This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Over the past several years, I've explored hundreds of ideas on Hidden Brain,
on how we can live better lives and have healthier relationships.
Many of these ideas have felt provocative and insightful to me.
And as I interview guests and edit stories, I tell myself,
I'm going to remember to apply these ideas to my own life.
I'll follow the advice of researchers who've discovered how we can have better relationships.
I'll become a better colleague, parent and citizen.
But in my daily life, I forget to apply these lessons all the time.
I'm impatient when I should be patient.
I'm distracted when I should be focused.
And I'm harsh with myself when I should be kind.
Psychologists sometimes call this the Insight Action Gap.
Knowing the right thing to do doesn't automatically mean we do the right thing.
It isn't about hypocrisy per se.
It's that learning something and doing something
involve different sets of brain muscles, so to speak.
This is a very ancient idea and something that many religious and spiritual traditions
have explored over the centuries.
It's an old idea in art and literature too.
In the 16th century, William Shakespeare wrote,
I can easier teach 20 what were good to be done than be one of the 20 to follow my own teaching.
Today on the show, we explore the Insight Action Gap
when it comes to our debates without political opponents.
It's the third episode in our series, Us 2.0,
where we explore how we can become more effective talking across our differences.
If you've missed any of the other episodes in this series,
please be sure to check them out in this podcast feed.
Why reason and empathy deserve us when we need them most,
and how to close the Insight Action Gap,
this week on Hidden Brain.
As we look at the news,
it's hard not to feel like the world is constantly in flames.
New conflicts pile on top of old conflicts,
and antagonisms and disagreements seem to erupt everywhere.
Conflicts also abound in our personal and professional lives.
How should we handle them?
How can we learn to diffuse them?
At Columbia University,
psychologists Peter Coleman studies how minor disagreements turn into endless conflicts,
and how our own thought patterns can deepen divides or help us to mend fences.
Peter Coleman, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you so much for having me.
Peter, in 2019, you were invited to attend a conference in Germany.
It looked at the emerging challenges in the Middle East and ideas to bring about peace.
Now, I understand the whole conference itself was focused on the idea of bringing together
these very seasoned negotiators and diplomats,
and the idea was that by putting all these experienced heads together,
you would come up with initiatives that could be applied in the real world.
Yeah, it was a very impressive group of contributors.
It was chaired by a senior person in the field
who had spent most of his life studying international conflict,
international peace processes,
and he had assembled quite an impressive group of,
you mostly, you know, former envoys or former ambassadors,
and then academics like myself or people from the think tanks.
And the idea was, yes, to offer current insights into what to do about the Middle East conflict.
In particular, it was really about what can we do to make a difference
in the sort of new era of more complex conflicts?
Hmm. So the conference took a turn in one of the final sessions.
Paint me a picture of what happened.
So, right. So this was a presentation by one of the co-chairs.
He was in Israeli, and he presented a paper,
a kind of conceptual model of, you know, complex systems and conflict.
And his responded happened to be a former ambassador,
a former Dutch ambassador, who also was a contributor to this.
And he said something like given the fact that you're in Israeli,
and the book is focused on Israel and Palestine,
my guesses will get more scrutiny than usual.
And that's about as far as he got in his comments.
And at that point, my Israeli colleague stopped and said,
something like, what are you saying?
And the Dutch ambassador, you know, paused for a second and looked at me and said,
well, what I was trying to say is, you know,
given that this is about Israel and you're in Israeli.
And the Israeli colleague then came back and said, yes,
but what exactly are you saying?
And he clearly was upset and triggered.
And it got tense from there.
Of course, we're a room full of peacemakers,
peacepilders, or scientists that study that.
And at some point, the other chair,
the senior member of the group,
tried to put a stop to it and said something like, all right,
enough of this foolishness.
Let's stop this right now.
And he, the Israeli said, I refuse to stop until I receive an apology.
I want a public apology.
And the Dutch ambassador said, what are you talking about?
I didn't do anything that requires an apology.
I refused to apologize.
And so they went back and forth, sort of like that,
for a little bit until the Israeli demanded an apology
and said if he didn't get it, he would leave.
And at that point, he started to kind of pack up his belongings
and put his things in his briefcase and backpack
and was preparing to leave.
And if I understand correctly what the Israeli negotiator
was sort of upset about was the implication
that because he was Israeli, you know,
there would be special scrutiny that was attached to his work
or to the work of the journal that it would be seen with skepticism
that he was biased in some way.
And he saw himself as being an objective scholar
and whose work should be treated objectively.
And the fact that he was Israeli was beside the point.
And the Dutch ambassador was saying, you know,
let's pay attention to the reality on the ground.
This is a heated conflict.
You're Israeli.
We're talking about the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
This is going to get more scrutiny.
And I can see from both people's points of view
how they came to their positions,
but I can also see how both people felt personally attacked
in the situation.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly what happened.
And then other people tried to sort of say,
hey, you know, we're here to, you know,
do good things for the world.
And we're really here to try to understand
and help the world, you know, with a peace process.
And let's remember that.
And let's try to put this conversation in that context.
And so there were multiple attempts.
It was very interesting to kind of watch this
because again, it's a room full of very skilled people
but who were thrown into this by surprise and unprepared.
And so at some point, the Israeli picked up and left
and the Dutch ambassador picked up and left.
And the irony was that an hour or so before there
was this paper on the role of identity and conflict
and hear both of these individuals, I think,
felt their identities, either their national identities
and or their professional identities attacked publicly.
And it really disabled them their capacities
to do what they would usually do,
which is sort of managed to the situation
if other people were in that.
But they were facing it personally.
Something similar happened to Peter
in his own apartment building in Manhattan.
It involved a neighbor whom he calls David.
I've known him probably for 10, 12 years, something like that.
So at times, I'm on the elevator when he gets on.
And what I noticed is that on occasion,
he started to make comments about, you know,
me two marches or black lives,
not matter marches or things that were happening
in the streets of the city.
Kind of sarcastic remarks about those things
were climate change.
And then at some point, it became clear to me
that he was a strong supporter of Donald Trump.
This had come just in a conversation in front of the building.
And then some of the things he started to say to me
seemed rather extreme at some point.
He mentioned something about having a lot of respect
for Vladimir Putin thinking he was a good leader.
And so at some point, I just started to think,
okay, this, you know, I can't get into a back and forth
conversation with him that's gonna be constructive.
I'm just out.
And so I basically just sort of pulled away,
stopped engaging, if I'd see him, I'd smile,
but I'd sort of just move on.
I really just tried to unplug from the relationship.
And was this because you were neighbors
and you just didn't feel like this was the kind of conversation
you wanted to have with the neighbor
or was this also that your own politics and preferences
were not aligned with his?
I think it's a combination of both.
I think I didn't feel like he was someone
that I could try to reason with
because he would just sort of hold court, hold forth
in his opinions to me were just informed
very differently from mine.
So I didn't see where we could go with this,
which is why I felt like, yeah,
I think I just need to disengage.
So there is some element of irony here, Peter,
which is that you are someone who studies conflict
and you are someone who studies disagreement,
but your response to this person who disagreed with you
was I anticipate there's going to be conflict
and my solution to this is to disengage with this person
and try not to bump into him again.
Fair, that's fair.
Yeah, and again, I think what most of us
in this field of conflict resolution piece building,
or it's an eclectic field, but most of us will say
that when it happens to us, when we're in the middle of it
and our passions get triggered or our politics get triggered,
it's a different kind of problem.
It's somewhat what happened in Hamburg
at this meeting of my colleagues on the Middle East.
So yeah, I think it's not something I'm proud of,
but I think my cost benefit assessment at the time was,
look, this isn't going anywhere.
I don't see him being open to listening or talking to me
and I don't have the energy for this, so I'm out.
From international forums to neighbors
in an apartment building, stray comments often lead
to bigger problems.
Once conflicts are up, it can be difficult
to put the genie back into the bottle.
When we come back, understanding the roots
of the invisible forces that drive us apart,
you're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
We all have moments in our lives
when we have to take something we've learned
and put it into practice in the real world.
Doing so, of course, is often a lot harder
than we think it'll be.
At Columbia University, social psychologist Peter Coleman
got to witness the gap between theory and practice firsthand.
On October 7th, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas
launched a surprise attack on Southern Israel.
It killed and wounded thousands of Israelis.
The incident launched a bloody reprisal
with tens of thousands of Palestinians killed
by Israeli bombs and a ground invasion of Gaza.
Peter, not long after the war in Gaza got underway,
you were preparing to teach a class
at Columbia University.
Paint a picture for me of what happened
that Wednesday evening?
Sure, yeah, so conditions at Columbia escalated
fairly rapidly after the October 7th incursion.
And we sort of felt it right away.
There were almost immediate protests
and several of my students come from different parts
of the university, a big group of them
were coming from the School of International Public Affairs.
And they're often international students
that are studying diplomacy and international affairs.
And this group were coming into my class just before 5 p.m.
at the evening and we're looking shaken
and they were looking at me with a concern.
And so they came right up to me
and started to describe their experience of the day,
which is that they were in classes
in the School of International Public Affairs
and some of their peers in a classroom had stood up
and pointed to other students and called them out
and said, their supporters of Hamas
or they're refusing to allow our point of view
to be expressed.
And so they would name names and point at each other
in a classroom, which was, again,
not typical protocol in classrooms in Columbia.
And so they were verbally attacking
or accusing one another and they left that class
to walk two blocks to my building.
And in front of my building, there was a truck
and it was a large truck that had four screens
on the side of the back of the truck
that were television screens.
And this truck had been driving around the outskirts
of campus and was showing either hostages
that had been taken Israeli hostages
that had been taken by Hamas, images of these individuals
and images of students with their names
and contact information that they say were not supporting Israel
or were supporting Hamas.
Other incidents like this were popping up all over the campus.
Eventually, police showed up.
And I was teaching on the first floor
the sirens were going by.
I could see different clusters of squad cars driving past us.
So the atmosphere was very tense in our room on campus.
And they had just spent the day navigating this
and came into my classroom and they were triggered
and traumatized by this.
And one of them said to me,
you know, I don't know if I should stay here.
I didn't expect this to happen in New York
and I don't know if I should even stay here.
So that was my experience of the first encounter
with how this was playing out in campus in my class.
So over the years, Peter, you have studied conflicts
that you call intractable conflicts.
Can you tell me what you mean by the term
is obviously the colloquial understanding
of an intractable conflict of conflict
that seems to drag on endlessly?
But you're using it, I think, in a more specific way.
Tell me what you mean by intractable conflicts.
Well, scholars that study these things,
these long-term difficult demanding conflicts
really see their three qualities
that distinguish them from other kinds
of more manageable conflicts.
One is that they tend to be highly destructive.
So the intensity or the level of destructiveness
can escalate and de-escalate,
but the pattern is very destructive.
They tend to endure for long periods of time.
They tend to, you know, we call them also protracted conflicts.
They can go on for, you know, some for decades, if not more.
And most importantly, in terms of diagnosing them
or understanding them as intractable,
is they have a history often,
where there have been many good faith attempts
to address them and to work them out.
And they may be mediations, they may be formal,
they may be informal or negotiation processes,
but they have a history of attempts to end them
that either seem to have no effect or actually backfire.
And so, yes, they have that kind of quality
where they bring things in.
I have to say it's, you know,
they sometimes feel like a storm,
like a hurricane that gathers
and has that kind of force that's bigger than us.
Just type away from what's happening in the Middle East
for a second to look at another conflict
that I think many Americans are seeing.
Many people feel like the partisan divide in our country
is getting deeper and it feels like an intractable conflict.
Now, thankfully, for the most part,
I don't think it devolves into violence,
at least at the level of violence that you see
in geopolitical conflicts and war,
but there have been times in the United States
in the history of the United States
where conflict between Americans has resulted in war.
Can you talk about where the partisanship qualifies
as the kind of intractable conflict
that you're talking about?
And in fact, has it gotten worse?
Is it an example of intractable conflict?
I do think it is an example
and it is how I think about political polarization
in the US right now.
And again, it's not always been this way,
but it is this way today.
It's by some measures,
this is something like 60-year trajectory
of increasing enmity and distance
between Red and Blue Americans,
more Republican or conservative,
more Democrat or progressive,
groups of individuals, for example, in Congress.
We've seen a lack of bipartisanship
and an increase in obstructionism in Congress,
and that's continued really since the late 1970s.
So by that measure, politically,
we see that this kind of division
and inability to work together to cross the aisle.
But it's also true in attitudes,
Pew Research Trust measures attitudes of voters
and Americans, mainstream, bottom up.
And they've been tracking a similar kinds of affective trends,
a lack of warmth or even a cold feeling
towards the other side that has been growing also
since the late 1970s.
So it's something that we see emotionally
and then politically ideological differences on issues.
And we have seen an increase in some political violence
that's taken place over the last certainly 20 years.
There's a book called,
How Civil War Starts,
and it's written by a woman named Barbara Walter.
She, by the way, works as an analyst for the CIA
and looks at political stability around the world.
And so they have metrics
where they sort of track the data.
And her position is that when we think about our first civil war,
what we think about is armies and a field,
with muskets and uniforms.
And her position is that that's not how political violence
will take place here.
That one of the things we're seeing here in the US
is an increase in small militant groups
who mobilize and do whatever they can
to destabilize the status quo.
And so we're not seeing the violence obviously
that we see in Gaza today,
but we are seeing our own versions of escalation
of political violence, which are highly concerning.
Peter and his colleagues have studied how conflicts escalate.
Some of it has to do with individual psychology.
Our inclination to lose our temper is during a conflict
or to seek out sources of news that match
our pre-existing beliefs.
These forces are amplified by group psychology,
our tendency to hurt together and defend the pack.
At a societal level,
the organization and structure of political systems
can exacerbate division by creating zero sum
winner-take-all dynamics.
While we often focus on these causes one by one,
misinformation, a populist leader, Jerry Mandering,
Peter says the real challenge is that all the issues
are intertwined.
My whole point is that there is no one thing
that drives this.
It's not Trump, it's not Jerry Mandering,
it's not the internet, it's not media,
it's not you or your tribal tendencies or your group.
It's how these things align and start
to feed each other in ways that start
to take out a life of their own
and then it does feel bigger than us.
And so even if you and I decide,
all right, I've had it with political enmity,
I'm not going to listen to the outrage on television anymore,
I'm going to really just live my life.
It's so hard to not be sucked into these patterns
and triggered by events or things that are frenzied
or don't say, because so much of our life
and our society and our culture
is contributing to these simple divides.
The complexity of the forces that drive us apart
explains why simple interventions
to bring people together often don't work.
Peter tells a story about a group called My Country Talks
where journalists bring political opponents together
to chat or break bread.
One such effort brought together a military veteran
from Pennsylvania who was a die-hard supporter
of Donald Trump with a voter who opposed Trump,
a yoga teacher from Brooklyn.
So they met in New York City.
They agreed to both come to New York City
and they met for breakfast and they went for a walk
in Central Park and it went pretty well.
They had a good connection between them
and they had things common that they found
and mostly talking about their family
and when they're work and what they did.
And so that went fairly well
and then they agreed to meet the next night, I guess,
and go to a Brooklyn Net Spascable game.
So they agreed to meet there and they went to the game
and then after the game they went out for drinks.
And that's when things went south.
The journalist who'd brought the opponents together
was feeling hopeful about the conversation.
He decided to bring up a controversial topic
to see what would happen.
He asked the two about their attitudes
to what's Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback
who kneeled during the National Anthem
to protest racial inequality in the United States.
At the time, President Donald Trump suggested
Colin Kaepernick should be kicked out of his team.
The journalist asked them what did they think about
that whole event and immediately that erupted
into a diatribe and the yoga teacher
started to get very angry and enraged
and that responded and as he said,
the F-bombs started to fly and they really became
aggressive and terrifying and then one of them stormed out
and the other stormed out.
When I pushed this organization, my country talks on this story,
they said, yeah, this is happening probably more than we want
that under the current conditions,
just bringing people together to chat,
as well-intentioned as it is, oftentimes
is insufficient or can backfire and can really go south.
And there's peer research that's now probably out of 2018
or 2019 about how Red and Blue Americans
feel when they speak across the divide.
And the majority of us leave those conversations
feeling more frustrated and more alienated
from the other side than before
because it's not as simple as just get together and talk.
For its part, my country talks reports
that hundreds of thousands of people have taken part
in these conversations.
The organization says that if those who were surveyed afterward,
80% on average say they're happy
with how the interaction went.
The psychological principle behind my country talks
on other programs like it was articulated
by the social psychologist Gordon Alport many decades ago.
He believed that direct contact
between different social groups could promote mutual understanding,
foster empathy, and reduce prejudice.
But what Gordon Alport was very clear to identify in his research
was there are certain conditions where that goes well.
And one of the conditions that's important is that
people are willing to do this and there's enough time
that they spend together so that they actually can start
to develop some kind of rapport or relationship
before they get to the conflict.
And what a lot of organizations do, unfortunately,
is start with the conflict.
They say, you're on this side, you're on that side,
let's go.
And if they don't take the time to build up
some sense of respect, rapport, trust, even in the facilitators
let alone each other, the other side,
it can easily blow up under conditions like we have today.
We all have people with whom we disagree.
These might be public figures, neighbors, even loved ones.
When disagreements snowball into conflicts,
they can seem insurmountable.
When we come back, Peter's research
into how we can find a way out of intractable conflicts.
You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
We all have values and beliefs that we consider non-negotiable.
Our convictions can run so deep
that hearing someone argue against them can feel immoral.
At Columbia University, social psychologist Peter Coleman
studies the anatomy of conflict.
Why it happens when it can lead to violence and war
and how we can build peace in our own lives
and in the world at large.
Peter, before you became a peace researcher,
you worked at an inpatient hospital in New York City.
What did you do there?
I was what they call a mental health associate,
which is basically a somebody that, you know,
I was young and somebody that'll do anything
you asked them to do.
So we were counselors to some degree,
but mostly we were just helping the nurses run the unit.
At one point, a young man at a facility
whom Peter had befriended, locked himself in a room.
He was breaking things and threatening violence.
Staff members called the police for help.
I knocked on the door and just said, look, you know,
any chance that you can talk to me.
You know, immediately he said, go away, you know,
you've no way.
And I said, you know, look, there's a SWAT team coming
and you know how that's gonna play out.
And we could possibly avoid that, is there any chance
you'll be willing to just talk to me?
And so, you know, after a pause, he unlocked the door.
And so I walked in and again, I want to be honest,
I wasn't really trained well to do this.
I didn't really have kind of, you know,
violence intervention techniques.
I just was going on the basis that I knew this young man.
He knew me.
I felt like he trusted me and that there was some chance
that this could deescalate.
And I walked in the room and I closed the door behind me.
And I sat down immediately, which is one thing I knew to do
is, you know, try to not be imposing, you know, I'm tall.
I didn't want us, you know.
So I just sat down and he was again,
and still enraged very angry.
He was pissed off that I had come in
because you really wanted to punch somebody.
You really wanted to hurt somebody.
And he said to me, you know, damn it, Peter,
why does it have to be you?
I can't punch you.
You know.
And, you know, and eventually he was able to kind of talk us
way down and deescalate enough that, you know,
he agreed to come out and, and so we were able to send
the SWAT team away in this particular incident.
That didn't always work, but when there was some kind
of relationship that we could try to leverage,
it sometimes would allow us to bring the temperature down.
Hmm.
So your experiences at the hospital made you realize
that you had an interest in conflict resolution.
And you were curious about what worked in deescalating incidents.
You came across a story that changed the way
you thought about conflict.
Tell me what happened in Boston in December 1994.
Yeah, that's an extraordinary story.
Boston was an epicenter of a lot of hostile rhetoric
and protest around pro-life pro-choice.
It's highly Catholic.
It's something like 36% Catholic at the time.
And in 1994, a man drove to two clinics
in Brookline, Massachusetts with arms.
And he pointed his rifle at one woman.
She was pleading for her life and he said,
you should pray the rosary and then shot her dead.
And so it was this terrible event that took place.
Even today, if you mention this, people remember this story.
It was a destabilizing time.
The archdiocese weighed in and they just said,
this is unacceptable, the governor, the mayor.
It really was, you know, the entire community
and across the country probably was this very upsetting,
extraordinary thing.
These leaders in the community call for peace.
They asked people to come together to find common ground.
But their pleas for peace and unity seemed hopeless.
Despite the tragedy, people were more divided
than ever in their beliefs.
The incident had all the makings of an intractable conflict.
But there was a group in town named the Public Conversations
Project and there was a woman that was the director of that
who had been doing work with pro-life
and pro-choice activists in the community
and had relationships across those differences.
Her name was Laura Chasen.
And Laura reached out to some of her contacts
and said, you know, would you be willing to have a conversation
with somebody on the other side?
And it wasn't an easy sell.
People were afraid of violence.
They were enraged by what happened
and they were enraged and blaming the other side.
And so it was a very difficult thing to do.
But there was a handful of women.
There were three pro-life leaders and three pro-choice leaders,
all women who agreed to temporarily meet and talk.
And they agreed to just do this for one month.
One of the groups, the pro-life group,
had met before the first meeting.
They met at a friendlies and they had coffee.
And they together prayed to God
because they believed that they were about to sit down
with murderers and that God would see that as a sin.
And they prayed to God to pardon them for doing this.
So they were really, you know,
they really were fearful of one another
and held each other in deep contempt.
And so to go into a room and have a conversation
even if it's well facilitated, aint easy.
They did it in secret.
They didn't tell anybody in their families
and their lives and their professions
that they were doing this
because of the potential consequences of it.
They met in a church basement in Massachusetts.
But it went well enough that after a month,
they agreed to continue it for a bit
and then they agreed to continue the conversation
until the anniversary of the shooting.
And what happened ultimately is that it took them five
and a half years of facilitated conversations
in this safe space and not telling members
of their community what they were doing
where they changed in terms of their feelings
towards one another.
They really came to, one of them described it as,
well, after a period of time we fell in love with each other
because they came to really respect
and appreciate the intelligence and the integrity,
the conscientiousness of each other
and how they take up their work,
really the importance of that.
And so they became very close as a group.
Importantly, this bridge building was less about the women
changing their minds about abortion
and more about finding areas adjacent to the central conflict
where they agreed with one another
as well as reasons to like one another.
And this is a really interesting and kind of paradoxical aspect
of this is that they, you know, in dropping all the rhetoric
and all the hate speech and all the two automatic phrases
that they would usually use,
they really needed to speak honestly,
carefully about why this issue was important to them.
And as they came to really care for the other women
across the divide, they really wanted them,
you know, it really became important that they understood,
that they joined them in their cause.
And so it was in some ways a fraught dynamic,
but because their relationships became,
I would say thicker, they became kinder and friendlier
and more respectful, that they ultimately came out publicly
in 2001, in the Boston Globe.
They are authored an article called Talking to the Enemy
where they detailed this experience.
And then they held a press conference
and there were a maze that at the press conference
there were all kinds of media who were very,
you know, major networks were there
who were very interested in what they were doing.
And they believed that their decision to talk to each other,
to get to know each other,
and then ultimately find where they did have common ground,
like, you know, the need to prevent pregnancy,
you know, unwanted pregnancies,
the need to protect young women,
and the need to really avoid violence, right?
Whatever they could do to keep violence
from coming back to the community,
they really felt that their activism had created the conditions
where that was more likely to happen
and they never wanted to see that again.
So they came together in that way
and they shared that message through media
and through talks they gave at colleges
and places around the country.
And in some ways, they had a broad effect
on the ethos around that particular division at that time.
They really brought the temperature down.
They modeled how to meet with the other side to get to know
the other side, and they all changed their activism.
You know, there are a couple of things that jump out at me.
One is that I think we often imagine
that if we could sit down with people
who disagree with us, you know, in a couple of minutes,
we could quickly disabuse them off their wrong views
and they will come around and see that we were right all along.
And perhaps the women in this group believed that as well.
They believed that if they could sit down with people
on the other side that in a matter of hours
and certainly weeks or months
that the other side would come to see that they were right
and they would change their minds.
But really what happened was a process
that was much more affective than cognitive, if you will.
It wasn't so much I changed my views
based on the arguments you placed before me.
But that I come to see you not just as a fuller person
in your humanity, but also come to like you.
In some ways, it has a parallel with what happened
in that impatient facility that you were working at,
which is the reason the guy didn't hit you
was not because you convinced him
that hitting you would be a bad idea.
He actually liked you.
And his own conflict is inner conflict of saying,
I like Peter, but I want to hit Peter,
you know, kept him from actually hitting you.
Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.
I mean, I think you're right that initially, many of us,
agreed to sit down and talk to the other people
because we think if I can just get them to sit down
and explain to them how crazy they're,
if they're logic is, you know,
we can find a way out of this.
But oftentimes that has very little positive effect,
it is taking the time.
And again, you know, and we talk about things long enough
until we realize what we don't understand.
And once you get there, then you start to think,
oh, okay, well, then maybe there's something to learn here,
right?
And then it's not about persuading.
It's really about listening and understanding.
Hmm, the other thing that strikes me about the example
you gave about these women in Boston is that, you know,
they really approached their conversations almost like,
you know, like a bomb disposal squad,
which is they didn't sort of wander in blightly and say,
okay, there's a bunch of wires here.
Let's figure out, maybe we should cut this one.
And let's see how it turns out.
They actually sat down and very carefully took apart
what they were doing.
They took their time.
They weren't in the public eye.
They were doing this in private.
And I think when it comes to conflict, you know,
resolution, a lot of us imagine that we can just simply show up,
you know, with a pair of clippers and sort of clipper wire
to disarm a bomb.
And that's going to be it.
We are underestimating how complex
and how difficult the challenge actually is.
I think that's true sometimes.
And I guess, you know, what I want to say is conflict
is in our life constantly, right?
We have internal conflicts of an our decision processes.
We have conflicts with our roommates and our spouses
and our kids and our family.
You know, we're always negotiating
and bumping into differences and disputes and preferences.
You know, and we learn to manage the most of the time
pretty constructively and with either ignore them
or to talk through them, right?
Some conflicts don't allow that.
Some conflicts become to aligned with passion,
with identity, with ideology, with history,
and we just make the mistake of not understanding
the distinction between, you know,
maybe what we should call disputes
and what we call deep conflicts.
These political conflicts that we're talking about,
you know, over abortion, over Trump,
these are deep identity conflicts.
They're based on, you know, a lot of assumptions
and, you know, deep affect.
And those are not easily discarded
or worked through or fixed.
I want to talk about another idea you have
about conflict resolution and that's to take advantage
of new beginnings.
Tell me about the bombshell effect, Peter.
Right, so the bombshell effect is, again,
it's sort of exemplified by what happened in Brookline
with the women.
It, when this violence took place,
it was so destabilizing, it was so shocking
that these activists who had spent decades competing
and, you know, obstructing each other,
were willing to sort of stop and think, okay,
this can't happen again.
We need to try something else.
And so when sometimes there are extraordinary things
that happen, COVID, health crises,
you lose your job, you lose a loved one.
When there are these destabilizing times,
sometimes they provide a sense of instability
that can make people more open to certain kinds of processes.
So when we talk about the bombshell effect,
we talk about a new start, a reset,
and how sometimes under those conditions
are choosing to reset that can happen
in the wake of extraordinarily difficult events.
Peter also recommends that opponents talk to each other
while going for a walk.
Physical movement, especially in beautiful surroundings,
can sometimes spring people out of their habitual perspectives.
Peter recently had a chance to put his ideas into practice.
He reached out to his neighbor, David,
and asked to go on a walk with him.
I did it because I felt ashamed.
Because in 2021, I had spent the two years
prior to that writing a book called The Way Out,
which was about overcoming toxic polarization.
And I wrote about ways to help with it.
And one of them was a chapter on movement.
And about a year after I wrote the book,
I was sitting and thinking about what I was proposing
to other people and thought,
you know, I can't just sit here
with this estranged relationship with this kind enough man.
I have to try to walk my own talk.
So I emailed him out of the blue,
and I said, would you be willing to take a walk
with me in the park?
And he broke back right away and he said,
you know, I'd be happy to sit down and talk with you,
but why walk?
Are you CIA?
Are you worried about surveillance?
He was very concerned about that whole notion.
And I said, you know, no, you just try to trust me in this.
So there's a reason, I have a rationale here.
I'll explain it to you.
So he agreed.
And we agreed to meet and go for a walk in the park.
You know, we live on the west side of Manhattan.
We went into Riverside Park.
I have to say before I met with him,
I was sick to my stomach.
He too was clearly very anxious right away.
He said to me, you know, yeah, happy to take a little walk
with you.
My wife isn't feeling well.
So I may have to come back early.
So, you know, he was, I was said, that's fine.
No worries.
No worries.
And we walked.
What I tried to do was follow my own recommendations,
which means that I had to first of all ask myself,
like, what do I want to do here?
What's the objective of this?
Because we could have easily gotten triggered
and gotten into the political nonsense and gone.
No, where?
And so I really said to myself, you know,
I reset and said, this is an opportunity to talk to somebody
who's all in on Donald Trump and Maga.
And so take an opportunity to listen
and try to get a sense of what that is.
So I was very intentional about that.
And then I was very intentional about how I approached
the conversation.
We didn't jump right into Trump and politics.
At first, Peter asked David about his life.
They discovered they had some things in common.
David was Jewish.
Peter's wife was Jewish.
But after they established some points of connection,
the conversation got heavier.
He started to talk about Trump and his ideas.
So he was hitting a lot of conspiracy theories.
But what I didn't do was what he expected me to do,
which is to joust with him, to, you know, to parry and challenge.
And I just listened.
I asked some clarifying questions when he would say,
oh, you know, we do this.
We don't do that.
I'd say, so your community is OK with this,
but not that, not with that.
And he'd say, yes, I'd say, OK.
And so he was very passionate and driven and walked faster
as we spoke and got very worked up.
But at some point, what sort of happened
is that we wrote a wave of that passion.
And at some point, as we were walking,
because I wasn't challenging him, which is what he'd expected,
he came to his own doubts.
He started to say, all right, should I vote for this person again?
Probably not, you know, or he made these mistakes
and these mistakes.
And so he started to come to his own, you know,
contradictions or doubts about his position, which, of course,
was much more powerful than anything I could have done.
But we continued to walk.
And then at some point, we were heading back
towards the apartment.
And I said, well, you know, I know that your wife isn't feeling
well.
And he said, oh, that's OK.
We can walk if you want.
So we continued and eventually ended back at the apartment.
And when we got to the apartment,
I had left a copy of my book in the front and handed it to him.
And so look, you don't have to read this.
I just wanted to give you some sense of why I asked you to meet
with me.
And he picked it up and he looked at the back.
And he said, yeah, political polarization.
He said, that's a huge problem.
I don't know what to do about it.
He said, I feel like I spend all of my time just
lost in the woods and angry.
But I don't really know what to do about this thing.
And I just said, well, I think what we just did is a start.
About a week later, my son, who's 27, who has lived here
for a long time.
But this man had never communicated with, never
had any contact with or never looked at.
He gets in the elevator with David.
And David looks at him and said, oh, you're Peter's son.
And my son had, like, said, yes, yes.
And he was sort of taken back and surprised.
And he said, all right, well, tell your father
that I'm reading his book.
And it's not bad.
And I thought, that is the best endorsement
that I can imagine having for a book is to have someone
who you think would be opposed to it say, it's not bad.
And I do want to say that this happened a year and a half ago.
And we continue conversations.
So we've been connected.
He sends me things to read.
I send him things to read.
And occasionally, we get together and talk.
And ideally walk, because that's when I feel like we connect
the best.
Peter Coleman is a psychologist at Columbia University.
He's the author of the Way Out, How to Overcome
Toxic Polarization.
Peter, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Oh, it's been a real pleasure.
Thank you for having me on.
Next week, we continue our Ask 2.0 series
with a look at how the loudest voices shape and distort
our understanding of political conflict.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy,
Annie Murphy Paul, Christian Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz,
Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
We end today's show with a story from our sister
podcast, My Unsung Hero.
It's brought to you by T-Mobile for Business.
In 2003, Jennifer Reinhardt suffered a traumatic fall
that left her with life-threatening injuries.
After three major surgeries and a medically-induced coma,
she was in tremendous pain.
One night in the hospital still stands out in her memory.
She was in a large amount of morphine
to help her sleep through the pain.
When she woke up, she was dripping with sweat and shivering.
I was so cold that shivering made my whole body hurt.
And so I was also crying because it hurt so bad.
And I was shivering and I couldn't stop.
And I managed to reach the call button and called
for the nurse.
And when the nurse came in and saw what was happening,
she's like, oh, honey, we'll get you out of this bed
and we'll get you into clean sheets.
And I just was panic struck because every single piece
of me hurt so badly.
I didn't know that I would.
I felt like I didn't know if I could even survive being moved
out of the bed.
And she called in an attendant.
And he was two or three times the size of me.
And he walked over and scooped me up out of the bed
like a little baby so tenderly and so gently.
He held me like I was made out of tissue paper.
And he just held me very still and quiet.
And hummed a song very quietly.
Well, the nurses came in and quickly got the sheets changed.
There was something about the power of the sound of his voice
and the vibration in his chest.
And how gently he was holding me that just put a balm
and a soothingness over that pain that I was feeling.
When he set me back down in the bed
and they changed my hospital gown
and I was back in dry warm, they brought warm blankets.
It was really the first time since I had fallen
that I felt sure that I was gonna live through this.
Then I'd get back home to my children.
I wish he could have known just how much he helped me.
Jennifer Reinhardt lives in Homer, Alaska.
Today's Mayan Sanghiro story was brought to you
by T-Mobile for business.
You can find more of these stories
on the Mayan Sanghiro podcast or at mayansanhiro.org.
I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
Oyes, you spent sometimes studying an insurance company
and one of the things an insurance company needs to do
is to tell prospective clients how much their premiums
are going to cost.
And underwriter says, if you want us to cover you
against this loss, here is this quote.
From the insurance company's point of view, Danny,
what is the risk of offering quotes that are too high
and also quotes that are too low?
Well, a quote that is too high,
you're very likely to lose the business
because there are competitors and they'll offer
a better price.
A quote that is too low, you're leaving money on the table
and you may not be covering your losses
if you do that to a great deal.
So errors in both directions are costly.
We define noise as unwanted variability in judgments
or decisions.
That is, if the same client would get different quotes
from different underwriters in the same company,
this is bad for the company.
And variability is a basic component of error.
So I think of the insurance business
as being driven by mathematics.
That's my stereotype that there are hard-nosed
statisticians who work at these companies.
So I would not expect a quote from one underwriter
to be widely different from the next.
You asked executives at this insurance company
how much variability they expected between underwriters.
What was their estimate of this kind of subjective variability?
I mean, it turns out that there is a very general answer
to that question.
And people have a very general idea about that number
will be, and it's around 10%.
Now, when we actually measured that in an insurance company,
the answer was 55%.
And that was a number that was an amount of variability,
as we call it, an amount of noise, that no one expected.
And that really is what set me off on this journey
that led to this book.
Now, the difference between 10% and 55% might seem trivial.
Who cares?
Well, the consequences of this variability
were anything but trivial.
I mean, I asked people what actually would be the cost of sitting
up a premium that is too high, or too low.
And when they carried out that exercise,
they thought that the overall cost of these mistakes
within the billions of dollars.
Now, what was, in some sense, saving that company
was that probably other companies were noisy as well.
But if you had a company that is noisy,
well, others are noise free, the noisy company
is going to lose a lot of money very quickly.
So with the insurance company, it's not
just that the insurance company is losing money.
There is also a cost that's being paid
by all the people who are trying to get insurance.
It might be that if you happen to get a quote that's too high,
you might end up being uninsured, or you
might be spending more on insurance
that you need to be spending, there
is sort of a general human cost to these errors,
not just in terms of the bottom line for the insurance company.
Well, of course, when you have a noisy underwriting system,
then the customer is facing a lottery
that the customer has not signed up for.
And that is true everywhere, that is wherever people
reach a dreadment or a decision by using their mind,
rather than computing.
Wherever there is judgment, there is noise,
and there is more of it than you think.
I want to look at a few other places,
because in some ways, what's striking about your book
is both a number of different domains, where you see noise
and the extent of noise in those different domains,
including in places where you really feel,
this should be a setting where noise does not play a role.
You cite a study done by Jaya Ramji Nogales and her co-authors,
who found that in asylum cases, this was a courtroom in Miami,
one judge would grant asylum to 88% of the applicants,
and another granted asylum to only 5% of the applicants.
So this is more than a lottery.
This is like playing roulette.
This is a scandal.
Clearly, the system isn't operating well.
In many situations, it's just that when people look at the same
data, they see them differently.
They see them more differently than they expect.
They see them more differently than anyone would expect.
That's the basic phenomenon of what we call system noise.
That is, when you have a system that ought
to be producing judgments or decisions that are predictable,
and they turn out not to be predictable, and that's noise.
You also describe in some ways there are different kinds of noise.
So if you're an asylum judge and I'm an asylum judge,
and we have very different subjective readings,
that can produce very different answers.
But it could also be that if you are reviewing a case
in the morning and you are reviewing a case in the afternoon,
it's possible that just within yourself, your own judgments
can be noisy.
Can you talk about that idea as well?
I mean, it's not only possible.
It actually is the case that when people
are asked the same question or evaluate the same thing
on multiple occasions, they do not reach the same answers.
For example, radiologists who have shown the same image
on two separate occasions and are not
reminded that it's the same image really
with distressing frequency, reach different diagnoses
on the two occasions, that we know.
It's true even for fingerprint examiners,
whom we really would not expect to be noisy at all.
But actually, they vary when you show them
the same fingerprints twice.
By the way, that's important.
They do not vary in the sense that somebody
would make a match on one occasion
would positively say it is not a match on the other.
But fingerprint examiners are allowed to say I'm not sure.
And between I'm not sure, and I am sure that it's a match,
it's not a match, there is variability.
One of the things that you point out
is that you don't expect that the lottery of who is reviewing
your file is going to make a huge difference,
or that extraneous factors would play a huge role.
The researcher, Uri Simonson, found that college admissions
officers pay more attention to the academic attributes
of candidates on cloudy days, and non-academic attributes
when the weather is sunny.
He titled this paper, Clouds Make Nords Look Good.
Talk about this idea that extraneous factors,
whether someone's hungry, what the weather is like,
that can affect people's judgment, too.
Indeed, it's been established in the justice system.
If you're a defendant, you have to hope for good weather,
because on very hot days, judges assign
most severe sentences.
And that is true, though judges are here conditioned,
but it's the outside temperature.
Nevertheless, seems to have an effect.
It's been established in at least one study
that for judges who are keen on football,
the result of their team on Sunday or Saturday,
depending on whether it's professional or college,
it will affect the judgment they make on the Monday.
And there will be more severe if their team lost.
No!
He missed the extra point wide-right.
That's a terrifying idea, isn't it, Danny,
that you're hoping that your judges' football team
wins the Sunday before your case is heard?
Yes, absolutely.
And you're also hoping to find a judge who is in a good mood,
to find a judge who is rested, has had a good night,
who is not too tired.
And your chances of being prescribed antibiotics
or painkillers differ in the course of the day.
So doctors tend to prescribe more antibiotics
for the end of the day when they are tired,
than earlier in the day when they are fresh.
And they are more likely to prescribe painkillers
later in the day, simply because it's an effort
to resist the patient who wants painkillers.
And when you're very tired and depleted,
that effort becomes more difficult.
So completely extraneous factors have a distressing,
the Lord-Refek.
Noise in medicine often shows up under a different name.
Medical mistakes.
Done medical news tonight about how many Americans
have something go wrong when they go to the hospital?
The astronomical number?
One in three patients.
We'll face a mistake during a hospital stay.
And these are costly errors.
One study estimate medical mistakes cost the US
more than $17 billion a year.
The doctors had discovered that Sarah
didn't have cancer in the first place.
She'd been misdiagnosed.
And all the pain and treatment that she went through
was for absolutely nothing.
So, Daddy, can you talk about these two different dimensions
of noise in the medical sphere,
the ways in which it might cause us to get diagnosed
with conditions we might not have,
but also for doctors to misconditions
and problems that we actually do have?
The contribution of noise is that which physician looks
at the data makes a difference.
And there is a lot of that, that is, we know
that the physicians disagree on diagnosis,
and they also disagree on treatment.
And that is a little shocking that, you know,
there is that element of lottery.
So, errors could happen for many reasons,
including luck, which is not an area in judgment,
but where information was missing.
But in some cases, the errors cannot be described
in any other way than noise,
that is different doctors looking at the same case,
reaching different conclusions.
It might seem obvious from these examples
that noise is a big problem,
and that combating noise makes a lot of sense.
Who could argue against reducing arbitrary decisions
and inconsistent rules?
It turns out a lot of people have a problem
with doing just that, and one of those people might be you.
You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.
We've seen how noise pervades many aspects
of our personal and social lives.
It can lead to wildly different estimates
on our insurance premiums.
It affects judgments, doctors make about our health.
It can determine whether we get a job or a promotion.
In that new book, Noise, a flow in human judgment,
Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors, Olivia Sibouny
and Cass Sunstein, show that noise also shapes
what happens in the criminal justice system.
It affects decisions that send people to prison
or sentence them to execution.
Danny Judge Marvin Frankel worked as a United States district judge,
and he made a name for himself by pointing out inconsistencies
in the criminal justice system.
He once wrote a case about two men convicted
for caching counterfeit checks, both amounts were for less than $60.
One man got a sentence of 30 days in prison.
The other got 15 years.
What did Judge Frankel make of such disparities?
I mean, he thought it's unjust.
He thought it's extraordinarily unfair,
which it seems to be on the face of it.
So he really felt that the justice system should be reformed
to avoid this role of completely unpredictable, unreasonable factors
that determine the fate of defendants.
You know, Danny, I feel like in the last year,
I've seen dozens of stories that talk about disparities
of all kinds, including disparities in the criminal justice system.
And invariably, when I read these stories about disparities,
they talk about the idea that it's about bias,
that it's about racial bias or gender bias or some other kind of bias.
So when Judge Frankel comes along and says,
you know, defendants are being given vastly different sentences.
The very first thing that pops in my head is,
maybe these defendants were of different races,
and what we're really seeing is racial bias at play rather than noise.
How can we tell the difference between racial bias and noise?
It's actually easy to do, because when you want to measure noise,
you can conduct a kind of study that we call the noise audit.
And so you take professionals, for example, judges,
and you show them a fictitious case.
And you ask them to make judgments as they would normally.
Now you know that it's the same case
that all been given the same information.
They should give you the same judgment.
The differences among them cannot be attributed to bias.
And indeed, when Judge Frankel calls to happen,
he calls many noise audits to be performed.
You actually conducted some himself.
And in the most famous one, 208s federal judges evaluated 16 cases
and assigned sentences to 16 cases.
And this gives you an idea of the lottery
that a defendant would face, in that where the average sentence is seven years in jail,
the probable difference between two judgments is over three years.
So that seems to be unacceptable.
So based on the work of Judge Frankel and others,
Congress eventually passed a law that basically limited the amount of discretion
that judges had.
Talk about the effects that this law had on reducing noise,
were their studies conducted to actually figure out if these were reducing noise?
Yes, studies were conducted and actually you can look at many cases
and look at the variability of judgments, many cases,
and you find that the variability significantly diminished,
which indicates that their noise was, in fact, reduced.
However, something else happened, the judges hated it.
They hated this restriction on their ability to make free decisions.
And they felt that justice was not being served.
So even as the data was showing that the noise was reducing and sentencing,
in other words, sentencing was becoming more consistent,
many judges were upset that their discretion was being taken away.
And Judge Jose Cabrános was one of those who spoke up.
And I want to play you a clip of something he said in 1994.
This was a discussion at Harvard University,
where they were talking about these guidelines that were aimed to reduce
ethnic disparities in sentencing by limiting the amount of discretion that judges had.
Here is Judge Cabrános.
These arcane and mechanistic computations are intended to produce
a form of scientific precision, but in practice, they generate a dense fog of confusion
that undermines the legitimacy of the judge's sentencing decisions.
Daniel, I want to draw your attention to what Judge Cabrános is saying
when you limit the variability of sentencing, you're telling judges,
for this offense you have to do X, for that offense you have to do Y,
a lot of judges feel their hands are tied and they feel the art of law
is being reduced to a mechanistic science.
Well, if it takes a mechanistic science to produce justice,
then I think we should seriously consider some mechanistic science.
And what seems to be happening is that from the perspective of the judge,
they feel that they're evaluating every detail of the case,
and that they are producing a just judgment because they are convinced
that what they're doing is a just judgment.
And somehow it's very difficult to convince judges
that another judge from they respect a great deal,
with presented with the same case, would actually pass a different sentence.
That argument doesn't seem to have penetrated when Judge Cabrános made that assertion
that in fact there is a problem and there is a problem to be resolved.
He was in effect as I hear him.
He was denying the existence of a problem.
Psychologists talk about a phenomenon called naïve realism
that in some ways explains why it is.
I am bewildered that you would not see the world exactly the way that I see the world.
Can you explain what naïve realism is and how it speaks to the question we just discussed
about judges not just reaching different conclusions,
but being bewildered that anyone would reach a different conclusion than them?
Well, you know, we feel that we see the world as it is.
It's the only way we see it, and what we see is real, what we see is true.
And it makes it very difficult to believe and to imagine that someone else looking at the same reality
is going to see it differently.
But in fact, we are struck by how different they are in the context of criminal justice,
the variability in sentences, is shocking.
But when you are looking at it from the perspective of a judge who looks at cases individually
and feels that he or she is making correct judgments for every case individually,
then it looks as if any attempt to restrict their freedom is going to cause injustice to be performed.
But they are simply not accepting, I think, the statistics that tell them that another judge looking at the same case
would actually pass a different sentence.
So these debates about sentence and singre form raged in the 1980s and 1990s,
and eventually in the early 2000s,
the Supreme Court struck down the guidelines that bound the way judges were operating
and sentencing reform essentially went away giving discretion back to judges.
Is what happened, what I fear happened? Did noise come back into the system?
Oh yes, I mean, there is evidence that noise came roaring back,
and there is also evidence that judges were a lot happier without the guidelines than they had been earlier.
One of the ironic things that you and others have found is that even though there is this distinction between noise and bias,
when the noise came back after the Supreme Court ruling,
black defendants were actually among those who were the most severely harmed by this.
Is it possible in some ways they can be intersections between noise and bias?
In other words, they can amplify one another?
Certainly. I mean, when you are constraining people and reducing noise,
you are reducing the opportunities for bias to take place.
So attempts to reduce noise and attempts to control noise are going to, in general, not invariably,
but are very likely to control and reduce bias as well.
If noise produces many of the adverse outcomes we see,
if noise produces much of the unfairness we see,
why is it that critiques of disparities invariably talk about bias?
Turns out that's because of the way our minds work.
The brain is a storytelling machine,
and the story of bias caters to our hunger for simple explanations.
I mean, clearly, bias in general is a better story.
That is, you see something happening.
It had the character of an event.
It had the character of something that is caused by a psychological force of some kind.
Variability noise is uncaused.
Noise doesn't lend itself to a causal story.
And really, the mind is hungry for causes.
And that leads us very naturally to thinking to the biases that errors must be explainable.
So if I get a misdiagnosis because a doctor doesn't like the color of my skin,
that might not make me feel good,
but at least I can make sense of what happened.
Once I settle on an explanation of racism or sexism or homophobia,
I tell myself I have every right to get angry.
When I discuss what happened with others, they'll get angry too.
By contrast, a misdiagnosis produced by noise is by definition no one's fault.
The error may have harmed me,
but I can't lay the blame on someone's evil intentions.
Noise is a very opposite of a good story.
It's meaningless.
And that can make me feel even worse.
Here's another problem.
When I see a judge pass a really harsh sentence or a very light sentence,
I can come up with a story of bias to explain this individual case.
You cannot do that with noise.
You cannot spot noise by looking at any individual case.
You have to measure it in the aggregate.
It shows up only when you look at the statistics,
and many of us are uncomfortable turning to data as our guide to the truth.
Reprefer stories and anecdotes,
and stories and anecdotes are better at illustrating the problem of bias.
Stories and anecdotes are what the mind is prepared for.
Statistical thinking is alien to us.
And statistical thinking is the only way to detect noise,
because it's variability.
It's sort of absurd to say about any single case that it is noisy.
You say that if you have no idea how it came about,
but noise is a phenomenon that you observe statistically,
and that you can analyze only statistically.
And that is not appealing.
So there's an even deeper problem than the fact that noise
is detectable only through statistics,
whereas bias, you can tell a story about bias.
For many people making decisions,
the data is simply not even available.
So at a statistical level,
you can see an insurance company is demonstrating noise,
but many of the decisions we are making are decisions we make as individuals.
So if I want to propose marriage,
and I feel like proposing marriage on a moonlit night in the springtime,
I have no idea if my decision to propose marriage
on that evening is being shaped by noise or not.
I don't have a statistical set of how I would behave
under different circumstances.
You know, the truth of the matter is that no one can tell you
that this decision was noisy.
What you can tell is that when you look at the collection of decisions
of people deciding to get married,
that collection is noisy.
There is no reason to believe
that these steps which improve judgments in the statistical case
do not apply when somebody decides to get married.
If noise is present in the decisions where you can observe it,
it's also present when you cannot observe it.
Hmm.
Some years ago, I interviewed the researcher, Berkeley DeteWorst.
He talked about how people respond
when a mistake has been made by a human versus an algorithm.
I want to play you a short excerpt of something he told me.
People fail to use the algorithm
after they'd seen the algorithm perform.
And make mistakes, even though they typically saw the algorithm outperform the human.
In our studies, the algorithms outperform people by 25 to 90%.
So he's basically saying the algorithms are significantly better than the humans,
but when a mistake is made,
and algorithms, of course, can make mistakes,
and humans can make mistakes,
he's saying that you prefer the human to make the mistake.
And I think intuitively that feels correct to me.
If I'm going to get a misdiagnosis when I go to a doctor,
I would feel better if it's the doctor who's made the mistake
than an unfeeling, unthinking algorithm.
I think that's absolutely true.
And when we're looking at a road accident,
we somehow feel less bad about it if it was a driver error
than if it was a self-driving car that caused the accident.
Algorithms, they make errors.
The error they make, by the way, are different from the errors that people would make.
And they look stupid to people.
Algorithms make errors that people think are ridiculous.
Now, we don't get to hear what algorithm think of the errors that people make.
And we do know that algorithm just make far fewer of them in many cases.
And you have to trade off the higher overall accuracy
against the discomfort of abandoning human judgment and trusting an algorithm.
Yeah.
You know, this might actually be a subtext of much of your lifetimes work, Danny.
But it seems to me that fighting noise requires a certain amount of humility.
And it seems to me that humans are not humble.
Well, they're not humble for fairly straightforward reason.
We do not go through life imagining different ways of seeing what we see.
We see one thing at a time.
And it feels right to us.
And, you know, that is really the source
of the problem of ignoring noise.
This is why it is so difficult to imagine it.
I want to talk just for a brief moment about places where noise can potentially be useful.
So let's say, for example, you have a company that's trying to innovate and come up with new ideas.
And you're in a creative enterprise where you want to pitch different ideas for movies.
In some ways, you might want to actually maximize the variability of the ideas you get.
So noise is not always bad.
Sometimes it can actually lead to good things.
Yeah, we don't call it noise in those cases.
We reserve the term noise for undesirable variability.
There are indeed many situations in life in which variability is a blessing, certainly in creative
enterprises. Also evolution.
So anything that allows you to select the better one of multiple responses wherever there is
a selection mechanism. Variability is a good thing.
But variability in the absence of a selection mechanism is a sheer loss of accuracy.
And those are the cases that we talk about.
So if you had a way when you have multiple underwriters of finding out who is doing a better job
than whom. And using that in order to improve their training, that would be a case where you could
make positive use of variability. But in the absence of such a mechanism, that variability just
is a sheer loss.
When we come back, how to fight noise. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Noise is endemic. It's also very difficult to fight in part because judges and doctors and police
officers don't like to think of themselves as capricious. We don't think of our judgments as
being arbitrary, certainly not when it comes to really important decisions. Even when we are
told about how noises affecting our judgments and decisions, we hate to be shackled by rules.
Danny in 1907, Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, asked 787 villagers at a county fair
to estimate the weight of a prize ox. None of the villagers guessed the right answer,
but then Galton did something with their answers that got him very close to the correct answer.
What did he do, Danny?
Danny. Well, he simply took the average and the average, I think, was within two pounds of the
correct weight. That led to a lot of research that was summarized in a recent book by James
Sura Wiecki on the wisdom of crowds and the fact that when you take multiple judgments, independent
judgments and average them, you eliminate noise. This, by the way, is guaranteed to eliminate noise.
So if you take multiple judgments, there is no guarantee that it will reduce bias because
this the judges agree on the bias, then the bias will remain when you take the average. Indeed,
it will be even more salient. But what is absolutely guaranteed is that when you
average independent judgments, you're eliminating noise. When you take four independent judges,
you're reducing noise by one half. When you take a hundred, you're reducing it by 90%.
So there is some mathematics of noise that lends itself to analysis that doesn't apply to bias.
So it's really remarkable. The correct weight of that ox was 1198 pounds. And as you said,
that was one or two pounds off the correct weight. And I want to point out that the reason
averaging the responses produces a better answer is that noise is random. You're taking advantage
of the fact that various estimates will be randomly high or low. And that's why when you average
them out, you're going to get closer and closer to the correct answer. And what happens when you have
different people making the same judgment of the same objects and then you're going to average them,
then the errors they make cancel each other out. But when people make judgments about different cases,
errors don't cancel them out. If you said too high a premium in one case and too low a premium in
the other case, that doesn't make you right. That just makes things worse. So this idea that errors
cancel out, you have to apply it quite precisely. They cancel out when you average judgments are
the same thing. And also the judgments have to come from people who in some ways who are independent
of one another. If I am seeing the judgment you make and then I make my judgment afterwards,
my judgment really is just a reflection of your judgment, not an independent one. That's right. And
you know, what happens basically is when you have witnesses who talk to each other,
the value of their testimony is sharply reduced. Because in effect in the extreme, if you have one
witness who is very assertive, all the other witnesses fit their story to his, then you have one
witness. Regardless of how many testify. One of the most remarkable aspects of the wisdom of the
crowd that you describe in the book has to do with how you can elicit the wisdom of the crowd
just from yourself. You cite research by Edward Woolen, Harold Pashler, that asked people to make
judgments about the same thing separated by a certain amount of time. What do they find when
you average out these different estimates? Well, for example, you know, if you ask people whether
the population of London and you ask it once and then you wait a couple of weeks, say, and you
ask it again, the striking thing is that most people will not give you the same number on the two
occasions. And the second striking thing is that the average of the two responses is more likely to
be accurate than either of the responses. The first responses better than the second, but the
average is better than both. In one of the studies they conducted, they actually asked people to
make estimates that were different than their initial estimates. And then they averaged out the
estimates and they found that noise was reduced even further. Why would this be the case, Danny?
Well, here what you're trying to do and you can do it within an individual is you're leaning
against yourself. You made one judgment and then you ask people to think how could that judgment be
wrong and then make another. And that turns out to be indeed better than merely asking the same
question twice. In some ways, this provides a solution to the conundrum I posed to Danny.
If noise is detectable only by studying statistical averages, how do I reduce noise in decisions I
am making as an individual? The answer? Try to make the same decision over and over under different
conditions. One way to tell if noises behind my decision to propose marriage is to ask myself whether
I would make the same decision under different circumstances, not just on a moonlit night in the
springtime but in the heat of summer or in the dead of winter. If I reach the same answer in
these different settings, it's possible I could still be making a mistake, but at least I can
be somewhat reassured that my decision is not the result of random extraneous factors.
Scientists are exploring lots of ways to reduce noise. The researcher send them a lion
athan and his colleagues, devised an algorithm to advise judges on whether to grant bail to suspects.
These are people who have been arrested but who have not yet been put on trial.
Keeping them in jail can cause all kinds of hardship. People can lose jobs or lose custody of their
children while they are incarcerated awaiting trial. It's costly for taxpayers to keep people in jail.
But letting someone dangerous out of jail can cause harm. Maybe they go on to commit other crimes.
The researchers had the algorithm offer advice to judges about whether to grant bail.
They found that if judges incorporated the recommendations, this could reduce the number of people in jail by 42%
without increasing the risk of crime.
The research goes further than that and that allowing the algorithm to inform the judges
actually not the best way of doing it. The research suggests quite strongly that when you have a
judge and an algorithm that are looking at the same data, with some exceptions, it's better to have
the algorithm have the last word and this is very non-intuitive.
Yeah. Besides being actually superior in some ways in terms of judgment,
one of the things that algorithms do better than people is that they're not noisy. They're actually
much more consistent. Can you talk about this that in some ways one of the advantages that algorithms
have is even when their judgments might not be as good as humans because they have less noise than
humans, you're able to get better outcomes? Well, noise is a source of inaccuracy and algorithms
by their nature are noise-free that is when you present the same problem to two computers running
the same software, they're going to give you the same answer which is not true of different
bail judges. So that advantage is in many cases sufficient to make algorithms superior to people
but I don't want to create the impression that our solution to the problem of noise is algorithms
because even if it were the solution there's just too much opposition to algorithms. So ultimately
we're talking about improving judgments. In some domains algorithms can be used and I think
where they can be used there should be used but this is a long process, a slow process
because human judgment is going to make the important decisions for quite a while.
Isn't it interesting though Danny that when you look at the news and you see the news coverage
of algorithms I feel like just in the last year I've seen dozens of articles talking about
algorithmic bias about how algorithms in some ways can make judgments worse and it is the case
that you can have poorly designed algorithms. You can argue that the old sentencing rules that we
had three strikes on your out in some ways that is an algorithm but you could argue the algorithm
in some ways was too crude to capture what actually needed to be done but isn't it striking that's
this so little attention that's paid by contrast to the potential good that algorithms can do
because we're again we're so focused with the story of intent of saying a bad outcome happened
and algorithm caused it clearly algorithms need to be thrown out the window. I mean we do not
want to accept the errors that blind rules will make. You know I was talking to
someone who designed self-driving cars and they realize that self-driving cars it's not
enough for them to be a hundred times safer than regular drivers they effectively have to be
almost perfect before they will be admitted and it's that kind of bias that is completely human
and natural we like the natural over the unnatural we prefer human drivers and human doctors to make
mistakes rather than self-driving cars and medical algorithms and that's just a fact of psychology.
You're talking the book about something that you call decision hygiene and others have
talked about this idea as well what is decision hygiene and why the analogy to public health?
When you're thinking of dealing with biases like a specific disease so you can think of a vaccine
or you can think of medication which is specific to that disease but when you're washing your hands
you're doing something entirely different you have no idea what germs you might be killing
and if you're good at it you will never know because the germs are dead and a similar distinction
can be drawn between different ways of fighting errors there is a difference between procedures
that are specifically aimed at particular biases and procedures that are intended generally
to improve the quality of the judgment and decisions and the way that this feeds back on the
individual is that if there are procedures that are good for organizations and for repeated
decisions they should be good for individuals and for singular decisions.
So if I'm a CEO of a corporation or if I'm a policymaker and I'm hearing this conversation
about noise can you give me two or three really specific suggestions on ways that I can reduce
noise in my decision making or in my company's decision making or in my organization or community?
Well I think the first step would be to ask whether you have a task in the organization that
is carried out by interchangeable functionaries like underwriters or emergency room physicians
they're carrying out the same task making the same kinds of judgments and you would like those
judgments to be noise free to be uniform. So first of all identify whether you have that case
in your organization if you do we strongly recommend you measure noise that is you actually take
those individuals present them with similar cases and see the observe the variability in the
judgements and possibly that may lead you to want to do something about it but the first step
is just to measure noise because our impuitions about the magnitude of noise are systematically wrong.
Danny thinks we should learn from the saga of the rise and fall of sentencing reform.
Once you detect noise in an organization it may be wiser to avoid trying to fix the problem
by asking everyone to follow rigid rules. As we've seen people hate to have their judgment
questioned they hate to have their discretion limited and they did test anything that smacks
of mechanistic rules. The main thing to do if you're attempting to improve the judgment of people
in an organization is to convince those people that they want their judgments to be better.
If you impose it as a set of rules that all of them will follow they will resist it they will
feel they are being robotized and they're likely to sabotage whatever you propose. I mean this
is well known in insurance companies that provides the underwriters in many cases with information
or even with a technical price with the suggestion about what premium should be assigned and underwriters
are very likely to completely ignore those and to follow their judgment. And basically I would think
you know it's obvious advice if you have a group of people who are noisy have that group
try to find the solution to the noise have them develop procedures that will make them uniform
do not impose procedures on them but work with them to make them more uniform because actually
they will recognize that they would like to be in agreement with each other
but letting them feel that what they are doing is what they want to do rather than what they're
being forced to do that is clearly a very important step if people really want to have organizations
that improve their judgment. Daniel Kahneman, Olivia Sibonini and Cass Sunstein are the authors of
noise a flaw in human judgment. Danny thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
It was really my pleasure. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production
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