https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sPho0bpoKm8
So the fundamental thing that I learned from Paul Rosen is to see us as these amazing omnivores. This is part of our survival strategy, even more than other apes. We are just brilliant omnivores. And we have the omnivores dilemma, which is we’ve got to be interested in all kinds of new stuff. We’re not tied to any place. We can roam on to a whole new continent. So we’re interested in stuff. But stuff has all kinds of toxins and microbes. We have to be careful about that stuff. And so these motives have to be in tension. And this is actually an interesting way to understand the left-right difference. You have to have both motives. So imagine two siblings, one of whom is set more towards trying new stuff, seeking out new stuff. And the other is a little more fearful, a little more like, whoa, no, let’s not try that. Let’s stay with what’s tried and true. I mean, that’s progressivism and conservatism. That’s the origins of it. And if you look at kids’ behavior at the age of two or three, it does predict how they’ll vote much later. Not hugely, but there is a clear prediction there. So disgust is part of a regulatory system about our engagement with the world. And whether we are just sort of out there and we seek out variety and diversity, we think diversity is just a great thing, or whether we want a little more order, structure, predictability, conservatives are neater than progressives. If you take photos of their rooms, you can actually, the cleanliness of an organization, you can predict how they vote. Disgust, it turns out, what’s really cool about disgust in modern politics is if you look at all the different things that we’re fighting over, especially in this country, our culture wars over, going back a few decades, sex, drugs, the flag, immigration, all of these things. I have a study with my colleagues, it was led by Sena Koleva, in which we asked all these cultural war attitudes of people, and we also had their scores on the disgust scale, but one of the foundations of morality is sanctity and purity, and it relates to disgust. What we found is that if you know what people’s left-right, how they place themselves on the left-right scale, you can pretty much predict where they fall on most cultural war attitudes, except for those that load on or implicate sanctity or purity. So what I mean is flag burning. Okay, do you think that people should have the right to burn the American flag or the country’s flag as an expression, as a political action? What do you think? People give some answer on a one-to-seven scale, and people on the right think more likely to say no, people on the left, yes. People who score high on loyalty are more likely to say no, people who lower on it say yes, and that’s even taking account of where they’re on the left-right dimension, but here’s the cool thing. It’s only if you add in the purity or sanctity thing that you can really understand what people are doing, because some people see the flag not as just a piece of cloth, they see it as having some innate essence, something sacred about it, which must be protected. And so this is true. They think of it as a unifying center. Exactly. That’s right. So if there’s something sacred, and this is the central piece of my work around politics and morality, is the psychology of sanctity. If you hold something sacred, then your team circles around it, and it’s only those who circle around with you, and sometimes literally circle around, like Muslims at prayer in Mecca, they literally circle the Kaaba. Circling is a very primitive, ancient, it feels right to circle something. But even if you do it symbolically, or you all bow at the same time, that binds you together. Children do that with their mothers when they engage in exploratory behavior, right? Well, they use their mother as a center of the world, and children differ in the degree to which they’ll move outward from their mother. So they move out until they trip over their uncertainty threshold. Oh, neat. Is it a distance? It’s a distance, yeah. And so the more exploratory kids who are lower in negative emotion will go out farther before they come back to their mother. So the mother is a center. And that would be associated symbolically with the idea of the center as a motherland or potentially as a fatherland. That’s right. That makes sense. So this way that we are incredibly symbolic creatures. We’re not just out to make as much money as we can. We’re symbolic and social creatures. And this psychology of sanctity or purity has become really important, not just on the right, it’s always been important for especially religious conservatives. We’re beginning to see it even on the campus left. And this is why I think we see some of the odd things we see on campus, that the campus must be kept as a sacred and pure space. One of the things that really alarms me about what’s happened on campus in the last couple of years is that the older idea we had that it’s a place for contesting ideas, it’s a zone of enormous choice, people can take what courses they want, say what they want, it’s kind of a wonderful free for all with some norms of respect. It’s now becoming much more of a religious zone where the perimeter of the campus is the boundaries and within, they’re almost, they’re blaspheming us basically. And I really started noticing this when you look at the videos of the Middlebury protest when Charles Murray spoke at Middlebury. And as everybody knows, he was shouted down. So the students are chanting and they’re chanting in unison and it seems like a religious revival meeting and they’re swaying and they’re saying their sacred, racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away, it’s like a ritual incantation. So that all… To define the space as safe and it’s safe in a kind of maternal way. Not yet, not yet. So far all this happening is they’re binding together, they’re moving and synchronous movement and call and response. So it’s using a lot of tropes from religion and religious worship. But here’s the cool thing. When the administrator, I forget who it is, comes on to say, okay, we have moved, we’re moving the talk and then you hear a couple people screaming out, off campus, off campus. And he says to another location on campus. And there’s like, oh no, no. Because, you know, look, no one had to go to this talk. So everyone could have just stayed home. And the students did succeed in shutting down the venue. So they could have declared victory. But it’s not a full victory unless he is physically off the campus. We can’t have him speaking on campus because that defiles us, that pollutes us. We must shut that down. And that’s where I started saying, wow, this is like full blown psychology of religion, Durkheim, sanctity, purity, blasphemy. And that I think, you know, that doesn’t describe most students, but that describes sort of the core, those who really have their identities wrapped up in this movement. Okay, so with disgust, I wanted to ask you a couple of things about that. So, you know, the big five research into political differences basically shows that the liberals are high in trade openness and low in trade conscientiousness and the conservatives are the reverse. But we’ve fragmented conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness with the big five aspect scale. And orderliness is strongly associated with disgust. So, right. It sounds like Freud, yeah. Right, right, exactly. It does sound a lot like Freud. But it also is in accordance with your observations that conservatives have neater spaces, for example. So now… And their meetings start on time. Yes, exactly. Right. Right, so… So then the nexus for political belief seems to be openness. So that’s that exploratory tendency that you talked about. Exploration of ideas and creativity. And low orderliness. And so then I thought, well, why in the world would… Why would the political nexus go across those dimensions, which are some relatively uncorrelated? Then I thought, and this is in keeping with your work on disgust, is that it’s an issue of borders, which of course seems more or less self-evident in the wake of Trump’s election, when he talked about borders. But you might say, and I think this is reasonable, that the conservative is someone who wants the borders between categories to remain intact, no matter what level of analysis. So it’s borders from the highest resolution level of cognition, all the way up to the actual physical borders of rooms, towns, states, countries, all of that. So the borders should be thicker. And the reason they want that… Now there was a paper published in PLOS One, I don’t know if you saw it, it was a couple of years ago, it was a mind-boggling paper, it should have been like front page news, as far as I was concerned. And what the researchers did was, between countries and then within provinces or states, within countries, they correlated the level of frequency of infectious disease with authoritarian political beliefs. And found a walloping correlation, it was like 0.6. It was one of the highest… For those of you who don’t know, social scientists never discover anything that’s associated with anything else at a correlation of 0.6. Other than heritability. Right, other than heritability, yes. And so what they found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious disease, the higher the probability of totalitarian or authoritarian political attitudes. And then they controlled for governance, because one of the questions was, was this top-down authoritarianism or bottom-up authoritarianism? And the answer was that it was bottom-up. Okay, and so I thought about that from two perspectives simultaneously. At the time, okay, so we identified disgust sensitivity with orderliness. So it’s, say, a fundamental sub-trait. And I was reading this book that was called Hitler’s Table Talk. And it was the recordings of virtually everything he said at dinner from 1939 to 1942. Yeah, so it’s a spontaneous utterance, I’d say. And it’s full of discussions about Jews and gypsies and all the people he tormented. But what’s really interesting is all the language is disgust. It’s not fear. So Hitler’s basic metaphor was that the Aryan race and country was a pure body. And then it was assaulted by parasites, right? And then I remembered what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans showed up and shook hands. What happened was that 95% of them were dead within 50 years, right? Because of smallpox and measles. And so that border issue that separates conservatives from liberals, let’s say, is the conservatives say the novel is potentially contaminated. It’s not so much that it’s dangerous. That’s different. That’s fear. It’s contaminated. And the liberals say, hold on a minute. If you make the borders too thick, then information can’t pass through. Exactly. That’s the omniverse dilemma right there. Right. And then since we have a biological architecture on which our cognitive platforms are erected, we have the same attitude towards abstract information, which would be ideas that we do to things like food or illness. Right. And so we can think of an invading idea or a polluting idea or a contaminating idea. That’s right. I’m a big fan of George Lakoff, metaphors we live by, that we use our bodily schemata to think about abstract things like politics and what our policies should be about borders and immigration. There’s a Canadian psychologist, Mark Schaller. He and his colleagues have developed what they call an account of the behavioral immune system. Yeah, right. We don’t just try to, you know, microbes killed probably many more of our ancestors than did lions and tigers and bears. And so whoever can keep themselves and their children from being exposed to fatal illnesses wins the evolutionary game. And so a lot of that is judging carefully about people. Is he dangerous? Is she dangerous? And that’s both for sexuality, for contact, for all kinds of association. So yeah, in a lot of ways, our emotions and our bodily interactions structure how we think and feel about social and moral. Well, even with the Black Death in Europe, I mean, so the Black Death occurred in Europe when the Europeans started to move around the world and they brought back rats that were infected. Exactly. So what you saw there was both of those forces at work at the same time. So the European expansion produced a tremendous interchange of ideas from all around the world. That’s globalization. But it wiped out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the population at the same time. So wouldn’t it be good if in every society or every organization we had some people who specialized in saying, hey, what are the opportunities? And then we had other people who specialized in saying, well, but what are the risks? And it just so happens that a lot of people have trouble doing all that in themselves. When we have systems that are well constituted with people who have different personalities and different motives and goals, we actually can get better outcomes. We can have a discussion between them. you