 If you genetically engineered a tree specifically so that shorter people couldn't reach the fruit that it grew, would that be a bigger tree? So in thunk episode 12 I talked about how to control other people's minds with language. If you haven't watched that you probably want to now because today I've got some bad news. That mind control thing turns out to be much worse than you thought it was. So you probably understand some of the basic mechanics of language and how we all have this database of words that has matched to things in the world. Like if someone says the word chair if you're American you probably think of something like this because when you learn the word chair the little cartoon in your baby's first words book looked like this and not like this or this. So we learn this thing that's familiar and it becomes what we think of whenever we think of a chair. We can imagine other chairs we've probably seen other chairs but if we hear a sentence like Susie sat in the chair and then see something like this there's the tiniest stumble as our brains catch up with our eyes. And that feeling almost like the one where you expect there to be one more step on a staircase that's us becoming suddenly aware of our inherent cultural bias. We're conditioned from birth to think of certain things as normal and familiar that's not a problem for chair but it's a huge problem for man. When you hear the word man you probably think of something like this or like this and when you think of manly the ideal of what man is supposed to be you probably think of something like this. No joke that's the first google image search result for manly stuff. In American culture being manly is beating someone up in a brawl setting your own bone wrestling a bear growing a beard in a day drinking a keg bench pressing your own weight surviving in the wilderness never complaining or flinching or heavens forbid crying physical strength stoicism ruggedness and virility are all well and good if you're Paul Bunyan or Davey Crockett but most people aren't like that so what happens if you take most people who aren't like that and then raise them in a culture where you have to be like this to be manly what if even the guys who are kind of like this are required to prove that they're manly to ridiculous extremes in short a lot of really terrible stuff if you want to feel physically strong like you're supposed to maybe you find someone to bully or sexually assault so that you feel strong maybe you develop an affinity for weapons or ultra violent video games just so that you feel as powerful as that cultural mind control ray says that you should if you're a person who actually feels emotions maybe you just act like you don't get upset until it becomes totally unbearable and then you blow your top maybe you distance yourself from people that you care about or from cute things just so that you're not tempted to emote what's really crazy is that most guys aren't like this artificial concept of manly that has no ties to reality but there's still that moment of uh what when we see a guy crying at the movies or drinking a daiquiri or saying i love you to a friend it makes us uncomfortable to see people deviate from that concept even though it's totally unreal and arbitrary it makes us so uncomfortable that some guys will literally fight to the death just to satisfy that mind control thing the same goes for black people the same goes for women the same goes for nerds and lawyers and hockey fans and everyone else who has a cultural stereotype we all have the chair problem our culture tells us that we should be uncomfortable with people who aren't this particular way only none of us are so we all have to pretend both for ourselves and for anyone watching the bad news is culture is part of how we think we can't ever totally get rid of our biases because they're part of the language that we used to describe and analyze the world around us it would be like trying to prove that numbers don't exist with math but the good news is that if you know what's happening you can fight it both by correcting for your own bias and by limiting how much of it you pass on the steps that we take to correct for cultural bias are always going to seem unreasonable no matter how enlightened we are because we think with culture it's kind of like trying to correctly adjust the color temperature on someone's monitor while you're wearing tinted glasses sidebar this is also why there has never been a point in history where people haven't thought that all problems of bigotry were behind them because if you're raised on it having separate drinking fountains for black people and white people seems totally reasonable and it's not like we're making them pick cotton or anything those days are over but despite always seeming unreasonable to our intuition we can take deliberate steps to correct for our inherent cultural bias kind of like cleaning up a mess that you made while you were sleepwalking for example recognizing places where our bias is likely to affect our judgment like deciding if somebody is threatening or trustworthy or innocent can give us a chance to ask ourselves questions like would i still feel this way if they were a different sex or nationality or race or whatever also being uncomfortable around people who don't fit our prejudices is much worse if we just aren't used to hanging out with those kinds of people deliberately making friends outside of your most familiar demographic can make a huge difference you can also limit the mind control array of cultural bias by simply not broadcasting it every time you reference some aspect of your culture whether you're simply saying the word chair or making a joke that references some cultural stereotype you are reinforcing and propagating that part of your culture like if you tell a joke about asian people and you're overheard by some kids who hadn't heard that stereotype yet guess what just got passed on to the next generation a lot of people get offended by the suggestion that they need to monitor what they're saying because it's not like anybody actually believes that but if you think about it the only way that those jokes work is by referencing something that we're aware of and accept on some level if you're not convinced the next time that somebody tells a racist joke around you just ask them politely to explain it you would be amazed at how uncomfortable some people get when they're suddenly made aware that they're being giant antennas for racist culture so now you know you've been used your entire life to convey and reinforce totally artificial ideas of how the world ought to be ideas that were dreamt up centuries or even millennia before you were born and beaten into your head from the second you could think but now that you know that you can consciously change those ideas and the future will thank you for it what bias exists in culture that you would really like to change have you ever been frustrated with yourself for being scared of someone just because they were different if you have any comments on today's episode future topic suggestions or if you just want to let me know that you prefer a particular head please leave comments let me know what you think thank you for watching i know that this week's episode was kind of long and not very funny but i promise i'll do something more entertaining in the next one don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share and i'll see you next week