Sana Qadar: There is just something about youth that makes you think you're invincible. Kurt Gray was a pretty typical teenager in that he thought he was invincible, especially behind the wheel of a car. So when he and some friends were running late to the movies one night, he hit the gas.
Dr Kurt Gray: So it had just rained and I had gotten my driver's license not long ago and it was dark. So I was rushing up the road. I wasn't paying a lot of attention because the music was blasting and we were talking about high school gossip. And I was just about to blow by the exit when a friend over the back shouted over the din, you're going to miss it. Turn left, turn left. And so I immediately turned left reflexively. I didn't look at my blind spot.
Sana Qadar: That's too bad, because in his blind spot was a brand new Mercedes-Benz.
Dr Kurt Gray: I hear it, see it, obviously, you know, we start squealing and spinning and eventually we stop. There's steam coming up from the road, the orange sodium lights. And there's no one around, just the two of us cars. And I unroll my window to apologize. And the guy gets out of the car, looking so angry, and he points to me and says, you're fucking dead. I'm going to kill you. You know, I freeze. And then I do what seemed to make sense and I slam on the accelerator.
Sana Qadar: Kurt starts driving in a blind panic. He doesn't really know where he's going and he ends up driving into a strip mall parking lot where he's cornered.
Dr Kurt Gray: He gets out of the car, menacingly walks over to us. And I lock the door at the last second and I unroll my window a little bit to apologize. And then he reaches into my window as I'm apologizing. He's trying to unlock the door, slapping his hand away while apologizing. It's like a very awkward thing to do.
Sana Qadar: This is terrifying and comedic now with distance.
Dr Kurt Gray: Exactly, with distance. Eventually, my friend in the backseat, she holds up a cell phone, which was still rare at the time. And she says, if you don't stop, I'll call the cops. He stops and says, yeah, you call the cops and I'll tell them what you did.
Sana Qadar: Now this comment confused Kurt and it incensed him because, yes, of course, it was wrong that Kurt had nearly smashed into the guy that he could have killed him. But now Kurt felt like he was the victim, this guy cornering him and threatening him.
Dr Kurt Gray: This comment was so strange to me because to me it was obvious that I was the victim. He was literally slapping me around, literally threatened to kill me. And yet he says that the cops would be on his side, right, that he feels righteous. And I realized, you know, through time, through my research especially, I realized that we both felt convinced that we were the victims in that situation. And that feeling of threat, of harm gave us the moral conviction that we were right.
Sana Qadar: Kurt Gray is all grown up now, and he's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he directs the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. He's also, hopefully, a better driver. But the fact that both he and the Mercedes driver thought they were the bigger victims, that they were most harmed, Kurt says that explains the crux of why we get stuck in all kinds of heated arguments. On everything from abortion to, yes, road rage.
Dr Kurt Gray: It's so self-evident to us that our moral convictions are true, right? Your opinion on immigration or abortion or taxes. But then someone else can have exactly the opposite opinion and also think that they are absolutely true.
Sana Qadar: Kurt explores all of this in his new book called Outraged, why we fight about morality and politics and how to find common ground. So today, we're digging into the psychology behind our moral outrage. I'm Sana Qadar. This is All in the Mind.
Sana Qadar: It certainly feels like we're more outraged than ever before, thanks to social media. But as we know, feelings aren't necessarily fact. So is this true?
Dr Kurt Gray: Scientists haven't tracked feelings of outrage per se, but lots of other indicators do suggest that we are more outraged and more polarized than ever. As you point out, social media, a big contributor. And also, I think another driver of this is that increasingly because we're so divided with different media streams, different media diets, we now tend to have different core assumptions about what causes harm, about what creates suffering and who the victim is in situations. So almost every hot button issue that you can think about, illegal immigration, abortion, these are ultimately arguments about who is most vulnerable to suffering and whose suffering are we really obligated to prevent. And so with abortion, for instance, there's a debate about is it the fetus that really needs protecting or is it pregnant women, women searching for reproductive rights? And so we've got this really intense tradeoff here. And both sides are ultimately concerned about protecting someone from harm. But conservatives make a really different kind of base assumption about fetuses than liberals, which is that a fetus is like a baby and can suffer harm. And so it's just one example of how your assumptions about who can suffer, you know, maybe you get it from your pastor, from the news, right? Those things change your moral convictions.
Sana Qadar: But disagreements over political, sometimes moral issues have become so heated in the statesespecially, that two nationally representative surveys conducted by researchers at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland found about 15 percent of self-identifying Republicans and 20 percent of self-identifying Democrats think the country would be better off if members of the opposing party just died. Which is incredible to me. And I don't think that vibe would be similar here in Australia. I think that's particularly American. But psychologically and evolutionarily, how have we gotten to this point, though?
Dr Kurt Gray: Well, yeah, it's a good question. If you think back in the midst of time, I mean, this question really gets at who we are as a human being. And it starts with a misconception, I think, which is that human beings are apex predators. And we have been incredible apex predators for maybe 100,000 years, maybe a little more. It turns out, though, that for the vast scope of our evolution, we were not apex predators. We were terrified primates hiding from the real predators, like saber-toothed cats or giant eagles. And so we're kind of hardwired to be on guard for threats. And so, you know, fast forward a little bit, right, the way we stayed safe from these predators is we lived in groups. You know, we banded together, built walls, stayed on the lookout for each other.
Sana Qadar: But then we faced another threat, which was other people. Other people could steal from us or they could murder us.
Dr Kurt Gray: And so we needed a tool to keep us safe from other people harming us. And if other people harmed us, we needed a way to get outraged enough to kick them out of our group, to punish them.
Sana Qadar: And that tool is morality. We developed stringent ideas about right and wrong. And if someone did something wrong, something immoral, outrage would be one punishment. And Kurt says this moral sense in our minds compels us to cooperate and not harm others and to get angry when other people might harm us or vulnerable members of society.
Dr Kurt Gray: And so that's a force that kind of keeps us together as a society. But I should add, it only applies to people within our group. And if there's another group out there, well, they could be a threat too. And so this feeling of righteousness, well, we can also use that to harm those who might attack us, those with different beliefs. And so there's this tension with morality, right? We're trying to protect ourselves from harm, but we're also willing to harm the villains we see out there in the world.
Sana Qadar: Kurt says the problem is that these days, the threats we face are less obvious.
Dr Kurt Gray: So no longer are we threatened by saber-toothed cats. And no longer are we really threatened by murder from other people in our tribes or cities. I mean, there's still crime, but people are much more afraid of crime than I think is rational. There are studies showing that people who live in inner cities where there's lots of crime, they fear crime just as much as people who live in the suburbs where there's almost no crime, right? So something's weird in our minds, which is that no matter how safe we are, we still fear violence in the same way. And so what that means is if there's no obvious threats, no obvious violence around us, we begin to see as threatening more benign or ambiguous threats.
Sana Qadar: It's why arguments on social media, on everything from your favorite celebrity to more significant issues like abortion, can inspire such vitriol and rage. And it goes some way to explaining what could possibly lead so many Republicans and Democrats to say the world would be better off if their political opponents were dead. But if this is our evolutionary programming, then is there any hope of overcoming this pattern? Well, Kurt thinks there is. And step one in that process is to acknowledge that harm. And a concern with preventing harm, is what all our arguments over moral issues, over what counts as right or wrong, boil down to. That's what they're ultimately about. But you might be wondering why that is step one. And before I can explain that further, I need to actually backtrack on what I've just said. Because this idea that harm is at the core of all our moral arguments, it's actually not what all psychologists who study morality think. Allow me to detour for a moment into a somewhat academic, but also relevant to our everyday lives, debate.
Dr Kurt Gray: So everyone in moral psychology, scientists, believe that harm is important for our moral convictions. We are all motivated to avoid physical and emotional suffering. Some other psychologists, namely Jonathan Haidt.
Sana Qadar: You might recognize the name. That's the guy who wrote The Anxious Generation and the book The Coddling of the American Mind.
Dr Kurt Gray: Some other psychologists believe that the moral mind is carved up into other little mechanisms. He calls them foundations. And the idea there is that some people, especially conservatives, have a richer moral sense because they have more moral foundations.
Sana Qadar: Meaning they care not just about harm and fairness, but also things like loyalty and authority and purity. Whereas progressives are primarily concerned with questions of harm and fairness.
Dr Kurt Gray: And so this theory, I think, is not only bad for discourse because it says conservatives have a bigger, better morality than liberalism. It's also, I think, scientifically not supported. So it is the case that conservatives are more likely to care about the opinion of church leaders or to care about premarital sex as a purity. But progressives also care about purity, like hot yoga, juice cleanses, right? Those are kind of liberal purity concerns. Liberals are concerned about listening to civil rights leaders as authorities. There's really no difference in these kind of values. And really where there's no difference is in the fact that liberals and conservatives are all ultimately grounding their moral convictions in concerns about harm. And so we've run so many studies that show that no matter what value you're talking about, no matter what moral keyword you bring up, right? Industriousness, punctuality, compassion, bravery. But it turns out that how much you care about those values, those kind of core moral convictions, is connected to how much you see them as connected to harm. And so at the end of the day, if you kind of dig deep down, it's harm underneath whatever seems to be lying on top.
Sana Qadar: And so does that have any effect day to day on our lives? Or is this purely like an academic debate?
Dr Kurt Gray: I think it does have an effect. And that's because if you think that there is some moral basis that you can't understand, so the argument is, look, maybe conservatives have a sense of purity and liberals don't. And so they can never understand each other, right? There's some unbridgeable chasm between the morals of the left and the right. On the other hand, if it's the case that we all share a common currency in our moral minds, then we can always find a way to understand someone on the other side if we can understand the harms they see. And I think that's a powerful way of bridging these chasms that have been created from social media, from political outrage.
Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Kurt Gray is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he's the author of Outraged, Why We Fight About Morality and Politics and How to Find Common Ground. So Kurt argues, and his research suggests, that everyone is ultimately worried about the same thing, harm. But their ideas of what causes the most harm and who is most vulnerable, that's what differs, based on personal politics, religion, culture, life experience, all kinds of things. The problem is there are a few factors that often cloud our ability to grasp this. One is our tendency to engage in something called moral typecasting.
Dr Kurt Gray: Just as we typecast actors into enduring moral roles, so if you run into Daniel Radcliffe, you don't think Daniel Radcliffe, right? You think Harry Potter. So too do we people into moral roles. We tend to see people as either villains or victims, but not both. And the reason for this is that within a typical moral act or immoral deed, like abuse, there's one person who's the abuser, one person who's the victim, and they're not the same person. And so we kind of like project this either or villain or victim mindset out onto the world when we make sense of the behavior of other people.
Sana Qadar: But not all situations are quite so clear-cut. In fact, many of the conflicts we face are way more complex.
Dr Kurt Gray: What typecasting means is that we strip others of their complexity and simplify them as either you're 100% a victim, it's not your fault, you did nothing wrong, or 100% a villain and say you can't suffer and you're only to blame. And you see these perceptions entrench and incite conflict because your side feels like the victim, I didn't do anything wrong, you know, you started it, right? And they feel the same thing. It makes it really hard to have conversations.
Sana Qadar: This kind of dynamic has been observed in all kinds of intergroup conflicts, from Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, to Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, to Israel and Palestine.
Dr Kurt Gray: I mean, any long-standing conflict, there's always legitimate actions, big or small, that involve villainy and there's victimhood. But what you can do, and this is, you know, often called competitive victimhood, you compete to be the ultimate victim because if you're the victim, you're not to blame, right? Because typecasting means victims are not villains. So no matter what side you're on, both sides have this tendency to really simplify the world and say, well, we're the victims and you're the villains.
Sana Qadar: And how do we bust through that inclination? How do we move past that quirk of our psychology?
Dr Kurt Gray: So one way to move past this is just to go a little bit off of 100% 0%. Like maybe I'm 99% victim and you're 1% victim, but now I've kind of understood and recognized that you are at least a little bit victimized and now we can have conversations. And this isn't just in geopolitical conflict, but also, you know, conflicts between spouses, between coworkers, right? So many times in relationships you think, oh, this person's doing all these terrible things. They're the villain and I'm just the victim. And they think the same thing. And the way you come together is you say, well, I still want to have a relationship with you. Now I recognize that I was kind of the villain a little bit and you're kind of the victim. And once someone feels validated, then they can better have conversations because now no one is cast as just evil and no one likes to be seen as just evil.
Sana Qadar: Kurt has some more specific advice as well on how you can go about talking with someone you disagree with productively.
Dr Kurt Gray: One, you can just ask yourself, what harms do they see? Because we often don't think that the other side is trying to protect themselves or anything, right? We think they're trying to burn it all down. And people have a misconception about what best creates respect in conversations about politics. And so we asked hundreds of Americans, imagine you're having a political conversation with someone on the other side. What would make you respect them? The majority of people said facts. I would respect when someone just gave me the facts without any editorializing. And so we said, okay, great. Here are the facts. And they say, well, not those facts. Those are not real facts. (Both laugh) Right? Those are fake facts. So we have different media ecosystems, different facts. And so not only do we not agree on the facts, but it turns out facts are not really relevant to questions of morality because those things we feel in our gut and those things are about harm. But turns out the most powerful way to bridge divides is through storytelling. And, you know, as a journalist, I think this is probably obvious to you, but not obvious to a lot of people, right?
Sana Qadar: This is why we lead everything with a story. Absolutely. Yeah.
Dr Kurt Gray: Exactly right. The car chase story. Exactly. You know, we evolved telling stories around the campfire. Even now, if you sit around the dining room table, you're not like, well, you know, if you think about the distribution of beliefs on this particular issue, you know, never. You think here's a story and that's what's interesting. And so when it comes to morality, we respect those who tell us stories to back up their beliefs, especially when those stories are grounded in experiences of harm.
Sana Qadar: This isn't just Kurt's opinion. It's what research from his lab has found across several studies. And let me just give you one example. So in one study, they would have a researcher grab two passerbys on the university campus and raise the topic of gun control with these two people. Now, one of these people would be a random and the other would actually be a research assistant, someone who was in on the study. And whatever the random person thought about gun control, the assistant would take the opposing view.
Dr Kurt Gray: They were often pro-gun control. And then our accomplice always took the opposing opinion. And she started out real strong. She says you believe in gun control. I can't believe that anyone who thinks that is un-American, right? Like those are fighting words. We wanted to get people feeling a little angry. And then she followed that up with the reason she believed that people should have more guns. And she either said, look, here's a specific statistic. I forget the statistic now, but she's like, here's a statistic about how many people use guns to protect themselves every year. Or here's a story. When I was a kid, my mom used a gun to defend herself from a homeinvader. Then we recorded those conversations. We had a team of research assistants rate them for respectfulness. And it turns out using stories led to more respect from the other person and also led her to be seen as more rational. And that's interesting, right? Because we usually think of the other side as stupid, as irrational. But if you ground your political views in experiences of harm, even if we disagree with those views, we can understand the desire to protect yourself.
Sana Qadar: And yeah, you can't tell her that event didn't happen, i.e. those facts aren't real. That's her story. That's harder to kind of fight against. And that taps into your personal empathy, I suppose.
Dr Kurt Gray: Exactly. And that's a great point. So in other studies, we found that personal experiences seem more true. And I'm a scientist. I still think facts are important. They're just not what you should lead with when you're about to start a conversation with someone who disagrees with you.
Sana Qadar: And if you don't have a personal story of harm, how do you engage in that conversation in a way that still maintains that respect and empathy?
Dr Kurt Gray: Right. So not everyone has compelling stories of harm, but we all are motivated to protect ourselves. And so I think you need to let the human shine through the kind of political division. In the book, I talk about three steps you can do that are all, I'm not going to say easy, but are at least straightforward for having more respectful conversations. So the three steps are connect, invite, validate. Connect — C, invite -I, V -validate, spell CIV. And it's the beginning of more civil conversations. So that's how you can remember. And so connecting is just talking to the person as if they're a person. You know, it shouldn't be hard, but sometimes it is. And so the way you can kind of connect with someone as a person is to ask them questions.
Sana Qadar: Specifically deep questions, which are questions that get at a person's values, beliefs, and experiences. We covered deep questions in a whole lot more detail in an episode last year on super communicators, which was super popular. And so if you want to learn more about deep questions, we'll link to that episode in our show notes.
Dr Kurt Gray: So that's the first step. Connect as human beings. Get at someone's hopes and fears and worries. Second, invite. Everyone likes being invited to a party. No one likes being demanded to attend a party. It's the same with sharing political views, right? If you want to know how someone's thinking, say, I know you voted differently than me in the last election. And I'm trying to understand why I'd really love to hear about it. If you'd feel comfortable enough to share it, right? That's really different than how could you vote for that person? Tell me. And then the third step, the V of CIV is validate. So once someone musters up the courage, right? And it's hard to share your beliefs, especially when you're worried someone might argue against you.
Sana Qadar: Yeah.
Dr Kurt Gray: Is to validate them. This doesn't mean agreeing with them. It doesn't mean giving up your moral convictions. It means doing something like saying, thanks, I appreciate you sharing that. And if I'm listening correctly, I think this is what you're saying. And so that's a conversation now, right? And now they won't feel so threatened if maybe you challenge them. And I actually have a story of having a conversation like this in a in an Uber.
Sana Qadar: Oh, yeah?
Dr Kurt Gray: So I'm taking Uber to the airport. As soon as we close the door, the driver asked what I do. I tell him I study morality and politics. And then he basically says, oh, boy, here we go. I have a really unique political view. I am a Christian nationalist, but not the typical Christian nationalist.
Sana Qadar: Okay. What does that mean?
Dr Kurt Gray: Yeah, exactly. What does that mean? And that's a good question. And that's the question that I ask, right? I say, I don't know many Christian nationalists. I don't know even what the typical one thinks. And so I'd be interested to hear how your views are maybe different from that typical Christian nationalist. And so for 20 minutes, he tells me about his views and he's a little libertarian, but he believes that this is how society should be structured and how the family should work. We go through it all. And it's clear I'm interested. I'm trying to understand. I connect. I invite. I validate. And then here's the interesting thing. As we're pulling into the airport, we start talking about abortion. Keep it contentious. And he says, I just think anyone who's pro-choice seems like they support concentration camps as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, right. So there's this old adage that if you have a conversation about morality long enough, especially on the internet, someone gets compared to Hitler. And so it happened. And what I did then was pushed back. I said, look, if we're going to have a reasonable conversation about politics, about morality, you can't go comparing half the country to the Nazis. Like, that's not how they are. And it's just not an acceptable thing to do in conversation. And he said, I completely agree. I'm sorry. I'll take a step back. I didn't mean it like that. It's just hard to express my views. And I just said that.
Sana Qadar: That is fascinating.
Dr Kurt Gray: Right. For the next minute, we kind of kept on talking. But the reason we could do that is because I tried to understand. It was a good faith effort to understand his views and connect. And now we can kind of be like, well, let's have a civil conversation. Right. But I couldn't have challenged him initially. Right.This kind of this connection
Sana Qadar: that would have just devolved into defensiveness and sort of not great stuff.
Dr Kurt Gray: Right. Exactly right. Because he knew that I didn't think he was a terrible human being. Right. He knew that I knew he was concerned about protecting his family in a different way than I thought would be the best way to protect your family and society. But he knew I respected him. And then the conversation could go better. But I think a challenge to these conversations is right because we're so entrenched in our political party, Congress is a conservative. Right. We feel like even trying to understand is somehow like betraying our side. Like if you just are seeking to understand the other side, you're somehow betraying the cause. But I think it's not true. I mean, I talk about this stuff a lot and many people are suspicious. They're like both sides. I'm like, no, you can hold fast to your convictions. But if you want to affect change, if you want to advance your goals, you need to understand the people who are opposed to those goals and you need to build coalitions. So even just from a pragmatic perspective, you need to understand them. And from a democracy perspective, democracy flourishes when there's distinct ideas and you need to understand what could be interesting and what section of them could be true to kind of navigate the messiness of our modern life.
Sana Qadar: Yeah. And I guess if you don't do that, you kind of are stuck in metaphorical trench warfare forever.
Dr Kurt Gray: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Sana Qadar: That is Kurt Gray, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Outrage, Why We Fight About Morality in Politics and How to Find Common Ground. That's it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to producers Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen, as well as sound engineer Roi Huberman. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next week.
Brought to you by ABC Radio National / Presented by Sana Qadar