Dr. Kurt Gray
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
You bet. So we have some work on moral panics and it's easy to see on social media, right? You log on and social media, those companies are motivated to get you to scroll and they measure your engagement. I just found out about this talking to someone at Facebook.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
They measure your engagement in terms of like feet or yards or meters, like just how many meters you're willing to scroll the kind of endless feed for 10 meters. That's a ton of scrolling, obviously. And so. You know, they're motivated to get you to scroll and to click. And the way they do that is by inciting moral panics, right? So what they do is they pair a limitless supply of threats.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
This is terrible. These people are out to get you, right? This is burning over here. There's these bad actors who are coming to get you. They're going to take this from you. And then what they do is they pair those threats with explicit measures of virality, right? So there'll be a little, this is how many times this has been retweeted or liked or shared.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And I think those are really powerful because our minds are not only attuned to harms, but also attuned to the kind of social feedback of others, especially when it comes to harms, right? So the analogy I like to use, it's from my post-doc Curtis Puryear, imagine you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe and you hear this roar in the distance, Godzilla roar.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And then all of a sudden you see 100 people running towards you screaming, right? What would probably happen at that cafe now is that you'd think, well, maybe I shouldn't finish my coffee. Maybe I should get up and run screaming along with these other people, right? Because there's a threat, you hear the roar, and now there's social feedback, everyone's running.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so social media is a lot like those kind of Godzilla roars and everyone's screaming, right? There's a threat and then everyone's screaming on social media. And those feelings of moral panic happen every day, every hour even, every time you log in. because there's something that pairs the kind of threats with those signals of virality. And so it's not good for us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
We actually have some data that suggests that people who use social media to check on politics and who pay attention to virality metrics, they often have elevated symptoms of PTSD, sometimes above the clinical threshold, right? So it's actually giving you like PTSD to check on politics on social media if you do it often enough.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
That's a great question. I think the feelings of mattering and being seen and heard really do matter when it comes to political disagreement, right? Because I think what drives our political disagreement is this sense that I perceive a victim, I perceive a threat to me and my family, and you on the other side, you don't perceive that threat, you don't perceive that victim.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
In fact, you maybe fundamentally deny its existence, right? And so anytime we feel like something so essential to our person, our morals is denied, right? You're wrong. It doesn't exist. It's not like that. Then, of course, we feel attacked, right? We feel maybe gaslit or just really not heard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so the way to bridge these divides and these conversations, whether it's at work or with a family member that you've fallen out with because of politics, is to really listen to what they are saying and when it comes to what they fear and what threatens them. And then you don't need to agree with them, but you do need to validate that feeling in a sense.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Be like, oh, that must be hard for you to fear that. I understand that you're worried about your family. I think that's what we need to make people feel heard about. That's what we need to make people feel like they matter. Like you are trying to protect yourselves. People are motivated by protection when it comes to politics and not destruction.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
It's so easy to assume that the other side is just trying to burn the world down. And maybe we could talk about elites, right? Like elites are a whole different ballgame. But I think everyday people, they're just trying to do what best they can to protect themselves and their families. And I think recognizing that goes a long way to making them feel heard and like they matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
It's a great point, especially over the course of the last few decades, people have been doing less and less in their communities. Bowling Alone, Putnam's work, argues that we're less involved in our communities, we're less likely to be an elk or a mason, we're less likely to engage in kind of volunteer organizations to help out our communities.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so this kind of retreat from public life and from feeling connected, I think, has really bad things for our mental health.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
if we don't have connections with other people authentic other people who are in your community then we form these kind of other almost like parasocial connections with people you meet on or you follow on social media right they don't even follow you you just follow them so elites or other organizations that you feel like i'm this party now right i identify red or blue
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And I think that's really not healthy because now you've lost the nuance. You've lost the social connection with everyday people. And now you're just connected to the kind of party apparatus. And if someone is that way, then you can't, you can't make them not that way in conversations, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Often our first, our first impulse in these conversations about politics is you're like, I'm going to change this person. I'm going to show that they're wrong. And people don't usually think through, but like, no one's going to say, oh, thank you for telling me that I'm wrong. You've pulled the wool from my eyes. And now I see, like, I shouldn't be this committed to my political cause.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
That never happens. And so what you need to do, going back to the conversation about mattering, right? It just makes people feel that they are rational, that they're thoughtful, that they're trying to do their best, and that they're trying to navigate a kind of complicated issues as best they can. And the way to do that, I think, is by asking them about stories, going back to storytelling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
So if you approach a kind of conversation with this question of, well, maybe you could tell me what things in your life maybe led you to appreciate this kind of political view. Then why it feels like it makes sense to you. I mean, going back to the question you asked me at the very beginning of this podcast, like this transformative moment, many people have these transformative moments.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And if you want to know who they are and really get them to share what they're all about, asking them about those kinds of feelings they have and the experience that they've had goes a long way to make people feel like they matter. And then to have better conversations about kind of contentious issues.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Absolutely. I really like you brought up this quote. I really like it. I really like Elaine Skari's work. And it doesn't have to be physical pain. Although if someone is in physical pain, probably not the best time to have an argument with them about morality and victimhood, right? If someone stubbed their toe, you want to be like, oh, I think what you did somewhere was wrong.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
I can't believe you did this or you said this to my mother. And they're actively in pain gripping their toe. It's not going to be a good conversation. Yeah. The idea that you can feel victimized by society or have a sense of grievance, or if you lost your job, or your spouse left you, or your kids don't talk to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
All these things can make you feel like you're suffering, and they're internal emotional pains. not only do you feel like a victim, but you look for someone to blame for your victimhood, right? If you're suffering, then our minds are compelled to find a kind of agent or villain responsible for that suffering. And so maybe that's someone else in your life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Maybe, I don't know, your ex-partner or something like that. But often it could be politicians or regimes or the other party. And so I think we really need to pay more attention to people's feelings of being aggrieved or victimized in the current political landscape because they really drive our kind of moral judgments and I think ultimately our voting.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
That's a good question. And at the outset of this research project, looking at how liberals and conservatives make sense of harm perhaps differently, I didn't really know how to do it. I just knew that there was a number of issues that liberals and conservatives were very divided on. We can take Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmentalism, taxation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And I just tried to figure out what were the kind of specific entities or people that might connect to those hot button issues and would those things cluster together in a way that made sense? And so we looked at maybe, I don't know, 80 different targets. And in the end we found kind of four clusters that are really most useful in explaining kind of these hot button disagreements.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And they are, one, the environment, so coral reefs, planet Earth, to the othered, which you could say is more marginalized people, but there's disagreements about what it means to be marginalized. So the othered are just folks who are outside the kind of center of American society or center of power. So I think trans folks, undocumented immigrants, Muslims. We've got the powerful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Those are maybe state troopers, corporate leaders, CEOs, and then finally the divine like God, Jesus, and the Bible. So we've got these four clusters, right? The environment, the othered, the powerful, and the divine.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And what we show is when we ask liberals and conservatives to rate how much each of those is especially vulnerable to victimization, how much they're likely to get harmed, how much they're likely to suffer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
one you find actually similarities i think it's important to point that out so everyone has the same kind of rank so liberal conservative doesn't matter you're one and two or the environment and the other and then it's the powerful and the divine but you show some really big differences across politics if you look at the data which is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Liberals, progressives see the othered and the environment as very vulnerable to harm, right, as oppressed in a sense. Whereas conservatives see these groups as a little more vulnerable to harm, but mostly in the middle.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And then if you look at the kind of powerful and the divine, you'll show that progressives see these targets as being almost totally incapable of suffering, right, invulnerable to harm. Whereas conservatives see them as higher, the powerful and the divine is pretty close to the other than the environment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
So what you get now, this landscape, if you can picture it, is this sideways V in a sense, right? With liberals really making this big difference between who they see as the oppressed and the oppressors and conservatives narrowing in and seeing everyone as more or less generally vulnerable to harm.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so you can think of it as like progressives think about a kind of group-based understanding of victimhood. Some groups are very susceptible to victimization. Some groups are very not, like CEOs. Whereas conservatives are more likely to think about victimhood in terms of individuals, right? Everyone can be harmed. Everyone bleed if they're cut.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so it doesn't matter if you grew up poor or rich, you can still be victimized. You can still be a target of crime or something like that. And so I think this pattern is really useful for explaining things like Black Lives Matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
That's a very progressive cause because progressives highlight the kind of if you are a black person, you're more likely to be victimized in all sorts of ways in society, live less long, be the target of crime. But if you're more powerful, if you're a corporate leader, you're less likely to be victimized as a whole.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
But I think for conservatives, they're, let's say, against affirmative action because they're like, look, it doesn't matter if you're black or white. If you don't get into college, despite the fact that you've got good grades, you're going to be upset about that. Right. And so let's try to keep the playing field even in a sense in terms of it doesn't matter if you're white or black.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
It just matters what your grades are. And so you can see this kind of like questions of victimization are really wrapped into all sorts of hot button issues. And I think this helps explain it, at least as a first pass.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
So the roots of moral typecasting come from the very kind of core of our moral judgments. And so if you think about a typical moral or immoral act, like a theft, one person is taking money from another person. Now, if one person was taking money from themselves, if they were the same person, they're just buying things, right? It's just, it's not immoral anymore.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Or think of something moral like rescuing someone who's drowning in a river. That's an amazing deed that you can do, right? It helps one person helping another, but now let's say that you're rescuing yourself in a river, well, now you're just going swimming, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
We have to contend with this idea that like within our tribes now, there's potentials for violence, potentials for harm. And so we needed a moral sense, a psychological tool to ensure that others didn't harm us, to safeguard us from interpersonal harm. And so that moral sense is just this kind of like moral conviction that those who perpetrate harm, especially within our in-group,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so there's this real tendency within our understanding of the moral world that the person doing the moral act, like the villain, let's say, when it comes to immorality, is not the same as the victim. They're different people. They're either or. And so what is true for a kind of specific moral act, like
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
theft or murder or abuse, we generalize more broadly and we typecast people as either generally more villains or as generally more victims, right? We see someone like an orphan as 100% a victim. And even if they do a bad thing, we're like, well, they had a really tough life and let's excuse them their sins.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
But a victim or sorry, a villain, someone who's done really evil things, we never think of their inner pain. We just think of the evil that they've done. And so we really split the world into kind of either or villains or victims.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And and thinking, yes, and thinking is hard to do, especially when it comes to morality, because we're so vested in this idea that these people over here are victims and these people over there are villains. But I think I try to encourage people just to move off a kind of either or of 100% to 0%. Like even if you're willing to say, and maybe in your own kind of arguments about morality too, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
No one wants to think of themselves as 100% the villain, obviously. But could you think of yourself as 1% the villain and 99% the victim in some kind of Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Daniel Katz- are immoral and if someone does something bad we get outraged at them and we kick them out of the group or we punish them somehow. Daniel Katz- And so, this kind of moral sense that we have today still really has its roots back in our kind of evolutionary past, where we first got into groups and we were first confronted with other people and their capacity to harm us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Thank you. We need to think of these conversations and not as just something that like happens immediately, right? Like we're going to talk about politics and like the 22nd mark, and then we're going to feel like we bridge devise at the 42nd mark. Something that takes longer to unfold, maybe 20 minutes, right. And go at it like slowly, carefully and obliquely.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Sure. It was an exciting story and it kicks off the book. I was driving, it was dark, the roads were wet. I just got my driver's license not too long ago. I was very confident in my abilities, probably too confident. I had friends in the back. We were driving to a movie theater. We were a little late.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Once we've established that we too are both human beings and we have deeply human concerns. So I think vulnerability is incredibly important, but it just takes a little while until you feel comfortable.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Great question. And that's a lot of what the book's about. I mean, politics kind of generate headlines, but I think what I'm really interested in is getting people to have better conversations and better relationships with their friends and their coworkers and their family members.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
I mean, I think everything we talked about can be applied here, but really think about when you're having a disagreement with someone, what are the harms that they're seeing? What are the harms that they're feeling? who are the victims that they're focused on and who are the victims that you're focused on?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And as we were driving towards the mall, a friend in the back says, you're going to miss the turn. You're going to miss the turn. And so I'm in the right lane. I swerve to turn left. I don't check my blind spot. I don't check to see if there's a car in the left-hand lane. There was a car there. I cut it off. I almost hit it. He's Reese on his wheel. We're squealing. We're spinning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And if you really think through these kinds of questions of harm and victimization and their perceptions and how those perceptions might differ from your perceptions, I think it's a powerful tool for allowing you to find common ground for understanding them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Your partner really feels they've been mistreated or victimized by something that you said, but you feel the same because of something else that happened earlier, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
showcasing those are not in a way to win again but as a way to understand each other provides you a way to connect and make it obvious that you're both concerned about the same things right both concerned about protecting yourself and really uplifting the other ideally in a relationship and so i think again if someone gets upset if someone gets morally outraged think about what harms are they seeing and if you feel that way think about what harms are you seeing
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And then the way you can make sense of those is by discussing them and the stories that you feel that connect to those harms.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
So we often talk about humility or intellectual humility in the classes that I teach and the kind of like circles that I run in universities. And I do think it's important for us to recognize that maybe we don't know everything right about how the world works and that learning is something that we need to do every day. But I also think we need to have some moral humility.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And it can seem like in some sense an oxymoron, right? Because part of being morally convicted on an issue is thinking that we know the truth, right? Like we're like committed to our moral feelings, right? To the judgments that we make. But again, from like 100% convicted to 99% or 98% is actually a really big jump, even though it's very small, right? It's big to go from 100% to not 100%.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And when I mean moral humility, it just means that maybe you don't know everything about a moral issue. Maybe there's something to learn from someone who maybe disagrees with you. Maybe they have an aspect of the truth that you maybe didn't think about. the first time, right, you thought about that issue.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And when I listen to people who have different moral opinions, when I come away from those conversations, I'm seldom thinking like, oh, I guess I was wrong, right? I still hold fast to my moral convictions, but I do think, oh, I learned something interesting about people on the other side.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And I think that's important for all of us to learn something and to have some moral humility as we move forward with our lives and with the current political moment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
I guess I'm on LinkedIn. I've got a lab website, Deepest Beliefs Lab, but we have a Substack that we should post more in, but it's Moral Understanding Newsletter and Moral Understanding Substack. So you can find us there and we'll post kind of fresh insights irregularly.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
We eventually stopped spinning. We'd stop, everything's still. I open my window, look out and this guy gets out of this brand new Mercedes and I apologize and he says, You're fucking dead. And he starts walking across the intersection. No one's around towards me. And I panic and I stomp on the accelerator. So I'm flying through the strip mall. It's like surprisingly empty.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
It's just the sodium glow, those orange lights. And I'm turning left, turning right. And he's right behind me, corralling me. Eventually corrals me into a loading dock behind a store like Home Depot. And he stops me against the loading dock with his car, kind of corrals me into a corner. terrified 16 year old. And he tries to open my door and I locked the door the last minute before he gets there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Thanks to a clear thinking friend in the back. And I opened the window a little bit, roll it down to apologize. And he starts slapping me and trying to like grab my collar and push me around. I'm like terrified. So this goes on for some time. The kind of slapping he's threatening to kill me. And then my friend in the back seat, the clear thinking one who told me to lock the door.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
She has a cell phone. Her mom is a manager of a cell phone store in the late nineties. Not many cell phones around, but she had one, one of those big bricks. And she says, look, we've got a cell phone. I'll call the cops. And so he slaps him around a couple more times and then it finally sinks in. And then he says, yeah, you call the cops and I'll tell them what you did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And then walked away, got into his car and peeled off. But that moment stuck with me because. Here I was feeling like the victim. It seemed very clear that I was the victim here. He was slapping me. He was threatening to kill me. And yet he felt like he was the morally righteous person. He felt that the police would be on his side.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so this is definitely a defining moment because I was confused at first for a long time. But then when I thought about it more, I realized that he too felt like a victim. And this really drove our competing kind of moral relationship. views of the situation. He was almost killed. I was driving recklessly. He maybe had his girlfriend in the car, who knows, right? I almost killed him.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And I think he felt morally justified. And of course, I don't excuse the violence, but it's allowed me to see things from his perspective. And that kicked off my interest in moral psychology.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Thanks very much. Yeah, I'm excited that people seem to find it useful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
That's interesting. It seems like everything fits together and makes more sense maybe from space. Although we can't all look down to the earth from space. But I think as human beings, we're really adapted to think of the here and now, to think of the kind of minor situations, the kind of social interactions that we're faced with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
I mean, you could imagine perhaps there's another astronaut on the space station that he has some friction with. I always does this one thing. And even from space, you can get, I can bug you. Like, I can't believe that this is always how... I don't know. I've never been to space. There's probably something like he does it this way and I don't think you should do it that way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Like the docking procedure he does is like all wrong. I don't know. And so you can imagine that there's still these little things that can really get under your skin and get you outraged even from a place like that. And so I do think there's times we can take a step back as I did. eventually thinking of that night.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
But I think, you know, we feel outraged so easily because we're such kind of moral animals and we're so focused on what other people are doing and whether what they're doing is right. And so I think it's really hard to put that at arm's length, but it is possible. And I think we need to think more about how to do that and bridge across these divides.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
I think there are a lot of folks, Amanda Ripley calls them conflict entrepreneurs, who have the microphone and are using it to incite division. And oftentimes these folks are using stories to incite fear, to highlight threats. And it turns out that that's a smart decision because that's how our moral minds operate, right? We're fixated on threats. We're worried about harms, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
We're driven by fear much of the time. And so they're using these kind of like storytelling, right? This person came across the border and the harm do this way, or this person tried to get an abortion and it didn't work this way, right? On the left and the right, like this person couldn't have a gun to defend themselves, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
There's all these stories that are propagated to make people feel outraged and entrenched in their political views, motivate voting bases. But I think it's time for those of us who kind of fight for good in a sense, everyday civility, better conversations to really recognize the power of storytelling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And I have lots of data that suggests that stories are the way to best bridge divides, to connect across others who disagree with us, particularly personal stories where we share the kind of harms that we're worried about, the suffering that we've had, the kind of vulnerabilities that we feel,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
I mean, those are the stories that really connect us with others and allow them to see us as human beings. And so I think, you know, media elites are already using stories, but I think we need to take it back in a sense and take it back more locally as we're having these conversations at Thanksgiving, at the workplace, whatever, in a way that we can connect with others.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
You bet. Right. So I'm not sure you said mortality. I think that was... But yes, harm is the kind of master key of morality. And I think if you think about our evolutionary arc as a species, when... we were, before we were Homo sapiens, when we were ancient hominids, there was a lot of threats around, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
It's easy to think now that we're apex predators, but if you look at the anthropological evidence, it turns out that we, as a species, kind of Australopithecus, or like ancient ancestors, were really more prey than predator. We were eaten by big cats. You could be gathering nuts and berries and look over and there'd be a big eagle that comes and grabs your kid and takes it away, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Because we used to be smaller then and eagles were still big. And so there's all these ways that we were hunted and we lived in fear. And so... To get over this kind of threat, we decided to live into groups. And so tribes allow us to protect ourselves. Every prey species lives in tribes and herds, whatever, or many of them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so we lived in groups, but then there's a new threat once we live in groups, right? We can better defend ourselves from predators, but now we have other people who can harm us, right? There's someone else and they want to take your food. There's someone else and they get angry at you and they're willing to fight you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
And so we have to contend with this idea that like within our tribes now, there's potentials for violence, potentials for harm. And so we needed a moral sense, a psychological tool to ensure that others didn't harm us, to safeguard us from interpersonal harm. And so that moral sense is just this kind of like moral conviction that those who perpetrate harm, especially within our in-group,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Daniel Katz- are immoral and if someone does something bad we get outraged at them and we kick them out of the group or we punish them somehow. Daniel Katz- And so, this kind of moral sense that we have today still really has its roots.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Kurt Gray on How to Bridge Moral Divides and Rebuild Trust | EP 591
Daniel Katz- Back in our kind of evolutionary past where we first got into groups and we were first confronted with other people and their capacity to harm us and, of course, today we're much safer than we were back in those ancient tribes, but we still have the same moral concerns about harm.