate you leaving me a review on Apple Podcasts. 

Thanks for listening.