Transcriber: Maria Pericleous
Right.
Loud.
My dear friend Emile Bruneau was originally slated to give this talk.
He directed Penn's Peace in Conflict Neuroscience lab,
whose mission is to use scientific methods to figure out what works
to reduce violence and increase peace in the world.
But little less than two years after he was diagnosed with brain cancer
this fall, Emile completed what his daughter, Clara,
asked us to call his transition to magic.
As the New York Times beautifully summarized,
Emile’s research spread light and empathy around the globe.
This talk is a collaboration with Emile,
using ideas that he outlined
about how science can make the world a more peaceful and just place.
Emile: In my time living and working and traveling overseas,
I had a number of experiences
that have informed the research that I do now,
but there was really one that will never let me go.
When I went to Ireland during the troubles,
I went there to volunteer at a conflict resolution camp,
and this is a camp that brings together Catholic and Protestant kids
for a kind of shared experience.
After three weeks of this experience,
after me, a bunch of the counselors and a bunch of the kids had left,
a fight broke out between two boys,
and it immediately split the group down partisan lines,
and there was a full-scale brawl between the kids.
I went away from this experience
wondering what the hell we had just done,
that we went here with all these great intentions
and wonderful intuitions
about what would be effective
to decrease hostility between these groups.
And I really think that we actually made things worse.
Our intuitions aren’t necessarily the best guides of what’s going to work,
especially in intergroup conflict.
So I think one of the important things about this research
is it challenges our intuitions and might give us a more effective way forward.
Emily: After Emile was diagnosed with brain cancer,
when friends and loved ones visited their home,
the Bruneaus invited us to add a piece of yarn
to a loom set up in their living room.
Together, we constructed a multicolored tapestry
with strands as warm wishes from each of us
to wrap around Emile.
Many of us were new to the art form,
but one special thing about Emile and his family
is that they patiently helped us figure out how to participate,
even if it meant a few tries, weaving and unweaving,
to get it right.
In fact, taking mistakes and trying to figure out how to help us all do better
is part of what guided Emile’s life’s work.
After experiences traveling
and connecting with people in conflict regions around the globe,
Emile noticed common threads
in the thoughts and concerns that people had,
despite the vastly differing tapestries of history and context
where they were situated.
He saw firsthand how high the stakes are for intergroup conflict,
ranging from who gets job opportunities and who gets incarcerated,
to other forms of violence in war.
Emile realized that he, and we,
get things wrong about other people and other groups all the time.
And whereas many of us might feel uncomfortable with that realization,
Emile saw it as an important opportunity.
He knew that a single intervention can’t undo all of the threads at once,
and in many cases, we’re working not only against biases
woven into our individual minds,
but also bigger ropes
woven into the fabric of our society deliberately,
to benefit some and not others.
So Emile devoted his life to developing and testing tools
to identify and unravel the pieces of our mental tapestries
that lead to harmful bias,
and developing tools to motivate us to change policies
that could systematically unstitch those bigger ropes as well.
In thinking about how to approach this problem,
before becoming a neuroscientist,
like many of us,
Emile assumed that the brain’s job
was simply to take in information through the senses
and give us as accurate a readout of the world as possible,
to guide our thoughts and actions.
As neuroscientists, though,
we know that our brains don't always care about accuracy or truth.
They care about survival.
And to that end, they’ve been shaped over the course of evolution
for efficiency, not fidelity.
In fact, if you look behind the scenes,
our brains are full of prior assumptions,
shortcuts and biases.
We can see this at play in the visual system,
with what we call optical illusions.
For example, these circles have the illusion of three dimensionality.
This reveals a prior that’s held by our brains,
that our main light source will be from above, the Sun.
So anything that’s lit on top and shaded below must be a bump,
and anything that’s shaded above and lit from the bottom
must be an indentation.
Our brains are also so hyper attuned to facial expressions,
that our brains see faces even when they’re not there.
Why might our visual system be biased in these ways?
Well, the answer is pretty simple for visual illusions,
biases are mental shortcuts that help the brain work faster
and brains that are able to distinguish this lion from its background immediately,
or at least faster
than the brain of the poor creature standing next to them, aren’t eaten.
So having biases that allow the brain to take shortcuts and work faster,
helped our ancestors stay off the menu.
But biases aren’t limited to the visual system.
Biases in how we process sound
allow us to identify our caregivers at a very young age,
and biases also extend to how we process broader information about other people.
Have you ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is a moron,
and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?
George Carlin used this line in his comedy,
but it’s also a well-known, self-serving bias.
We tend to attribute anything bad that I do to the situation,
“I’m driving too slow because I’m lost.”
“I’m driving too fast because I’m late for an important appointment.”
But we attribute anything bad that others do
to their disposition, being a moron or a maniac.
This attribution bias also applies to groups.
Just like the brain’s visual system takes shortcuts,
humans’ bias tendency to categorize people into groups
and then give preference towards those who are closest to us,
or who we perceive as most relevant or similar,
is so strong that we can even conjure group identities out of thin air.
Research shows that if I were to give a random half of you a red shirt to wear
and the other half a blue shirt to wear,
red and blue shirters would start self segregating.
And being part of these two groups would start to shape our thoughts,
where red and blue shirters
would think of people from their newly anointed groups
as more intelligent, more trustworthy and even more attractive
than those from the opposite group.
And this is true, even if it’s revealed at the outset
that the group designations are completely arbitrary.
As with our optical illusion,
some of us may not have given a lot of thought
to the initial source of these social biases.
Yet, over time, as we engage the same mental shortcuts
about me and my group and you and your group,
the threads of these thoughts and mental shortcuts
get strengthened and reinforced,
and connected to other threads and enmeshed in our thinking.
This leaves us with a tangled set of illogical, irrational
and often unfair assumptions and beliefs about other groups
that, in many cases, are reinforced by systems of inequality.
But fortunately, we also have minds and brains that can be rewired
and in fact are fundamentally optimized to change.
So how does this immense potential for change express itself in us?
What kinds of change does it allow in our beliefs about others?
Emile believed that if what we know to be true of other groups
is connected in a web to irrational biases,
then challenging key assumptions about other groups
might be one way to find pieces of thread
that we can pull on, to help unweave our biases.
For example, one study
that I collaborated on with Emile, and Nour Kteily,
started with an observation.
When a diverse group of non-Muslim Americans
were asked how responsible Muslims are
for an act of violence by Muslim extremists,
they blamed Muslims about three times as much as they blamed Christians
for an equally horrific act of violence by Christian extremists.
This is one example of hypocrisy, that arises from our social biases.
Many of the folks answering these surveys
probably hadn’t thought much about the hypocrisy
and our tendency to blame one group, but not the other.
So the team created a simple activity
to help people identify threads they could pull on individually
and to push for change in society
through the policies they support.
Here’s what happened in the activity.
First, participants learned about a series of horrific acts
perpetrated by extremists,
such as a white nationalist Norwegian who committed acts of terrorism,
killing 77 people and wounding over 300,
and citing his white identity as a motivation for the attacks.
After each of these true stories, we asked how responsible the bigger group,
in this case white people in general, are for the acts of this extremist,
and how responsible they thought they were, personally, for these actions.
Then we turned the question around, and described acts by Muslim extremists
and asked how responsible Muslim people in general are,
for the acts of the extremists,
as well as how much to hold individual Muslims accountable.
Finally, we asked how much they supported different anti-Muslim policies.
What we found was that this simple activity of highlighting hypocrisy
and blaming one group, but not the other,
first causes people to reduce the amount they blamed Muslim people in general
for the acts of extremists,
compared to people who didn’t do the exercise.
Critically, it also reduced their support for anti-Muslim policies.
Emile and collaborators then replicated these findings in Spain
and showed that not only did the activity
reduce collective blame of Muslims as a group,
and reduce support for anti-Muslim policies,
the idea stayed with people,
and they still reported less collective blame of Muslims
and less support for anti-Muslim policies,
a month later, and a year later,
when the research team followed up.
Of course, any one study or intervention takes only a small step forward.
For example, noticing that collectively blaming other groups,
while not taking responsibility for our own is hypocritical,
is just one small stitch we can grab a hold of,
in the larger tapestry of our biases.
In addition, at the same time
that we tried to reduce collective blame for marginalized groups,
in this case reducing Islamophobia,
Emile, his collaborators, and many others
are also building on the decades and centuries of research
and work by scholars of color, activists and peace builders
to encourage people from dominating groups,
such as white Americans,
to recognize our individual and collective responsibility
to unravel the systems of advantage that we benefit from,
and re-weave a society that’s more equitable.
Emile’s research also shows
that people whose groups have the most power
benefit from actively listening to and reading stories
from people from marginalized groups,
whereas people who are part of marginalized groups
benefit more from being heard.
Finally, Emile’s work, and the work of many others,
shows that our assumptions about members of other groups
are reliably false.
So what can we do when our biases poke into conscious awareness
like a stray thread of thought,
as when we noticed that it was hypocritical
to blame one group and not another?
Or when we assume that members of another group don’t like us.
A common response might be terror, defensiveness, push it back down.
But Emile and the activists, peace builders and scholars
whose work he admired, would encourage the opposite,
actively look for and notice
the pieces of stray thread of thought that you can grab onto.
You can see stray threads in the moments
when a racist or sexist or homophobic or anti-Semitic thought or comment
comes into your conscious awareness as you go about your day.
In those moments, you’re being provided with insight
into how your brain is working,
and a reminder of the importance of doing this work.
Instead of tamping down the stray thread, grab a hold and pull.
What's that thread connected to?
It’s connected to a whole system of threads and ropes
that uphold racism and sexism and other biases.
And one of the ways to unweave our own bigotry
is to pull hard on that thread
and push for change in the systems that we’re a part of.
We can pull on these threads by getting better at facing discomfort,
getting involved with organizations and groups
where we meet and develop relationships with people from other communities,
listening openly, not making snap judgments
and actively taking time to untangle the web of our own biases.
This unraveling then makes space to allow our brains the opportunity to change,
to rewire, to learn and to grow as a community.
I’ll leave you with Emile’s words.
Emile: So this is a tough fight against intergroup conflict,
but isn’t it worth that type of effort isn’t it worth that type of fight?
You know, we know the realities of conflicts
by all projections that kind of suffering is going to increase.
I am trying to say that my goal,
our goal,
should be more dramatic
than just doing good science,
although that’s important, and wonderful and good.
But but we have the potential to do more.
We have the potential to walk through darkness and spread light.
And the nice thing is
that this force is in us and communal.
It’s not owned.
And the best way to activate a communal force
is to be a community.
So that’s why we’re here.