The show Hidden Brain airs Sundays at noon on KRWG Public Media. The show’s theme throughout the month of February is “U.S. 2.0”. Scott Brocato recently spoke with the host of Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam, about what “U.S. 2.0” will be about.
SCOTT BROCATO:
What will be the overriding connective theme of “US 2.0”?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
So the series is either “U.S. 2.0” or “US 2.0”, Scott, and the idea here is that when we're thinking about our political landscape across the United States, I think it's quite clear that the American people need some psychotherapy. You know, our political discourse in many ways is broken. Our relationships are often dysfunctional. We're often speaking past one another. We're consumed with so much anger and bitterness and fear that it's sometimes difficult to actually have a conversation with people with whom we disagree. And so the purpose of the series really is to try and get under the hood of our political polarization of how these partisan feelings arise, how we can think about what's happening inside the minds of our political opponents, and most importantly, how we can talk across differences.
SCOTT BROCATO:
The first show is titled “What We Have in Common”, where you speak with psychologist Kurt Gray about how we think about both our political allies and our opponents, and how these insights can help us to chart a new path forward. As a country that is becoming increasingly divisive due to issues like politics, what insights can we glean regarding what we have in common?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
So one of the insights that the psychologist Kurt Gray has is that even when we see a lot of anger and vitriol in the political space, in public conversations, his insight is that a lot of this is actually motivated by fear, by a sense of threat, by a sense of vulnerability. He draws on research that suggests that during our long evolutionary history, humans and their ancestors have a very keenly developed sense of fear and a sense of threat and danger. And we have brought these mental algorithms, if you will, over to the political sphere. So what we often see as anger and hatred and people screaming at one another in the political sphere is often driven by an underlying sense of threat that people feel, if I lose this election, if I lose this policy debate, if this other person gets elected, it's not just that I won't get the policies I want, but you have the sense that other person is going to destroy my way of life. This other group is going to take away the things that I care about most deeply. The country itself is going to come to an end. And when we have these deep feelings of threat and vulnerability, it produces often feelings of anger and hatred, and it comes out in terms of conflict. But the underlying emotion, the thing that binds the sides together if you will, what we have in common, is this shared sense of threat, of vulnerability.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Another upcoming episode is titled “Not at the Dinner Table”, which explores what I think is an intriguing possibility: that our real political divide isn't between left and right, but between those who care intensely about politics and those who don't.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
This is worked by the political scientist Yanna Krupnikov and others. So when we look out at the political landscape, again we often feel like, you know, half the country fervently believes in one thing and half the country fervently believes in exactly the opposite thing. But the truth of the matter is, if you look at the data, it's only a relatively small number of people in both parties who want to live, breathe and talk politics all the time. Politics is important to the vast majority of Americans, but for many people, it is not the most important thing in their life. It is not even the second or third most important thing in their life. And they don't want politics, in fact, intruding on every facet of their lives in, you know, baseball games and at the Thanksgiving table and their walks and their talks with neighbors. They don't want politics intruding in every dimension of their lives.
But because the loudest voices tend to be the voices that we often hear on social media, on Twitter, or on cable television and op-ed pages of newspapers, we often are under the mistaken belief that those loud, angry, partisan voices represent the entire country, when in fact they don't. The large majority of the country, I think, is really exhausted by the kind of political discourse we have by people screaming at one another; and are really anxious, I think, to find a more calmer and peaceful discourse.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Another episode is about persuasion, where you speak with a sociologist about how most of us go about persuading our opponents and why our favorite technique is strikingly ineffective. What is our favorite technique, and why is it ineffective?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
So our favorite technique, Scott, is to basically to marshall all our facts and arguments and try and speak over our opponents and speak louder than they speak. And of course, as we know, there has never been a time where any of us has been convinced about something because someone yelled at us and threw a bunch of facts at us. And so in some ways, it is surprising or paradoxical that we believe that we are effective when we do that to our political opponents.
This episode features the Stanford sociologist Rob Miller, and he actually presented to me a very funny and interesting metaphor. He said, “Imagine, for example, you are selling a used car. And a prospective buyer comes to buy a used car. You don't tell the prospective buyer all the things that you are going to get out of the sale if the buyer completes the purchase. You don't tell the buyer, I really want to take the money and I want to buy a new car, or I want to take this money and I want to go on a nice vacation; that's why you should make the purchase. What we do, of course, is we look at it from the buyer's point of view. We say what is in it for the buyer? How do we convince them that the car is useful to them, or is going to be a good car, or is a good value for money?”
Strikingly, in the political domain, we do this very rarely when we have an issue that we disagree with. Not only do we stick to our guns, but we use our own framing, our own moral language, the things that are important to us to make our points. And then we are befuddled when those arguments, in fact, are ineffective. One of the points that Rob Miller makes is that we would be much more effective if we try to prosecute our arguments using the moral language of our opponents. So if we understand what it is that motivates them, what they care about, and we craft and frame our arguments in those frames, we are far more likely to get our way on the political issues we care about.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Finally, at the end of the month, what do you hope listeners will take away from U.S.-- or US --2.0?
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
I'm really hoping that listeners will take away the idea that that there is a way to speak with their political opponents that's effective. One of the other ideas that we explore in the series is the power of listening as a means of persuading someone else of your point of view. And it seems sort of counterintuitive to say that, but I do think that one goal of the series is to help Americans listen better to other people. So often we're consumed with our own sense of rage, our sense of impotence, our sense of helplessness, our frustration, that we feel that we need to yell louder and louder to be heard; when in fact, taking the moment to listen to our opponents, to be curious about how they come to their positions, to ask them why they believe what they believe, to listen to them charitably, to listen to them with compassion, surprisingly turns out to be a more effective way of changing people's minds than bludgeoning them over their heads with our “facts”.
SCOTT BROCATO:
Shankar Vedantam, host of Hidden Brain. The series will premiere this Sunday here on KRWG Public Media at noon. Thank you for joining us today.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM:
Thank you so much, Scott. It's been a pleasure.
