 All right. Hello, Jay. Thanks for coming on. How are you doing today? Good. Thanks for having me on, Chris. Yeah, absolutely. So you were kind enough to send me an early copy of The Power of Us. I binged it, loved it. And so the first thing I want to ask you is, I'll preface it like this, I read a ton of books on this topic and just, you know, I got really interested in like group psychology and how we interact in groups. And with that being said, with so many books I read like you guys, your book was totally unique. And I think you guys saw that there was maybe a gap that needed to be filled with these books. So can you kind of explain like what inspired this book and what you guys try to do differently with it to discuss this broader topic? Yeah, thanks for asking and thanks for noticing that. One of the things that we read a ton of books to maybe not as many as you but one of the things that we come across repeatedly in books and in kind of journalistic treatments of group dynamics is that people are becoming aware of identity and how important it is. But they have a very kind of narrow conception of it, which is that it just triggers tribalism, that there's just this us versus them mindset and that we're kind of inevitably going to arrive at that. You know, no matter what the situation is, and just trust and dislike outsiders and always trust and like insiders. What we wanted to do is kind of dig a bit deeper and show that that's not always the case. In fact, that's part of our psychology but then once you identify with the group, how you acting the group is determined by things like the norms and how leaders act. And they can create groups that do the exact opposite of what we might predict that they can create inclusive groups that embrace difference, they can create groups that embrace dissent. In fact, we try to shatter a bunch of myths in our book and yet another myth we try to shatter is that there's this notion that if you dissent, you know, you're either with us or against us if you're dissenting it means you side with the other team. What our research shows specifically Dominic's research is that the people who are willing to dissent are the people who care about the group the most. Dense is actually really hard. And you can be socially ostracized by it. And so it's only if you really care about where the goods going and you see going on a bad path that you're willing to stick your neck out there to try to convince people that things are going wrong and fix things. So that's the key lesson of our book is really to kind of shatter a lot of these myths of identity and also it wants to give people an understanding of it hopefully give them the tools to push back and change things and to opt into identities that are healthier and kind of promote better things in the world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's something that I've noticed too so basically I got into this whole, this whole just trying to understand groups because in 2019. I had thousands of complete strangers on the internet coming after me right and I'm like, what the hell is happening, you know, and I noticed this and I, one of the things that happened to me immediately was the first person to defend me. Everybody went after them right, and I noticed what makes dissent so hard. This morning I actually saw a journalist talking about this with kind of the situation in Afghanistan and the conversations around Biden and his, you know what he did and all that. I think 99% of calm conversations are very nuanced but I guess what I'm asking have you noticed this like very like black and white thinking when it comes to these group identities like you're with us or against us, and it's difficult in the middle because something we know is when you're when you're pushed out of the group, like we're like evolutionary design to like be like this sucks. So we stay quiet, right. So, so have you kind of noticed the black and white thinking of a lot of people within these groups. So one thing is that certain types of groups promote black and white thinking. And I think that is very as a scientist I think that's a dangerous way of thinking because most things are nuanced and have shades of gray and the evidence is pretty complex and there's multiple perspectives. The reason that happens is when groups, not only have a sense of identity but that identity gets tinged with morality. Then you really have thinking that shifts into black and white. And, and then it's anybody who disagrees with us is bad under those conditions. And that's where it becomes really difficult or dangerous for a dissenter to speak up because then they are sort of to be seen as a heretic. We, you know, you can do a brief look through human history to see how heretics are treated. And so that is a point at which you know that the group has gone in a toxic direction usually when you see that type of thinking. The other thing that you have with the dynamics of social media now is that it's very easy to signal your group loyalties and to signal your values and your righteous virtuous person. And so the incentive structure and this is research that I've done in my lab led by Billy Brady is when people use moral and emotional language. I just shared more on social media, especially on platforms like Twitter. And so it also because of the algorithms and the reinforcement structures and the norms of those platforms. People have an incentive, even if they're kind of like actually have a nuanced view of something is to take a really overly strong moralistic view. And that's where all the rewards are. That's what makes their messages go viral. And so of course, that might be fine for some issues, but a lot of times there's collateral damage and people who are getting piled on, you know, especially if it's disproportionate to whatever their sin is or based now what we see as enormous amounts of misinformation and conspiracy theories and fake news, then it can become a really toxic environment if people are piling on somebody and harassing them for that reason. Yeah, yeah. And, and yeah, actually in a minute I want to dive deep into that because the other topic I got really into when all this stuff, you know, happened to me and I noticed it in politics was, was moral psychology and moral philosophy because I noticed that that was like, this fuel on the fire and you mentioned signaling and people like, here's my group here's the moral stance that my group takes and here's what I'm going to amplify. So, but before we, we touch on that I kind of for those who don't know because I read about this all the time. I'm trying to get better about this is like, I want I want to kind of like go over like the basics and some of the major findings so one of the core ideas of your book, and when I got sucked in was when you talk about, I think I always screw the name up, but the like minimum group paradigm. Minimum group paradigm. Yeah. All right, cool. I was close. All right. So when I came across that research and found like the different ways they kind of like tried it like with the dot study and, you know, like estimating. I was blown away I'm like, everybody needs to know this. We need to start from this place and understand how trivial this is but anyways, can you kind of explain what the minimal group paradigm shows us. And what, and like, do you think it's as important because you guys put it in early part of your book like, why is that so important to understanding kind of the broader conversations. So, 50 years ago this year. Well, I think one of the most important studies in the history of social sciences was published by Henry Tajfall and his colleagues at Bristol University in the United Kingdom. What they did is they were trying to find what are the causal factors that trigger each group conflict and discrimination. The problem they had is that when you look around the world to try to study this, the groups that are in conflict often have, you know, strong stereotypes about one another, fighting over, you know, scarce resources or sacred land. And so it's really hard to figure out, you know, what is driving the actual discrimination that could be any of those things. And so they decided to strip all that away. And, you know, kind of like, you know, scientists and chemistry and other fields create a vacuum to study like, you know, molecules and compounds. And then they were going to add these things in once one at a time and see what is the key thing that triggers discrimination. So this was supposed to be a control condition. And so what they did is they took a bunch of young boys in the original studies, and they just basically had them estimate the number of dots in an image. And they gave them false feedback. They basically put the coin and told them either you're an overestimator or underestimated. So you tend to overestimate the number of dots on a sheet or underestimate it. In fact, the feedback they give them had nothing to do with their dot estimation abilities. And most people think dot estimation abilities is meaningless anyways, right. And so they give them this feedback. And then they give them a bunch of options about how to allocate money to other overestimators or underestimators. In other words, if you were an underestimator, you had a chance to give money to an underestimator that would be your in group member, someone like you, or people on the other group would be an out group member. And what they found repeatedly is that once you flip a coin and put people in groups even over these totally minimal or arbitrary group distinctions. And again, these are not race this is not religion this is not status. This is dot the freaking dots. But people easily and readily discriminated they would give more money to an in group member than an out group member. And in fact they never even met these people are interacted with them or, and they have other studies where you know they change what they make sure that you don't think you'll ever interact with these other people. They have studies where they just flip a coin and you get to see the coin being flipped. I do this in my own classroom all divide my class up into two sides, and I'll put them on teams for the class and halfway through the class I'll give them a little survey. And then I'll ask how much they like and identify with their team and every time I've ever done this in my class, people start to identify with their side of the class more even though they just saw me randomly pick a side right. And so this is something that's really robust it's been seen in cultures all over the world. And it really seems like a part of our basic human psychology. In fact, anthropologists have looked at every single culture on earth, and they found that everywhere they looked. People divide themselves into coalitions within groups. And so, and fluid coalitions, you know where the power dynamics changing the coalition change too. And so this just seems to be part of human nature as we identify with coalitions really easy and it was part of our, our way of cooperating and surviving and ending off predators and you know avoiding being cast out of the tribe and dying a lonely death somewhere. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, like it's, it's dots right it's, it's like the key word of all this I find is minimal right something so small. So this, this transitions into the next piece of, you know, research so I wanted to discuss actually I wrote about it the other day. It's the IAT, the implicit association test. And this is something that's highly debated and I've seen the arguments about, you know, the results and everything. But again going back to what we're talking about it seems like people see it as very black and white right you have one side who's like, look at this, everybody's racist right, then the other side is like, look at this, it says no matter what I do, I'm racist, and, and there's a lot of nuance but basically you know with with the minimal group paradigm and what we found is, we're designed to have these reactions that we don't even notice right. So with with the implicit association test I would love to hear from you like, what are your thoughts about it as a gauge of, you know, of our biases. And like, do you do you think that you know just the larger conversations that happen around it from just average people are just completely missing the point of it. The IAT has become politicized and so now people view it through the lens of politics rather than what it actually is so the IAT is an interesting and quite good but very flawed measure of the associations we have with different groups. I've used it I've been using it for almost 20 years in studies, and the critiques of it have been known for a long time. So one of the main critiques is it's pretty unreliable for personality measures so I'll compare it to, like if you take an IQ test, and you can take it again you know two years later it's very likely you'll get a score. With the IAT you can take it and take it again a year or two years later or even a month later, and it's not super highly correlated with the score you got at one time. So it's just not as good of a measure as as some of the best personality tests we have. But the IAT is still measuring something, and if you get large samples of people at the aggregate it tells you about the associations they have towards certain groups. And so one of the most impressive things about people who developed the IAT is they put it online and got huge data before anybody else was doing online studies and getting huge data. And so they can measure across millions of people degrees of bias, and you can link those biases at the group level so at the county level or state level to, this is one of the studies we mentioned in our book. And it predicts, or sorry, the level of slavery at a county level, you know, over 150 years ago predicts racial bias on the IAT 150 years later with remarkable precision. And so at the aggregate level once you're average across a lot of people, it accounts for the fact, once you do that you kind of rule out all the noisiness of the measurement error, and you kind of get better estimates of a group of people or a place. And so that's I think the best way that the IAT is used is not to treat it as a measure of somebody's individual psychology and use it to assess, you know, whether they're deep down or a racist or a sexist or something like that. But it's to kind of get a almost like a canary in a coal mine of the broader environment that you're in, the place that you're in, the time frame that you're in the city that you're in, and kind of get a sense of their overall attitudes or biases. Yeah. And, and yeah, I don't I don't want to get too political even though I have a few questions about some of the stuff you guys talk about later in the blog. But here's just something like where where I go insane, right. And maybe there's just, you know, the way I see it from my own lens. But for example you have a lot of conversations around like, you know, free speech and open discussions, especially like a great example, or the conversations around that the trans community, right. And you know you have these people like hey we should at least be able to have the discussion right. Can we at least talk about rates in children identifying as trans skyrocketing like you know as a social scientist like it's like hey, let's let's at least look into this Well anyways you have a certain group of people it seems like who have this argument but then when it comes to the IAT and stuff. It almost feels like that same group is like no that thing's baloney, it's calling me racist. But like you said, it feels like it's just to kind of catch the canary in the coal mine and just be like hey, hey, I'm not calling you racist but maybe, maybe in this area, or in this group. There's something going on that we might want to look at. So, so what are your thoughts on that am I crazy or do you kind of see this kind of like selective picking of science and research and conversations we're having. So, so this is, we also have a chapter on this is that once you're motivated by a political identity. You have all kinds of ways of rationalizing your positions on things. And, and this can be about whether or not you want to, you know, have a debate over here but not over here turns out. And this is like one of the things about cancel culture, you know, is cancel culture a left wing thing. Well, there's research on this cancel culture, or basically censoring opinions you don't like is driven by people at the extremes of any belief system. If they want to score higher on dogmatism, they think that anything that doesn't agree with them is harmful or morally wrong. And so they want to shut down conversations and don't agree with them. There's very few people who actually principally agree in pre speech as a general thing. And so this is, unfortunately, that's part of what kind of certain types of extreme identities do is they shut down conversations that are different from them. And this is true of the left and true of the right as well. So that's when I whenever I see debates about cancel culture I'm like there is cancel culture, but it's not just a left wing phenomenon it's just as likely to occur among people on the right, but just for different issues. Yeah, yeah, that's that's what I noticed and I've noticed this I actually had a Lee McIntyre on here not a not long ago for his book how to talk to a science denier and we talked about them like, you know, you know, as somebody I feel like I'm pretty left leaning. But I look at you know my side or whatever I'm like hey there's certain science that you guys just don't want to talk about but you'll look to them and say you guys deny global warming. I'm like, I see I notice a lot of like selective science picking like hey, hey, like we either believe in the scientific process, or we don't, you know, like I see that kind of like, you know we have to, we have to look at all the science and all these things and that's how science progresses and we learn about people and I think at the end of the day the reason I'm so passionate about that and just kind of trying to be as objective as possible is solutions don't get solved unless we look at it in a, you know, in a true way and have these conversations. So is that something that you guys kind of noticed with these kind of like politicized identities around scientific discussions. Yeah, I actually think that politicized identities around scientific discussions is really risky and potentially harmful to science like I saw use the it is a good example is, you know, since about 2002 when I when I started my PhD, there's been lots of debates about it. And so I've gone to jam packed rooms at conferences with 300 people, where a person will stand up and do a rant criticizing it with with evidence, and all the creators of the it are sitting in the front row and they have to listen to it. And then maybe one of them will get up and give a counterpoint. And then the rest of us are all listening to this and trying to see kind of what the evidence is in the middle. And some of us, you know, stopped using it because of it others decided it wasn't that bad. Most of us decided on a middle ground which is like, it's good for these things but not for these things. And other things I wouldn't use it for, because it's not as good for those things right understand the limitations I want to use it, wouldn't use it to assess individuals, but I think it's a reasonable device to assess group attitudes. And so, that's how science is supposed to operate. It's not supposed to operate where there's certain topics that are verboten, or that sort of critiques are not allowed. And if the critique is good and based on evidence and rigorous, then it should be allowed in the sphere of discussion. If not, we're, you know, censorship is a is a risky thing to do in science. So, so that's why I really don't like this. And I'll say sciences scientists are humans. We cherry pick things all the time, just, but usually what happens with scientists, people often think scientists politics drive their, their what they publish. And besides that, we found very little evidence for it. You know, scientists are largely liberal but if you look in the literature the liberal findings that are more liberal are kind of just as strong as the findings that tend to be published that are conservative. So, so what what I think scientists are biased at. And this is something that, if you ask any scientist by enclosures I agree, is it sometimes it's a really committed to their little pet theory. And because that's what gets you social status in the scientific community, your theory and your work get cited, that gets you a job that gets you a raise that gets you tenure. So the real metrics of success and science what really gets rewarded is not really your ideology. It's, it's your theoretical precision and your empirical work. So, I think that that's where scientists and a lot of researchers have gone wrong. They'll cherry pick certain findings or leave out outliers that don't agree with their, their position, or that don't that that contradict their theory. And so there's all different types of identities we have, and all different types of biases we have and I think that's one of the big ones that scientists have. So that's why we're constantly trying to figure out new ways of rooting out bad practices and forcing people to make their, their data public and stuff like that, so that we can kind of mitigate those things in a scientific community. But I wish, you know, discussions on social media would have ways of mitigating misinformation and bad evidence to at least scientists like that's what we spent a lot of time trying to figure out. Yeah, it's something that you know I just, I just sit back and think about because when I, I think about you know misinformation and all that I'm like okay let's, let's say I we had a magic one and we got rid of all the misinformation and just the best stuff came out. But still based on our identities and you know the polarization, would those people accept the truth, you know what I mean. And so like so I like when I think about that I'm like, you know is, is, you know is that a step closer, is there another route we should be taking, and all that and out of curiosity as we're talking about this. Are you familiar I don't know if you've read her book, the work from Dr Jennifer Eberhard and she wrote that book biased. I read it. Yeah, it is and it's interesting I wanted to ask you because whenever I hear these debates around my biases and racism and stuff. I literally I never hear anybody bring up her work or if it's contested. Do you know if it's if any of her research is contested at all like, I just don't hear about it seems like she has some of the most important work, especially when it comes to policing. So this is one thing that's actually incredibly frustrating for me is watching all the debates about policing and bias and not people not citing Jennifer Eberhard's work. She's been doing this for like 10 years and working closely with police forces and Oakland and other places. She's one of the leading scientists on this she's a tenure professor at Stanford. She's a little woman and in her book she talks about when she was confronted and she's a little woman and was manhandled by the police, but also in her book she talks with an enormous amount of perspective taking about what like to be a police officer and they're hearing things on the radio all day. She's gone in and worked with them talk to them. And so I'm just like, is it should there be a more urgent person in this conversational policing and race and Jennifer Eberhard in this country, like very few people have actually done the work, been in police forces have been on the other side of it as a minority woman. And, and her work is just woefully under recognized and actually talk where she's her book. I actually listen to the audio book. She has so much empathy and nuance and depth of understanding from personal experience and the like very rigorous science that it is absolutely tragedy that Jennifer Eberhard's work is not read more and cited more and engage with more around these issues. It's really, it's just, I shake my head. It's unfortunate. Yeah, and thank you Jay like I have felt insane for the last like year since I read her book. Like, I'm like, Okay, well, well maybe there's a ton of debate around her research maybe there's something shady going on, because I never hear anybody talk about it but I think I actually heard about her book because she was on the The Daily Show, right. And then last year when you know all the BLM protests like sparked up I started reading a ton of books, and I was like this one has been on my list I'm going to read it. But like you said, I never see it cited and I've been meaning to reach out to her and you know have her on but if you ever come up with any ideas like I want to just put on there. So any quick story, there's, I don't know if you're familiar with his work but there's an author I think he's a professor to his name's dad sad. And in his recent book. He talks a lot about you know, oh, you know there's not really racism there's not really biases it's a bunch of snowflakes all these things, and all that. And in my review of his book I'm like, it doesn't like you can criticize all these other ones but I've noticed. People are criticizing some of the conversations around it. They never bring up Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt but anyways after I wrote that review. If you're denying racism and not actually reading the research on it that then you're not you have no arguments. I mean there's a reasonable argument about is racism the cause of all of these things. Yeah, you know racism, like this is the thing about social science. It talks about identity right and we talk about how important identity is for all these different things from from how you see things to whether or not you engage in a revolution to whether or not like how your beer tastes. But what we try to communicate I don't know if you said it explicitly but identity accounts for about 5% of the variants and all those. So identity affects a lot of things, but it's just a small chunk personality accounts for a huge chunk of behavior. It affects the situation accounts for a huge chunk of our biology and other ways accounts for a huge chunk. And so, so we're talking about identity and it's a thing we study but it's really only 5% of the story. And it's the same with things like racial bias or the IET. You know those things count for a few percent of the variants and people's behavior. And so I think people understand me get frustrated when they are hearing that that's 100% of the story. It's not there's all these other things, but to deny that it's part of the story is also utterly insane. Yeah. So the challenge the best research is what meta analysis do which is summarize, you know hundreds of studies, is they usually try to give you an estimate of how much variance is explained by this issue, or this variable, and the history of social psychology if you look over the last 100 years of meta analyses on average it's about 5% for every whatever topic you're looking at on average it counts for about 5% of the variants. So that's why you know some people think these things are understandably overstated, but to deny their existence is also just that science denial denying that we put a man on the moon, you know, that's insane. Yeah, it's, it's something that I try to bring up often when I talk about any of these types of issues because I, you know, I try to read. I try to read like the most extreme views from both sides right and then be like okay well what's in the middle right and and just to see like because, like, for example if I'm just talking politics, you know somebody like Ben Shapiro right or somebody like way way over on the right I'm like you're going to point out stuff that nobody on my side is talking about right so that's why I try to do it. But anyways, what I've been noticing and try to talk about is, like if you want to, if you want to debate like the degree that's something, you know, if you want to debate the I'm all for it, but I feel and I don't know if you've noticed this too seems like there's a lot of debate around the existence. Right. And, and it's like, but I don't know and I don't know if this goes into like you know the the moral conversations that get the the most reach on social media, but those, those are the ones that get the most attention when people take a very black and white stance, rather than, hey, racism does exist because if you talk to people one on one. 100% of the time they'll be like yeah yeah racism exists right, but publicly that's not something that they talk about and and I try to figure out, is this a problem of people talking or us who are engaging with it. You know what I mean like what are your thoughts on on that. This is this is where I think the black and white moralistic thinking is problematic for science discussions because the debate should be if we're going to talk about my work will talk about does the minimal groups increase bias by 5% of the variance or 4% you know, whereas like biologies accounting for the culture you're in accounts for part of it. And, and so that's where the conversation should be it should be whether or not it exists because at this point there's 100 studies on it. And that should be the same thing like when we're talking about let's say like outcomes for undergraduate students in colleges depending on their race. There might be like the graduation rate from my white students might be like let's say 86% for black students 80% that's a 6% gap, and then you can talk about how much racism accounts for that gap right. And of course it's going to count for some of it, but other things might be accounting for it, including like poverty, other structural factors that might not be about racial animosity per se that they face at a school level. And so these are the types of conversations that would be like a normal conversation I have and then you can figure out how to fix it. So if you're figuring out like if they're facing a lot of racism from their professors, let's say and there's some evidence that professors are racially biased in terms of how they respond to emails is great work by Dolly true and Katie milkman and I do pay a canola on perfect send professors a bunch of emails with different sounding names that were black minority names or white names and genders and they found professors didn't respond as much to emails from students with these minority sounding names. And so we know that that happens. The question is how much of that success, you know and graduation rate for undergraduate students or job outcomes is that accounting for those types of barriers. And then we have to like educate professors about how to be more fair in their email responses or something. And so that's why we need to know those. Yeah, what type of solution to have but to deny they exist is just like, again, to me that's just science denial it's not, it's not helpful at all it distracts and again I think what's happening is those people will sell more books if they completely deny that racism exists. You know, just like you'll sell more books and you'll get on Fox News if you deny is exists. So it's really unfortunate in the United States particular this doesn't happen as much in Canada where I'm from. There's not as much polarization so there's not as much of a economic incentive structure to misrepresent things or take absolute statements I'm sure I don't know how many books God sells in Canada but that book probably sells better in the US where it kind of fits into this black store type of dynamic and then it gets in bookstores and sells many copies, but it's not really that informative in fact it's, if it says I read it but if it actually actually says that it's actively misleading people. Yeah, yeah and and yeah that that brings up yeah I want to ask you about one of the studies you guys talk about in the book which, like I think also says a lot but but just real quick on on that topic. It comes to books right like, I thought Trump sucked as a president right but there's 1000 books on Trump and like book after book bestseller bestseller bestseller, and I'm like, none of these have new information like, I don't know like I'm a former J. Okay, like in 2012 I got I got sober but like, I almost feel like confirmation bias is like a bigger hit of dopamine and we just get hooked on like yeah, give me 300 more pages about how Donald Trump sucks like how is that expanding you but yeah that's my little rant about that because like you mentioned that that sells and I don't know. I don't know what the solution is to that J. I think we didn't talk about it in our book but maybe I'll talk about it. Oh yeah, yeah, give it to me. Dominic and I call it identity grifting. And so there are some people who genuinely are true believers of these things. But then there's other people who just see like a really lucrative market opportunity to make money. And, and this happened, you know, in 2015 and before the previous presidential election where there's all this fake news coming out. And some of the fake news companies were producing negative fake news about Trump but also negative fake news about Clinton. And they tracked some of them down and these were just like guys living in Macedonia making six figures a year, and they didn't care who won but they just knew publishing this bullshit would make the money because people click on it and then they get advertising dollars. And so the problem with, and I think this is a problem in social media, and, and some of the publishing industry is part of this is that there are these incentive structures monetarily, and ways to gain social status even if you don't get money off it that are yolks to these types of identities, and you can exploit people by getting into buy your product or your book this is happening right now with kind of an anti-vaxxer community. Some of these people are selling like these alternative products, websites, these anti-vaxxers of podcasts. And so they're making money hand over fist. And God knows that they generally believe this. So this is happening on Fox News, a lot of the main people are pushing kind of anti-vaxxing messages, privately they all got vaccinated. And so this is one of these things where they're doing it because it's marketable. And this happens on the left to that people market identity all the time you can go into a lot of coffee shops in my neighborhood. I walk in and used to be you go to a coffee shop said great coffee or great latte or whatever, whatever you're into. And when you walk in it's just symbols of identity all over the place in the coffee shop about like how they're using the proceeds to help some certain group. Yeah, there's a coffee shop I went to in Providence called I think it's called like blue state coffee, you know, and then these places and now on the right there's what is it black rice will copy. There's these copies that are essentially like the puppy coffee is not that different between these places. But what's marketable for them what makes them a ton of money is that they're marketing an identity and selling it and making money from it. And so that's kind of I think like what we have to recognize is that that we're, we're, we're being sold identity from people, oftentimes more than their genuine thoughts and we eat it up because we're looking for the confirmation bias and and affirmations of our identity. So it's not necessarily the people who are selling it to us aren't necessarily true believers, some are, but a lot just see a market opportunity. Yeah, yeah, absolutely I just finished a book that talks a lot about this because something I think about and read about a lot is just signaling right signaling what tribe or with what group or with, and all that and you know so some of this like I buy this coffee doesn't do anything different but it symbolizes this right like hell you you see what's his name Mike Lindell just having that pillow signals what side you're on and stuff and like we just do this constantly and it's like Hello that the guy with my pillow yeah yeah that my pillow guys putting all his money into still trying to show that the election was a problem or whatever but but they feed they feed and profit off of anger and one of the studies that blew my mind and like I think you guys conducted this one, correct me if I'm wrong and just reference it, but it was the baseball fans and see right because I think it's super important to size from the minimal group paradigm, and something I learned from Dr Jennifer Eberhardt's book is perception of threat and aggression. So can you break that down a little bit this this kind of baseball study of opposing fans. This was done by led by one of my former PhD students Jenny shower, and we wanted to look at people who are threatened by their groups and right now we're talking about pretty motive groups right we're talking about race and policing. We're talking about politics. But there's lots of other identities that people have in society and turns out these matter, you know more than most people most of the time. And one of them is their sports loyalties and so I live in New York. I have to admit I'm a Toronto blue jays fans from Canada. And I was a kid when they won the World Series and so there's research showing that it as a kid if the team in your city or state or country wins when if you're about 12 or 13 years old, it gets imprinted on you you become a fan for life. That's like the kind of like critical window if you're a little boy. And so I was about that age when the Toronto blue jays one two old series so I'm like a stock being a fan for like even if they suck. But in New York, of course, it's the Yankees are the team. I mean there's the Mets but no one, no one will measure up to the Yankees they've been dominant for so long. And the biggest sports rivalry maybe in the whole country here is between the Yankees and the Red Sox that beats back you know to Babe Ruth and over 100 years old that rivalry. And so we went up to Yankee Stadium Jenny and our research team, and she measures had fans come pouring into Yankee Stadium, you know the house that Ruth built, and asked them, you know, had them look at a map of the northeast coast, and they had a map where Fenway Park was where Boston Red Sox their, you know, our tribal played. And it was also at the time where they would play off race with Boston ago and they were number, you know right number one and two in the division. And she also had the mark on a map where the Baltimore Orioles are. And so Baltimore in Camden yards where they play is almost the exact same distance apart to the south is Fenway Park is to the north of New York so it really made a really good control condition. They were also in the same division as the Yankees but they I think at the time are like 23 games back they were in last place. They're historically a pretty terrible team. And so people had to estimate how far away the arch rival Red Sox were and versus this terrible other outgroup that's non threatening which is the Baltimore Orioles. And the Yankees fans consistently thought that Fenway Park was closer to them than Camden yards, you know where the Red Sox were closer. And so Yankee Stadium also fold a lot of tourists to pass through New York in the summer. And the tourists were accurate. They had the estimations much more accurate than Yankee fans did. And so Yankee fans because they were threatened by Boston their archival had this distorted perception of this outgroup kind of looming closer to them. We also gave them a another study where we had been look at the seating chart of all of Yankee Stadium. Ask them where they wanted Red Sox fans to sit, if they came into the stadium for a game and they wanted them all to sit in the nosebleed section. And we even had some people we were shocked by this, because we've had a picture of the stadium on a blank piece of paper. Some of them wrote that Yankee Red Sox fans should sit outside of the stadium that should basically be banned from coming in. And they just we were shocked because we didn't ask you know we thought they'd all mark inside the stadium they just spontaneously wrote an area outside the stadium where Red Sox fans should sit and they should also pay more for tickets they said. So this is like classic discrimination right. Yeah, segregation, keeping outgroup members away and outside of society, charging them more for things. And but in baseball, you know, it's, it's okay for people to express these prejudices, it's like one of those domains of society where we tell people it's okay to be prejudiced against the other team. And so that was something that we, we've, you know, founded our studies that matters just as much for these other identities. And let me let me tell you, I, in my review of your book, like I say this like I read so much but the way you two structured the chapters, like it was just, I loved it. Yeah, because as, as I read it right and like I just remembered like how much I love that because as you're talking about this with baseball teams right and we talk about the minimal group paradigm. So listen, you're hearing about like this research around something so trivial as sports that you think somebody from the, the opposing fan is closer to you, more threatening they would have them sit outside the stadium, but then we're like, nah man, police officers could never be racist right you can never think you know I'm like I'm sitting there and I'm just like there's so many things like of course like of course and and we need to we need to recognize this stuff but yeah the way you guys built on it for everybody who gets the book and reads it I encourage them to do that like, like when I read these studies I'm like okay what are the real world implications of this what is this. Tell me about life and and and all that you know what I mean is that is that something that you hope people do like we're just with a variety of studies that you guys do. Yeah, so one thing we wanted to do is, you know, when you talk about these things just within the political domain people get their backup, they get defensive because people are really invested. It's easy to have wanted to deny things or rationalize them or you only watch a certain news source. And so, we only have one chapter on politics in the whole book right. Most of it is about all different other types of identities national identity sports identities. And so we want people to understand that these are basic parts of human psychology that affects all kinds of ways in which we live our lives. And one of the, you know, in the very first chapter we say, we quote Walt Whitman the Great New York poet he says, we contain multitudes that I'm a sports band just as much as I'm a son just as much as I'm a New Yorker just as much as I'm a Canadian, just as much as I'm a father. These are all key parts of boy I am and they get triggered in different situations. And so what that means is that, since we contain multitudes. It gives us some power to choose, you know, we want to be most of the time. Also, we get to choose a lot of times what groups we decide to identify we decide to join. And then other ones that we're stuck with. You know, let's say you work you can't sometimes easy to switch your job. But then we also try to tell people how norms work, even if you're in a group. You can stay in, in how the norms of the group work that you can cultivate descent, or creative thinking or anchoring the discussions on truth and facts and reality not misinformation. And so we want to give people kind of the tools understand, you know, we are all these different identities. This is tends to be how some of them go wrong, but let's give you the tools to either opt into the right ones, or to give you the tools to the ones that you're in and to make them more accurate to make them more humane things like that. Yeah, so, so I want to, I want to hopefully lead into the end on a happy note and some optimism right because here's the thing as much as I love this stuff as much as I love evolutionary psychology and being like okay this is like part of me right. This stuff is like as much part of me as it is my hand, and you guys discuss some of this in the book and you also have a ton of solutions towards the end or ideas for solutions. So one of the things I want to touch on real quick there's so much debate and arguing around my companies, like you know especially during the last summer right everybody's like okay we need to do implicit bias training you guys all need to know about that. There's just evidence that some of this stuff. It doesn't stick. So my brain, and you know maybe it's the cynical pessimistic side of me. I'm like, Okay, this is a part of me. These biases, and here's what's nuts J real quick side note, I'm half black so it freaks me out even more because I'm like, Okay, am I partially racist because I look like do I identify more than this. But anyways, like, what, where's the hope for this like is this just part of us forever are we always going to have these reactions to out group members like you've been studying this for like you said like 20 years has yours gotten better. You know, like, what do what do we do what's the hope for humanity, if we notice this and how do we make it stick. Yeah, so that's a, that is the question I think. So I think that there's two things you can do one by learning about it, you can critically reflect on it, understand how people are manipulating you. So this is one of my favorite books of all time is Bob Chaldeany's book influence. Yeah, his book is all about. You remember how it structured every chapter is, I got suckered into doing this dumb thing. I wanted to understand how it works so I would be. And so we want people to understand who's manipulating you how leaders manipulate you propaganda manipulates you the media manipulates you in ways that give you the tools to understand that. Or you know, when you're a victim of identity grifting you buy this thing. That's not any better but because someone's like appealing your identity, you know, understand that at least consciously, that's what's happening to you and if you want to resist it then you can. And the next tool we want to give people is, and this is the kind of take on point from our chapter on discrimination and prejudice. Again, we only have one chapter on that but the main messages, the two things first of all build more inclusive identities that we have capacities human to go up a level. We don't only have to hear in our little tribal identities we can move up to something that we both share find common ground. And the last thing you want to do if you make it stick, because people will always try to suck you back down to that competition of is to change a process. So most of discrimination, in my view is actually structural and institutional. We get stuck on the symbolic things, or, or something somebody said. But what often causes more destruction is a system that's unfair. So let's say like an algorithm for hiring or medical recommendations. I recommend to people to think of what systems you have control over and try to fix them to be more fair and unbiased, because I think that that's where most of the harm is caused. And those are often the things that operate in the background. And what that also means is we live in the world where we're distracted. Our prefrontal cortex is constantly overloaded with stressful things in the world, or like constantly getting like pinged from our iPhone, you know, or emails pouring in as we're trying to be in meeting. And so we don't often have the capacity to regulate ourselves constantly and check ourselves. And once you read our book, you know, you read it deeply but a lot of people are going to slip out of their mind and then just slip back into the little habits, you know, the next day. And so what we want people to do is walk away and change one system you're a part of and make it better. And if you can convince other people around you to do that, that's how you're going to affect things so that they're more fair and unbiased and non discriminatory. And also this, I didn't cite this in my book, I don't think, but my colleague at NYU, Mo Craig has this great research showing that if you tell people they're prejudiced, they get defensive. And they don't want to change. We tell them they're racist, they really don't want to change. If you tell them a system that they control is racist, they're open to changing it. They're not defensive and they're like, Oh, I didn't know that. That's bad. I'm going to change it. And so I think the way a lot of our conversations go unfortunately online is about accusing each person of some kind of racial prejudice. And the reason people don't like the it I think the average person is because they don't want to be told that's them. And it's threatening to them. Many people unfortunately to hear that and they don't want the accusation or that taint attached to them and the shame and that comes with it. And so I think the more recent research is telling us there's better ways to go around it and also those ways are probably actually more effective in changing the world for better. And so that's how I would approach it is like, tell something you might not be aware of this but the way that you're doing this hiring process is unfair to this group, because the way you wrote the job ads talks about hiring a rock star and that just doesn't, you know, no women are going to apply to that job because they're doing like a dog whistle that that doesn't apply to them. Sounds like it sounds like do do road that, you know. And so that's the type of thing that people might not be are often very unaware of and often matters a lot. And most people are actually open minded to changing once it's pointed out to them. So that's kind of where I would say most of the change can happen is think of a structure you can change and think of convincing other people around you to change structures. Yeah, I like that and, you know, I only got like one more question for you but like I, it makes me think of you know when you call the person or racist like last summer you know when I read Dr. Jennifer Eberhouse I'm like, What's this book. What's this book white fragility everybody keeps talking about and I jump into it I look at it. My main takeaway is what what you just said, when you call someone out for something they're doing they get defensive. Right. And I'm like, Okay, that's the base of the book put it away right then all of a sudden I think I find out that people just hate Robin D'Angelo I'm like what am I missing. So her new book came out nice racism I read it started looking around I'm like, Oh, right. And it seems like just like common sense but it's what sells like, you don't go around saying your race, your racist nothing you could do can change and it's like, like, I've worked with addicts for years if I go to a drug addict to say hey, you're a drug addict you're always going to be a drug addict you're never going to be anything but a drug addict. You know what they're going to say. Well, I'm just going to keep doing drugs because you know what I mean. So, so it's the way the message is given but it sucks because like you said, we're being manipulated to feed into that. You know, um, but one other thing that you said that's really important and this also great book if you hadn't read it by Anthony Kia, he's a philosopher. He wrote a book called the lies that bind. And the point of his old book is that when the way we talk about identity is that we attach an essentialistic element, like your racist. That's part of who you are deep down religion, you know, you're a Muslim you're a Jew. We attach it to national identities you're a Canadian you're an American. And the way we talk about is if it's this essentialistic thing that's attached to you like biologically you can never escape. We have real conversation about people make them open minded. We got to do the opposite. We got to get rid of essentialistic language and use what, what, you know, Josh Aronson and Carol Dweck and others in our field call growth mindset. Yeah, talk about people as if they're we're all on a journey of growing and learning every time you read a book, you know, you're this voracious leader you learn something you walk with and you met lesson. Every time I run a study it's the same. Every time I make a mistake in a relationship hopefully I can learn from it. We want to treat these as opportunities for people to grow and everybody's on a different path along this this journey. And if someone's earlier in the path than you. I really worry about excoriating them because I've been on my own pathway and I remember being in an early stage of enlightenment a lot of things. Yeah, you know, I would have hate to have been ostracized that I was grateful at each stage that people hold me along the path a little bit further and made me aware and helped me grow and gave me the opportunity to go and treat me as if I was capable of growth. And so whether you're talking about the stigma of people who use drugs, you know, you're here because you saw an opportunity to grow past your addiction. I hope that other people can grow whether it's politically or around actual information or around racism. A good book on this and a good person who hammers this home is Dolly Chos, colleague of mine at NYU is, and she really has a newsletter and a book around good people that a lot of us are trying to be better we're trying to be good people. And her but all about just trying to help you get a step further along that road. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely I wouldn't be here I wouldn't have my son back in my life and you know we we hang out and you know I'm a father I'm a son I'm a friend. I wouldn't be here if people didn't just give me that opportunity to grow. I also just, I think it's really I just want to give you credit for sharing that story really you're making yourself vulnerable you're being authentic. And when other people struggling through some of these things, hear that from you and see where you've come. It shows them maybe they can do it maybe they can get back in a relationship with their son. Overcome drugs or other things. So I also think that's an important thing is we show our vulnerabilities and our goals to other people can see that's a potential pathway for them. Yeah, yeah, something I think about and why I'd like to read and you know read books like yours and so many is just changing my beliefs like save my life you know and and it's that's kind of the core of why I read so much and trying to learn about growth and all that but last last question for you, speaking of me and what I read. So I'm a, like I said I'm a former drug addict college dropout just a guy who likes to read and learn. And I'm wondering because I hope everybody who's listening this understand how important your book is, and I'm like, who, who do you and Dominic hope reads this book, right because like I look around I see the people talking about it on Twitter seems like other researchers and professors, and it's like okay cool, cool. I hope you guys read it so you can teach people. Awesome. But I want to like give it to like high school students and college students and I want to give it to employers and all these other people so I'm just curious if you had in mind like, if you had one wish, who would read this book to understand better about our how I did it he plays in all this. That's a fantastic question. So our book right now because it's in an area that a lot of researchers read and most people probably follow me on social media or researchers. A lot of them actually probably know some of the stuff they probably know at least a third or half of it if not most of it. I'm really grateful that they like it because it means that if serious researchers think it's good with science justice. But really who we wrote for is people outside of science, because the work on social identity is published in 10,000 articles. It's in 1000 academic books, but no one outside of academia has actually read those books. And so what we want people to read it is people like yourself we're just curious people who want to learn. And then we wrote it in a way that the stories would make it under life and that would stick home. We tried to summarize with the research in a very simple way as if you're reading the newspaper. We wanted to be for the average person who just reads a blog or reads a newspaper or listens to a podcast is like, actually a smart podcast listeners almost our ideal audience. It's like someone who listens to your podcast somebody who cares about science and learning is doing it on their free time this is not something that they're required to do in school, or for their work. And they just want to enrich their life and get smarter because they could be like listening to like serial podcasts about like, you know murder mysteries and stuff like that right to listen to your podcast because they want their intrinsically motivated to get smarter and wiser about the world and about themselves. That's actually our target leader. And so those those type of people pick it up and read it and just walk away a little bit smarter and it could be about how they run how they manage their daughter soccer team. Better at that, then we it's a win for us. I just want our every reader to use it to make a group that they're part of get better, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And aside from this this episode if there's anything I could do to help accomplish that goal, you let me know because I come across books and I'm like, this is important. You need to read I have like a list of books where it's like my son, he's only 12 right now when he gets a little bit older it's like, here's all the books that you have to read, but my son's 11 and a half so he's almost ready for that list to. We'll make a group list maybe I'll post. That'd be a great post for you like teenagers need to read that'd be awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And, and yeah, so we're recording this a little bit before the book comes out. But by time the post the book will be out but can you let everybody know when it's out where it's available and where they can find you and dominant because you guys are researching and talking and like you guys are very active on social media and stuff so where can people find both of you as well as the So here's the title the power of us. It comes out September 7, and we have a website called power of us dot online, and you can go there and sign up to our newsletter, you can buy the book anywhere. So, you know it's available wherever books are sold will be sold, you know whether it's Amazon if you don't like that you go to target independent booksellers will have it. And you can get on audible we've even recorded a personal preface the story opens with me choking and Dominic saving my life. I enjoyed that. Yeah, so that we recorded that ourselves and the rest is on audio if you like to listen audio books like I do. And we are also available. If you go to our website is links to all our social media, and you can follow us and engage with us online. We look forward to as many readers joining our community as possible being part of our team. Beautiful and by the way, last thing I'm gonna say and I want everybody to hear so so hopefully we can peer pressure you into doing it. I need that book identity grifting I need just an entire book on it. Okay, I'll pitch that to my agent maybe that'll be an excellent I think that that's that'll be controversial but I think that'd be a fun or book to read. Yeah, I would love it I'll be an early reader but yeah, thank you so much for your time Jay and and yeah it's it's been a pleasure we'll have to do this again sometime. Okay, thanks so much. It was honored to be on the show.