so the fundamental thing that I learned
from Paul Rossum is to see us as these
amazing omnivores this is part of our
survival strategy even more than other
other Apes we are just brilliant
omnivores and we have the Omnivore's
Dilemma which is we've got to be
interested in all kinds of new stuff
we're not tied to any place we can roam
on to a whole new continent so we're
interested in stuff but stuff has all
kinds of toxins and microbes we have to
be careful about that stuff and so these
motives have to be in tension and this
is actually an interesting way to
understand the left-right difference you
have to have both motives but if so
imagine two siblings one of whom is set
more towards trying new stuff seeking
out new stuff and the other is a little
more fearful and more like whoa no let's
you know let's not try that let's stay
with what's tried-and-true I mean that's
progressivism and conservatives and
that's the origins of it and if you look
at kids behavior at the age of two or
three it does predict how they'll vote
much later not hugely but there is a
clear prediction there so so disgust is
part of a regulatory system about our
engagement with the world and whether we
are just sort of out there and you know
we we seek out variety and diversity we
think diversity is just a great thing or
whether we want a little more order
structure predictability conservatives
are neater then progressives if you take
photos of their rooms you know you can
actually you know cleanliness an
organization you can predict how they
vote disgust it turns out what's really
cool about disgust in modern politics is
if you look at all the different things
that we're fighting over especially in
this country are culture wars over you
know going back a few decades you know
sex drugs the flag immigration all of
these things I have a study with my
colleagues was led by Seneca Leyva in
which we asked all these cultural war
attitudes of people and we also had
their scores in the discuss scale but
one of the foundations of morality is
sanctity impurity and it relates to
discuss what we found is that if you
know if you know what people's
left-right how they place themselves on
the left/right scale you can pretty much
predict where they fall out on most
culture war attitudes except for those
that
Oh Don or implicate sanctity or purities
what I mean is flag burning okay do you
think you know do you think that people
should have the right to burn the
American flag or the country's flag as
an expression as a political action what
do you think people just give some
answer not one to seven scale and people
on the right think you know more like
they say no people on the Left yes
people are score high on loyalty are
more likely to say no people who lower
end it say yes and that's even taking
account of where they're on the left
right dimension but here's the cool
thing it's only if you add in the purity
or sanctity thing that you can really
understand what people are doing because
some people see the flag not as just a
piece of cloth they see it as having
some innate essence some something
sacred about it which must be protected
and so so this is true they think of it
as a unifying Center exactly that's
right so if there's something sacred and
this is that this is the central piece
of my work around politics and morality
is the psychology of sanctity
if you hold something sacred then your
team circles around it and it's only
those who circle around with you and
sometimes literally circle around like
Muslims at prayer in Mecca they
literally circle the kvass circle is a
very primitive ancient it feels right to
circle something but even if even if you
do it symbolically or you all bow at the
same time that binds you together
children do that with their mothers when
they when they engage in exploratory
behavior right well they use their
mother as a center of the world and
children differ in the degree to which
they'll move outward from their mothers
so they move out until they they they
trip over there their uncertainty
threshold it's a distance and so so the
more exploratory kids who are lower
negative emotion will go out farther
before they come back to their mother so
the mothers a center and you know that
that would be associated symbolically
with the idea of the center as a mother
land or potentially as a father land
that's right that makes sense so this
way that we're we are incredibly
symbolic creatures we're not just out to
make as much money as we can we're
symbolic and social creatures and this
psychology of sanctity or purity has
become really important not just on the
right it's always been important for
especially religious conservatives we're
beginning to see it even on the campus
and this is why I think we see some of
the odd things we see on campus that the
campus must be kept as a sacred and pure
space one of the things that really
alarms me about what's happening on
campus the last couple years is that the
older idea we had that it's a place for
contesting ideas it's a it's a zone of
enormous choice people can take what
courses they want to say what they want
it's kind of a wonderful free-for-all
with some with norms of respect it's now
becoming much more of a religious zone
where the perimeter of the campus is the
the boundaries and within its if they're
almost there blasphemy laws basically
and I really started noticing this when
you look at the videos of the Middlebury
protest when charles Murray spoke at
Middlebury and as everybody knows he was
shouted down so the students are
chanting and they're chanting in unison
and it seems like a religious revival
meeting and they're swaying and they're
saying they're sacred in a racist sexist
anti-gay charles murray go away it's
like a ritual incantation so that's all
I mean this the space is safe and it's
safe look I'm not mature yet so far all
this happening is they're binding
together they're moving at you know
synchronous movement and call and
response so it it's using a lot of
tropes from religion and religious
worship but here's the cool thing when
the administrator I forget who it is
comes on to say okay we have moved we're
moving the talk and then you hear a
couple people screaming up off campus
off campus and he says to another
location on campus and there's like oh
no no because you know look no one had
to go to this talk so everyone could
have just stayed home and the students
did succeed in shutting down the venue's
they could have declared a victory but
it's not a full victory unless he is
physically off the campus we can't have
him speaking on campus because that
defiles us that pollutes us we must shut
that down and that's where I started
saying wow this is like full-blown
psychology of religion durkheim sanctity
purity blasphemy and that I think you
know that doesn't describe most
that that describes a sort of the core
those who really have their identities
wrapped up in this okay so so what's
discussed I wanted to I wanted to ask
you a couple things about that
so you know the big five research into
political differences basically shows
that the Liberals are high in trade
openness and lo and trade
conscientiousness and the Conservatives
are the reverse but we've fragmented
conscientiousness into orderliness and
industriousness with a big five aspect
scale and orderliness is strongly
associated with disgust so so right
right right exactly it does sound a lot
like Freud but it but it also is in
accordance with your observations that
conservatives have metre spaces for
example so so now in their meetings
start on time yes and yeah exactly right
right so so then the the nexus for
political beliefs seems to be openness
it's not that's exploratory tendency
that you talk about exploration of ideas
and creativity and lo orderliness and so
then I thought well why in the world
would why would the political Nexus go
across those dimensions which are some
relatively uncorrelated then I thought
and this is in keeping with your work on
discussed is that it's an issue of
borders which of course seems more or
less self-evident in the wake of Trump's
election when he talked about borders
but you might say and I think this is
reasonable that the conservative is
someone who wants the borders between
categories to remain intact no matter
what level of analysis so its borders
from the highest resolution level of
cognition all the way up to the actual
physical borders of rooms towns states
countries all of that so the borders
should be thicker and the reason they
want that now there was a paper
published in PLoS ONE I don't know if
you saw it it was a couple of years ago
it was a mind-boggling paper it should
have been like front page news as far as
I was concerned and what the researchers
did was between countries and then
within provinces or states within
countries they correlated the level of
of frequency of infectious disease with
authoritarian political beliefs and
found a walloping
relation was like 0.6 it was one of the
highest buy that for those of you who
don't know social scientists never
discover anything that's associated with
anything else at a correlation of 0.6
other than heritability right other than
heritability yes and so what they found
was that the higher the prevalence of
infectious disease the higher the
probability of totalitarian or
authoritarian political attitudes and
then they controlled for governance
because one of the questions was was
this top-down authoritarianism or bought
him up authoritarianism and the answer
was that it was bought him up okay and
so I thought about that in - from two
perspectives simultaneously at the time
okay so we identified discussed
sensitivity with orderliness so let's
say a fundamental sub trait then I was
reading this book that was called
Hitler's Table Talk and it was a it was
the recordings of virtually everything
he said at dinner from 1939 to 1940 -
yeah so it's a spontaneous utterance
assay and it's full of discussions about
Jews and gypsies and all the people he
tormented but what's really interesting
is all the languages discussed no it's
not fear so so Hitler's basic metaphor
was that the Aryan race and country was
a pure body and that it was assaulted by
parasites right and then I remembered
what happened to the Native Americans
when the Europeans showed up and shook
hands what happened was that 95% of them
were dead within 50 years right because
of smallpox and measles and so that that
border issue that separates
conservatives from liberals let's say is
the conservatives say the novel is
potentially contaminated it's not so
much that it's dangerous that's
different that's fear its contaminating
and the Liberals say hold on a minute if
you make the borders too thick then
information can't pass through exactly
that's the Omnivore's Dilemma right
there right right and and then since we
have a biological architecture on which
our cognitive platforms are erected we
have the same attitude towards abstract
information which would be ideas that we
do to things like food or illness right
right and so we can think of an invading
idea or a polluting idea or a
contaminating idea
that's right now I'm a big fan of George
lay cough metaphors we live by that we
yeah we use our bodily our bodily
schemata to think about abstract things
like politics and like what our policies
should be about borders and immigration
there's a Canadian psychologist mark
Schuyler he and his colleagues have
developed what they call an account of
these the behavioral immune system yeah
right that we don't just try to you know
microbes killed probably many more of
our ancestors than did lions and tigers
and bears and so it whoever can keep
themselves and their children
from being exposed to fatal illnesses
wins the evolutionary game and so a lot
of that is judging carefully about
people is he dangerous is she dangerous
and that's both for sexuality for
contact for all kinds of Association so
yeah in a lot of ways our emotions and
our bodily interactions structure how we
think and feel about about well even
with the black death in Europe I mean so
the black death occurred in Europe when
the Europeans started to move around the
world and they brought back rats that
were infected exactly so so what you saw
there was both of those forces at work
at the same time so the European
expansion produced a tremendous
interchange of ideas from all around the
world that's globalization but it wiped
out somewhere between 30 and 60 percent
of the population at the same time so
wouldn't it be good if in every society
or every organization we had some people
who specialized in specialized in saying
hey what are the opportunities and then
we had other people who specialized and
saying well but what are the risks and
it just so happens that a lot of people
have trouble doing all that in
themselves when we have systems that are
well constituted with people who have
different personalities and different
motives and goals we actually can get
better outcomes we can have a discussion
between them
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