 We want to start with you, go right to the heart of the matter. From your perspective, what is dehumanization and why is it that we threw out history to dehumanize others? I would say, and let me check, can you hear me in the back? No, no. Can you hear me now? Excellent. Thank you. So I'd say at its most basic level, dehumanization refers to a tendency that we have to see other people, and particularly members of other social groups, as less than fully human. And what we mean by that usually is that we see them as less capable of embodying the full range of human emotions, human qualities, human intellectual capabilities that we might afford to other people that we would see as fully human. And so seeing them as lesser beings, we have a tendency to think that they might not be entitled to the same quality of behavior that we would afford to people that we would regard as more fully human. And as I was thinking about these issues, I was also thinking about how another way to think about dehumanization is also who we're inclined to include or exclude from our circles of moral concern, who's basically worth being concerned about and who's not necessarily worth being concerned about. Like my brief version. I mean, similarly, I just think it's interesting that we have a number of moral prohibitions against harming others, but these are all predicated on the assumption that they're human, that we don't have the same moral prohibitions against harming animals in general, right? In fact, we use them for sport and food and clothing. So if you define someone as outside of humanity, then the problem is you might have some moral disengagement with their welfare. And so the other answer to the question is how we try to measure it as a scientific community. And there are three kind of, I think, primary ways that you might think of dehumanization. One is thinking of kind of objectification. So thinking of someone as an object, this might be like the objectification of women or of prisoners or of athletes, NCAA programs. This type of objectification is maybe a type of dehumanization. Another type that's commonly thought of is mechanistic dehumanization. Thinking of people as like a cogs in a machine. So workers might be thought of in this way. People often, this is often the type of dehumanization that's applied to like Chinese or Japanese. People think of collectivist cultures sometimes a little bit more mechanistic. And the last one is animalistic dehumanization. So thinking of them in terms of animals. So they embody some of the characteristics of animals. But all three of these have that kind of similar characteristic which is they're all removed from moral concern. And there's also this element of denial of some kind of mind to them. That they don't have the full capacity of reason and compassion and so emotions and feelings and ability to think that kind of we do. So yeah, just hearing Emil talk about objectification. I think another useful example that might be a little more accessible to us in common language is stereotyping. Because essentially when we just apply a stereotype of a social category and basically say all those people are just like that. We're simply treating people on the basis of that category membership and not really recognizing their full humanity. So even though we might think about dehumanization in more extreme contexts like cases of massive violence or genocide. I think there's also many everyday ways in which we have a tendency to dehumanize people. So I just wanted to unfortunately raise that as well. Great. And all these things are clearly on a scale. And I think that leads really to the next question around the kinds of measures that you've developed and to sort of look at degrees of dehumanization. And so if you could tell us a little bit about what that research has shown sort of summarize some of the key findings. And then maybe also tell us why you chose to focus on refugees, immigrants and Muslims in your analysis. Yeah. So I have been focused on specifically trying to look at animalistic dehumanization. Because that's the type of flavor of dehumanization that seems to have accompanied a lot of like the darkest chapters in human history. From genocide to warfare to colonization to slavery. All these groups are depicted as animals really commonly going back through history and very explicitly. And so there's been a big interest in social psychology on dehumanization. It kind of formally started really after the Holocaust. But there wasn't really an attempt to really empirically measure dehumanization until around 2000. And then the measures that came out were they focused on trying to measure dehumanization in a really subtle way that people might not even be aware that you're measuring it. And the assumption there I think was that maybe dehumanization still existed today but kind of as echoes of colonization. That people might not be willing to admit to dehumanization. And even if they were they might not even be aware of how they were dehumanizing groups. And I think this is really fascinating research. But I helped sponsor this conference between scientists who were studying dehumanization and people who actually experienced dehumanization. So Native Americans, Palestinians, the Roma minority population in Europe. And what they said basically after the conference was they were really fascinated with the science but they said but the way that we are experiencing dehumanization isn't so subtle. We are being called dogs and bananas are being thrown at us as we're playing soccer on the field. So we actually just wanted to see if we could measure just blatant dehumanization if people would actually be willing to cop to this level of dehumanization. Whether it went beyond just the anecdotal examples and whether it could provide a meaningful measure that could predict anything else that we cared about in the real world. So that we measured this a few different ways but the first way we did it was to just be as blatant and offensive as we possibly could. And what we did is we just gave people the Ascent of Man diagram inspired by Darwin. You know the five images of evolution. And then we just listed groups underneath and we gave them sliders so they could move the slider over to indicate how evolved and civilized they considered these groups to be. And we've now done this on four different continents with about 10 or 20,000 people in 10 different countries and it's really consistent. People are perfectly willing to rate other groups below their own on this scale. And the degree to which they do it is a really high predictor of all the nastiness that we see in the world. So from attitudes towards the Roma minority population in Europe. So to give you an example of how big this dehumanization sometimes can be. If you just convert that to a 100 point scale we could measure the amount of dehumanization as how much lower people put a target group than their own. So if we do this in Hungary for example, Hungarians will rate Hungarians here and they'll rate the Roma about 30 points lower on the scale. So that means they're just over half way on the kind of evolutionary ascent scale. And the degree to which across individuals the degree to which they dehumanize the Roma predicts things like their endorsement for really draconian policies like forced sterilization of Roma women who have a number of children. And this might seem totally outlandish but the Czech Republic actually had to apologize for this in the 1990s because they were actually implementing this program. So it is a program that has been in place in the past and people will endorse it to the extent that they believe the Roma are less than human. And in Hungary also it isn't just these blatant policies, we also looked at this dehumanization measure among teachers and training. And we asked them to do this task where they supposedly placed Roma and non-Roma children into educational tracks. So into the lowest track which denies you any chance of secondary education versus an intermediate track or a high track. And we found that teachers somewhat unsurprisingly, even if the qualifications were identical, if they thought it was a Roma child they would tend to place them into the lower track. But that was predicted by how much they dehumanized the Roma in general and was not predicted by how much they disliked the Roma. And in fact the teachers who did this the most, who showed the greatest amount of discrimination were teachers who liked the Roma and dehumanized them. So this I think is just a really nice example of what we've seen in the past, right, of a colonialism, of a paternalism that's often applied to minority groups. Like removing native children from their families to educate them in boarding schools. That can be cloaked, and it might actually be cloaked in caring about those children wanting to do the best for them. But if it's combined with dehumanization, then what was the saying like you want to kill the Indian to save the man or something? Like this is that type of sentiment seems to map pretty well on the elements of dehumanization. And so, yeah, we've looked at it all over the place that the strongest levels of dehumanization I've found so far have been in Colombia towards the FARC rebel group. So I've been working down there because, you know, Colombia just signed a peace treaty with the FARC rebel group. The degree to which Colombians reject that treaty is based on how much they dehumanize FARC members. So a quick question. When you ask people to raid or to move these sliders, the question is around whether they see this group as more or less civilized. You use the word civilized no matter what language or translation of that. And then you actually have that image of the ascent of man. Yeah. So we've done it three main ways. One is to describe it a lot. Some people think that other groups are less evolved and civilized and some think they're more evolved and civilized. How evolved and civilized do you consider these groups? We've also tried just giving them just the graphic image and not giving any explanation whatsoever and people respond just the same. It's very intuitive, right? People know what you're trying to get at with the scale and they respond accordingly. Yeah. And then your thoughts. So I want to just highlight or reinforce one of the points that Emil set about his research, which is why I think it's so great, which is that it's important to distinguish between dehumanization and prejudice. Because so much of the research in our field has focused on prejudice. How do you reduce prejudice? How do you get groups to like each other? And the focus on dehumanization kind of shifts the focus a bit to say it's a little bit more closely tied, I think, to policy implications and how we treat people as compared to just liking. Because I think it's very easy for many of us to distinguish between liking people and saying, oh, well, you know, I like people. I think they're fine. I just choose not to live near them. I just choose not to support things that they care about. And so I think this issue of dehumanization is particularly important because of those broader policy implications. And as a related piece, just to kind of also give you some flavor in some research that Emil and I have done with a mutual colleague in Hungary. There was another study where we had looked at what types of family conversations non-Roma-Hungarians have about the Roma. And then we did a consent analysis basically coding the types of responses that people say they would have likely heard around the dinner table with members of their family. Trying to say like, oh, so, you know, mention one positive thing about the Roma that you might have heard among members of your family around the table. Or mention one negative thing you might have heard. And the negative things were like they are scum. They're a vermin. They're taking over. They should be all killed. Again, it's very much reinforcing. So it's not merely that people are being primed by the ascent of man graphics. But when you just ask people spontaneously the types of things that come up in conversation in their families, in their homes, we see similar types of trends. So I imagine in many cases like that you'd see a kind of convergence of prejudice and dehumanization. But it seems like you're making this really critical point, and you are too, that the two don't necessarily go together. Yeah. And actually when it comes to attitudes, we might have mixed attitudes, right? So there would be a lot of people who say like, they play music beautifully. I just don't want them living anywhere near my people. So, you know, we can have positive and negative attitudes currently. But dehumanization, I think it's hard to say that you're going to both re-humanize and dehumanize at the same time. It's a little more of a switch. At least I would think so. I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. Well, one of the things about, I mean, I think one of the chilling things about dehumanization is that it does seem to be this cold calculation. That it's not necessarily driven by how you feel about the group. One of the ways I tried to get about this is put people in the scanner while I'm having them judge these groups on a feeling thermometer scale, which is a standard way of measuring dislike or prejudice, so how warm or cold you feel towards these groups. And to judge the same groups on this dehumanization scale. And what I found is that there are completely different brain regions that are active when they're doing this. So these are separate processes when people are making these judgments. And one thing I was really looking for was just to see if there was any hint of activity in kind of the emotional limbic areas when people were doing the dehumanization judgments. And there just wasn't at all. So it really seems like it might be this cold calculation of how human are they and that can really inform policy decisions. But yeah, and it also suggests that there might be two separate routes to intervene. That intervening just on people's emotional responses to a group might miss some of the perceptions that are really driving their support for these policies. So also just thinking about like when I hear it, we'll say a cold calculation. I just want to also mention that it may not be entirely conscious, right? But there may be people who are a little more sinister and really thinking about it. But I think there's also just kind of this perhaps gut level feeling of like, nah, like they're not people that I need to be concerned about. So that's just also something to keep in mind. Yeah, you know, I was waiting in line at the taxi line in DC one time. This is right around when Obama was trying to decide whether to sign the nuclear accord or not. And I was behind this guy who was a reporter, who was reporting on this. And he was appalled that Obama was considering this. And I asked him, I said, wow, you know, that really surprised me because it seems like a good idea to me to actually try peace this time rather than kind of blow somebody up. And he said, well, Iranians are bad actors. So rewarding them with a peace deal is like giving your dog a treat after it's peed on the run. And I thought that was such a perfect description of a dehumanizing example that, you know, you can think of people learning in different ways. Animals learn very directly through this type of system. And, you know, you can see people applying that to other humans. You can imagine teachers applying this kind of method of learning to black students but not white students. And again, yeah, like you said, maybe not even realizing that they're using a different logic for each one. And so when you say cold and calculating or it's not lighting up the parts of the brain that are more to do with emotions, is it more of what we would colloquially say is sort of a cerebral, more of a kind of like rational? Yeah, we don't, I mean, I don't know enough yet exactly about what it is. The one, and there's not a whole lot of research on this yet. So some brain regions are really well characterized, right? There have been a gazillion studies and they all show activity in this one area. But if you do a study that doesn't have a whole lot, you find a brain region active and there hasn't been a whole lot of research that's shown activity there, you don't feel very confident in saying what exactly it's doing. So, I mean, I think the most provocative is that there are a couple of studies that have had people judge the status of others, the social status of others, and that does seem to activate regions that are similar to dehumanizing. And I think that it would make a lot of sense for dehumanization to follow along with status. And this is something that primates care a lot about status, right? So it makes sense that that would be a brain region that would be activated when you're making dehumanization. And has your, what's your research suggest about the impact of dehumanization on those who are dehumanized and what do you see about as the social implications of that? Yeah, so we have referred to this as meta-dehumanization. So how much I think you are dehumanizing me, right? And you and me is usually a target outgroup and me is my ingroup. So how much is that group dehumanizing my group? And this matters a lot. So one thing we've been looking for is, well, what drives dehumanization? What are the things that feed into it that get people to dehumanize another group? This is one of them. If you think the other group thinks of your group as less than human, that is a strong trigger to getting you to both dehumanize them in return and advocate for all kinds of nastiness towards them. And so this, I think I see this a lot in rhetoric about Muslims, right? Muslims, so I think probably the more people endorse the idea that Muslims see us as infidels, that idea I think is probably kind of rooted in dehumanization. They are dehumanizing us and the response to that is very strong. To dehumanize them. Yeah, but of course, dehumanization is most often directed at marginalized groups. So there's also an effect on people who are dehumanized commonly, right? So Americans being dehumanized by Muslims I think is interesting and important because all the Pew surveys show that that's just not true. So it's a perception that doesn't match reality and I think that's interesting but also important because that's the type of thing you might be able to correct. So you might be able to correct how someone is feeling dehumanized by another group and that might be an indirect way of decreasing their dehumanization of that group. And that's what we've started to do is do interventions that aren't directed at how much you dehumanize another group but how much you think the group dehumanizes you. And these indirect approaches in our hands are more effective than the direct ones. Can you give an example of an intervention? Yeah, so our first attempt at this was looking at dehumanization of Americans perceived dehumanization by Iranians around the nuclear accord and we found that the degree to which Americans felt dehumanized by Iranians predicted their opposition to the peace deal and their support for war and their willingness to sign petitions to congressional members to do this. So it predicted these behaviors whereas prejudice, how much they disliked Iranians didn't predict it much at all. And so the degree to which Americans thought that Americans were dehumanized by Iranians predicted how much they dehumanized in turn and how much they endorsed these policies. So what we did is we wrote a fake Boston Globe article but we populated it with actual information from a compilation of Pew surveys that was published just a couple of years ago. Those Pew surveys collected across the Muslim world over 10 years and it showed that by and large Muslims had very positive views both of Americans and America despite all the interventions overseas. For example, they asked them what are the two things you respect most about the United States and what are the two things you respect least? And the two things that Muslims respect most about the U.S. are the same two things that Americans respect the most about the U.S. And the two things that Muslims respect least about the U.S. are the two things that Americans respect least about the U.S. Do you remember what they were? The respect least is like a degradation of the family unit. And I can't remember the other one. But respect most is like democratic institutions and freedom and freedom of the press, things like that. So you showed these articles? Yes, so showed these articles. And the people who saw these articles, read these articles, dehumanized Muslims or dehumanized Iranians less than those who didn't read out a document or something. OK, your thoughts? Well, golly, so there's some research parallels with some of the work that people in my life have done looking at racial and ethnic relations in the US. So just to kind of give an example of some of the things that we're dealing with here at home. So when we've asked people about perceptions of other groups and meta-perceptions, so it's similar to the dehumanization and meta-dehumanization. So how interested in intergroup relations and contact across group lines I think members of other racial and ethnic groups are towards my group and also how I feel towards their groups. And what you usually see is some reciprocity. That's not too surprising, right? The more I think they want to interact with people like me, the more inclined I am to interact with people like them. But then we've also tried to look at what that means in terms of people's conceptions of diversity and the extent to which diversity is valued. And there we see some really interesting asymmetries between white people and people of color. So again, kind of getting to how the status differences of the people that are perceiving or being perceived really does seem to matter. So we find, for example, among white American that what really seems to matter is how much they value diversity. If they personally think diversity is good things and they're more interested in getting to know members from other groups. But for people of color, we've replicated this across a few studies. It doesn't matter so much how much they value diversity. What matters is the extent to which they think whites value diversity. If they think whites value diversity, then they're willing to engage in those cross-group interactions. So again, you can kind of see that there are these status differences in how groups are conceiving of their position in relation to each other and what types of information they're using to make judgments. So I can imagine how Americans, it might be nice to hear that Iranians feel positively towards us, but given the status structure on the world stage, that might not matter as much to the everyday American as compared to how Iranians think Americans feel towards them in terms of the implications for their nation. Yeah, and I think this idea of meta-perceptions more broadly, so I mean, we shamelessly cribbed the idea of meta-dehumanization from Linda and others who have meta-perceptions work. But I think, like thinking of this more broadly, so again, if you have, if your meta-perceptions are accurate, there's not a whole lot, like you don't wanna attack those meta-perceptions because there's nothing really to attack, right? So Democrats and Republicans on this dehumanization scale, they dehumanize each other quite a bit, and equally, and it's equally predictive across both groups of nastiness. And their meta-perception is pretty darn accurate. If you ask Democrats, how do you think Republicans will rate you? It's pretty close to how Republicans actually rate them and vice versa, right? Democrats think that Republicans will dehumanize them, us a little bit less than, a little bit, yeah, a little bit less than they actually do, and Republicans are spot on. So to me, that means, okay, great. So take that off the table for me as an intervention, but if you have something like FARC, so for the FARC rebels, Colombians think that FARC has no interest in peace and no interest in integrating, and those things are just categorically false, and so that gives you an opportunity when you see this mismatch where you can actually start targeting something, and Democrats and Republicans aren't accurate about everything, right? If you ask them, so I've asked Democrats and Republicans, this is kind of an old paradigm that was used in the 70s, and I've tried to resuscitate a little bit. If I ask people, how do you feel about gun control or open versus closed borders or this scenario where a white police officer killed an unarmed black suspect? Where do you fall on this spectrum of, say for the officer and the suspect who holds the most responsibility? So make your rating, great, they make their rating. Then I ask them, where do you think the average Democrat would rate on here and where would the average Republican rate on here? And the interesting thing about this is you can get Democrat ratings and their perceptions of other Democrats and other Republicans, and you can get Republican ratings and their perceptions of Democrats and Republicans. And the interesting thing is there's a real ideological divide that you can measure, right? The average Democrat is here and the average Republican is here. But both Democrats and Republicans are in complete agreement that the ideological divide is twice as big as it actually is by on every issue we looked at. So this is an opportunity for intervention, right? Because if we are basing our hostility towards the other group where we think they fall on this line and it's twice as big as the ideological divide actually is, that's a problem and that's an opportunity to intervene. Yeah, no, it suggests a lot in terms of intervention. Linda, I wanted to move a little bit to your work on empathy and apathy and ask you in particular in relation to the zero tolerance policy around immigration. And Melika shared earlier with me this Quinnipiac poll in June that 55% of Republicans supported the policy to separate adults from children as they crossed the border so that the adults could be persecuted. Should I order a please? Sure, sure, so sorry, hold the mic up. So we're asking Linda to talk a little bit more about her research on empathy and apathy and as an example, to think about the zero tolerance policy around immigration, the fact that according to a Quinnipiac poll I mean 55% of Republicans supported separating adults from children at the border. And just what can be done to, I mean not to single out Republicans but what can be done to increase empathy for the effects of such policies on immigrants and minorities? Oh, it's just a little question. A little question. So I'd have to say, from the last 20 years that I've been an academic, for me the million dollar question is how do you motivate people to care when they don't have to? And just to try to give some background as to why I think that's such a crucial issue for us to consider, the way that our minds work, there's a couple of social psychologists who say that we like to act like cognitive misers that we're inherently motivated to try to conserve our cognitive resources and not think about things more than we actually have to. And I would venture to guess that similar processes are at play not only when we're thinking about cognition or how we process information but also from a motivational perspective that we're not motivated to think about things or people unless we absolutely have to. And I think keeping in mind that we're motivated perceivers that we are constantly, whether conscious or not making decisions about what to focus on in our social environments because we can't possibly take in all the information that's out there or read all the news coverage that's out there. So we select, we focus on particular things more than others. And so I think about that as kind of undergirding my interests in empathy and empathy because people in more like an individual differences tradition in psychology would talk about empathy as a trait or the characteristic that some individuals are more empathic than others. But some of the research that we have done also looks at kind of the intergroup dynamics involved in empathy. And in some of the research that we've done where we look at how contact between groups can help to improve intergroup attitudes. We've also found that empathy is one of the key drivers through which contact helps to improve attitudes. But it's not just a direct relationship between more contact, less prejudice, for example. But there are a couple of roots that seem particularly crucial. They're both emotional in nature. One being that contact helps to reduce our feelings of anxiety and threat in relation to other groups. So the more contact we have with them, the more comfortable we are around them and with them. And also that greater contact is associated with more empathy. And we can think about that as either a greater willingness and or ability to empathize with what other groups are going through. And I actually think about those in a kind of sequential model where we through contact experiences we can often reduce those feelings of defensiveness that kind of correspond with anxiety and threat which then makes people more open to being willing to empathize and take the perspective of others. Regarding empathy, I have to say, my interest, my research interest in empathy really grew since the election in 2016 because I was really struck by how many people in those last few weeks of the election season there's always those interviews of people like oh I'm undecided, I just don't know. And I was struck by how many people I saw in news headlines saying things like oh Reese, yeah that's not really my thing or that's not my problem. And I think it very much relates to everything that we've been talking about in terms of dehumanizing or having kind of a switch turned off that oh yeah I don't need to tune into that station because it's not relevant to me. And so I've been trying to do some research to see whether empathy and apathy are really flip sides of the same coin. Is it like one the opposite of the other? And I've studied this in a few different ways and it doesn't appear to be the case. They're independently contributing to predicting attitudes towards immigration and you might imagine people hire a sense of apathy regarding racial and ethnic issues and have less supportive attitudes towards immigrants. And I know a lot of your research has focused on contact theory and as of end contact, that contact does increase empathy. Can you say a little more, is it any kind of contact? Is it particular type of contact? What would you say? Yeah, I really appreciate you're raising that question because I think there's a temptation to say all we need to do is bring groups together and then everything's going to be great and I think we have to keep in mind that just in terms of numbers of hours or numbers of days, it's absolute value terms. The more contact that groups have with each other, the greater the probability that they will have some negative contact as well as positive contact. We can't assume that it's always going to be positive but I think what really does seem to matter so much is having meaningful engagement across group boundaries but it's not enough to necessarily buy your lemonade from the same cashier every day. That might, you might start up conversation, there's the possibility but if someone is just swiping a SKU code and then letting you on your way, that's not necessarily going to be the type of contact experience that will really transform attitudes or social relations and there's a few different ways that the research literature has talked about contact and what's necessary for contact to really transform attitude. One tradition in that literature would say we really need to think about characteristics of the situation in which groups are coming into contact. And that's coming from an assumption that a lot of contact will be negative and that if we just leave people and groups to their own devices, there's the potential for conflicts to break out. So we have to think very carefully about how we structure situations to maximize the potential for achieving positive outcomes. So those types of optimal conditions to promote positive outcomes from contact would include things like equal status between the groups in the contact situation that even if they are of different statuses or power relations in the broader society that when they're brought together they are regarded and treated as equals. Common goals that they are working or striving toward common goals in cooperation and not in competition and also that there's institutional support but there are some norms or laws or authority figures or customs indicating that yes, you should interact with each other and you should interact as equals that if those types of conditions are in place that helps to maximize the potential for contact to promote positive outcomes between the groups. So that's kind of one brand to the contact literature and another brand to the contact literature has really focused more on close relations across group boundaries and in particular talking about the role of cross group friendships because friendships tend to typify many of those conditions. They tend to involve equal status, some form of cooperation maybe not so much institutional support but they also involve things like self-disclosure and perspective-taking that fuels a sense of caring and psychological investment in the other with whom you're interacting. And so there have been many studies in a variety of contexts from our research and others looking at relations say between Blacks and whites in South Africa between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland currently between different communities in Rwanda that are tending to show that you know the more positive and meaningful contact experiences that you have with members of other groups the more inclined you are not only to have positive attitudes towards them and to trust them but in the last couple of years we've published some work showing among those groups in South Africa and Northern Ireland that the more positive close contact that you have across those group lines you also have more positive beliefs about the other groups' intentions it's a lot like the meta-perception idea that you are more likely to believe that they are truly invested in peace and you are less likely to believe that they are just saying they're interested in peace while working toward other strategic goals and that in turn predicts greater involvement for the participants themselves in reconciliation efforts. So it seems like there's a lot of these issues around perceived intentions that when we become psychologically invested in the welfare of other people kind of turn on that switch for moral inclusion we become more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt give them the same types of psychological and emotional resources that we typically reserve just for members of our own group. We could, yes. Yeah, just one point about the refugees and this motivated empathy component which I think is so interesting is that you know empathy is a motivated process it's not that some people are more well some people are more empathetic than others but it seems to be controlled so much by the situation and so one example of this of an excuse we might use to be cognitive misers and withhold our empathy towards migrant children is I just asked a large group of Americans to estimate how many of the children who are being brought across the border they think are being used as props by adults to gain entry illegally and the estimate over all Americans was a third 35% that's how many of these children they think are being used as props the Department of Homeland Security has data on this so I looked at the Department of Homeland Security data and for 2017 which is the one complete year they have data the answer is 46 children. Wow, out of tens of thousands, right? Not 46% but like 0.004% Exactly, so 46 children were suspected of being used but the anecdote they used was an MS-13 gang member who was bringing his actual child across the border but it's unclear what that means maybe he is trying to, you know so that includes that's an over probably a high estimate, right? Anybody suspected of and the degree to which people predict this of course is a strong predictor of their support for the family separation policy and their level of empathy for the parents and children, right? So what I think is so one astonishing thing is that Democrats and Republicans are much closer to each other than they are to a reality, right? So Democrats are only overestimating by about 250 fold but I think one of the reasons for that might be if you think that they're legitimately being detained you can take a little edge off the empathy how much you feel for that and that might, you know from a cognitive miser standpoint we might look for excuses not to empathize even if we don't realize we're doing it we might do the same thing for felons, right? Oh, they kind of deserved it so I'm not gonna feel so bad that so I think it's just an important thing to realize that it's not, you know this isn't just a Fox News effect, right? This is something that might be some aspect of being human and that we have to all kind of throw it in, yeah, yeah so we could keep going but we wanna give a chance for people to digest just a little bit so I think Melka is going to help us get into groups there you are once I touch the light, we do that and then we'll reconvene so there'll be plenty of more time to hear from Emile and Linda Right, well thank you so much, Olivia and thank you all so much for being here my name is Melka Sundani I'm the Director of Critical Connections which is an organization here in the Valley that puts together events that offer analysis and opportunities for dialogue on issues related to the Muslim world and also American Muslims and other minority groups and I would also like to extend my thanks so much to Emile and Linda for sharing your insights and analysis it's so important especially as we here in the US become more increasingly diverse to sort of understand the science behind how we relate to one another and sort of the policy implications of that and also perhaps check our own biases and how we tend to sort of do that in our own daily interactions with people so that sort of takes us to the second part of our program now which involves all of you and so we wanted to give about 15 minutes for small group discussions where we would like you all to perhaps process what you just heard the experts speak about but really relate that to your own experiences of dehumanization either as you have experienced dehumanization yourself or have witnessed it or perhaps even inadvertently dehumanized other people in your daily interactions so we'll spend about 15 minutes doing that and then you'll reconvene as a large group and then engage our speakers for what we hope will be a lively Q&A session Anything you want to say? Yeah, say anything you want to say I'm interested Well, I'm having a really hard time with this one It's a lot of work in the work-torn areas and I can always say so with the perspective of the foreign party welcome All right So now before we get to everybody's questions and questions being posed to our speakers, we thought it would be nice to sort of hear a little bit about what bubbles up in your conversations in your small groups. So if there's anybody who would like to share, just very briefly what was discussed, what was some of the themes that came up, we would be very interested to hear. So if there's anybody who wants to go first. I'm going to speak loudly. Okay. One question that came up when we were talking was, is there a difference between other things and dehumanizing? Did you all hear that? We don't know. I wonder if anyone has any opinion on that. You guys might have some insight on that. Yeah. And we'll get to the questions in just a little bit. But if there are other people who would like to talk about what was discussed, that would be... We... Lucinda, do you want to speak? Yes. You're good. I found it fascinating because... Oh, I have to stand up? Yeah. Oh. There was a woman in our group, who I offered to let her be the speaking, who directed the play West Side Story at Amherst High School when it became a giant controversy. North Hampton. No. Oh, you directed it North Hampton, where there wasn't the controversy, but subsequent to the controversy at Amherst. Right. And we talked a little bit about the complexity of different perceptions. And actually there were a lot of Americans who were not offended by the play, but there were white people who were offended because they anticipated without finding out what Puerto Rican people felt. So that was an interesting... And it sort of relates to a lot of what you were talking about. And I just mentioned about my life that I grew up in the worst of the Cold War, Camavigian, the 15th, and we were trained to hate Russians and be prepared to kill them. And then I lived through and saw a public policy engineering of making us have people-to-people contact with the Russians because it was time to get along. And that didn't happen in any organic way. That was from the top. So they were aware, maybe not the level of science, I mean I'm blown away by what I'm so impressed, but they knew how to engineer this. And then just very quickly the next thing, I went after graduate school, I went to live in Iran for two years. In 67, I went. Nobody here ever heard of Iran. Is it near Nepal? When I got here, of course, Iranians were everything about us. They adored Americans and everything about our culture. But they hated the fact that we took this shot on top of them. And then after the hostage crisis, when everybody here thought the Iranians hated us, they had no understanding of why they had a legitimate reason to. And I was hoping with the proposed treaty that we could engineer a people-to-people thing with Iran because I love you, honey, people, I've been with you for a couple of years, and it didn't come to pass. So thank you. Yeah, something I thought that was really interesting in our group that we talked about was we have a couple of people who are originally from Texas in our group. And it was just interesting thinking about humanization on lines that aren't necessarily race or an even accent. One member of our group talked about feeling like there was prejudice against her because of her accent and that because people perceive that accent as having less IQ of this nature. And that's just interesting because we don't tend to think about groups like that and there are so many different categories of groups within groups and that was interesting to hear about too. Maybe we'll take maybe one or two more of the reports and then we'll direct to our questions to our speakers. Or if our speakers would like to respond to some of what they've had that would be great. And there was a question around the different weather... Other... Yeah, the one piece of research that we've gotten that's spoken to that question and the question is is other inherently dehumanizing? The one bit of evidence we have is when we ask people to rate different groups on this accent dehumanization scale we often ask about a number of groups and a really consistent finding is that many groups will humanize another group above their own. So groups in Eastern Europe will humanize groups in Scandinavia as higher on the scale than they themselves and sometimes Americans will humanize will say that Europeans are a little bit more evolved and civilized than us. It's interesting and then if you ask the feeling thermometer measure how warm or cold do you feel never ever ever do you see groups placing another group above themselves but in this dehumanization measure pretty frequently you do. So that's another way in which they kind of dissociate from each other. Can I just ask you about the extent of man-measure do you discuss what the results were here in the U.S.? What are some of the most dehumanized groups here in the U.S.? Different Muslim groups. So Muslims in general Arabs who Americans don't really distinguish between Arabs and Muslims. Iranians Muslim refugees they all are rated about 15 to 20 points lower on the scale than Americans and Europeans. Do you discuss Native Americans? Yeah, we have assessment of Native Americans and African Americans and Hispanic Americans. They are also dehumanized but not as much as Muslim groups. And of course this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to study this because I feel like our field actually hasn't done a very good job of looking at Islamophobia. It's been very strong. It's really overt, especially with the dehumanization but there aren't many people still in the field that are studying any form of Islamophobia. Thank you. That's what we try and count here. I also, I just wanted to respond. I think it's a fascinating question if there's a difference between othering and dehumanizing and I was thinking about some of the broader research perspectives that we have in social psychology around intergroup attitudes and this tendency that you see pretty much across all groups for in-group favoritism, that we just tend to like our own groups a bit more than we like other groups. So I do think that there is some othering happening very often. I think we very naturally categorize ourselves in others into different groups and then we have relatively positive associations to varying degrees and I think one of the interesting questions then becomes like at what level of in-group favoritism do we think it becomes problematic because I think a lot of us would agree that it feels good to feel good about who we are, right? Like to have a healthy sense of group esteem and it's really hard to clarify or pinpoint on any sort of scale at what point that discrepancy between how we might regard our own groups and other groups becomes problematic. I think so, I've been thinking about this too of course, this is what we do. But I think that where it becomes problematic to me where I don't think it has to become problematic is we so often have to define an out-group that contrasts with our in-group. But if you're a teacher you can feel social identity as a teacher you don't have to have a competitive non-teacher group generally you don't. And that doesn't have to be true for any other group as well we just allow it to be true. So having a social identity feels good, this is like a human desire but establishing an out-group is something that we also I think our brains kind of push us towards but we don't have to go there it's just easy to go there. And we can also kind of go there in different ways so there's other research in our field having to do with how we feel as a group identity and on the one hand we feel like a psychological attachment to our groups that we feel close to other group members strong ties with other group members we think of ourselves in terms of that group membership but that's very different from a glorification of our group that involves some degree of status distinguishing or superiority, inferiority in relation to other groups so you can have like a healthy attachment to your group, so I love who I am but that doesn't mean that you can't love who you are the problem usually comes in when people are like I love who I am and you should be more like me and if you're not like me then we have a problem I think that's where a lot of people kind of get defensive or feel threatened by difference as compared to people who are just happy to be part of the community that they're a part of and not to the detriment of other people's ability to be part of their own community sorry, related to that what is the role of zero sum thinking in dehumanization and related to that I'm thinking of I'm thinking in political terms like a loss for you means we get everything and it's all become a zero sum game so I was wondering if you could talk about that and then just as a follow on have you done any of this dehumanization work across political lines yet because that seems to be where the conflicts at least in our country are really heading I will happily defer to Emil when it comes to dehumanization research because he's done a lot more of that than I am but I think usually zero sum framings usually involve competition exactly as you were saying the more that you get the less for people like us and unfortunately it's very common if you look at a lot of survey data among white Americans that when they think about the growth in proportion of the US population of non-white communities or the browning of America some people might say that provokes an incredible sense of threat and they tend to frame it or we tend to frame it in zero sum terms so we see that as automatically threatening as compared to saying like huh more opportunities to learn about difference like that's usually not where we go first we're usually very attentive to potential threats but we don't necessarily have to frame increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the US as a potential threat like in fact I love this research by a researcher at the University of California Berkeley Victoria Plout she's been doing some work where she looks at different framings of multiculturalism to see how white people might respond to it and some of what she's done is use kind of like typical representations of multiculturalism and then a multiculturalism plus condition where she makes explicit and like hits people over the head like and that means white people too like you're included in that too and when you do that whites are like oh I'm okay with multiculturalism it's just because there's that underlying assumption that multiculturalism excludes and therefore is threatening so again getting back to the framing in zero sum terms for the dehumanization bit so democrats and republicans on this scale dehumanize each other about 25 points so democrats and republicans dehumanize each other more than americans dehumanize muslims for example and it is it is a good predictor of zero sum type outcome so the more you dehumanize so the more if it's a democrat the more democrats dehumanize republicans and endorse doing something that harms republicans even if it harms the country so that I think almost takes it a step beyond zero sum right this is it predicts things like spike I'm having a problem with term dehumanization I liked all the information and statistics I believe all that it seems though that what's really going on and in many cases from what you said very consciously people value certain people higher give higher value and lower value to other people and so for instance I would bet some of the people in this room who value doctors over paid assassins and yet I'm not sure I would say that's dehumanizing paid assassins it's saying that we don't like them as well and I worry that half of the population of this country and probably other countries will get turned off like the people in Hungary will get turned off if you're saying they're dehumanizing them when they give them more ratings and so that we sort of end up with the conflict before we get past the original word I think there are a couple of really interesting things you mentioned so first how much does rating people lower on the scale really indicate dehumanization I think that's a good question it's a good point this is one of the reasons why we've tried to measure it a couple of different ways so just to give you a sense of the other ways we've also just given people traits like how savage and barbaric are these people how cultured and civilized are these people so those are in pretty close concordance the ratings on the dehumanization scale and the multi-item measure and they're pretty interchangeable whenever we're trying to predict any of the outcomes so I totally agree that the scale, one of the nice things about the scale is it's very intuitive it's visually people know what you're talking about but it also could capture a bunch of different things and that's a totally valid concern so it's important to have these other measures of dehumanization to compare it to the other part of your question which I think is really important is how do people respond to this information when I come back to a group and say you are dehumanizing this other group so to me I'm in the communications department and to me that's a communications problem that is a problem with how you take this information then and do something good with it if you gather the information and in the process of gathering it and disseminating it you make things worse that is something that I have to consider because ultimately I'm here I came here from the peace building world to become a scientist and so I don't want to lose track of the fact that the reason I'm here is to put science to work for peace not just to put science to work and I think that's a totally valid concern and it's something that's one of the reasons why I'm really glad that I'm working right now with policy makers so I'm in a collaboration and those are the types of things they're always putting to me that scientists never do scientists never take you to task over things like this at a conference and I think it's really important to have people take scientists to task over exactly these types of things this is for both of you I'm wondering in the research that you do if you look at outcomes based on age of your subjects and if there's differences by age yeah there are some differences by age it really depends on the type of project and the region or the country where we're working if you think I'm just thinking about one of the examples of the data that we have in Rwanda where we're looking at different programs that might promote leadership or community building or reconciliation that tend to be organized around different age groups people who were adults during the genocide or people who were very young during the genocide and trying to think about what types of programs seem to be most appropriate for people at those different ages some of the other research that I do has to look at activism for racial justice among white people or people who might identify white allies and seeing how people who were active during the civil rights movement might compare to younger generations of people getting involved and whether that kind of longer history of experience contributes somehow differently I'd have to say in most of the studies that I've looked at I've tended to do some brief comparisons by age but I tend to find kind of similar trends so that the patterns are very similar and then we end up using especially for nationally representative survey data we look at age and gender and socioeconomic status and level of education and political orientation as control variables making sure that any effects that we're looking at of these other characters that we're interested in such as some of the relationships we've looked at between contact experiences diversity in one's local environment and willingness to welcome immigrant communities into your community things like that we would tend to use those as control variables to make sure that any effects we're observing of contact are not inadvertently due to those demographic factors and then every once in a while when you see some of those playing some role then we'll test them as moderators to see if they interact with the variables that we're mostly interested in but overall I tend to see ages seeing similar trends across different age groups just one thing one of the process that I've been looking at aside from dehumanization and empathy is the tendency to collectively blame an entire group the actions of individuals and this is really relevant for Muslims because Americans have a strong tendency to blame all Muslims a quarter of the world's population for what one Muslim guy does in one part of the world and this is quite strong and I've found interventions that can decrease this perception and change people's policy preferences which is great the interesting thing is it never works for millennials the really young ones but that's because they don't collectively blame Muslims right they're already down at floor and that's why it doesn't work and so that that is the strongest age effect I've seen actually is the tendency to collectively blame a group for the actions of individuals and I don't know if that's a generational thing or if that's something that's developmental if we just learn over time to blame groups more and more or if it's something more to do with generations and I just think that that's a fascinating thing and the last thing is that the relationship these relationships between various prejudice measures they're generally a positive correlation in the US older Americans have stronger biases it's reversed in Hungary in Eastern Europe you see the opposite pattern okay so just mentioning those examples I just have to share one other example related to age is what I use with my undergraduate students because there are some national polls of millennials that have shown that they're like the most tolerant generation and when I share them with my undergraduate students they feel all good and you can kind of see what I'm talking about and then later on in the semester when we start talking about discrimination I show them data from the same poll the exact same polls showing that about half of white millennials believe that discrimination against black people I'm sorry against white people is as big a problem in the United States as discrimination against black people and then they don't say quite so high but again and I mentioned that as a particular example because we would like to think that that is something that would extinguish more generations past Jim Crow segregation and it is strikingly stable I found myself curious as to when you performed these humanization tests like what specific years and by extension if you're considering doing follow-ups to see if these trends change over time if there's specific moments in time whenever any of these seem particularly strong yeah it's a great question so yes we've done a lot of longitudinal stuff the most interesting one for me was totally accidental I promise it was that we started doing this research a couple of months before the Boston Marathon bombings when my main colleague and I were entirely we were both in Boston at the time so we were doing this research across the U.S. and we had samples at a bunch of different time points as we were testing out this measure and then we had plans to assess it and so we just ran the study right after the Boston Marathon bombings and one of the groups we were asking about and if you remember right after the Boston Marathon bombings there was a lot of information that it was definitely Arabs that committed this right there was the profile picture that was sent around of an Arab guy so if people were clear that it was an Arab guy then of course it turned out that they weren't Arabs and so we had data from the months leading up immediately afterwards when the perpetrator was thought to be Arab and then months afterwards and there was a clear spike so Arabs were dehumanized about 12 points before and months after and about 17 points right afterwards so there was a clear and this is the nationwide sample it's not just in Boston so there was a clear response to that there the other anecdotal example is even stronger which is I had also been assessing dehumanization of Muslims among Hungarians and this started before the refugee crisis the influx of Muslims into Europe and one of the things that Hungary did was the Hungarian government is very right wing they started posting billboards around the country and the billboard said things like if you come to our country you cannot steal our jobs if you come to our country you can't change our culture if you come to our country you can't convert us to your religion and they were all in Hungarian right so they're ostensibly directed at their refugees but of course they're totally illegible to them so of course it's directed at the population and it was incredibly effective because dehumanization of Muslims before this campaign was 15 points and afterwards was 30 so these policies like it can work it's easy to dehumanize another group we've been doing it as a species for a long time and probably we're doing it because it's an incredibly effective tool and it's easy to kind of turn that switch I think in people's minds I was wondering if if your concept of dehumanization how that relates to what I'm going to call super humanization and what made me think of that was a family member who by birth is Asian and by appearance is Asian and she wanted to do poorly in math in high school to sort of fight a stereotype and I said well you know at least it's a positive stereotype she said yeah but it's no less confining and I just wondered what you would have to say about something like that I think that's a really interesting observation the one bit that's been hammering in my head is at one point on one of these surveys I asked American adults I told them about the marshmallow test do you know about the marshmallow test so you put the one marshmallow in front of like a four year old you leave the room and say hey if you can hold off eating this then I'll give you two and I get back and the test is how long will they wait before they shove that in their mouth they start chewing it and so I told the participants about this and I said okay here's the average amount of time that an American, a white American child how long do you think children from these other backgrounds will wait and if they are black or Hispanic they'd say oh they wouldn't wait quite as long right but they don't have as much impulse control if it was a Muslim child they said they would wait much longer and I think this is part of that super humanizing it's almost like Muslims have this remarkable self control this is how the stereotype goes they have this remarkable self control but they've twisted it into a way where they can infiltrate our government and be a sleeper self that's how it's I think turned around where they acknowledge Americans can acknowledge that they have a trait that's very human self control but it can still be used as a way to define them as less than human which I think is just like the humans go through remarkable way of gymnastics to justify beliefs and this is I think one of those examples of that process if I could add so yeah I see this again I'm not entrenched in the role of dehumanization research so I'm thinking about it more in relation to stereotypes and stereotyping and there's a concept known as stereotype threat this threat of confirming a stereotype about your group and it's usually been thought about in terms of confirming negative stereotypes about your group so if a stereotype is salient or if we're in a testing context and we happen to be Latino or African American and we're led to think that this test is diagnostic somehow of our intellectual abilities we might underperform on that test just to give you an example there have been studies done of Asian American females where they've primed either her female identity or her Asian identity and then had her do a difficult math test and primed as female she underperforms and when primed as Asian she overperforms so that's kind of a part of the function of stereotypes is like the susceptibility that we have in ways that influence our behavior regarding another aspect about stereotyping is there's been a fair amount of research on the the functional nature of stereotypes I think we're oftentimes inclined to think that stereotypes represent something about people but I think they actually represent to a large extent the motivations that we have as perceivers of other people and representing our relationships to them and with them so an example that I use in my undergraduate class are stereotypes of Native Americans for over long periods of time in this country where I actually found history textbooks from Boston Public Schools from the early 1900s and all of the representations of Native Americans are being savage and just really vicious and then you think about in the 1970s how Native American imagery was evoked by the ad council to promote peace and reduce pollution and all of these types of things and how there's something about the nature of our relationship to Native Americans at these different periods of history that is contributing to that shift in stereotypes because if it were something about the people themselves you shouldn't see such extreme shifts in the stereotypes so there's actually a fair amount of research done by people like Susan Fisk at Princeton University under what she calls the stereotype content model that she says that we have these kind of relational or functional understandings of the stereotypes of different groups in relation to their relative status positions and the potential for threat to us that they pose in our society so you would tend to see groups with their stereotypes laid out in two dimensions, a dimension of warmth how warm or cold we feel towards them how much we can trust them or not and then in terms of competence that has to do with their status so you can think about high status groups that are perceived to be ones that we can't trust unfortunately oftentimes Jews in different Asian communities end up in that quadrant and scientists and lawyers there's a few different types of groups that are perceived to be a little bit more cold but competent and then there's the ones who are perceived to be incompetent or less competent but warm like the elderly those with disabilities but again it's kind of representing our understanding of our functional relationships to them it's not necessarily about those people as much as how we are inclined to relate to them given our own status and our own position but I don't know if there's anything else Hi, Shell Horowitz from Going Beyond Sustainability I want to first thank you for making it the insight that we demonize those we perceive as demonizing us that's I think a really interesting frame and one that explains a lot you've both kind of looked in the window of my question without opening the door I want you to throw the door open and it's where do we find the hope of that piece that you want to do how both as individuals and as a society how do we counter the negative effects of all of this other aid yeah yeah I mean this is this is to me the important question and it's also really hard turns out it's much harder to humanize people than it is to dehumanize them it's much harder to get people to like a group just like the group and I think part of this is just I think a lot of how our brains evolved and all of what we think of is human history like the Roman Empire and the Mongol invasion and the Versailles Treaty and women's suffrage everything is like a tiny little sliver it's the last 10,000 years but for hundreds of thousands of years before that we were tiny little humans fighting like hell against other little tribes of humans from the archeological record 15% of every generation died from warfare for hundreds of thousands of years and so that's the environment that our brains evolved in and if that's the environment that your brain involves in then yeah in group affiliation being able to identify your outgroup by an arbitrary characteristic because they probably look just like you being able to do these things and it's possible in case you like take them over and take some of them into your group like all of these things would follow and it seems that that's how we think of outgroups we have to teach our children how to be racist young children have no concept of race only by about 5 years do they have some kind of preference and ability to understand that this is a thing so we as a society actively have to teach kids what the salient group characteristics are and I think that's just the consequence of how our brains evolved the environment our brains evolved in so with that being said I feel like our default state is if we're thinking about interpersonal situations if you rely on the default you're going to be decent and kind like affiliative altruistic these are the things that keep these small groups of humans together and working well like a nice machine but if you think about an inner group context if you define it as inner group then your instinct I think will be exactly the type of thing that will escalate conflict and the problem is we often just rely on our intuitions and our intuitions just often backfire and that's why these interventions are so damn hard and why fanning the flames of conflict is so damn easy because it comes intuitively to us so that being said I think the saving grace of that is that our brains have to be flexible and we have brains that are almost infinitely flexible like every inclination we have can be retrained and it's not just it can be but that's like down to the sub cellular level our brains are made to change like everything about them is made to change and we as humans have gained conscious control over crazy unconscious processes like body temperature you know if people can gain conscious control over body temperature then surely we can gain conscious control over racism that's such a smaller easier thing to get a hold of so the last thing is the whole like what actually works well I think there's a set of things that work that are like our brains can learn through training and you can set up your own habits our brains can also gain conscious control over these unconscious processes so for example a great intervention for stereotype threat to eliminate stereotype threat is to teach about stereotype threat once you understand it then it apparently inoculates you against experiencing it and there are other psychological biases that this is true for so in this case your own awareness of your own mind can help you relieve yourself so that is to me incredibly hopeful and I think, and this is a message I'm trying to figure out how to frame this but I'm going to try here for the first time it is to embrace and be fascinated by your own racism and the reason I say that is I think that we have so much fear of being or thinking things that are racist that that is what prevents you from gaining conscious control over it what you have to do is be thrilled when a bit of your racism pokes through because then you have the opportunity to change it, if you don't allow yourself that awareness then you can't go to the next step and so I think that's the message I'd like to give paradoxically is to be totally thrilled whenever you witness your own racism because that has to be the first step to gaining conscious so just to kind of echo and follow up with some things that Emile was talking about there was actually a fair amount of research to suggest it's called like the inter-individual intergroup continuity effect by Inko and Will and all those folks who basically show that when things are framed in intergroup terms we think about things more in terms of fear and threat and competition than we do when they're framed in inter-individual terms in terms of these things about group processes where a lot of our assumptions about human nature and how we interact with people just start to break down in terms of interpersonal relations we assume that people are on the same page we are that we're similar to each other in an intergroup context we assume difference we assume dislike we assume all of these negative things so that's kind of like a little bit of an uphill battle that we have to face for me part of the the hopeful part comes through also in relation to training it's kind of trying to do the reverse of what I was talking about around being cognitive misers or being miserly in how we approach things I think one of the challenges though is that it's just more effortful right if we want to be efficient which is how we're often inclined to be because it serves us well in many ways we will not pay too much attention when we see people walking down the street and we'll just basically process their approximate age, gender and race and then think from that information whether they're a threat to us or not and then be done so we take very quick snapshots of other people in our social environment so we don't necessarily act in generous ways towards them with our cognitive emotional and motivational resources so for me I find hope in trying to encourage people and to train people to just be more generous in using their resources that it's not necessarily our goal is not always to be the most efficient as possible but maybe to kind of shift the narrative and think to learn the most possible and so kind of related to what Emile was talking about in terms of like yay I'm racist I got to learn there's actually also research that talks about having more of a learning orientation as compared to a performance orientation so I think we are riddled with fear I think we are oftentimes so concerned about how we're going to be perceived that we won't engage in discussions about race we won't say what we actually think and people might still interpret that as bias because they see us hesitating when we respond to things so we might feel anxious about talking about race and people might encode that as oh they're trying to hide how racist they are so I think the more that we can actually just allow ourselves to be vulnerable and just kind of give it a shot like this is oftentimes what I recommend when I'm asked to teach or lead facilitate racial bias workshops I invoke things like you know why not try like why not try to engage somebody in conversation when we first try to learn a new language we don't expect to speak fluently when we first try to learn how to play tennis we don't know how to hold our wrists to hold the racket right like we learn and so we should think about the same thing when it comes to talking about race when it comes to talking about racism when it comes to talking about all of these different types of things that we might not be the customer doing because we get better with practice and the more we're focused on learning from those experiences like what Emile was talking about the more we're focused on the other and the more we're focused on the content of what we're learning through that and the less self-conscious we are the less attention we have focused on ourselves so I think that's part of the issue is we're so self-focused when we enter into these spaces so I guess I would agree with Emile that kind of encouraging more of a focus on learning in pursuit of reducing a self-focuses is often really helpful and I also think something as simple as giving people instructions is really helpful so there's some work on behavioral scripts to suggest that you know if people are in an awkward situation that will introduce a lot of anxiety people won't know how to act but if you say like your job here is to talk about this and to really learn what the other people are talking about that can help guide those discussions Thank you so much so we are nearing the end of our program so I think what we might do is just take a few questions all together and then have you guys respond if that's okay just because we're nearing you are you sure? I have two questions for you one is in any way in your research do you take involved in that research the cultural and social cultural historical reality of the group that the respondents are from so for instance I wouldn't expect an American to have the same response to Roma as they do in Hungary but there's a reason for that there's a reason for that so how much if any do you take this larger environment that's only one question I have another one but I won't ask thank you how much do you take that into account if at all the question of that sense of being persecuted of being othered and dehumanized that strikes me as the easiest thing to manipulate it's hard especially in large groups to dehumanize someone if the audience isn't already there at least part way but it's very easy to make people feel like these people are up to get me I mean that's what happened in Rwanda that's what happened in Germany it's happening now in the United States one last question she's been trying to screw up I'm sorry that I can't remember the third group that you said was the most dehumanized in this country Muslim Arabs and different derivations of the Muslim groups because Arabs are perceived to be Muslims by most Americans so they're interchangeable in most American minds so there wasn't the third group that you mentioned Iranians so what struck me was that you didn't mention black Americans and that really surprised me so could you just comment on where the racism against blacks fit yeah I think those were the three questions yes well do you want to start with the I mean I'll just very briefly say in response to the question about do we take into account the cultural, social and historical reality of the groups I would say from our training we do tend to study like relatively universal processes things like identifying with groups feeling threatened by other groups contact with different groups as relatively general processes that might apply and manifest themselves in different types of contexts but then within those different contexts of course we have to take into account the local manifestations of conflict, the different triggers of conflict the memories that people have of instances where group difference really matters so I personally come from a tradition of contextualized social psychology to understand these general principles how they operate in many different contexts but then examine them how they manifest in more specific contexts so I before I became a psychologist and a neuroscientist I just found myself in these conflict regions mostly just by happenstance in South Africa at the end of apartheid in Sri Lanka during their civil war in Ireland during this camp with Catholic and Protestant kids and what really stood out to me was it seemed to be that the things in people's minds that was driving them to conflict was eerily similar across these different conflicts but the conflicts couldn't have been more different there are three different continents different religions, ethnicities histories, cultures, languages everything was different about them but I just saw these patterns and so yes there are differences between the groups but I'm really compelled by the remarkable similarity about the consequences of being having a human brain and being in a conflict situation like the similarities stand out to me much more than the differences do as important as the differences are dehumanization dehumanization and briefly lack of black American so I think so this is a little bit half big and Linda has baked this a little bit longer than I have so I'll give the half baked response and then we'll print it all the way home so I think there are some big differences between perceptions of Muslims and perceptions of African Americans and I feel like part of it is that American perceptions of African Americans have been steeping for so long that they're more entrenched and they've gone through more stages like the stages of Greek you have a bunch of different stages there must be the stages of racism too you hear an argument against racism and then you develop a clever counter-argument and then there's an argument against that one and I feel like we might have gone through so many stages with African Americans and things seem like they're more stable and hard to push around whereas with Muslims there are all these really strong feelings and when you get down to it there's a really shaky foundation that they're built on there's some half baked ideas about how Muslims think about us and how they want to change our culture and implement Sharia law it hasn't gone through that full stage and so what I've found is that interventions to try to combat anti-Muslim bias go over better than interventions to combat anti-black bias this is just from my personal experience doing the research on these groups so far but yeah, I guess my thoughts about race relations have been percolating for a while born on race in a city that was about 85% black 25% unemployment I think about it a lot in terms of status and position that the white American narrative in relation to black Americans is more like black Americans are trying to rise up, we have to keep pushing them down where I think a bit more of the narrative around Arabs and Muslims is more like external to internal so it's just kind of like a different movement or a different sense and I think especially since 9-11 the idea like, oh wow it really effectively hurt us makes that threat of change and safety and those types of concerns to seem a little more real or material in some way as compared to just trying to keep an underclass down so I see it more in those trends and there's one more can you remind us the ability to manipulate the self-victimization that sense of self-victimization I mean it's truly amazing we're as human beings we are just so much more attuned to potential threats than we are to potential benefits even kind of an introversely like gain-loss theory like you know we're more concerned about losing things than gaining things we want to protect our resources so if you think about it in terms of contact or positive intergroup relations we can have a whole history of positive relations and then there will be like one negative instance and then from that point forward we'll be suspicious because we know the negative can happen so we just, we kind of have this little like a little bit of a trigger, a quick trigger finger or something in relation to threats there's also one of the things that was really remarkable to me starting to do neuroimaging is that you put someone in a scanner brains are really noisy people are thinking about they're hungry, they're tired they're not thinking about what you want them to be thinking about oftentimes you put them in a scanner you don't get, you get like a smear of activity all over the place but there's a couple of activities that give you like rock solid localization of brain activity and one of them is getting people to think about other people's minds I can put any of you in a scanner and in 10 minutes I can tell you precisely what brain regions you are using to think about somebody else's mind and one of them that seems dedicated to this is right here above and behind your right ear right it's lateralized to the right side the right temporal parietal junction the tiny little region that just all it cares about as far as we can tell all it cares about is other people's thoughts and it makes sense we're always thinking about other people's thoughts do you think I'm smart do you think you know does she like me these are like things we're always engaged in and I think it's the combination of having this dedicated neural machinery that's always like hammering away trying to figure out what is in other people's minds and this negativity bias and this tribalism and wham you have these three things it's like the perfect storm where you have this tendency to just glom on to oh of course that group is thinking these negative things about me I think that it's just it's not an accident it's like a construct of how our brains are designed that all of these things point to this one compelling message not too hopeful your statement was that's so easy to manipulate and that's what we see in conflict situations across the world and somewhat alarmingly here but again like the great hope is that we have these brains that are so darn flexible that we have the capacity for one shot learning you can hear something that blows your mind once and it can change the rest of your life and that is just astonishing that we humans are able to do this also I feel like there's so much power we have it's just a matter of finding the right triggers that can counteract these processes and I mean just is perhaps not the right word it's hard but I feel like they're there right and the people who made these dramatic transformations like I got to talk to this group of former white nationalists last summer these are people who've made a dramatic transformation and they're all the way they're all in you don't see any residual it's not like they're like one step one foot back in white national they're they're fully over here and it's amazing seeing someone who changes in ideology and just completely flip flops what did you do I had nothing to do with it I was trying to figure out what happened for them what happened for them one of the things is that they were treated really decently by someone whose decency they didn't deserve that's one thing they cite and the thing that they cite that pushes them away from transformation is people trying to shame them and I think it's important that that's one of like the liberals go to strategies to try to change what they've done and that overwhelming way they cite that is the exact from thank you thank you so much thank you all for being out tonight on a Wednesday and for upcoming critical actions events we have quite a few on Sunday October 28 we are co-sponsoring an event called Muslim women in politics shaping narratives, shaping perceptions this will be with Ahira Amato Wadud and Shaheen Pasha and then in November we are sponsoring an event called not in our name civilian casualties in American wars at five wheel arts collectives in East Hampton, Massachusetts and this is from seven to nine as well and that other event is at the first churches in North Hampton Edwards sorry, sorry and you can find more information about our upcoming events on our website criticalconnections.org and we have some lovely fliers put together on our spring series here so if you want to get a head start on that if you can and again thank you so much both of you for having two of you here because you guys like talk to each other and you're in this research together and it shows and it's inspiring so thank you