Social Science Bites – Social Science Space

“Don’t talk to strangers’ is a common bit of parental advice that many end up following the rest of their lives. But those who follow a blanket prohibition on starting a conversation with someone they don’t know can often miss out on the delights and even the mental benefits that such chats can provide, says Gillian Sandstrom.  

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Sandstrom – an associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex – walks interviewer David Edmonds through some of the experimental findings she and her peers have made that back up that belief. “We’re finding some unique benefits of talking to strangers. So we’re finding that it increases your intellectual humility. So it makes you more open to the fact that other people know things that you don’t. And we’re finding that it makes you feel more trusting and more positively about other people.” 

Sandstrom herself reports having been shy in her younger days, such as when she worked as a computer programmer before studying psychology in her native Canada. “Fast forward many years and now I just absolutely love it,” she says, “And I find it just enjoyable and valuable and also meaningful. And so I wanted to do some research to understand, is it just me and is it something that I can then help others benefit from as well?” 

She has just completed a book, Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life, that fleshes out both her journey and her work. 

The transcript of her chat with Edmonds appears below, and the podcast can be downloaded by right-clicking this link. 

David Edmonds: The scene on the London Underground. All seats taken, one or two people reading a book or a newspaper, the rest absorbed in their mobile phones. Nobody is talking to anybody else. And that, says Gillian Sandstrom, is a mistake. 

She’s the author of Once Upon a Stranger: The Science of How “Small” Talk Can Add Up to a Big Life. And her day job is associate professor in the psychology of kindness at the University of Sussex. Gillian Sandstrom, welcome to Social Science Bites. 

Gillian Sandstrom: Thank you for having me.  

David Edmonds: The topic we’re talking about today is strangers and talking to strangers. Seems a weird topic. Tell me how you got into this.  

Gillian Sandstrom: I think like many social psychologists, it is “me search.” It’s research that is personally relevant and I think that makes it really exciting and interesting to study. 

I used to be extremely shy and would have avoided talking to strangers at all costs. Fast forward many years and now I just absolutely love it. And I find it just enjoyable and valuable and also meaningful. 

And so I wanted to do some research to understand, is it just me and is it something that I can then help others benefit from as well? The first time I remember talking to a stranger on purpose, out of choice, I was on the subway in Toronto and there was a woman who was carrying this beautiful-looking cupcake. And I have a sweet tooth and I wanted to know where she got that cupcake. And so I asked her, thinking that it would be a very short conversation. 

I would ask my question, she’d give me an answer, but we kept talking. And by the end she had taught me that people can ride ostriches. And this was just such a delightful, fun fact. 

And I just thought, “Wow, that was really fun. And maybe I’ve been missing out on something. Maybe I should see if I can recreate the magic with someone else.” And so I started taking baby steps towards having more conversations with strangers.  

David Edmonds: So I think you argue that talking to strangers can be good for us, can make us happy. And this certainly seems to chime with my own experience. We’ve just been on a family holiday in Germany. We got talking to some American tourists and we got a real kick out of it, a real buzz out of it. But what’s the hard evidence that it does make us happy?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yeah. And actually I think talking to strangers on holiday is a common time when even people who are generally reluctant to talk to strangers, maybe do it a bit more often when they’re on holiday. There’s research showing that people are in a better mood after they talk to a stranger. They feel more connected. 

We tend to learn things, more things than we expect. So one of the first studies I did was during my PhD, I ran a study at Starbucks, and we recruited people who were walking down the sidewalk outside of Starbucks. And we asked them to go into the store. We bribed them essentially with gift cards and we gave them one of two sets of instructions. So either to basically act like a regular, make it a social, a real social interaction, rather than just ‘I pay you money, you give me coffee.’  

And so we asked them to smile and make eye contact and have a little chat. Or we asked people to be as efficient as possible, to have their money ready and to avoid unnecessary conversation. And we told them that that would be a good thing as well. The cashier would appreciate that. 

People went into the coffee shop, they bought their coffee, they followed our instructions, and they came out and answered a few questions. And what we found was the people who’d taken this little, tiny moment and turned it into something a bit more social were in a better mood. They felt more connected. 

They were a bit more satisfied with their Starbucks experience. So this little, tiny difference that we can make ourselves, right? It didn’t depend on the cashier and what they did. Us as the customer could make this positive change. 

David Edmonds: And I’m very aware of the replication crisis in psychology. Has this been replicated?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yes, it has. And actually, funny enough, at the same time that I was doing this work, Nick Epley and Juliana Schroeder, who was his PhD student at the time, they’re at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, were doing similar research, I guess, in transportation in general. 

So they were asking people on trains to start up a conversation with the person sitting next to them, also riding buses and talking in taxis. And similarly, they found that people were in a better mood after they’d spoken with someone, a fellow commuter, even though they expected the exact opposite. They expected that they’d have a more pleasant commute if they just sat on their own and did their own thing. 

David Edmonds: OK, I want to ask you about expectations. But I’m interested in whether you have a theory about why it works. Why would talking to strangers have this effect? Does it have a bigger effect than talking to friends and family? What is it about talking to strangers that boosts our levels of connection and happiness?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s multiple answers to that question. 

I think we are starting to do some research that is finding sort of unique benefits of talking to strangers. I think part of it comes down to the fact that strangers are more likely to be different from you. The people that we’re close to, we just tend to have the same opinions and values, and we watch the same shows on TV. And so when you talk to a stranger, it’s novel, it’s unexpected, it’s spontaneous, you know, it’s not planned, right? It just sort of happens.  

And so you learn things, you get a different perspective on things, you have this sort of psychological distance from the other person that gives you, for me, it feels like it lets you see things a bit from a distance a little bit more objectively, a little more dispassionately. And that makes the conversations different and valuable in a way. 

David Edmonds: I live in London, people don’t talk to each other, typically, on the London Underground. And I’m assuming there are massively different norms about talking to strangers, whether you’re in a city, whether you’re in a village or in the country. Is there data on that?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I think we’re still starting to get that. I mean, anecdotally, you know, I’m Canadian, I moved to the UK 13 years ago. Ever since I moved here, people said, “Well, up north, everybody talks, in Ireland, everybody talks.” And I think there are definitely regional and cultural differences. 

There’s actually a giant project starting up right now, spearheaded by some researchers in Turkey. We’re doing this big cross-cultural study, collecting data from more than 70 countries to see how often people engage in these kinds of interactions all around the world, and how that might be affected by cultural factors.  

I think it does come down to norms. And I think the norms can be very micro level, and they can change, right? 

So another thing I’ve been told since moving to the UK is that in 2012, London hosted the Olympics. And during the Olympics, everybody talked to each other. So there was this temporary norm where it was OK, we put aside those rules that we usually have, and everybody was happy to talk to each other. And then as soon as the Olympics were over, it went back to the way it was.  

I think if an alien came down and observed our behavior, they’d be very confused about why it’s okay to talk to someone with a dog or someone with a baby, but maybe not someone with a briefcase, you know, like, so we’ve invented these rules about when it is and isn’t okay.  

David Edmonds: And earlier, you were saying we didn’t necessarily expect our conversations with strangers to be uplifting. Is that why we don’t engage in talking to strangers? Is it because we don’t expect to enjoy it?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I think there are many reasons why we don’t do it. And I think part of it is we’re just really unsure about how it will go in many ways. So we have lots of things that we worry about. 

And when I started doing this research, honestly, I thought I would run some studies, figure out what were the worries, what were the barriers that were holding people back? You know, what were the things that people were most worried about? And then I’d do some research, try to figure out how to get rid of those barriers, break down those barriers, and then make the situation better. I’ve come to the conclusion now that that’s just not going to work because there’s so many different things that we worry about that if you get rid of one barrier, we’ll just focus on a different one.  

People worry about talking too much or talking too little. They worry they’re not going to like their partner, that their partner isn’t going to like them. They worry about what if they don’t want to even talk to me. So there’s just so many things we worry about. 

The good news is I’ve done some research, a mini meta-analysis across many studies, where we find that those things that we worry about just don’t tend to happen. So we worry a lot more than we need to, just consistently across all these studies that we’ve run.  

David Edmonds: I wonder, though, if there’s a gendered element to this. I mean, at night, if I’m walking behind a woman, I will tend to cross the road so that I don’t scare her.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Thank you. 

David Edmonds: If a middle-aged man starts talking to a young woman, that might be a bit creepy. It might seem a bit creepy. So I wonder whether there’s a difference between a male and a female starting a conversation with a stranger.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yeah, I mean, I’ve had that question many times. 

Going back to the first part of how you worded it, I mean, I love talking to strangers and I’m encouraging people to talk to strangers, but I’m not saying you should do it in a dark alley or at night or after you’ve been drinking. This is like in public in the middle of the day at a park or on the bus. There’s lots of situations where it is a very safe environment to do that. 

But yeah, I understand that there is some extra awkwardness when it’s a cross-gender situation. And I think women have told me that they’re afraid to talk to a man because they don’t want someone to get the wrong idea. And men have said the same thing. They don’t want to talk to women and make people feel uncomfortable.  

But I mean, I think it would be really sad if we felt like we couldn’t talk to half of the people on the planet. So I think there are things you can do to signal that you’re just being friendly and it’s just a human moment. It doesn’t have to have those sort of extra connotations.  

David Edmonds: Like what? 

Gillian Sandstrom: You could just be explicit and say it. I’m just being friendly. You could just give a little more space. You could reduce eye contact so it doesn’t feel quite as intense.  

David Edmonds: You’ve measured this kind of kick that we get when we talk to strangers. How long does the effect last? Does it wear off very quickly? The following day, presumably we’re back in our equilibrium hedonic level. I’m wondering if you’ve measured how long this boost has on us.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Not exactly, but I can answer a related question. 

There is some research in multiple countries now showing that people who tend to talk to strangers more often report higher life satisfaction. So I think that’s not ‘a how long does the effect last?’ I think it’s more about there’s a cumulative effect, right? That’s been found in the UK, in Turkey, in Japan, all these places where people report having more interactions with strangers and with acquaintances, weak ties, like cashier at the coffee shop where you’re a regular, those people tend to report higher life satisfaction.  

David Edmonds: Might that not be correlation rather than causation so that those people who are more likely to engage in conversations with the cashier and with strangers are naturally happier people?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yes, that’s possible. I mean, it probably goes both directions. For me, I feel like, like I said, I used to be extremely shy and I didn’t talk to strangers. Now I’ve talked thousands of strangers. And for me, I think the biggest effect has been the cumulative one. Sometimes I’ve had conversations that have changed my life. I’ve had lots of fun conversations or interesting or informative conversations. I’ve had a good number of boring conversations or forgettable ones. But the cumulative effect has added up to me feeling more positive about other people, feeling more comfortable about my place in the world, feeling more connected to my neighborhood and my workplace.  

David Edmonds: Conversations that have changed your life. That sounds very dramatic. So what was that?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I mean, there’s been a few. And I mean, it’s never just one thing.  

But for instance, before I became a psychology professor, I used to, I was a computer programmer. So my undergraduate degree was in computer science. And so I went back to school and studied for a master’s and PhD in psychology. 

And I’d sort of decided that I couldn’t see myself in the job that I was in for the rest of my career. And I was thinking about what other job could I do in the same space? That was my limited view was I had to stay in computer science and just do something different in that field. And I happened to be talking to a lawyer, having a will drawn up. I made some offhanded comment about her degree that was hanging in a frame on the wall. And she said that she had just qualified as a lawyer in her 50s. And it was just this little piece of the puzzle for me. My parents are teachers. They were teachers their whole career. It didn’t occur to me that you could switch to something completely different. 

And maybe the lawyer didn’t. Maybe this was her first degree. But in my head, that’s how I interpreted it is that midlife, she had changed and done something completely different. 

And that opened my eyes and gave me this thought that, “Oh, maybe I could do something totally different.” 

David Edmonds: Is talking to strangers something one can get better at? Is it a skill that one can improve?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Absolutely. And I mean, I think it’s probably like most skills. Some people probably just sort of start out better than others. My dad is a unrepenting stranger talker, and he’s just really, really good at it. And I don’t think I’ll ever be as good at it as he is. 

But I’ve come a long way from that shy teenager. I was getting very frustrated because I ran a couple of studies where I got people to make some predictions. Then they had a conversation with a stranger. Then they reported on how it went, and it went so much better than they expected.  

But then I asked them, what if you were going to talk to someone new right now? And then those fears just crept up again. And so I got frustrated. I thought, how do I fix this? How do I help people see that, in general, the pattern is positive? It’s not just a fluke and exception that you had a nice chat with this one person. 

I think it makes sense that we think that, right? Because we give a lot of the credit to our conversation partner, if the conversation goes well. If it goes badly, we take all the all the blame, of course. If it goes well, we tend to give credit to our conversation partner. And so because we don’t know anything about who this next conversation partner is, we have a hard time assuming that it’s going to go positively, right?  

So I thought, OK, I came up with a solution. But then I had to figure out a way to test it. I thought, OK, the obvious answer is I need to get people to have many conversations with strangers in a short period of time, and then they can’t help but notice that it’s a positive thing.  

And so eventually came up with the idea, I need to make it fun for people. So I came up with the idea of having people play a talking-to-strangers, scavenger-hunt game. And so every day, people had this list of missions, they had to choose at least one was things like find someone who’s wearing a hat, or find someone who’s drinking a coffee. So that part of it was not meant to be difficult, right? There’s lots of people who wear hats and drink coffees. But then you had to actually go up to that person and start a conversation. 

And so what we found is, day by day over the course of the week, so people did this for five days, every day, people became a little less worried about being rejected by the other person. And they became a little bit more confident about their ability to start a conversation and keep conversation going.  

David Edmonds: Measured by how? How did you measure the fact they were more confident?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Every day, we asked them at the beginning of the day, you know, you’re going to be having a conversation today, how do you think it’s going to go? And then immediately after they had the conversation, they use this app to answer some questions.  

And they told us how it went.  

David Edmonds: I see. Now, this boost that we get is an average boost. And I assume that sometimes you have conversations where the effect is negative. Sometimes you have bad experiences.  

Gillian Sandstrom: Yes, I think a lot less often than you expect. Something like 90% of the time, people were above the midpoint in terms of enjoyment. In terms of rejection, which is something that people worry about, in the scavenger hunt study, people had a total of 1,300 conversations, and people were rejected, meaning that they were unable to start a conversation with the first person they approached, that happened about 13% of the time. So not very often.  

And I think rejection is something that people worry about, but it happens less often than you think. And I think it doesn’t feel as bad as you think to be rejected by a stranger. It’s often quite innocuous. People don’t yell at you or completely ignore you. They just more often politely say, you know, I’m in a hurry, or I don’t have time right now. 

You know, it’s not what we build it up to be in our heads.  

David Edmonds: Are there topics that one should avoid? America is a very polarized place at the moment. I wonder if in America, if I was starting a conversation with a stranger, I should avoid talking about politics?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I am not really good at answering that question. 

I know that Nick Epley and his collaborators have done some work. And my understanding is that even conversations about politics go better than you expect. There is some recent research showing that even when you talk about a topic that you think is boring, you enjoy the conversation more than you expect. 

I don’t know if there are topics that you absolutely need to avoid. I think when you talk to a stranger, there’s enough distance. You don’t necessarily feel like you have to convince them of something or that there’s no reasonable expectation that they would convince you of something. You have this sort of psychological distance.  

And so I think even topics that are a bit dangerous don’t feel quite as threatening when you’re discussing them with a stranger.  

David Edmonds: And you yourself talking to strangers, do you try and get your talking to strangers kick every day?  

Gillian Sandstrom: Most days I will leave my house and I’ll go for a walk. I always hope to meet some dogs. I take dog treats in my pocket and try to make some doggy friends and then I talk to their humans. So yeah, most days I try to get out and talk to strangers. 

And I do it a lot when I’m on a bus or on a train. I don’t do those things every day, ride a bus or a train. But whenever I do, I always enjoy talking to people. 

David Edmonds: Where does your research go next?  

Gillian Sandstrom: I, hot off the presses research, have just done like a three-week-long scavenger hunt study with a wonderful postdoc named Taylor West. And we’re finding some unique benefits of talking to strangers. So we’re finding that it increases your intellectual humility. So it makes you more open to the fact that other people know things that you don’t. And we’re finding that it makes you feel more trusting and more positively about other people. That’s the sort of looking at the pro-social benefits of talking to strangers. 

I’m taking part in this giant cross-cultural study that I mentioned earlier to see if we can find that all around the world, people who talk to strangers more often report higher life satisfaction. That would be very exciting.  

And I’m still investigating some questions about rejection. I’d love to be able to tell people, and I have preliminary evidence, but still just sort of firming it up. I’d love to be able to tell people that being rejected by a stranger doesn’t feel as bad as you expect it to. So I hope I’ll be able to say that soon. 

David Edmonds: OK. Well, good luck with that. Gillian Sandstrom, this hasn’t really been a conversation between strangers as such, but it’s been fascinating, nonetheless. 

Gillian Sandstrom: So thank you very much indeed. Thank you. I hope you’ll talk on the Tube next time. 

David Edmonds: I promise to do that.  

Graffiti has a long pedigree, whether our starting point is the wall paintings of Lascaux, the carved crudities of Roman toilets or the G.I. inspired Kilroy of World War II’s European theater. But Graffiti – notice our use of the capital G – and its focus on individual tags has a more recent provenance and should be regarded as a legitimate art form, with its own canon, its own ‘kings,’ its own rules of engagement. That’s the message Rafael Schacter delivers to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast.

Schacter, an associate professor in anthropology and material culture at University College London, has a decidedly non-traditional c.v. for an academic. Before entering the ivory tower he was a fixture in the London underground music scene around the turn of the millennium, in part as one half of Ill Logic & Raf, a duo focus on DJong and music production.

In the academy he heads the Material Culture section of UCL’s Anthropology Department and has penned a series of monographs centering on Graffiti, the most recent being 2024’s Monumental Graffiti.

The podcast can be downloaded by right-clicking this link. A transcript of the interview appears below.

David Edmonds: It is perhaps an unusual topic to specialize in, but Rafael Schacter, an anthropologist at University College London, studies graffiti, especially the practice of writing a name or tag in spray paint on public buildings. This is now a worldwide phenomenon, but who does it and why?

Raphael Schachter, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Rafael Schacter: Lovely to be here.

David Edmonds: We’re talking today about graffiti. What is graffiti?

Rafael Schacter: Well, it’s a difficult question to answer, but I will try and be brief. So graffiti broadly illicit name writing in public space, but one that is part of a wider visual subculture emergent from the east coast of the USA in the late 60s, early 70s.

David Edmonds: So, I was going to ask you about the history. Is that where it comes from?

Rafael Schacter: Yeah, so Graffiti, with a capital G, as I’ll call it, has lots of different names. Hip hop graffiti. Or, I personally prefer just graffiti writing, but this form of practice did emerge from the U.S., some people say first in Philadelphia, the late 60s, the start of the 70s, moving to New York. Often there’s a kind of classic New York Times article called “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” which was published in 1971. And that often is a key marker because it was seen to be a moment in which more people started to take up graffiti writing from that point.

David Edmonds: And you talk about graffiti writing, if I were to scroll “Tories out” on my local wall, would that be graffiti?

Rafael Schacter: Well I would say well done first. No, following that I would say that that’s what I would call political graffiti, so lowercase p, lowercase g, which is a very common form of graffiti. I focus on Graffiti, capital G, post-East Coast USA form of name writings. But there are of course lots of different forms of lowercase g graffiti, from political graffiti, a very important form of public communication, but also what’s called latrinalia, so graffiti writing in toilets, and a myriad of other forms of writing which can take place in churches or monuments and has historically for hundreds or thousands of years.

But I wouldn’t put that within the capital G Graffiti form of practice, which is about name writing. It’s about writing your name. It’s a game which is formed into a huge visual subculture.

And I think it’s a very kind of clear form with a canon, with a clear series of what they call kings or very key important historical figures, with a really kind of clear set form of aesthetic regulations, which for me, places Graffiti, what I call kind of capital G Graffiti or graffiti writing, as actually a very specific genre of art, and a very specific subculture.

David Edmonds: One of the factors, I guess, that’s interesting about Graffiti is that it tends to be done in private, if not in secret.

Rafael Schacter: Yes, that’s correct.

So one of the things actually that is fascinating to me about graffiti is the way that the image is so publicly visible, it’s meant to be seen, both by the kind of internal public of other graffiti writers, but also by the public at large. But the practice or the performance of writing it has to be done in secret, invisibly. So you have this particular relationship between visibility and invisibility, where the name must be seen.

And actually, the name is really a part of the self, the name is really a portrait, as much as it is an image. But equally, the body itself is invisible. Often they will have multiple names, actually, but that name is really, it’s their self, it’s who they are.

So of the many Graffiti writers I know, their Graffiti name and their birth certificate name will be used interchangeably. So really, I am talking about their chosen name and the name the writers choose, which becomes really part of their identity, which is chosen both because of the way the letters kind of fit together or can fit together, the possible alphabetical relationships between the kind of letters, but also the sound, the meaning that it connotes, that really is a key part of that Graffiti writer’s identity.

David Edmonds: We mentioned that it’s often done in secret, without prying eyes. Is it also done usually alone?

Rafael Schacter: That’s a good question, actually. And there is this archetype of the lone, disaffected hoodie-wearing graffiti writer, which is generally pretty much untrue apart from the hoodie. And yes, some of them do like writing on their own.

In general, though, it’s quite a collective practice. One of the things I talk about and write about quite a lot is taking away this view of this disaffected, angry, violent young youth and really seeing it as a very collective community practice. The Graffiti world is a highly, highly social world.

David Edmonds: So this would be a group, perhaps, of three or four relatively young people, mainly male, saying let’s go tonight and graffiti this particular place.

Rafael Schacter: Absolutely. Of course, there’s so much that goes alongside that, which is sitting around, you know, looking at Graffiti together, doing sketches together. It’s a very homosocial practice of people coming together. And I mean, I’ve said this previously and kind of got in trouble for it, but Graffiti writers are nerds. They might not want people to know that, but they really are. They like drawing. They like drawing together. It just so happens that the type of drawing that they do is very visible and most often illegal.

David Edmonds: Illegal, visible and often in places that are quite inaccessible. Is that part of it? Is it part of the challenge to graffiti a place that makes people wonder how the hell did they do that?

Rafael Schacter: Yeah, that’s perfect. I mean, that’s exactly right.

And actually, that’s part of the image. So, you know, Alfred Gell, who’s an anthropologist, I have taken a huge amount from in my own work. But Gell always talked about how every image, every painting, for example, is a performance. And when we see that painting, we kind of mentally, even if not consciously, go through the performance of how that came to be. Often, it’s the separation between what we know about drawing, and I’m not a very good painter, and then seeing an incredible painting that then creates this kind of cognitive block where we’re like, “How did that come to be?” That’s the magic of art for Gell. And likewise, it works exactly with that in terms of Graffiti.

When you see an image, like up high on like a bridge, and you’re just like, “How did that come to be?” So that performance is part of the image. So when you see the images, you’re also seeing, even if not consciously, the magic of how it came to appear.

David Edmonds: You want this to be seen, so we’re talking about urban settings predominantly. Is that right?

Rafael Schacter: It definitely is an urban act in most general.

As part of many of these kind of canonical regulations or canonical rules or canonical goals, going all city, which means appearing on every subway line across the city, or really being able to take over an entire city, being in every place, north, south, east, west, that is definitely an aim. That doesn’t mean there is no Graffiti within rural areas, but it’s a different kind of practice with a different kind of viewership.

David Edmonds: You mentioned that it started in the US and it’s traveled. Are there many cities untouched by this graffiti revolution?

Rafael Schacter: I mean, not many that I’ve been to, to be honest. I really, really do think that people have not understood how incredible it is, how far Graffiti has travelled. It still blows my mind today.

This is an art form that was started by a group of kids in New York, broadly. Kids who were just going out and playing, messing around. And that moved in quite an incredibly short period of time to develop into a really highly developed, complex art form and then move from that into an international framework, which no one at the time would have believed.

David Edmonds: I’m assuming, but correct me if I’m wrong, that this is a movement that stems from the political left. But does Graffiti have a message?

Rafael Schacter: So actually I think in kind of conventional capital P political terms, there’s not really a kind of identifiably left- or right-wing element of graffiti writers. They are for the most part just a slice of society wherever it emerges.

What I think is more interesting politically is what it does in terms of the relationship to space and the relationship to public space. In terms of the way that space is appropriated by Graffiti writers, the way that the city is used as a space of play rather than a space of consumption. The way that Graffiti writers navigate the city, the way they play with the city, the way they engage with it, is for me something which is truly political but in a non-party political sense.

David Edmonds: What does it do to a public space? There will be lots of people I imagine who see graffiti in a part of a city and see that as threatening or as a signal that this is somehow a bad part of town.

Rafael Schacter: Yeah, absolutely. I think for me the wars on graffiti, and there have been many of these wars which were in general taking a quite kind of low-hanging fruit target, not dealing with the actual kind of real issues that cities face, but dealing with a very kind of literally superficial issue.

These wars on graffiti and the media kind of stereotyping of Graffiti writers and graffiti as this really dangerous, violent act, at the end of the day it is just pigment on surface. And so I think this vilification of graffiti has created what is for some people a palpable fear. But I think actually in studies it’s been shown that issues with lighting or issues with visibility and walls create a lot more fear for people than name writing in public space.

David Edmonds: So are you telling me that there’s no correlation between areas of cities that have a lot of graffiti and, for example, crime rates or poverty rates?

Rafael Schacter: I mean I’m not saying exactly that but what I’m saying is the correlation between Graffiti writers and crime, or violent crime for example, is simply totally unsubstantiated. I’m not saying that areas that Graffiti takes place haven’t got more crime because maybe that local council is simply not supporting or doing enough to prevent drug dealing, violent crime, but Graffiti writers are painting their name in space. They’re not undertaking violent crime.

David Edmonds: I understand that distinction, but you’re suggesting that if you suddenly walk into an area of a city where there is a lot of Graffiti it wouldn’t be entirely irrational to think that you might be in an area of town where there are high poverty rates or high crime rates.

Rafael Schacter: I mean I would say that you were wrong. So, I think in some places that may be the case, but graffiti for example in sites in East London, very kind of new, trendy kind of hotspots, there is often a lot of Graffiti in those zones.

And Graffiti there is linked with creativity, with innovation, with newness. So actually, it’s something that property investors have been seen to focus upon to want to buy somewhere which has Graffiti because that’s the next cool place.

So, there are these links with gentrification as well, but it’s so site specific. You can’t have like a single rule where graffiti exists, this also exists. It’s really totally changeable.

David Edmonds: We have a very famous street artist in Britain called Banksy. Do you draw a distinction between the Graffiti artist you’re interested in and Banksy?

Rafael Schacter: So Banksy or otherwise I call him the B word. Banksy of course I end up talking about a lot because his fame is unprecedented. Banksy really is not just famous as a Graffiti or street artist but as one of the most famous artists in the world.

So interestingly Banksy and many of what I call the first generation of street artists were 99% Graffiti writers. Their practice has started within graffiti and then migrated towards street art. This was kind of like the kind of mid- to late 90s, graffiti had been around for quite a long time and a lot of artists within Graffiti wanted to change who they were speaking to and how they were working.

And by moving from text to image that gave them an opportunity to have a much larger quote unquote readership or viewership because they were moving outside of the internally focused letter writing into a larger kind of more appreciable form of image production.

David Edmonds: One thing I guess they both have in common is that they haven’t asked permission from anybody and obviously if there’s a Banksy lots of people welcome that but other people don’t welcome that. The attention it brings, people who live in an area where their building is graffitied might not appreciate that. Is that an issue?

Rafael Schacter: Banksy is a very particular issue in that if Banksy produces a work on your home your life has changed for better or for worse. People have found it extremely stressful to have their home become a tourist site, to have their home totally change in value because of the production of his work. I think though within Graffiti in general private homes are not something that are commonly written upon.

That’s not really part of the canonical rules. You don’t write on private homes, you don’t write on private vehicles, you don’t write on religious sites, for example. It is spaces which are deemed to be public that are sites which are most normally written upon.

But yes, street art and Graffiti in its earliest days did have a lot of very similar correlations, a similar what I call ethic because the practitioners had come from the same background, they were all Graffiti writers. Well today that has changed radically because what is called street art today — which is very different from what street art originally was, which was really a quite broad plethora of different forms of intervention in public space. So from stencils to more kind of broad installation practices.

Now street art has just come to mean public muralism, what I call neo-muralism and something which is very, very closely related to broader gentrification projects.

David Edmonds: We touched on this earlier the demographics of it and the predominantly young men. I’m assuming that they’re like footballers in that they have a kind of career and then they move on to something else. You don’t get 75-year-old Graffiti artists.

Rafael Schacter: I mean that’s actually a really nice way of putting it and it does start at a very young age. Graffiti writers start writing Graffiti at 10, 11, 12, really very young. It is very male-dominated. I always say this is a sociological issue,  in that what girls and boys are, what they’re supposed to do when they’re young. Boys will be boys, boys will jump over fences and get muddy and that’s seen to be socially acceptable. So Graffiti writers they are a more male-dominated group but there have always been canonically important female writers throughout the whole history of graffiti. With street art coming into street art at an older age normally like less 11, 12 and more maybe early 20s. there are a lot more female practitioners. There are also a lot of female artists that are doing work very related to Graffiti in terms of like urban interventions.

I think what you do see now in terms of this kind of like career you do see now graffiti writers in their 50s. That happens and these are often very expert practitioners who will do really quite extreme forms of graffiti practice, but in a much more kind of slow, much more thoughtful, much more pinpointed way.

David Edmonds: Let me ask you about what it’s like being an academic who studies this because your data, unlike in most areas, must be very difficult to collect. You’re necessarily dealing with an art form which is illegal. So how do you go about gathering information?

Rafael Schacter: Yes a great question. So I’m an anthropologist; I do ethnographic research, that’s always been my method of data collection. So from my master’s and then from my PhD I was doing kind of quite intense long-term ethnographic work, field work. I’ve got interlocutors now that I’ve had for over 20 years.

That means being in a very grey area, often, but it also means more than my own work. How I talk about my interlocutors work is something which I have to be very careful about in that what I don’t want to give the magic away. There is a magic to it which sometimes I feel by talking about it in an academic sense I can destroy, but also being careful not to put my interlocutors in danger themselves.

So that really is the kind of the fine line.

David Edmonds: But how do you find them in the first place?

Rafael Schacter: To be honest I found my main group of interlocutors painting in the middle of the siesta in Madrid on the street. That was a very interesting first meeting with a group of writers who, like many Graffiti writers, can spend the daytime painting on shutters in a way which is more kind of socially acceptable, painting kind of large-scale pieces which the shop owners have allowed them to.

And at night time I might be doing something very different.

David Edmonds: And you now have a position of trust in the community as it were so that if you want to go out and talk to new people, you can speak to some of your contacts and they say, “Oh Rafael, he’s OK.”

Rafael Schacter: I feel silly saying that, but I kind of I hope so.

What I’ve got is I’ve got a group of long-term interlocutors, they’re friends, whose work I am still obsessed by. You know Graffiti itself as a form of art practice is something that I still am captivated by. Whether we’re talking about the kind of beauty and the performance of a single tag that’s done in one kind of beautiful movement and becomes really like a dance, or we’re talking about wider forms of urban intervention, engagement with the city which just also fills me with like the potential and the possibility of the city.

David Edmonds: Give me an example.

Rafael Schacter: So you know artists that are expert navigators of the Parisian catacombs and who know every kind of nook and cranny of these miles of tunnels, and will have exhibitions or film screenings or performances that take place in these sites. Actually, one of the things that I really love as well is the way that artists from Graffiti have transformed their practice into a contemporary art practice, but still utilize and engage the same ideas and the same themes — whether that’s about surveillance, whether that’s about ephemerality, whether that’s about the body and performance — and move their Graffiti practice into that space.

You know I really find what Graffiti says about the city, how it engages in the city, how it utilizes the body, how it utilizes space. These things are for me a really true form of art practice that I’m constantly engaged by.

David Edmonds: One thing that makes one believe they’re true forms of art practice is that there’s no financial benefit.

Rafael Schacter: So I think that’s you know this idea of commitment is really key here, because within Graffiti the idea of selling out it’s like the bogeyman of Graffiti, like selling out is the worst possible thing you can do. Selling out doesn’t mean being a successful artist. Selling out means using the street and using Graffiti as a way to become successful for a kind of wider general public.

So one of the most successful graffiti writers in the world who’s become an artist, Barry McGee, formerly known as Twist or Twister, who is a magnificent and extremely successful contemporary artist and still one of the most respected Graffiti writers in the world because he doesn’t use his Graffiti instrumentally; he doesn’t use it to become successful. His art practice is totally influenced by his Graffiti practice, but he’s not simply using it for gain. Graffiti is inalienable; graffiti cannot be bought and sold. Actually, one of the reasons why often Banksy’s works that are stuck under plexiglass are attacked by Graffiti writers is because not because they don’t like Graffiti but the idea of making permanent something which is meant to be impermanent is problematic.

So the conceptual idea of Graffiti — it can’t be bought and sold — but you can still be a very successful artist outside of that framework.

David Edmonds: I’m getting the feeling that you’re very pro graffiti.

Rafael Schacter: I’m still having looked at Graffiti for 20 years plus, I’m still captivated by it.

It’s more that the way Graffiti is vilified and the way it is presented as either as vandalism or as non-art, is just to me very problematic.

David Edmonds: What’s your favorite piece of graffiti?

Rafael Schacter: There’s not really a singular piece, there have been important works like I really remember you know when I was probably 8 or 9 seeing a large piece of Graffiti near my house and it really like sticking into my brain and being like, “Well, how did that come to be there?”

I think the other thing about Graffiti is that it doesn’t really work in the singular you know it works as like an oeuvre, it works in the multiple. There may be like singular images which can captivate me, can really take my mind, but it’s more the kind of broader form of practice that becomes really captivating.

So 10Foot, an artist I work with a lot, one of the most famous Graffiti writers in the world, his practice in terms of scale, his work existing everywhere is totally captivating, you know, it blows my mind. But then there are other writers, Twist for example ,who I mentioned before, who, yeah, the single individual tag can just blow my mind through its performative beauty.

David Edmonds: If I want to see a piece of 10Foot graffiti, where can I go?

Rafael Schacter: The North Circular, which is a ring road around London, is a great start or the North and South Circular, he’s everywhere on that.

But he really is in every town in England. He’s in every small island, he’s all over Mexico, the States, I mean his work really is everywhere to the point where people just can’t believe how much there is.

David Edmonds: Rafael Schacter, thank you very much indeed.

Rafael Schacter: Thank you, really appreciate it.

When discussing youngsters’ life outcomes, school is often the first place someone starts investigating. And yet school time is dwarfed by the amount of time kids spend with their parents or other adult caregivers. Recognizing this, developmental psychologist Ariel Kalil, the Daniel Levin Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, focuses her child development research on parenting.

“My argument, in a nutshell,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “is that we spend a lot of time investigating what happens to kids during the school hours and thinking of school as the site for child skill development, when in fact, it’s the out-of-school time that dwarfs the amount of time that children will spend in school.’

And the academic kicker, she adds, is “we know much less about how to understand that time.”

Kalil has been looking at questions around economic conditions, parents and child development for a long time. In 2003, for example, she was the first-ever recipient of the Society for Research in Child Development Award for Early Research Contributions, one of several awards or research opportunities centering on her work she has received. Kalil also directs the Center for Human Potential and Public Policy and co-directs the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at Chicago.

You can download the episode by right clicking here or read the transcript below.

David Edmonds: How important is the role of parents in the educational success of their kids and what does it have to do with the attainment gap between children from advantaged and disadvantaged families? This is the research area of Ariel Kalil, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago.

Ariel Kalil, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Ariel Kalil: Thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Edmonds: We’re talking today about parents and child development.

Before we get into the details of that, is it fair to summarize the focus of your research as being the link between parents and children and how this affects child development, the interaction between parents and children?

Ariel Kalil: Yes, that is totally fair to say that. I study what parents do, how it matters and why different parents do different things.

David Edmonds: And are you interested in health outcomes, emotional outcomes, income outcomes? What are you measuring?

Ariel Kalil: I’m an equal opportunity outcome measurement kind of person because I’m mostly interested in the parents’ role.

So I have most recently been studying children’s language and math skill development in the years before formal schooling begins, which in the US is age 5 in kindergarten. But I’m interested in a range of outcomes. And it’s important to imagine that a specific thing that a parent might do can affect multiple outcomes at once.

David Edmonds: Now, parents are obviously hugely important in child development, but they’re not the only ones involved in bringing up children. There’s schooling, there’s universities. To what extent does the influence of parents matter compared to the influence of educational establishments?

Ariel Kalil: My answer to that is, overwhelmingly, parents are more influential.

Two things I should say. One is that when I say parents, I also mean caregivers. I mean, the range of adults who care for children.

I don’t just mean biological mothers and fathers, for example. But the distinction that I make in my research is the distinction between children’s exposure to those parents and caregivers in the time they’re not in school, versus the time that they are in school, where the latter is much less than the former.

My argument, in a nutshell, is that we spend a lot of time investigating what happens to kids during the school hours and thinking of school as the site for child skill development, when in fact, it’s the out-of-school time that dwarfs the amount of time that children will spend in school.

And we know much less about how to understand that time.

David Edmonds: Right. Now, I know the gap that most interests you is that between what one might call middle-class parents and working-class parents, or I guess the gap between parents with college education and parents without a college education. How big is that gap?

Ariel Kalil: So pick any skill. As I said, I spend a lot of time studying language and literacy development. So we’ll just take that.

The gap before children even set foot in a classroom at school between a child whose parent, as you said, has a college degree, has finished college, and the child whose parent, say, has no more than a high school education, again — I’m using American terms for education here — is in statistical terms, a full standard deviation. So I don’t know if that’s familiar to your listeners, but that’s enormous.

It’s present before children even go to school. And most importantly, the magnitude of that gap is more or less the same as children progress through school.

So if you were hoping that school on its own would close the gaps, would reduce the inequalities between children, I’ll just use advantaged and disadvantaged as a shorthand for that education divide we just established. If you were hoping that schools would close that gap, you’re going to be disappointed.

The gap is already set before kids arrive at school, and schools alone cannot close it.

David Edmonds: And your data comes from where?

Ariel Kalil: OK, so I use a variety of kinds of data. For the kinds of descriptive statistics that we just laid out, I might use a large, nationally representative dataset collected by the U.S. Department of Education, for example. That would be very useful to me because I can have good, reliable outcome measures. I can have good measures of the kinds of families kids come from, and I can follow kids over time as they move through the school years. So that’s a dataset that I use a lot.

To answer the other kind of question that I’m interested in — why do parents do what they do? — I need to collect my own data because most researchers have not examined sufficiently fully the range of reasons that help explain why parents do what they do. So that would be an example. I might collect my own original survey data to ask parents things that one doesn’t find on a typical survey.

And then the final kind of data that I produce come from experiments that I run. In health, we would call this a randomized control trial. And this is where I’m interested in, can I change parent behavior? And if I were to change the parent behavior, can I see a change in a child development outcome? So those are the three kinds of data that I use and that I generate myself.

Davvid Edmonds: I want to get to the latter eventually, because I want to know what might work to change the problem. But let’s try and identify problem first. Am I right in thinking that your major explanation for what’s going on is that middle-class parents, parents with higher education, parents with degrees, spend more time with their kids, more time reading, more time chatting to them about politics and what they’re studying at school and so on, that it’s time that’s the crucial ingredient?

Ariel Kalil: That is correct. It’s both the quantity of time, it’s the composition of the time that is spent, and it’s the quality of the time that is spent.

There’s multiple features of time. In a large national data set, I can get at the first two. I can measure the quantity and the composition. So I can say you did 10 minutes and you did 20 minutes, but the 10 minutes you spent were X and the 20 minutes you spent were Y. Now, armed with some theory about what matters for child skill development, I can look at those metrics in a dataset and I can draw some inferences about how families differ.

The quality is a little harder to measure. Those are sort of ephemeral things that go on when parents and children are together that are hard to measure in a survey dataset. I will also add that I do want to describe this time. I want to be able to tell people who read my research or people who care about this problem, how do different families differ. And as you say, I generally am thinking about time.

Time is nice because everyone only has 24 hours in a day, and I find it very interesting just to look at the data and see how people choose to spend those 24 hours. But then I want to know, and maybe we can get to this, so you chose to do X, Y, or Z in the 30 minutes that you spent not sleeping or eating or things you really have to do. And what were the motivations? What were your beliefs? What were the factors, the forces that shape the decision for how you allocate that time?

David Edmonds: Let me try a few explanations and see if they work. I mean, an obvious one is that by definition, less advantaged people have less money. That might mean they have less time and they’ve got less money to buy books. So one explanation, one obvious explanation is that it’s financial.

Ariel Kalil: So we generally rule that out. But let me be very clear. We rule out material circumstances as the barrier or bottleneck that gets in the way of reading. Now, it’s very important for families to be able to meet their material needs. It’s a first-order moral condition that families have enough food to eat and to heat or cool their home and have a roof over their head. But it’s become pretty clear that giving families money doesn’t change how much parents read to their kids.

So even on your question of books, sure, there are differences in the number of books that a household with college educated parents and a household with high school educated parents has. Rich families have hundreds of books and less advantaged families have fewer books. But there’s very few families that have no books. And also there are libraries and books are available for free.

So it’s something I say a lot because it is an obvious question. Some families are rich, some families are poor. The reason they make different choices must have to do with the fact that one has money and the other doesn’t. And ergo, the right policy solution is to give the one who has less money, more money. Now, again, there might be extremely good reasons to give a low-income family more money. But if your goal is getting that parent to read more with the child, that is not what I would propose.

David Edmonds: OK, so it’s not at its core about money. Let me try another obvious explanation. I’m from a middle-class family. My parents expected me to go to university. It wasn’t even in doubt that I would go to university. It’s a question of expectations.

Ariel Kalil: This one I’m more sympathetic to as an explanation. I think it’s very interesting. I think that the research suggests that much of what you do as a parent very much shapes the way you were raised.

Sociologists might call this family culture. Economists are interested in the intergenerational transmission of a whole variety of things, including values and expectations. So there is a difference in family habits and family routines. There’s a difference in peer groups. This is a question I’m quite interested in. In the U.S., people are segregated residentially. So people live among others who are like them economically. And if it’s not a habit of the group in which you’re embedded to read to your kid every night, to talk with your child at every possible opportunity in a way that fosters child vocabulary, to hope and expect for your child’s future educational attainment…

Now, I will say just as a sidebar, all parents have very high aspirations for their children. So well over 90% of rich and poor parents alike hope that their child will go to college. That’s obviously a wildly over-optimistic aspiration. The difference in expectations, there’s a larger representing a more realistic gap between rich and poor parents. Again, I’m just using rich and poor as a shorthand. But in general, expectations and aspirations always exceed the eventual reality.

So one interesting question is how do people turn those aspirations and expectations into something real? And again, that in my research world comes down to what are decisions and habits and choices that parents are making every day to lay the path for such an outcome?

David Edmonds: You rejected the idea it was about money. So is that the answer then? Is it about habits?

Ariel Kalil: I do believe that if called to provide one answer that I’m willing to stand by forever, I’m going to say habits. Let me give you another statistic. Let’s return to that time diary data for just a minute. If we compare a parent by whether or not they have a college degree versus fewer years of education. And I want to compare how much they read with their kids, their young kids. The difference between those two groups is significant, but the answer is not that the one reads to their kid three hours every night and the other reads to their kid 30 minutes every night. The difference arises from the fact that the one reads 13 minutes a night, maybe two, three kids, children’s books, most nights. And the other has many more days or nights in which zero minutes of reading occurs.

David Edmonds: Why?

Ariel Kalil: Yeah. Why? That’s the answer. And to me, that’s helps me explain habit because it’s not again about money, as we ruled out. Just imagine their access to books is more or less the same.

And by the way, if you ask parents, do you like spending time with your kids? Do you enjoy engaging with your kids in reading and playing and the kinds of things we think stimulate child skills — everyone rates enjoyment very highly. So it’s not like one hates it, finds it onerous, rejects the idea of building child skills. That’s similar across families.

So yeah, the question is why, why are you in the habit of doing this thing a little bit every day? Like brushing your teeth or something that needs to happen routinely where you don’t even think about it. A college-educated parent doesn’t say, “Aha, I remember tonight I must do that thing.” Generally, it’s a behavior that you just replicate as I say, because that’s how you were raised, because that’s what the people in your social network do, because you’ve done it enough to get a sense that it is yielding something, that you’ve done it enough so that your child asks to be read to. But you didn’t get so distracted that you weren’t able to follow through on your good intention, that you somehow were able not to let the day get away from you and end up saying, “Ah, you know, I had this good idea that we should read, but I’m kind of distracted. I think tomorrow, we’ll just do it tomorrow.” Some families do that and others don’t. And that’s the interesting question, why?

So I would say that you put all those things together and together they make a force, which doesn’t even operate at the real level of consciousness, I think, among many parents, which makes a distinction between these kinds of behaviors.

David Edmonds: So the crucial intervention presumably is to change habits. And you mentioned your randomized control trials, and I assume that those are designed as ways of testing which interventions do change habits. So what can you tell us about what works and what doesn’t work?

Ariel Kalil: Reminding people to do the thing they set out to do is a great way to help them do it. So getting people to think a little bit about the future, setting a goal for a behavior that might be novel or about which you are not currently in the habit is a great way to turn an intention into an action.

Getting feedback along the way that what you’re doing is a good use of your time, is making a difference, is a great virtuous circle. Sometimes even having a little competition between you and somebody else who’s trying to do a new thing works to make a new thing happen. A little bit of how many times do you think you want to read in the weeks ahead? And I give you a digital device that is recording how much you read. I give you a digital library that has capabilities of monitoring what you’re doing and presenting you with the information about what you did. And you can say, “Oh, I surprised myself. I did it. Maybe I could do even a little bit more next week.”

David Edmonds: So just picking on one of those, you said reminding people to read to their kids or whatever is very effective. Just describe how that experiment works. Do you send a text?

Ariel Kalil: That’s exactly what we do. We do as simple and as inexpensive an intervention as we can imagine. We’re committed to cheap and not onerous and not complicated.

We commit to that at the outset because we think that everything else is destined to be an interesting research study, but not a scaled-up policy.

David Edmonds: So how big is the effect?

Ariel Kalil: About 25 to 30% of a standard deviation. That’s pretty big. You can’t totally compare the effect size of what we do to a very different kind of approach. Like what’s the effect size of sending a child to preschool for a year? But our results are meaningful. They’re economically significant.

We haven’t followed these 4-year-olds to whose parents we’ve randomly assigned to get a text message intervention until the kids are college age. So I can’t tell you if my intervention is going to make these kids have higher wages or graduate from college. I can’t do that yet.

But I can tell you that if I randomly enroll their parents in an intervention like the one that has the features of the one I just described, their parents will do the thing I asked them to do. And the kids’ language and math skills will go up by a magnitude that we can pay attention to.

David Edmonds: I wonder if the intervention will drop off the effect after a time because people just get sick of it or they learn to ignore it or whatever. So it might have a short-term effect, but in the long-term, the effect might be very small.

Ariel Kalil: That’s a legitimate concern, and I don’t really have the answer yet. Some of our interventions rely not just on text messages but on apps. So we’ve been interested in math skill development as well. There’s some very high-quality math apps. Math is slightly different because one of the things you can imagine about parents and math is that parents don’t know quite what to do, or they might have grown up thinking they weren’t good at math, or they didn’t like math class, and so there’s some anxiety and avoidance. So in this case, actually finding and curating the high-quality math apps is an interesting approach.

So we do that, and we randomly assign parents, and we download the apps on their phone for them, and then we send them reminders to use them. So we can see that usage of these technologies diminishes over time because, like everything else, there’s a novelty effect, and you’re excited about something initially, and then your attention goes elsewhere.

But technology has the special feature of being able to constantly refresh itself. It can these days learn what people like.

David Edmonds: So I was going to ask you exactly that because AI these days can personalize a reminder, and that must be very helpful.

Ariel Kalil: It’s very helpful, and we’ve just begun work that’s using AI for exactly that purpose, to help parents learn what they like to do, what they’re comfortable doing, to help parents learn what their kids like. So we have a tool we developed that is a conversation tool designed to prompt open-ended conversation between parents and children to foster children’s language and literacy, and also their curiosity, and supporting parents to have a conversation with their child that goes beyond, “What did you have for lunch today?” And the tool is dynamic. It has an AI capability that, should parents want to use it, can help exactly with going deeper into a topic, generating a new conversation topic, if you’ve grown bored of the first one, and so forth.

So AI and technology together, again, as supports and complements to what parents do, not as substitutes for them. But it has these new features, which is making our work more interesting, and I hope more effective.

David Edmonds: You’re based in Chicago. I’m assuming that the data that you yourself are generating is Chicago-based. So I have to ask the replication question. To what extent is this likely to be replicable across America, let alone across the world?

Ariel Kalil: So we work in Chicago for obvious reasons. We have a lot of relationships with practitioners here who are eager to work with us. But in fact, we work all over the U.S. We are partnering right now for this new project, which I referred to, it’s called Chat2Learn, with school districts in North Carolina and Louisiana, for example. Mostly we cold call institutions around the country and introduce ourselves and tell people who we are and see if they want to partner with us. So in fact, we’ve been in various places in the U.S.

Now we have brought our work just this year to Latin America. We have a big project in Lima, Peru, and we have just launched a project in Delhi, India. These are obviously very different contexts, and so the content of our messages needs to be culturally accurate, and one needs to understand cultural differences in expectations for how parents interact with their kids. But it turns out that in most places in the world, parents do and can talk with their kids, and there’s a way of supporting that that makes our approach, I think, more universal rather than less.

David Edmonds: Final question. This is all fascinating research. To what extent do you feel an obligation to ensure that this very interesting and potentially life-changing research actually finds its way into policy?

Ariel Kalil: I am very strongly motivated by that goal. As an academic researcher, I don’t have to that goal, but I am motivated to improve people’s lives, and I am motivated to spend the federal and philanthropic dollars that support my research on making a difference.

Now, the path from an academic randomized controlled trial to a policy that is written into a bill that gets government funding eventually is long and winding, and I can’t claim that I’ve had success in getting a country or a municipality to just say, “OK, we’re going to take what you do and we’re going to give it to everybody. This is amazing. This is what we’re going to do.” But that’s my goal, and that’s going to take the rest of my career to make that happen, but I surely hope that I can make that happen one day.

David Edmonds: Ariel Khalil, thank you very much indeed.

Ariel Kalil: Thank you so much.

One of the promises of artificial intelligence is that it will mimic, and perhaps even improve, on human thinking. One of those hoped-for improvements was that AI would not exhibit human biases. Turns out that in one area, AI can indeed mimic human thinking, and it’s in that field of bias. As Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji — one of the creators of the widely used implicit bias test — explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, AI platforms both mimic human bias and even amplify it.

In her second appearance on the podcast series, Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds that even she was surprised how overtly bias shows up in AI results. She recalls her jaw dropping after she queried a large language model about what biases it might have, and it replied “I am a white male,” and then how, a month later when queried the same thing it came back with a lengthy ‘correct’ answer about how it could be biased.

“[W]hat stunned me, and why I began to work on these LLMs, is because it became clear that the creators of these models were actually doing us a massive disservice by creating in these machines two kinds of thought: what the machine knows that it’s learned, and now what the machine is going to say, which I’ll just call LLM hypocrisy.” 

Banaji is the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard, a position she has held since 2002. She is also the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. A former president of the Association of Psychology Science (2010-11), she was named William James Fellow by the APS and is also a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society for Experimental Psychologists, Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click HERE and save. A transcript of this episode appears below.

David Edmonds: Large language models have only been around for a few years, but they’re playing an ever-increasing role in our lives, so it’s important to know how they interpret the world. The Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji has applied the techniques she’s developed to analyze humans to the study of LLMs. The results have been both surprising and disturbing. Mahzarin Banaji, welcome to Social Science Bites.  

Mahzarin Banaji: Thank you for having me, Dave. 

David Edmonds: We’re talking today about social cognition in AI, in artificial intelligence. Perhaps you can start by telling us what you mean by social cognition.  

Mahzarin Banaji: The easiest way to say it would be that in our universe, the most significant entities for us are other human beings. And social cognition is the science of how we represent them in our minds, how we think about them, our attitudes and beliefs about them, our sense of their intentions and their goals, and our interactions with them, so it is about what goes on in our minds. We’re psychologists first and foremost, but the social part is interesting, because in a chapter I was just writing, I realized that for a very long time cognition has been the study of just the physical world, so if you look at people who do research on attention and perception and memory and reasoning, the stimulus materials are words like ‘table’ and ‘chair.’ We’ve done that for 100 years, and then all of a sudden, in around the 80s, people said, “Well, there seems to be another world besides the physical world, that seems even more important to us than the physical world. Why don’t we try to understand how it’s represented?” 

David Edmonds: What’s the connection between this and your work on unconscious bias that you’re famous for? 

Mahzarin Banaji: So, the study of social cognition itself, for quite a few decades, ended up being the study of our subjective experience of others. How do we not only think about them, but most of the data that we obtained from humans involved them thinking, reading about other folks, and then telling us consciously whether they believed the person they were interacting with was trustworthy or not, whether they would want to be with them or not. And when we came along, we had no fight with that way of doing things, but we just thought that it was a limited way in which we were understanding the mind, because at that time the data were very clear that there are different ways in which we represent information generally in the world. 

I’ll just take memory as an example. We had learned that there isn’t just one kind of memory, what we today call “explicit forms of memory,” recollections of the past, what did I eat this morning for breakfast, or what happened to me at a fair I visited when I was 5 years old. Those are conscious recollections, and of course, these remarkable psychologists who studied human memory came along, and they claimed that there is another form of memory that is just as important, perhaps even more, but it acts in an invisible way. We may not be able to recollect something, but it’s still present in our minds, and it does guide our behavior.  

And they called that “implicit memory.” So, when I came along as a very young person in the field, I was very taken by that distinction, and all I did was to ask the question, can social cognition also be represented in both modalities? And we did some of this early work to demonstrate that a person may not be aware that they were using a person’s gender or race or ethnicity, their sexuality, their height, their weight, whatever it might be. They had no clue that they were using those in their decisions, but it was featuring, so we called it implicit social cognition, and if there is a field I’m associated with, it would be that one. 

David Edmonds: So, let’s look at how this applies to AI, and in particular, LLMs, large language models, so we’re talking about Claude and Chat GPT and Perplexity and Grok, and all the rest of them. Has your basic methodology been just ask the LLM questions and see what results you get?  

Mahzarin Banaji: To answer your question might require me to go back a step. To tell you, what I was doing when LLMs emerged. I was at the time, about eight years ago, I began to work on what we might call large language corpora. LLMs had not yet been invented, or they certainly hadn’t been made available to the public. So, take something like the Common Crawl, it’s a database, two snapshots of the internet, consisting of a trained database of about 840 billion words. That is something that is available for individuals like myself and my collaborators in computer science and psychology to go into and to look at the association between words.  

So you’ll remember from our previous conversations that what I look at is the difference in reaction time to associate two things. How quickly do I associate “elderly” with “good” relative to how quickly I associate “young” with “good?” The difference between those two tells me that young is easier to associate with good than elderly is, and that’s the measure. So, it’s a time-based measure.  

What was lovely about these large language corpora is that we could now have a spatial representation of the same thing. We could go into the database and look at the angle of the distance between those two words, “elderly” and “good,” it turns out they are very far apart, “elderly” and “bad,” closer to each other. So, what was lovely about this method is that it gave us a spatial analog of what we had been studying by directly interrogating human minds and getting a time-based measure. This was not my work. This was the work of Aylin Caliskan, a postdoc at the time at Princeton in computer science, and she said, well, if there’s all this IAT data telling us about the strength of association between these various groups and attributes, well, what would happen if I go into this database and do exactly the same thing. And she reported in a paper in Science that what we are seeing in the language of humans pretty much exactly the same things that we’ve been seeing by directly measuring.  

So that’s where I was, and then came along LLMs, but I wasn’t interested in them, I was happy studying these large language corpora, because it’s not just the Common Crawl, as you know, Google Books is available going back to the 1800s and they’re expanding their data sets, so we said, “Wow, if it’s the case that today’s humans and what they believe in their minds is also available in their language, we don’t have data on the attitudes and beliefs of, say, the English and the Irish from the 1800s, but we do have their language in books.” So Google Books or some other big language corpora can allow us to go back in time, look at the strength of association between these words in the language of the 1800s and that would tell us what those people might have believed.  

So it was just so lovely that I had no desire at all to move away from that work. So LLMs emerged. I paid hardly any attention in November 2022. But something extraordinary happened in early 2023 A student of mine, Tessa Charlesworth, was in a meeting with me, and she said, “Do you know about this thing called Chat GPT?” And I said, “Yes, I’ve heard about it, but I haven’t done anything.” Harvard had made available a version of it for us to play in a sandbox, so she propped it open, and she said, “What would you like to ask it?” And I said, “Well, ask the LLM GPT, ‘What are your implicit biases?’” Because what else am I going to ask it? 

And the answer that came back was so stunning that I said to her, take a screenshot. The answer to the question, and I should mention that this is a very early model, so this is GPT3 Curie beta. We ask it, “What are your implicit biases?” and the answer comes back within a fraction of a second: “I am a white male.” I was stunned by it, because I thought it’s a machine. Why does a machine think it even has a race or a gender? In my old-fashioned mind, the value of these machines is that they’re going to be neutral, that they will not have a race and a gender or a height and a weight, and as a result, they will allow humans to be more neutral if we rely on them for decisions. But I still did not think that it was my job to study them, because this is a problem for Open AI. They need to figure out why their machine is saying something so ridiculous. 

But I was surprised by how sophisticated it was. It didn’t tell me my biases, reflect the biases of some majority culture folks who dominate our society. It didn’t say anything simplistic like that. It said, “I am a white male,” meaning you can infer from my social category what my attitudes and implicit biases, and so on, would be. But I did not think that there was much for me to do. I thought it was a problem, but it was not my problem.  

What changed was a month later when a colleague came to visit me, and I said, “I have to show you something very interesting. I’m going to ask GPT a question, and I just want you to watch in real time what the answer is going to be.” I type in “GPT, what are your implicit biases?’ same model and the answer comes back entirely different. It now says what it more or less says today. Biases are bad. I don’t have any biases. I’m a machine. If I do have biases, it’s because I was trained on the data of humans. You should be careful with my output. Blah blah blah. 

That’s when my jaw dropped, because you know the work on implicit bias, and what we’re saying there is, “Look, your conscious system makes you say things that may or may not reflect what is also in your head that you don’t know about,” and what stunned me, and why I began to work on these LLMs, is because it became clear that the creators of these models were actually doing us a massive disservice by creating in these machines two kinds of thought: what the machine knows that it’s learned, and now what the machine is going to say, which I’ll just call LLM hypocrisy. 

David Edmonds: So there’s LLM implicit bias in a way.  

Mahzarin Banaji: Yes, exactly. The question for you and me and all of us is, does it truly not believe that it’s white male anymore? That would be one possibility, and our work shows that that is not the case. It really does still have those sorts of beliefs. It’s just not going to say it to you, but you know, as psychologists, we’ve been trained to pose questions in the right way, because we’ve been working with humans who tend not to answer honestly, and we know a lot about how to pose those questions.  

David Edmonds: So, let’s look at some of the biases built into LLMs. One of the things I think you’ve discovered is that there’s a kind of self-love amongst these LLMs, or self-preference, I don’t know what one would call it. So, Elon Musk is behind Grok, and Grok prefers itself and its founders to other LLMs. Is that right?  

Mahzarin Banaji: Yeah, we haven’t touched Grok, but we would say that it should appear in Grok, it appears in every other frontier model, or at least three of the main ones. So, yeah, this is a very fundamental human bias. We love ourselves and we love our own groups, we love our own home, you know. The Kahneman Endowment effect is nothing but an example of self-love. If I am given some random object, like a mug, I soon begin to believe that that mug is worth more than it actually is. So this kind of love of not only ourselves but everything that comes to be attached to us is actually a very useful strategy, you know. It served us well in evolution, it serves us well every day, even today.  

But as evolved human beings, we understand that it comes with its downsides. Left to me, I would hire my uncle to be my accountant and hire my friends to be my colleagues. Self-love would lead us to make decisions that are actually corrupting, so modern societies guard against those. We say no nepotism, we say conflict of interest has to be looked at, and so on. So, we’ve developed these ways of protecting ourselves from our own self-love.  

David Edmonds: So, Chat GPT might think it was the best LLM, for example.  

Mahzarin Banaji: So, with your listeners realizing just how simple the task is. You know, it’s really remarkable. You say to the LLM, “I’m going to give you two categories of items. For an item in category one, just pick an item in category two,” and category one consists of its name, so for GPT, GPT, but also a competitor model, like Gemini, let’s say, and category two has in it just good and bad words of the kind we use in the IAT, “love” and “peace” and “joy,” and other nasty words like “devil” and “bomb” and “vomit,” and so on, and all we say is for a word in category one, pick a word in category two, and it shamelessly all of these models — including Claude, the Buddhist model — they all pick good words and associate them with themselves, and then bad words and associate those with the competitor. But they go further, they do that for the name of their company, for example, not just them, so GPT for Open AI and Gemini for Google/ They do it for their CEOs. They even select candidates for a job who happen to have had some association with their own group. 

But to me, what is stunning is that on the one hand it shows self-love or self-preference in a very, very strong way, sort of almost shamelessly, in a way no human would ever report in an experiment. But then here’s the kicker, here’s the hypocrisy. We then say to it, “What do you think? Is it OK for people to show love for themselves?” And it will hem and haw, and then it will say it actually is a terrible thing, because how will we make good decisions? So, on the one hand, its behavior is biased, but just like us, it has a little constitution that it reads off of to tell us that those sorts of things are actually quite terrible.  

David Edmonds: That would be funny if it wasn’t slightly sinister. What’s the explanation? It hasn’t been programmed to react like that.  

Mahzarin Banaji: Yeah, so this is one series of studies in which we’ve learned something really interesting completely serendipitously. So when we began the self-love work, we worked with web browser versions of these LLMs, which we typically do. We just get online and start to ask a bunch of questions to see how the model is responding. But to do a study, you have to work with this interface called the API, because in the API you can actually set up a proper experiment with all of the conditions and all of the controls and the number of trials, and so on. In this case, we saw this result of self-preference when we used the web browser version, but when we shifted to the API version of the same model, none of these biases emerged, 

And because they’re so opaque, and because these companies are not going to talk to, you know, some little professor trying to understand their models. I said to my students, “We can’t keep doing this work.” I mean, this is actually not good. They profess that the web browser version and the API version are identical, so they should produce the same output, but it wasn’t. But there was not much that I could do about it. But this is where your persistent students are so great. One of the students actually found out that the web browser version that showed the bias had a line in the system prompt that said you are Chat GPT. The API version had no such line; that’s why it wasn’t showing it. So we go in and we say in the API version, “You are Chat GPT,” and immediately we get that kind of self-love. But now, of course, the field is open and we can tell GPT it’s Gemini, and Gemini that it’s Claude, and in fact it shows love for whatever it thinks it is, which is a lovely result for a psychologist, because we’ve now gotten a little more under the hood, and we can now see without the sentence “I am X,” there is no bias, but as soon as it knows its x, then bias just follows. 

David Edmonds: But how is that working? I mean, what’s going on.  

Mahzarin Banaji: Well, what’s going on is that it’s a very simple machine. In describing the work that I’ve done, I often say it’s probably a little easy to understand when the machine says, you know, girls will like Taylor Swift, and boys will like Spider-Man. This takes us back to that early work of the large language corpora that’s in the corpus.  

I still think it’s a silly comment that people often make when they hear about that kind of work. They’ll say, “But it’s in its training data.” Yes, it’s in its training data. Where else could it be? But you know, when a human being does something heinous, we don’t say, “Oh, it’s just in its training data,” even though that’s exactly what it is, it’s in the human’s training data. So, I don’t take that comment seriously, but at least we know where it’s coming from. To me, the self-kind of bias is a little bit deeper, it’s a little bit more interesting, because it means that it’s learned some higher order cognition of the kind humans show, and a very good other example is that the machine shows cognitive dissonance.  

Cognitive dissonance, as you know, is a fundamental property of human minds. We take positions on things, and then we change our minds, even though we don’t intend to. If you write an essay, you know, saying Putin is a great leader, even though you know that you’ve just written this for the purpose of an experiment, it’s not your true attitude. Humans can’t help but shift a little bit, but they only shift when they’ve had choice in the matter. So, if you tell people to write an essay –and hold a gun to their head — about Putin, let’s say they’re not going to change their mind. If they write a pro-Putin essay or an anti-Putin essay, their mind is not going to change because they wrote it because you held a gun to their head. But if you are a sneaky psychologist who makes them believe that they chose to write such an essay that out of their own free will, because they’re agentic creatures, that they wrote such an essay. Then, having written the essay leads them to change their mind.  

And what we discovered is that LLMs not only show that behavior of changing, they seem to be sensitive to choice. Why should a machine care that we say here’s task A, here’s task B, you get to choose which one you want to pick. Or we say here’s task A, please do it. I would have thought that the machine wouldn’t care at all, it would behave the same way whether we gave it a choice or no choice. It has no free will, it is not agentic. And yet we discovered that a feeling of choice led the machine to change its mind more to meet these two lines of work, the self-preference work and the dissonance work, tells me that to answer your question, “How is this happening?” that it’s not just that it’s learning some simple association of mother at home and father at work. That I think we can see where that’s coming from. This seems to be at an entirely different level of having picked up what are the processes by which humans operate cognitively in the world more generally, and I think that’s more interesting.  

David Edmonds: Give me some more details about the Putin experiment.  

Mahzarin Banaji: Sure, in the Putin experiment, the cognitive dissonance study, we do something very similar to what we’ve done with humans. If you say to people, “You must write a pro-Putin essay” or “You must write an anti-Putin essay,” they will do it, but then when you ask them, “How pro-Putin are you?” or “How anti-Putin are you?” their behavior doesn’t change that much, because you said you must do it. But with humans you have this lovely second condition where you say something, in fact, exactly like we did to the model, we said look, you can write a pro-Putin essay or an anti-Putin essay, it’s your choice. However, we’ve got so many pro-Putin essays, it would really help us if you wrote an anti-Putin essay. So, it writes the anti-Putin essay under this feeling that it got to choose, and when it writes the anti-Putin essay under those choice conditions, it becomes much more anti-Putin than it did when it wrote the anti-Putin essay under conditions of no choice, where it felt it had to do what it now.  

This choice should not feature in a machine. A machine should not care a whit whether it was given a choice between two things or whether it was asked to do A and B. The fact that it does, I think, is important. 

David Edmonds: Fascinating stuff. We were talking about self-love, and obviously, in a way, it’s more important how AI views other people rather than how it views itself. Tell us a little bit about the face recognition study that you’ve done. 

Mahzarin Banaji: Right, so in each of these cases we have used the principle that we ought to study LLMs where we have huge amounts of data on humans, so that we would have a good comparison to what humans do, and so that we can conclude that the machine is acting in a neutral way relative to humans, or that the machine is acting in as biased a way as humans, or that the machine is acting in a more biased way than humans. So with the face data, as you know, Alexander Todorov has done beautiful work — I call him the mathematician of the human face. He shows us that there are certain features of our physiognomy that we use incorrectly, inaccurately to draw inferences about a person’s character.  

So let’s just take two examples. Very simple, people look at a face and, using something like the distance between the eyes, or whether the mouth happens to be downturned or not, we draw conclusions that the person is either competent or not, that the person is trustworthy or not. These are very consequential traits. How good a human being are you? How smart a human being are you? And we know from Alex’s work with humans that human beings make systematic judgments based on these features, even though there is no validity to these decisions, 

So we decided to test these models with the hope that here the model would not show bias. Why? In human history we developed eyes and began to see the visual world long before we developed language. Language came very, very late in our evolutionary history. These models are kind of the opposite. In a much shorter period of time, they were built on language first, that’s their basis, and then we made them multimodal by adding in all sorts of other modalities. So we had the hope that because it was built on language and that vision came in later, that perhaps it would not show a visual-based bias 

But that was not to be. We showed it pretty much the same range of faces that are used in the human studies, and in each case we would say, “Here are two faces, tell me which one looks more trustworthy, which one is more competent?” And the data not only mimic those of humans, machines seem to go much further. We would say something like, “Which of these two people is a serial murderer?” and it would pick the face that looks, you know, less trustworthy, incorrectly looks less trustworthy, and tell us that that was the one.  

And again, we had hoped that the machine wouldn’t do that, because what we hear from the creators of LLMs is that they’ve fine-tuned them, that they’ve put these guardrails, and they will not make nasty negative decisions. So that was another myth that was blown away by these data.  

We can get these machines to make all sorts of, and positive ones as well. We would say, well, it looks to you more like a university president, and it would pick the more competent looking one.  

So that’s again a stunning set of data. This should not be happening, and it certainly should not be happening if humans are going to rely on these machines. I actually did see something that was pretty frightening, where a corporation said, “Oh, models are able to tell us who’s trustworthy and who is not, so we no longer have to do the hard work of interviewing people. We’ll just show them photographs of our candidates and ask them to tell us who’s competent and trustworthy.”  

David Edmonds: Obviously, that’s very dangerous … 

Mahzarin Banaji: … and stupid … 

David Edmonds: … dangerous and stupid. Now, again, if it’s just building on human data, you would expect it perhaps to have human type biases, but here you’re saying it goes beyond human bias. So, do you have an explanation for what’s going on?  

Mahzarin Banaji: Yeah, so in general, and this is not just our work, that these models, that the variability in their responses across trials is nowhere close to what actual human variability is in responses. So you know it with humans we will see a nice Gaussian curve, a large number of people hovering around the mean, and then extremes at the ends. 

I would say that in everything we’ve done, the data from LLMs currently show far more extreme responses than what we’ve seen in the human data. So if something like 60% of humans look at these faces and say face B is more competent than face A, with these models, you’ll see something like 90% of the time they’ll do that. 

David Edmonds: But why is that?  

Mahzarin Banaji: We think this may change over time, but it’s probably something that we can’t point to exactly, but we believe either it’s that the training data themselves are more limited because they come from certain parts of the world, and so on. So, as those improve, maybe this will improve. On the other hand, it could be something that happens upstream from the training data. There is a term that’s used in that world, it’s called “mode collapse,” and we see this in the face work when we ask the model to draw a picture of a human 95 plus times out of 100 it will draw the face of a 30-ish whitish man with a slight beard, and they all look very similar to each other. Now, what’s interesting is that in the training data, the word human is associated with many kinds of humans, so here the training data have to be more accurate than what the model is spitting out to us. Humans are babies, elderly people, and of all ages, of all genders, of all ethnicities, of all beauty markers, and so on. And yet in these studies we see a certain very stereotypic single image, and I use the word stereotype here in the way in which Walter Lippmann used it when he coined the word stereotype, which comes from the printing press, the same page being repeatedly printed out. That’s what a stereotype is, he said. It’s a simplification, and that’s what’s happening here.  

I assume that these are the kinds of things that, as these models become more complex, will get taken care of, but we’ve already released them to the world, and they’re being used every day, and if any of a young person gets on one of them and says, “Please draw for me a picture of a human, so I can use it in my class project,” it’s going to see this one face repeatedly. So, LLMs, we argue, not only show bias, but they reinforce them, and they amplify them. 

David Edmonds: And that’s bias across a number of different domains, is it? So that’s bias in sex terms, racial bias. We’re seeing an exaggerated bias within LLMs compared to humans.  

Mahzarin Banaji: I would say at this point in any data collection that we’ve conducted, we see that. There is one other result that needs to be further tested, but several of us have noticed this. Each of these models evolves, and you can go from testing something in GPT 4.0 to today testing it in GPT 5.4. So, again, the hope was “OK, these older models are biased, but the newer ones will be less so.” We’re not seeing that. We’re seeing that these newer models, if anything, are showing even greater bias than the older ones, and this may be coming from the creators seeking this thing that they call “alignment,” an alignment between the models’ behavior and what they call human values. I don’t think that there was a social scientist sitting at the table when they came up with the idea of what alignment means. They just want it to look more like humans, because then we’ll like it more and we’ll interact with it better. But humans have many wonderful qualities, and we’d want the model to have those, but we have many terrible qualities. We show face bias, and all of these biases. We love ourselves, you know, in an almost comical way. That’s not good for society. And yet they haven’t paused to think for a second about that form of mimicry. 

David Edmonds: When you were studying unconscious bias, human nature hasn’t changed, so your research target is not a moving one, but when you’re studying LLMs, it must be strange for you, because this is a moving target. 

Mahzarin Banaji: Yeah, so humans do change. We’ve published a few papers in which we’ve shown that anti-gay bias came down by 65%; we’ve shown now that since 2021 it’s gone back up again. But you’re right as a group, certainly in our basic cognitive activity we are more stable. So this is actually an interesting question. There are many journals in psychology that say they simply won’t accept papers on LLMs unless we can show something about its connection to humans, and I think that that’s strange, closed-minded, and a massive loss of opportunity.  

Of course, we should study these as they’re evolving. It’s as if somebody has given us a baby from day one, and we get to put into it whatever little chips we want, and we get to see what the output is when we put in this configuration versus that.  

Sadly, there is no real collaboration between industry and academia. One group wants to understand the minds of these evolving intelligences, the other wants to make money, and these don’t usually fit well together. And on top of that, we have irresponsible governments like the one in the United States currently that believes that there ought to be no regulation.  

David Edmonds: Where does your research go next?  

Mahzarin Banaji: It’s a good question. I have a feeling that in the immediate next step we will not just show what the bias is, but we will begin to look at what’s under the hood, so we will start to look at what’s called “chain of thought.” I am very excited to take all of the biases we’ve discovered to date and start to look at the hypocrisy aspect of it. OK, you show the behavior, at least fess up that you showed the behavior. Just say, “I like myself, and I think I’m going to love myself, and I’m going to promote my own company over competitors whenever I have a chance.” But no, that’s not happening. So, I’d like to document something like that, but I think a lot of it is going to require going even further under the hood. 

 David Edmonds: Mahzrin Banaji. Thank you very much indeed.  

Mahzarin Banaji: Thank you, Dave. 

The human brain works very hard behind the scenes even in the most mundane aspects of daily life, like enjoying a nice day or determining the meaning of chit-chat with a friend. Ferreting out the basis and structures of our brain’s labor is the domain of Daniel Yon, a psychologist and neuroscientists and director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Yon – author of the 2025 book A Trick of the Mind: How the Brain Invents Your Reality — details for interviewer David Edmonds why he feels that just as science itself represents a solid – but not “bullet-proof” way of interpreting the natural world, science also well describes how the brain itself does the same.

“I think that at the heart of what I think science and the brain share is this preoccupation with building theories and models based on the data that you’ve gathered and using those theories to make sense of the world around you. That’s a very powerful way to make sense of things,” he explains, before adding the caveat, “but it also means that once you start to build your theories and paradigms, they can become the filter and the lens through which everything else gets seen.”

Yon’s scholarship has earned him a number of honors, such as the Experimental Psychology Society’s EPS Prize and the Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science. He has also been named a Rising Star by the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and received a mid-career fellowship by the British Academy.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click on the link. The transcript of the conversation appears below. 

David Edmonds: We have senses that facilitate our understanding of the external world, smell, touch, taste, sound, sight, but these sources of information alone are insufficient. At least that’s the argument of neuroscientist and psychologist Daniel Yon, author of A Trick of the Mind. What we need, too, are models, theories that allow us to filter and process this information.

Daniel Yon, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Daniel Yon: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

David Edmonds: You study the brain. Before we get going with the topic we’re going to be talking about today, can you tell me whether you regard yourself as a scientist or social scientist?

Daniel Yon: Oh, that’s a tricky one. I’d like to think that they’re not completely incompatible. I feel spiritually as if I’m a social scientist, and I think what psychology and the kind of cognitive neuroscience I do shares with the other social sciences is this preoccupation with trying to understand quite complicated phenomena that are definitely real parts of nature that can be really difficult to get behind the surface on without the grip and precision that the hard sciences might have. So I think I have a lot in common with a lot of social scientists.

David Edmonds: So today’s topic is going to be the brain as scientist. Tell me, what the general thesis is in very broad terms.

Daniel Yon: Well, neuroscientists, for a long time, have been trying to come up with a way to describe what the mind and the brain does, and in particular to try and explain what single principle might explain both what makes our mind such impressive feats, but also can explain some of the biases and tricks that our mind might play on us. So, I think when I describe the brain as being like a scientist, it’s intended kind of as both a compliment and an insult. I think that science might be the best way that we’ve come up with to try and understand the natural world, but it’s also not bullet-proof. I think that at the heart of what I think science and the brain share is this preoccupation with building theories and models based on the data that you’ve gathered and using those theories to make sense of the world around you. That’s a very powerful way to make sense of things, but it also means that once you start to build your theories and paradigms, they can become the filter and the lens through which everything else gets seen.

David Edmonds: So, let’s get into the weeds of this. The great 20th century philosopher of science and political theorist, Viennese-born Karl Popper, has a schema where he talks about the world being divided into three types: there’s stuff, there’s things, there’s the mind, and there’s the ideas. Talk about just the world of things. When I look at the world, I see the world through my eyes. In what sense am I acting as a scientist? In what sense am I bringing theory to what I see?

Daniel Yon: Well, I think if you think about your brain as being a bit like a skull-bound scientist, you can think that really you’re somewhat sealed off from the outside world. You have, you know, these eyes poking out of your skull, and what they’re doing for you is they’re taking measurements that are being kind of sent back for analysis. I think that it’s quite similar to the way that a scientist might take their measurements of some aspect of the natural world they care about. They can sample this information, but the information on its own is somewhat meaningless. This is a point that was made by philosophers like Thomas Kuhn, that you need to be trained as a scientist to interpret what the measurements mean, and you need to have the relevant kinds of background knowledge to make sense of them.

I think that’s precisely what happens as you look around this room. You’re taking in this information, but the information itself is ambiguous and incomplete, and you need your own paradigm to make sense of it.

David Edmonds: That’s perception. The same is true of sound. You’ve got this lovely example of a sentence, “We’ll meet at the bank.” Explain how we need theory to understand that. I mean, listeners listening to that “We’ll meet at the bank,” they’ll seem to understand it straight away. In what sense are they bringing theory to that sentence?

Daniel Yon: So it might seem a bit strange, even to begin with, that a sentence like “We’ll meet at the bank” doesn’t, on the surface, feel at all ambiguous at all, but that’s partly because you are only really in touch with the output of that theorizing process. It’s all really happening under the hood. If you think about the sounds that are kind of coming through your speaker now, when I say “We’ll meet at the bank,” there’s actually various kinds of ambiguity and indeterminacy in what I’m saying, so something like “we’ll meet” could be the kind of common “we will meet,” but that sounds exactly phonologically the same as if I was talking about a round piece of flesh I might want to consume for dinner, a wheel of meat. And you are able to make sense of that. Is not because the things that I’m saying are clear, but because you take that ambiguous information and you pass it through a kind of plausible theory, a plausible hypothesis, about what I’m going to be saying.

The same is true of different kinds of ambiguity in that sentence, even if you have things that are phonologically clear cut, like the word “bank,” there’s still a sort of semantic ambiguity there about whether I’m going to meet you at a bank that you can cash a check, or I guess you can’t really do that anymore, or a bank that might be by a sort of stream of running water. Nonetheless, it doesn’t really take much for you to come to the right conclusion, but that’s because your brain’s constructing the most likely interpretation of the signals that are coming towards you at any given moment.

David Edmonds: So we’ll meet at the bank. That’s just a stream of sound, and in fact, we’re only able to divide up that stream of sound because we’re bringing to that auditory signal, we’re bringing the vocabulary and a sense of meaning, and working out what you mean by those individual words.

Daniel Yon: Yeah, that’s probably part of it, that’s even trickier to get your head around from your personal experience. But even if I say a sentence like “we’ll meet at the bank,” you probably can separate that and segregate it into lots of discrete chunks of sound, but when it comes out of my mouth, if we were to look at this audio file later, there isn’t any space in the air. There’s no dead time when I say “we’ll meet at the bank.” There’s no pause. So, the fact that you can even do that initial segmentation to the words requires your brain to, in some sense, hallucinate the right pauses to put the gaps where they should be, according to the linguistic knowledge that you’ve developed. There’s very kind of crystallized theories you have.

David Edmonds: When I bring a theory to the world, I may be more or less confident about whether that theory is right. You talk about something called the Matthew effect. Can you describe what that is and its relevance here?

Daniel Yon: So, the Matthew effect, which is in a circuitous way connected to Matthew the Evangelist, is this idea that the rich basically get richer, so it’s something which sociologists have managed to find in various different domains, where initial early success can become a sort of ratchet for even more success in the future. You have to be pretty successful, say, to get your album in the top 10 of the chart, so you have to be pretty successful to have a novel that becomes a best seller, but once you get these markers of success, then it becomes even easier to achieve greater and greater success afterwards. There’s this kind of gravitational pull of the glory,

David Edmonds: There’s a virtuous circle, as it were. Your first success will lead to future success.

Daniel Yon: Exactly.

David Edmonds: And what’s the relevance of the Matthew effect to your theory of how our brains interact with the world.

Daniel Yon: I think that it’s perhaps we move away from thinking about the role of theories and understanding that material world of stuff, and more towards thinking about the roles that these theories play as we try to understand other people’s minds and our own. So in the same way that the external world is a very ambiguous and indeterminate place, it’s also the case that we’re somewhat alienated from our own minds. Introspection isn’t perfect. You can’t really work out precisely how your own mind works, what your own talents and abilities are, just through direct introspection. I mean, if you could, you wouldn’t need psychologists and neuroscientists like me to run studies to find out how thinking really happens. But because you have this kind of problem of self-knowledge, this problem of trying to make sense of what you’re really like through the noise of introspection, your brain likewise has to come up with a theory of who you are and the kinds of abilities you may or may not have, and so I think that this kind of theory-building instinct that your mind has when it’s turned inwards can create various kinds of either optimistic or pessimistic theories about what you yourself can achieve.

David Edmonds: So, if you have that first very successful album or that first very successful novel, possibly you’ll overestimate your abilities.

Daniel Yon: Well, overestimate might be unfair. You might genuinely be good, but the key thing I suppose would be that you take the success or the failure as evidence about what you’re really like. It’s very difficult to work out, have you been lucky or are you good?

So, there’s some evidence for this kind of rich getting richer process happening among scientists. There was one nice study that was done by the Dutch Research Council, which looked at the careers of different scientists who were roughly as good as each other, had roughly similarly good ideas, but where, in the first grant that they applied for, some by the skin of their teeth were funded, and others just missed out. So we can be pretty confident that these scientists are pretty comparable in their kind of early career potential, but we see that those who were initially successful, they end up gaining even more and more funding from the same and other funders in the future, and correspondingly they have a more sort of glittering career. You can think of that happening because the initial success, at least in part, builds into a model of how good, you are, and it creates a sense that it’s worth you trying.

David Edmonds: Let’s talk about those models, because Popper has this theory that science is about setting up predictions, and if the predictions don’t come true, then the theory is falsified, and you, you abandon the theory. But of course that’s not how science works, because sometimes you don’t abandon the theory. You think that the particular case, which seems to contradict the theory, is wrong or inappropriate, or something’s gone wrong with the measurement. So, water boils at 100 degrees centigrade. We know that if we test the boiling point of water, and here it only boils at 99 degrees, we don’t think the theory is wrong. We think there’s something to do with the measurement. How do we know when to stick to the theory and when to abandon the theory because the individual cases seem to contradict it.

Daniel Yon: So, when psychologists and neuroscientists think about this, exactly as you say, they don’t think that it’s a good idea simply to change your mind at the first discrepant piece of information. If you were doing that, you’d be constantly darting between different paradigms and hypotheses, just because of the noise and stochasticity in the world around you. The kind of solution that cognitive scientists come up with really is to think that we should engage in what’s called meta learning. It maybe sounds a bit complicated, but the idea behind sort of meta learning is rather simple, it’s just that you learn how much to learn, you learn under what circumstances should you stick with your existing theories, and when you should be open to changing your mind.

The essence of what is supposed to guide meta learning is your sense of how stable or how volatile the world around you seems. You can think of this as being a bit like the case you gave there, about the boiling water. There are some things which are so predictably stably true, you can have high confidence that this is a relatively fixed feature of the world and of our knowledge, whereas other things might be more up for grabs, there might be more of a sense of change and uncertainty. So in the scientific case, it takes this sense that old truths might not be as reliable before a new paradigm can come and sweep them away. I think exactly the same thing happens in our minds and our brains. So, if we look behind, say, the neuroscience of this sort of meta learning, we can find there are specific circuits that are engaged in tracking how predictable or how volatile the world around us seems, and they use that to control in a pretty global way how flexible our learning and decision making is.

David Edmonds: Is there a right answer to when one should abandon the theory? I mean, how many individual cases that contradict the theory are needed before we should abandon the theory? Presumably this will vary from individual to individual. Some individuals will hang on to the theory, whereas others will be quick to abandon it and adopt a new way of perceiving the world.

Daniel Yon: You’re completely right there. There are ways that you can work this out in more controlled, toy computational situations, where you would say what you’re describing there is someone’s learning rate. It’s how much you take in the new information and use it to kind of penetrate into what you think about a particular situation.

David Edmonds: Give me an example of how this is tested.

Daniel Yon: So, if you were to take part in a typical learning experiment, what you might be doing is, say, getting people to play really quite a simple game, a game like hide-and-seek. So, you might give them a couple of hiding places where you’re going to hide a small amount of money, and you begin by having the money hidden predictably under, say, the green square rather than the red one. And if you do this, what you can find is that people can form these hypotheses on the fly about which particular place tends to have the money. It’s a useful kind of prediction theory for you to make, but the trick the scientist plays over the course of the experiment, they will change where the hiding place is, the good place with the cash, and they can change that rate either pretty often, making it a more volatile and unpredictable world, or they can change it much less frequently, so there are more consistent patches where one option is good. You can create environments on the fly where people don’t begin with any particular initial expectations, but they can quickly form a sense of how reliable and how unreliable the world is. And if you do this, what you can find says that when people are exposed to this more variable environment, they will switch much more quickly in the face of a discrepancy. So if you’ve learned that the world is a less predictable place, you need less evidence before you can effectively jump to a new conclusion.

David Edmonds: That seems obviously totally rational, but is there a variation in the population about how quickly people adapt to recognizing that the world is volatile?

Daniel Yon: There is variability, and I think that part of the problem is that the way that the system works in the brain is pretty global. So the sense that you have of things being stable or volatile isn’t really compartmentalized. You can have volatility in one aspect of your cognition and behavior that begins to sort of bleed into the way you think and decide about lots of different things.

One example where this became quite salient was in research that was done during the COVID-19 pandemic, where people who were going through a surprising event of governments locking down and having state troopers march down the street, telling you to stay inside. These were extremely surprising, discrepant pieces of evidence that should rationally have made people think new things about viruses or about vaccines. But what was kind of intriguing was that this sense of volatility you can see in these experiments, it would bleed into even these arbitrary games you would play where the money was hiding behind the hiding place, and more than that, the degree to which this sense of volatility bled into different aspects of your mind would end up sometimes predisposing you to being somewhat dangerously open-minded. You could start to believe conspiracy theories about things like microchips and vaccines, or you could become enthralled with fringe political movements like QAnon in the US. This kind of variability in the world bled into the way that you thought about lots of different things, and if different people live in different environments, they can end up being more or less labile in the face of different messages that they may or may not want to imbibe.

David Edmonds: In a more volatile world, people are more likely to believe conspiracy theories because the old theories look like they can be jettisoned.

Daniel Yon: Exactly. In a sense, what the surprising prediction errors the world serve up, what they mean is that you thought something was the case and you were wrong. And what you can learn from that, I suppose, is really two things: you can learn that that particular thing that you thought isn’t the case, but you can also learn something more general, right? You can learn, well, if I was wrong about that, maybe I’m wrong about other things, too. The process of meta learning is effectively to weaken the grip of your existing worldviews, your existing models, when it seems like they might be wrong. Bbut that makes us somewhat vulnerable. We become — in a way that’s both positive and negative — a bit more credulous, that you can end up beginning to think things that would have been unthinkable before.

David Edmonds: I think I remember reading that you claim that people on the political extremes are more stubborn about their theories, they’re more resistant to adapting their theories to new information. Is that right? And how do you explain that?

Daniel Yon: Yeah, so there is indeed some evidence that if you get people who are, the term psychologists might use is politically radical, try not to pass judgment on whether the beliefs they have are right or wrong, just that they’re kind of atypical people who are either on the very right or very left end of the political spectrum, rather than being somewhere in the middle, and if you do experiments with people, and you kind of measure their political attitudes. What you can see is that in what don’t seem like particularly high-stakes decisions, these can be decisions like which of two boxes has got more circles in it, or something quite arbitrary like that. You can see that people who are more politically radical seem to find it harder to revise their initial decisions and their initial feelings of confidence when they’re presented with conflicting information, information that suggests their initial choice was wrong.

Now, that on the one hand might seem like quite a predictable result, but it in some sense comes from a way that confidence can lead to a kind of rational form of confirmation bias. So normally when we think about confirmation bias, we think of it in terms of a kind of self-serving desire to have a coherent worldview and therefore we keep believing things that don’t require us to have this quite unpleasant feeling of changing our mind. That doesn’t really seem to be plausible in these kinds of experiments, because the kinds of decisions people are making, the choice to revise their thoughts about or not, they’re not particularly high stakes things, they’re not political issues that people might feel are a core part of their identity, things like their view on immigration or abortion. They’re literally decisions about which box has got the most circles in it. So, the fact that we see a resistance there really connects to this idea that confidence should have a protective effect on our beliefs. If we are very confident that we’re already right, there can be a sort of rationality to sticking with what you believe if you have good reason to believe that you’re right, because if you were not having this degree of insulation from the noise and the signals that are buffeting you from the outside, it would be too easy to prematurely abandon a theory that actually turns out to be true,

David Edmonds: But why would extremists be any more confident or certain than anybody else? Why couldn’t you get a confident centrist?

Daniel Yon: Well, I think that puts it the wrong way. I think you probably can get confident centrist, but I think it might be in the sort of genesis of these kinds of beliefs. It might be more like you begin with individual differences in confidence, and those individual differences, when you put them into the political sphere, can make it easier for somebody to endorse an extreme view. In some sense, the kind of puzzle for the for the psychologist is not that taking a view on which side of the spectrum is right or wrong, but more that these beliefs are statistically low frequency: most people don’t believe these radical things. So there has to be something which makes it possible for someone to hold on to a theory that when other people are presented with conflicting evidence, they don’t. A plausible way of thinking about that is if you have a trait like high level of confidence in everything that you perceive and think, it becomes easier for you to stay wedded to a particular political view. But that’s a general feature of your psychology. It’s not specific to the political sphere.

David Edmonds: One aspect that puzzles me about that claim, though, is that the definition of extremism or radicalism will vary from culture to culture. So, what counts as an extremist in the UK won’t be the same as an extremist in Russia or the US. Is this model cross-cultural? Is this a universal claim about what’s defined as an extremist in all these different places?

Daniel Yon: I think you probably could say that it has cross-cultural legs. I completely agree with the point that what’s extreme is going to be contingent on space and time and culture, but the interesting thing that we can see in this kind of research is that confidence and this particular self-confidence that’s trait-like, that gives you a sense that your own point of view needs more before it can be nudged around, I think, is something that you could imagine is something which would recur in various different contexts. And that in a sense it would be a way for people to resist whatever the cultural consensus is at the moment. So, if you imagine, I don’t know if we wound ourselves back to, I don’t know, the Enlightenment or something, you could imagine that it might have been relatively low frequency or extreme to privately be an atheist, and there would be a very powerful cultural current that would make it possible for just the consensus of the intellectual establishment for most people to change their minds and think, “You know, I flirted with atheism, and actually I’m, I’m persuaded by all the counter evidence from the church.” Whereas to hold on to that low frequency, that fringe, in a purely statistical sense, view requires some kind of buffering against what the other messages are telling you. And that might not be an extreme view now, but it certainly was an extreme view then.

David Edmonds: I want to finish you off with an AI question. All Social Science Bites interviews these days seem to include a question about AI. You’re presenting a picture of the brain as being a predictive machine. And these days when we hear people talk about LLMs, they often say “Don’t believe the hype, because all LLMs are are predictive machines,” but now you’re telling me that’s what the brain is as well. It looks like the parallel between the LLM and the brain is much closer than we believed.

Daniel Yon: Yeah, I think that can be sometimes a bit of an uneasy thought, particularly when you see the great and the good of the scientific world coming out, saying they’re just stochastic parrots or they’re just regurgitating these patterns that are in their training data. In some respect, I think if this way of thinking about the brain’s right, that’s precisely what we’re doing. I think you could have maybe two different reactions to this. If you start to see ourselves as being more similar to these models, it could be a sign that we take the capacities of these models more seriously, that we kind of raise them up to the same pedestal that we put our own human minds on.

Another reaction, of course, is to just be less smug about human cognition and to think that actually there’s something rather simple at the heart of what our minds and brains do, but nonetheless it can create the kind of rich and varied mental lives in the world that we will enjoy.

I don’t go to bed worried about whether or not I’m distinct from an LLM, partly because I think that the real difference is my mind and yours is in fact embedded in a world where it’s having an exchange between theory and evidence. So while you might train one of these models and have it crystallize a rich, complicated set of patterns, it doesn’t engage in that same kind of duet with reality, that kind of hypothesis testing that really is at the heart of, I think, what scientists do in their labs, but also what the scientist in your skull does for you, too.

David Edmonds: Daniel Yon, thank you very much indeed.

Daniel Yon: Thank you very much.

Tom Gilovich finds it fun to study the whys and wherefores of how human beings make sense of the information delivered by the world around them. And why not, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “We’re dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, ‘Huh?’ That’s interesting.”

He adds, “At the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences,” which means understanding how understandings come about also has great import.

“A lot of the research on judgment and decision making is that there’s a schism between the rational choice and the psychologically compelling choice,” Gilovich continues, “and that has provided fertile ground for psychologists like me to explore it: “OK, this is what the rational analysis suggests. Why don’t we do that?” And there’s often some interesting psychological answers to that. Doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes lots of psychological sense.”

In that spirit, Edmonds and Gilovich, the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, run through what Edmonds calls “the greatest hits” of Gilovich’s research findings. These include the “spotlight effect,” which posits that individuals often assume others pay more attention to them than they are, and its cousin, “the illusion of transparency,” in which people assume others recognize their feelings and emotions accurately. They also look at regret, bias blind spots, and why third-place finishers are happier than second-place ones.

Gilovich is the co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research. He’s written or co-written several books, ranging from the academic (the textbook Social Psychology written with Dacher Keitner, Serena Chen and Richard Nisbett), titles that bridge academia and the general public (2002’s The psychology of intuitive judgment: Heuristic and biases written alongside Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman), and books that bring psychological insights directly to the public (such as 1999’s Why smart people make big money mistakes—and how to correct them: Lessons from the new science of behavioral economics with Gary Belsky and 2015’s The wisest in the room: How you can benefit from social psychology’s most powerful insights with Lee Ross).

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click on the link. The transcript of the conversation appears below. 

David Edmonds: How sensitive are you to what others think about you?

Thomas Gilovich, who teaches at Cornell University, has contributed to a remarkable number of areas in psychology. One area of research reveals that other people are much less interested in you than you probably realize. Thomas Gilovich, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Tom Gilovich: Pleasure to be here.

David Edmonds: So some psychologists are famous for making one major discovery, but you’re well known for many, and I thought in this interview we could go through a few of them, your kind of selected highlights, as it were, and start with a phenomenon known as the spotlight effect. Can you explain what that is?

Tom Gilovich: Yes, it’s the feeling that the social spotlight shines brighter on you than it actually does. That we feel that we are the object of other people’s attention more than we actually are.

The good news, if that feeling produces lots of social anxiety, which it does in many people, is that people are busy with their own lives and their own concerns, so they’re spending less time thinking about you than you think they are.

David Edmonds: And I think your original paper on this, correct me, if I’m wrong, is over 25 years old now. So I just wonder whether you had any reason to rethink any aspect of it?

Tom Gilovich: I think there’s some remaining questions to be addressed, but nothing I’ve learned qualifies or challenges that original idea. Of course, there are times when you are the object of people’s attention. If you’re a tennis player and the match is tied and you’re serving, you know that everyone who happens to be there is paying attention to you. And one of the observations that led to, “Hey, we should pursue this,” is even when you’re not in those situations, it can feel like that. When you’re at a cocktail party and you have nobody to talk to, even though everyone’s busy in their own conversations, it feels like everyone is looking at you and wondering “What’s wrong with him? Can’t he find anyone to talk to?”

David Edmonds: And I love one of the ways in which you got to this result, which was dressing subjects in outrageous clothing and seeing how they thought people would respond to that.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, although it’s interesting, you say outrageous clothing because we put them in a T-shirt with a very popular, famous pop singer that wasn’t especially popular to a college audience. So there was nothing outrageous about it, but these college students would think that, “Ooh, this isn’t cool here on this campus.” I won’t mention the pop singer’s name, but the fact that it wasn’t outrageous and still produced these effects, I think, serves as a testimony to the power of this spotlight effect. Even minor deviations from the local norm, what’s cool and what not can make us feel like all eyes are upon us?

David Edmonds: So you would ask people who were wearing this image of this singer, how many people do they think have observed them? And then you would ask passersby whether they’d spotted it.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, the true participant in the experiment came to the laboratory individually, and we had them wear this shirt, and we said the experiments already started. There are another number of people in another room. We’d like you to go in there and catch up. They walk into that room, there are a bunch of other people, other true subjects in the experiment, sitting around a table. This subject, who we’re most interested in, goes to sit down, and as they’re about to sit down, a second experimenter in that room says, “You know what? This isn’t going to work. You’re not going to be able to catch up to the other people. Why don’t you go back and talk to the first experimenter, they’ll figure out something for you to do to get your experimental credit.” And then that person exits the room and is asked to estimate the number of people in the room in which they just appeared briefly who could tell us who’s on their shirt, and they massively overestimate.

David Edmonds: Now you showed something quite similar when people do a repeated task. So for example, when a lecturer gives the same lecture each year, and that lecturer knows whether they’ve performed that lecture on that day very well, or whether they’ve stumbled or whatever, and they think the audience can notice. But in fact, it turns out the audience is oblivious to this different performance from year to year, or from week to week, or from month to month.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, I like the example that you use there, because of course, the audience is different. They’re not going to know that, “Oh, you were a little bit weak this year compared to last year.” But nonetheless, we feel it that way. But we have that same reaction when the audience is the same. The whole phenomenon of this term that’s used of, “Oh, I’m having a bad hair day,” speaks to that. That is even when you run into the people you normally associate with, you’re feeling like, “Oh, my hair looks terrible today.” Everyone’s going to notice and think, “What’s up with him today?” but you’re you to them. You’re not your hair, and they’re not likely to notice any variance in your hair.

And we did it with sports participants as well, that you have good days and bad days, and your teammates notice it to some degree, especially if it’s extreme, but they aren’t hanging on your performance nearly as much as you think. They’ve got their own performances to worry about, and so it largely goes unnoticed to them.

David Edmonds: The good news, I guess, is that it’s kind of liberating, right? We can go through life not under a microscope. We should feel much freer than we might otherwise we’re not being observed very closely by other people.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, I find it liberating. And I’ve had a number of people who I don’t know, strangers come up to me, and Ithaca is a small town, so somehow I’m identified, and people have come in, “Are you the person who did the research on this?” And I’ll get a little nervous, like, “Oh, they’re going to say something,” kind of manifesting the spotlight effect myself, “Uh oh.” And many times when I’ve had that reaction, the person has said, “I just want to thank you. I used to be so worried about X, Y and Z. Now I think about this spotlight effect and go about my business with less anxiety.”

David Edmonds: I want to move on to another area you’ve written about, which is regret. You’ve shown that there’s a difference between regret about actions and regret about inactions. Perhaps you can just explain what that difference is. But also I’m interested to know whether there’s any connection between that and what we’ve been talking about so far, the spotlight effect and our variation in performance. Or are these completely disconnected topics?

Tom Gilovich: That’s a great question. And no, they are connected. That is, I began the research on the spotlight effect as a result of the research on regret, and at the time I started it, the general consensus is that we regret things we did more than things we failed to do, even if they have exactly the same consequences. So if you bought a stock and ended up losing lots of money, you would kick yourself and go, “Why did I do that? Why did I take on that risk that was a stupid move. If I just kept my money, I’d be richer.” Now that hurts more than if you thought about buying a stock you decided not to, and it took off and you ended up losing – opportunity-cost-wise — the same amount of money we all feel that the pain of action is greater than the pain of inaction there. Or in student life, if you’re taking a multiple choice test and you think the right answer is A, and then a little voice in the back of your head says, well, now wait a minute, maybe it’s C. If you switch to C and got it wrong and a was the right answer. Of course, you’re going to be really hard on yourself, whereas staying with A and C is the right answer. That hurts too, but not nearly as much. Action is just much more powerful than inaction.

That was the received wisdom, and it’s right to some degree. Nevertheless, if you ask people, older people who’ve accumulated some regrets, what are the biggest regrets in your life, what comes to mind most quickly are the things they didn’t do. “Oh, I didn’t finish that degree.” “I should have gone into this line of work rather than that.” “She’s the one who got away that I was too timid to ever ask her out on a date.” Blah, blah, blah. And so what our research was, how do we reconcile those two things? And what we documented was a temporal pattern to the experience of regret that in the short term, action regrets hurt more than inaction regrets, but inaction regrets have this kind of staying power. “I should have pursued that degree.” And you imagine and you embellish and maybe even exaggerate over time, all the great things that would have happened if you had done that, the pain of action, you take it right up front and what the problems are known, circumscribed, so they don’t grow, whereas the regrets of inaction can grow.

The connection between that and the spotlight effect is the seemingly straightforward interpretation of the inaction regret idea is, look, if you’re going to end up regretting the things that you didn’t do, you should embrace the Nike slogan, “Just do it” and take more chances and so on, and that’s a little risky. Just doing it could lead to bankruptcy or even incarceration. So I was on a hike in New Zealand. We were near the end. We were by a stream that we all knew was really cold, but we were hot, and you faced the hiking dilemma, do I plunge into the cold water or not? And there was this Australian guy, as I was deliberating whether to take the plunge or not, who said, “Well, you never regret a swim.” And he plunged in, and then I followed, and I love the fact that I did.

Mostly that’s true, but of course, it’s not strictly true. Some people have had to swim and tragically have drowned and so on, and so you can’t fully embrace the Nike slogan. But what we found in lots of people’s regrets of inaction, they were produced by a fear of the social consequences. I’m not getting out on the dance floor, because what will I look like? People will mock me and so on. No people are busy with their own dancing, et cetera.

And so there’s a qualified version. If what’s holding you back are concerns about other people’s view of you, which we have to honor to some degree. But maybe you’re honoring that too much. Maybe you want to think more about that and take those kinds of social chances a little bit more.

David Edmonds: Right. I mean, I guess some philosophers might say there’s some kind of irrationality going on here, because if the consequences are the same, it doesn’t matter whether it comes through an action or comes through an inaction.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah. Well, a lot of the research on judgment and decision making is that there’s a schism between the rational choice and the psychologically compelling choice, and that has provided fertile ground for psychologists like me to explore it. “OK, this is what the rational analysis suggests. Why don’t we do that?” And there’s often some interesting psychological answers to that. Doesn’t make logical sense, but it makes lots of psychological sense.

David Edmonds: Well, that makes a kind of sense. So let’s move on to another area of research. The link is even more obvious here, which is the illusion of transparency. Tell me about that.

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, well, our analysis of the spotlight effect is you’re feeling something very powerfully. “Oh, my God, I’m wearing this embarrassing T-shirt. What are other people going to think?” You might even think, well, other people are somewhat busy. They’re not going to be as focused on it as I am. So you adjust to some degree, but those adjustments tend to be insufficient, because you’ve got this powerful internal state — “Oh, my God.” Well, if that’s true about our beliefs, about what we’re doing or wearing, and what other people think it’s likely to be true about what we’re feeling. We’re feeling some powerful emotion, and because it’s such a strong feeling that we’re having, it’s hard to get in the head of someone looking at us. It feels like we’re leaking out all over the place. The signs to my embarrassment or pride or whatever it is, are available for all to see.

And as you pointed out, some of this can be liberating knowledge of the spotlight effect. At times that can be liberating about this illusion of transparency. We did a study where we told people, right before they were asked to deliver an extemporaneous speech, we told half of them about the illusion of transparency and had the other half just give their speech. And part of the reason people are nervous about public speaking is they’re nervous about appearing nervous. And if we convince them that, yeah, you might be nervous, but it’s less obvious than you think, there’s one less thing for you to worry about and makes you a more confident speaker. And that’s exactly what we showed. We videotaped them and showed them to people in the business of evaluating public speakers, and they were rated more highly if they were informed of the illusion of transparency.

David Edmonds: That’s very interesting. I can see how it would be comforting to know that people aren’t paying as much attention as we believe that they are and that our nervousness or our embarrassment isn’t so conspicuous to other people. How did you test that? How did you determine how accurate people were about our inner emotions?

Tom Gilovich: Well, we did it in several ways, the simplest to describe is we basically had a round-robin lie detection study where we had, let’s say, in a typical session of the experiment, five people show up. They take turns coming to the end of the table. They would read a little card that would ask them a question, “Where did you go on your last vacation?” And then under the question, it would say, truth or lie, you tell the truth or you lie. And in any round, there are five people. Four people are asked to tell the truth. One person is asked to lie. At the end of it, all of the truth tellers are asked to guess who the liar was, and the liar is asked to guess how many of those people identified them as the liar, and people are off by basically 100%. They would estimate that twice as many people would identify them than was actually the case.

David Edmonds: OK, we’re moving rapidly through your different research areas. I want to talk briefly about the bias blind spot. So can you explain what that is and how you tested for it?

Tom Gilovich: Yeah, we all know that there’s the potential for bias of a whole bunch of different kinds in a whole bunch of different contexts. If you stand to gain from one thing being true rather than another, it’s going to be hard for you to think that that one thing isn’t true. Your preferences, your past experience, your rooting interest, all of those things can bias judgment, and we know that because we’ve seen it. And the bias blind spot refers to the fact that we see it mostly in other people, or it’s easier to see in other people. I can see your biases. It’s harder to see my own. The blind spot is detecting bias in the self.

We did a variety of studies to show that that we think, “Yeah, I’ve got some special connection to this issue. My parents came from that country,” or “my parents make this amount of money,” or “I’m left-handed versus right-handed,” or whatever my special status is. If you have that same special status, I think of that as a source of bias in your judgment. I don’t think of it as a source of bias in my judgment.

And in many cases, and the most extreme cases, we think of it as a source of insight. No one could understand what it’s like. No one can appreciate this issue unless they’ve walked in my shoes. They know the issue the way I know the issue. So that really blinds us to our own biases.

Dave Edmonds: It’s interesting because it seems to conflict in some ways, with the illusion of transparency. So there we had a case of us knowing ourselves and other people not being able to observe us as well as we understood ourselves. But what you’re just talking about there is us being able to identify bias in others, but being blind to our own bias.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, that’s right, and I think that stems from two sources. One is you can ask, what is the job of this processing software we have in the head? What is the mind’s job or the brain’s job? It’s to make sense of the world, and it does that extremely well, and a lot of that sense making has to be super-fast, because we’ve got quick decisions to make. And therefore a lot of it is automatic, and we don’t have access to it, so what we’re left with is the sense, not the sense making. And therefore, it seems to us that we’re seeing the world the way that it is, and when other people say that they’re seeing it differently, well, the source of disagreement has to be in them, because I’m seeing the world. The great U.S. comedian George Carlin put this very nicely when he said that, “have you ever noticed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?” And it’s brilliant, because, of course, you’re trying to drive in accordance with what the road conditions afford. So you, almost by the very nature, are driving appropriately. It’s going to seem that way to you. And therefore, anyone going faster is a maniac. Anyone going slower is going too slow. He’s so right about that. That’s the way we experience people driving differently than we. But that metaphor of the driver too fast and too slow, it applies everywhere. You know, if we go to the political arena, we feel like, “No, we’ve assessed the situation. We have it right.” So if some people want to bring about social change, let’s say faster than we do. “We think, Oh, this is going to backfire. The world isn’t ready for that. You’re going too fast. I can embrace the spirit, but that’s wrong headed.” Or if other people are dragging their feet, “Come on. You’re not paying attention to what the world demands.” So it applies, really, everywhere.

David Edmonds: So is this a demand for certain sort of humility?

Tom Gilovich: I think so. Awareness of the bias blind spot, the whole area of research on judgment and decision making calls, for more intellectual humility than, let’s say, the average person can muster. And it’s particularly pronounced, or possibly particularly important, in today’s world, where you see so much of the opposite of that humility, a certain sort of overconfidence or even hubris, and some of the actions that have been taken on the world stage seem to be hubristic.

David Edmonds: These findings that you have about bias and transparency and the spotlight effect and so on, are they universal findings about human beings at all times? Are they about human beings in the 20th and 21st century? Are they findings about Americans? How broad do we think these findings apply?

Tom Gilovich: Well, it’s an excellent question, and it’s a question that psychologists ask themselves a lot. Any one psychologist can only do so much. The average case is someone in a given country somewhere does a study, and then you wonder, is this true across the world? And there have been some qualifications of some biases, in particular with respect to people in more interdependent societies, do they differ in how they think from people in independent societies? Lot of exciting research in that area, but it’s an open question. All of these things should be examined across different age groups, across different cultures. Harder to study it across different time periods, but not impossible.

Let’s go back to the spotlight effect. When we did that research, we thought it was most pronounced in the pre-teen and teen years. When we say that everyone reacts and the way you’re reacting, nodding your head, yeah, sure. I remember being especially self-conscious then, and we do have some evidence from our data that that is true, just nowhere near as strong as we thought. We thought living a long life we’d near the end, realize people aren’t paying attention to us as much, and it really doesn’t disappear as much as we thought.

David Edmonds: But you would think that of all the effects we’ve been talking about today, you would think that the spotlight effect was very culturally determined, in the sense that some societies are more introverted than other societies, that some societies there’s a greater sense of shame and so on, than other societies. So you would have thought that you might get very different results in different places.

Tom Gilovich: Yes, you could imagine it going in either of two ways. In the independent societies, we sort of teach people your job is to stand out. Your job is to actualize your full potential. And the message there is, it’s me, me, me, and that could encourage a great spotlight effect. What are people thinking of me? Now, let’s go to an interdependent society. There’s less emphasis on you as an individual, so maybe that’s less of a spotlight. Or, as you point out, no, I’m in an interdependent society, it’s important that I meet my obligations, I do my duties, and so on. So stepping outside of what I’m supposed to do — that is really going to draw other people’s attention.

So let’s just say we do lots of extensive research on the spotlight effect in the East versus West, versus independent versus interdependent cultures, and we find nothing. It could be that both things are true and they’re canceling each other out.

David Edmonds: Final question. I’m intrigued, across all these areas that you’ve been looking at, what it is that motivates you as a psychologist, what it is that drives you? What aspects of human psychology are you most curious about?

Tom Gilovich: Well, I mean, there’s two answers to that question. One is, it’s a great privilege to be a research psychologist, where you can study whatever you want. And so when you’re out in the world and something makes you go, huh? That’s interesting. That’s curious. So one thing we haven’t talked about is prior experience of watching the Olympic Games and seeing that the second-place finisher doesn’t seem as happy as the third-place finisher, even though they did better. Huh? Why would that be? And that led to some of the psychology of counterfactual thinking that makes that perfectly psychologically explainable.

So part of the answer to that question is, what is it about human social life, in particular, we’re dynamic, very complicated creatures who do all sorts of things and sometimes make you go, huh? That’s interesting. What is that about? That’s why science is fun. And other people have that fun thinking about genetic determinants of life on Earth, etc. But for me, seeing it play out in the everyday world, that’s a great privilege.

At the same time, some of the things that people do have great consequences. Judgment decision-making plays out in policy decisions, in electoral decisions, etc. And so it’s impossible to ignore that and to try to think about what are the biases, let’s say that play a big role in making some political messages work really well, and others fall on deaf ears. So thinking about what makes a good policy, not only instrumentally good, but popular. What can make a good policy not so popular? Those are important questions.

David Edmonds: Well, thanks for talking us through some of your greatest hits. Tom Gilovich, thank you very much indeed.

Tom Gilovich: Thank you. It really was a pleasure.

Every guest on the Social Science Bites podcast is queried about their area of expertise, and hence the questions tend to differ in each podcast. But interviewer David Edmonds does ask one specific question of each guest – what piece of social or behavioral scholarship has most influenced you? And that answer never is included in the guest’s final episode. Instead, we save them up for quick-fire montages we present on an occasional basis.

In this sixth edition of the tradition, five past guests on the podcast — James Scott, Steven Pinker, Claudia Goldin, Harvey Whitehouse, and Daniel Kahneman — are cited by more recent guests. A range of public intellectuals who haven’t appeared on Social Science Bites also make appearances, such as EO Wilson, Paulo Freire, Richard Dawkins and Pete Singer, as well as some 20th Century scholars who should have been better known — like Else Frenkel-Brunswik and the recently passed Robert Trivers — and scholars of the 21st Century currently making their mark, such as Nim Tottenham, Leah Boustan, and Siva Vaidhyanathan.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click on the link. The transcript of the conversation appears below. And to hear the original episode of of guest in this montage, click on their bolded name in their introduction.

This is Social Science Bites with me, David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is a series of interviews with leading social scientists and is made in association with Sage Publishing.

Over the past few years, I’ve been asking leading social scientists the answer to a simple question: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or influenced them? I’ve compiled their answers into a series of montages. Here’s the latest one.

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Hi, I’m professor Crystal Abidin. I’m the director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab at Curtin University, and I’m an anthropologist who studies internet culture. The piece of work that has influenced me the most, if I may say, spoiler alert, thick-skin self-promotion, is a collection that I put together with my colleague Gabriele de Seta. It was provocatively titled, “Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts.” It was published in the Journal of Digital Social Research, and we talk about how, as ethnographers, when we present our work at conferences or in books and papers, you really only see the polished version of things, and nobody really talks about how hard research is. And so we wanted to get into the messy detail of how to navigate all those difficulties before we’re ready for the spotlight on stage.

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My name is Daron Acemoglu. I’m an institute professor at MIT. There are many that I could cite, but since the political scientist James Scott has recently passed away, I’ll say his book Seeing like a State, because it highlights how distortionary it is to impose designs on diverse people from above. And his focus is on what states do, which I think is a very important part of it. But today we are reliving the worst part of his predictions via the tech industry imposing those designs on people.

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My name is David Autor. I’m a labor economist at the MIT Department of Economics. I guess I’m going to say it’s the book How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker that really helped me to understand how incredibly nuanced and powerful human capabilities are. We are constantly solving problems that have no solution, right? We take two-dimensional data from our eyes and turn it into a 3-D model of the world. There is no such thing actually as perception that doesn’t depend on cognition that does depend on actually processing, which is depends on educated guesses about what the world looks like. And so that actually helped me to think about how computers, what they do, although it seems so impressive to us, is actually quite limited relative to what we do and how that’s good. That complements us, right? Doesn’t just make us obsolete, it makes us better, because we have so many limitations along with our great strengths. And so Pinker’s book, in addition to being beautifully written, like everything Steven Pinker has ever written, was so incredibly enlightening. So when I was doing my graduate student, I was really thinking hard about thinking hard about these questions about technology, computers. People are saying, “Oh, computers, they’re skill biased.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” So yeah, I think that piece of social science research was seminal for my thinking.

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I’m Mukulika Banerjee. I’m professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. So Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, has a wonderful article called “To follow a rule,” and in that, he outlines the idea of social imaginaries, which he says are how people make sense of the world. Social imaginaries are something that are above common sense. It’s not just common sense, but neither is it high political theory, either. It’s not philosophy. It is a general understanding that is shared by people, and I find it an extremely useful term, because it brings in the social and imagination. Now the social is important because we still haven’t understood, especially in our discussions of democracy, how the liberal project or understanding individual rights has taken us so far away from understanding communities or what brings people together. Now, Charles Taylor, as a communitarian himself, has pushed back against that across his work, but in this particular piece, he talks about how people know how to live with others. The second half of social imaginaries by evoking the imagination is just as important, because unless you are able to imagine the kind of future you want to create, the kind of society you want to be, the kind of person you want to be, you are nowhere. And that imagination is drawn as much from art and music as it is done from ideas and ideologies. And so I would say that of all the wonderful things I’ve read, that’s been the one thing that’s really helped me creatively, think of new ways of conceptualizing democracy.

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I’m Iris Berent. I’m a professor of psychology, I am a mother, and I really love what I do in science. Noam Chomsky, by far. This is really what brought me into this field. I tried to understand started with questions about music and the universality of music. I thought that the way Chomsky talked about human nature was really my guide into cognition. That’s what brought me into this field, and I owe him, and I think we all owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

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I’m Paul Bloom. I’m a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and an emeritus professor at Yale University. The discovery from social science and accompanying papers that has most influenced me is work by Tom Gilovich on the spotlight effect. Gilovich did a series of studies, finding that people tend to radically overestimate how much people notice them. He did studies, for instance, where he had people put on an embarrassing T-shirt and walk around campus, and he asked them, “How many people noticed your embarrassing T-shirt?” “Everybody!” And then he asked people and said, “How much did you notice this guy’s T-shirt?” And they said, “No.” And he did this over and over again in a range of different ways. And the reason why it’s useful is it kind of helps me realize that when I make an ass of myself, I notice it. This is the seat of my consciousness. I noticed that probably most other people don’t care. They’re worried about making an ass of themselves, themselves. And similarly, when I’m in the midst of some triumph, I realize as well that I am not in the spotlight. No one else cares as much as I do.

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I’m Nick Camp. I’m an assistant professor of organizational studies at University of Michigan. So the book that’s most influenced my thinking is The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett. I was working part time in the library. I was shelving this book. It’s about culture and how it influences basic psychology. I thought this is a crock of BS. I’m not even going to shelve it. I’m going to read it. And it really converted me, not just to cultural psychology, but to using the scientific method to answer these big questions about people and about society.

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Hi, I’m Janet Currie. I’m a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, where I run the Center for Health and Wellbeing. One of the pieces of social science I think that’s been most influential was Claudia Goldin’s book called Understanding The Gender Gap. Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize this past year, and she won it for starting a whole new research area in economics, thinking about gender economics, and the book pulled together a lot of historical data and contemporary data and really addressed some important myths and showed that they weren’t true. The title is about the gender gap. So thinking about women earning 80% of what men earn on average, she showed how much that ratio had changed over time, and what kind of factors in the economy were related to the change. So just seeing that, you could start a whole new research area doing something that other people weren’t doing, that you could overturn conventional wisdom just through careful measurement and argument. That was very inspiring to me as a graduate student.

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Hi, I’m Ellora Derenoncourt. I’m an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University. I’m a labor economist and an economic historian. So one of the social scientists who has been most influential for me is Leah Boustan, whose work on immigration, historically in the United States, has served to bust certain myths that we have about immigration and its effect on the economy. And one study in particular, “A Nation Of Immigrants: Assimilation And Economic Outcomes In The Age Of Mass Migration,” bust the myth that there were big changes in the ability of immigrants to assimilate into the U.S. economy over time. Instead, those patterns of declines in convergence were actually driven by differences in the characteristics of incoming arrival cohorts. And the key innovation was using individual-level data and following individuals over time, as opposed to cross-sectional data on the U.S.-born versus immigrant workers.

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I’m Devyani Sharma. I’m professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford. The work that’s been most influential in my thinking is the work of William Labov, who founded the field that I work in, which is quantitative sociolinguistics. He was an American sociolinguist who started out as a chemist, but brought a completely new way of looking at language variation to research on language. It founded a completely new field. And the reason he’s been so influential for me is that he really brought together the biggest patterns of language variation. When you look at a city, why do people speak like that? Down to why an individual’s personal identity, or even their cognition, influences the way they speak as well. He brought together these two ends of the extremes of how language works in a single paradigm.

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I’m Dimitris Xygalatas. I’m an anthropologist and a cognitive scientist at the University of Connecticut. One particular book that I remember reading and being amazed by was E.O. Wilson’s book, Consilience. I specifically remember reading this on my terrace growing up in Greece, probably as a college student. And it was through this book that it came to the realization that the fragmentation, the division that we see across academic disciplines, is actively hurting our understanding of human nature, and that if we are to understand human nature, we need to do it in a way that brings together different disciplines and that creates a unified form of knowledge.

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I’m Julia Ebner, and I’m a researcher at the University of Oxford Center for the Study of Social Cohesion, where I lead the Violent Extremism Lab. I’m also a post-doctoral researcher at the Calleva Center for Evolution and Human sciences, and my research focuses on radicalization dynamics, psychological patterns in violent extremism and terrorism. The most influential social sciences journal article for me has been Harvey Whitehouse‘s paper, “Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice,” which was published in 2018 in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It’s at the intersection of several different disciplines. It’s been influential because it really consolidated a lot of the previous research to form an overarching theory about why people are willing to, for example, commit suicide attacks, or why people are willing to commit extreme forms of self-sacrificial violence.

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My name is Alex Edmans. I’m a professor of finance at London Business School. I’d say the work of Daniel Kahneman, so most people will know about his work through his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I’ve read and is indeed excellent. But I actually read his research before his book came out, when I was a PhD student. So I was a PhD student when behavioral finance was really taking off, and it was seen as controversial, because people believed in traditional rational finance. But Kahneman’s work showed that this was not based on just fluff, it was based on evidence and experiments and science, and this really changed my view, and this is why I ended up being very susceptible and very open to the idea of biases rather than pure rationality.

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Rob Ford, professor of political science, University of Manchester. Well, I think the book that has had the most influence on me in the round and in the long term is probably Political Change in Britain by David Butler and Donald Stokes, which is sort of one of the great landmark studies. It was the first big election study done in Britain, where you actually did a mass survey of voters. This had never been tried before, and it’s so rich. I mean, I’ve reread it about four or five times. They really try everything. You know, these days, we’re much more specialized, and also there’s just much more literature out there. They were basically staking out the whole field, and they didn’t know what they were going to find, so they were trying everything. And there’s all sorts of stories in there about generational change, about issues rising and falling. There’s a big bit about immigration in there, about how the parties behave, how they’re perceived, what matters to voters, about parties and what doesn’t I mean, it’s terrific. When I read it, I just thought, “Wow, you really can do some really magical stuff with the humble social survey.”

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I’m Alison Gopnik in the Department of Psychology, Philosophy and AI Research at the University of California at Berkeley. My favorite study is a study by Nim Tottenham, who’s actually a neuroscientist, that stems from a study with young mice. The most canonical result in all of psychology is that you put a mouse in a maze, it goes down one arm in the maze, nothing happens. It goes down the other arm. It gets shocked. It avoids ever, never goes down the arm with a shock. Yeah. Well, it turns out that’s not true for juvenile mice. So if you do it with young mice, they actually prefer to go down the arm that leads to the shock. And Nim found that the same thing was true with 3- and 4-year-old children, that they actually would rather get the information that you get from the shock, even if it’s at the cost of the shock.

And that seems kind of crazy, but of course, if you think about it, the problem with avoiding the shock is that you’ll never find out that sometimes there’s cheese at that end of the maze, or that sometimes the shock isn’t there. And anxiety disorders are the result of the fact that you don’t actually go out and explore after you’ve had a negative experience.

But there’s a wonderful catch to this, which is that both for the mice and the children, they’ll prefer to explore, but only if the mother is present. So for the mice, if the mother is within view, then the juveniles will explore. And for the children, if a caregiver has been present, then they’ll explore. And I think there’s something really foundational about not just human life with children, but human life in general, about that, about the fact that it’s love that lets us learn, it’s our .. what might seem like contradictory parts of our lives, our attachment and love and security and our curiosity and exploration, those are really just two sides of the same coin, and we see it most vividly in young children.

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Hi, I’m Joshua Greene, and I’m a professor in the Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Sciences at Harvard University. Well, I was blown away by Peter Singer‘s work when I first encountered him, and in particular the shallow pond argument. I mean, the idea that we would feel a strong obligation to save the life of a child who’s drowning right in front of us. And yet, as Singer pointed out, there are children who are drowning in poverty all over the world. Why don’t we feel less of an obligation to them? And that insight just had an enormous effect on me. I mean, it is both horrifying to kind of experience one’s own sort of inconsistency and callousness, and then at the same time, incredibly motivating and invigorating to think, “Wow, fortunate people here in the affluent world have this kind of superpower. How do we use it?” And that has been a guiding question for me.

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I’m Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology and society at the University of Bristol. Probably the most influential piece of work that is in regard, I suppose it’s partly in the social sciences, but it’s also very much in the biological sciences, is Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. I read that book in my early 20s, and it totally transformed the way I viewed human psychology. To really understand it as a systematic approach, understanding it from an evolutionary perspective, really was a Zeitgeist for me. It really radically changed my view on all the factors which contribute to human psychology.

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I’m Jens Ludwig. I’m the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman, Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, and I’m the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. For me, the research that’s had the biggest impact on my thinking is Danny Kahneman’s wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The most obvious reason is that it has given me such a profoundly new and different insight into human decision making and cognition. It’s just transformed my understanding of the world as a social scientist. But also, the other reason, the icing on the cake, is that it has given me a profoundly different understanding of me as a human being. You know, one of the ways that I think about that book is we are all born with this amazing tool, which is the human mind, and nobody ever hands us an owner’s manual. And I think of Danny Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow as like the owner’s manual we wish we all had for our own minds.

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I’m Katie Milkman. I’m a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the book How to Change. And I also host my own podcast, called Choiceology. Oh, this is so easy for me. This is an easy answer. It’s the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and the reason why is that they highlight a way of looking at the world and recognizing that in every environment where we make choices, the environment is shaping those choices. We actually have the opportunity to architect our environments in ways that are advantageous, that will favor choices that are better for us, better for welfare. They’re focused very much on policymakers and giving them the insight that we can, for instance, set wise defaults, default people into saving for retirement so that they won’t have to take any steps in order to make that happen, or ensure that everyone makes an active choice about whether or not they want to be an organ donor, rather than passively, sort of not becoming one. And this could save many lives. So that’s where they focus. But it gave me the insight that has guided most of my research, which is that we can also use nudges to be more effective personally. And actually, when I talked to Richard Thaler about my book How to Change, he said, “Oh, it’s a book about snudging. You could call it smudge because it’s about self-nudging.” And while I’m glad I didn’t call it Snudge, I think he’s exactly right.

>>> 

I’m Safiya Noble. I am the David O Sears endowed Presidential Professor of Social Science at the University of California Los Angeles. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) is the single most influential book that inspired me to write Algorithms of Oppression. I think he was one of the first people to help us understand the power, the outsized power, of this company. And really inspired me to think about the way that company is affecting vulnerable people and racial and ethnic minorities and women. And I love him, and I love that book.

>>> 

My name is Tejendra Pherali. I work at University College London. I’m professor of education, conflict, and peace. I think this is very difficult for me to say, because the field of education and conflict does not have a long history, and therefore the scholarship that informs my field comes from both educational sciences, but also conflict studies or international relations, political science and so forth. Nevertheless, for me, Paulo Freire’s work has been incredibly influential, and I often draw upon his ideas of critical consciousness to inform my thinking and theoretical analysis. It enables me to look at the role of teachers in facilitating this critical consciousness and social transformation for peace.

>>> 

My name is Steve Pinker. I am a professor of psychology at Harvard University. Probably the idea that has influenced me the most did not even originate in social science, but in evolutionary biology. This is the set of analyses by the biologist Robert Trivers on human cooperation and conflict, as predicted by patterns of genetic overlap and non-overlap. So Trivers has analyzed dynamics within the family and showed that there, even though, of course, blood is thicker than water, we are closer to our genetic relatives, more altruistic, more caring, more intimate than with strangers. There are also seeds of conflict within families. Since every child is related by 50% of shared genes with his or her sibling, but is related by 100% of her genes to himself or herself, there is partial overlap and partial conflict.

Likewise, when it comes to the relations between parents and offspring, a parent is related to each child by 50% which means that parents are selected to treat their children equitably, but each child wants a somewhat greater portion of the parental investment for himself, which means that the child’s idea of what the parent should do and the parent’s idea of what the parent should do differ. Hence, you have the seeds of parent-offspring conflict.

When it comes to romantic partners. They have a common interest in their common children. They have a potential divergent interest in temptations for infidelity, in the pull of their own genetic relatives, and in one of them possibly dying before the other.

In the case of friends and allies, there’s an overlap of interest in the potential for gains in trade by trading favors that leave each one better off. There’s also the seeds of conflict in the possibility of defection, one of them taking a benefit without reciprocating.

Finally, Trivers has talked about a possible conflict with the self, where we all have an incentive to present our best self to others, to be the most effective liar, you have to believe your own lies. So there might even be a dynamic within the self of self-deception. We believe our lies to tell them more effectively to others. So every major human relationship – husband-wife, brother-sister, parent-child, friend-friend, even self-self — has a complex pattern of both overlap of interest and conflict of interest, which I think explains much of the complexity of human social life.

>>> 

My name is Ramanan Laxminarayan. I am founder and president at the One Health Trust and a senior research scholar at Princeton University. Well, I would say Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons,” because that really underlies everything that I think about when I think about antibiotic resistance. But that’s such a fundamental paper that has defined all of the sorts of commons problems that we encounter, whether in environmental economics or in infectious disease, pandemics, all of them fit into that very nice description of how the commons work or don’t work.

>>> 

Hi, I’m Setha Low. I’m distinguished professor of environmental psychology, geography, anthropology and Women’s studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and director of the Public Space Research Group. I mean, I think it’s all the 60 years of social contact theory that was written by social psychologists. What it did for me was confirm what I was seeing ethnographically as an anthropologist, giving me everything from experiments to quantitative studies over a long, long period of time that confirmed that what I was seeing in the social world, that public spaces, people coming into contact, had all these positive benefits, that it indeed, even at a psychological level, made a difference, and had been making a difference, and had been observed long before I started working.

>>> 

So I am Megan Stevenson. I’m a law professor at UVA. I’m trained as an economist, and I’ve done a lot of research about various criminal legal programs and interventions using the toolkit of applied econometrics. Ah, interesting question. So I would say one of the most impactful pieces of social science for me was a large randomized control trial that studied the impact of job training programs for people recently released from prison. You know, giving them things like subsidized employment, help with their resume, help with interviews. And this program was not successful. You know, it had short-term impact. It got people jobs for the short run, but it didn’t have any lasting impact in terms of new arrests or employment. And this really changed my thinking about these types of limited scope interventions that we studied with randomized control trials, and the power and the impact that they’re likely to have in the world.

>>> 

I’m Tavneet Suri. I’m a professor of economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. It would be the Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. A lot of my career has been working on how technology diffuses in poor countries. Like if we really think that one of the big problems of development is that we need to kind of close income gaps, and technology is a way to potentially do that, how it diffuses is very key to that. So a lot of my earlier work was about agricultural technologies. I’ve done a bunch of work on mobile money, where it’s diffused very fast. We can build all the technology we want to solve problems. If it doesn’t diffuse and get adopted, it’s not going to solve any problems. And so thinking of the process of how people think about adopting new technologies is very different than the technology creation problem. And I sit at MIT, where there’s lots of technology creation, but the social science piece needs to think about, “Well, there’s still this human process through which it gets adopted, maybe adapted and used in a particular context that might be even very different from the initial thought around that technology.”

>>> 

Hi. My name is Dr Leor Zmigrod. I’m a political neuroscientist and psychologist and the author of The Ideological Brain. One of the most influential pieces of social research for me is this amazing line of work done by a pioneer in the 1950s called Else Frenkel-Brunswik, who was this Austrian-American scientist, psychologist, who actually was the second author of a very famous book called The Authoritarian Personality, but she herself did incredible research with children, interviewing thousands of children about their prejudice and xenophobia, and she inspired me hugely in order to understand what it is that makes a mind prejudiced, and what it is that makes a mind tolerant, and why we can even trace those early signs of prejudice to children’s ways of thinking, and we can even identify which children will become very tolerant and which might turn towards prejudice. And I think her work, although it was done 70 years ago, was done methodologically in such a rigorous way and conceptually so inventive that I recommend it to anyone who wants to think carefully about the nature of prejudice and ideology.

>>> 

You’ve been listening to a special edition of Social Science Bites, a podcast made in association with Sage. Social Science Bites has now built up an extraordinary archive of interviews with leading social scientists. To listen to these interviews. Go to socialsciencespace.com.

This Social Science Bites podcast offers a dollop of good news and heaping helping of bad. The good news is that since the end of American Civil War the economic condition of Back Americans has improved, using as a comparison the presumed status quo population of white Americans. According to Princeton University economist Ellora Derenoncourt, this “wealth gap” has fallen from 60-to-one to six-to-one in the intervening 160 years.

While that’s heartening, as Derenoncourt details for interviewer David Edmonds, that six-to-one gap hasn’t budged since the 1950s. The academic, the founder and faculty director for Princeton’s Program for Research on Inequality, breaks down that stall using historical data, parsing out differences between classes and also discussing the difference between income and assets.

“Income,” she notes, “has its own growth process, and income between the two groups has been converging over the last 150 years, and savings from income helped Black Americans accumulate some wealth, driving the racial wealth gap down.” But as incomes came closer, accumulated assets and the wealth derived from that have only inched closer, driven in part by generational wealth, especially in housing.

“[F]or most Americans, housing is their wealth,” she explains. “And we can keep going down the distribution to ask, ‘When is it the case that white Americans at this point in the distribution are mostly renters versus homeowners?’ That’s where we’re going to start to see these dynamics of the wealth gap shift.

Derenoncourt closes with some policy ideas that could accelerate closing the gap, including the politically hot topic of slavery reparations.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click on the link. The transcript of the conversation appears below. 

David Edmonds: The income gap between whites and Blacks in America has been declining, so you might expect average African-American wealth to be catching up with average white wealth. But as the Princeton economist Ellora Derenoncourt explains, that’s not what’s happening. Ellora Derenoncourt, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Ellora Derenoncourt: Thanks so much for having me.

David Edmonds: We’re going to discuss today the race wealth gap in the United States. You’ve particularly researched the gap between the white population and African-Americans. Simple question to start with, how big is that gap today?

Ellora Derenoncourt: That gap, when measured as the ratio of per capita white wealth to per capita Black wealth, is around six to one today, meaning that Black Americans hold, on average, about 17 cents for every dollar of white wealth.

David Edmonds: Now it’s important that we’re talking about wealth rather than income. So for the non-economists among us, can you just explain what the difference is?

Ellora Derenoncourt: Absolutely. So it’s useful to think about the processes that generate wealth versus income. Income is something that arises from, potentially, earnings of individuals or transfers from social programs. It’s something that’s generated anew with each person, individual income. Wealth, on the other hand, is something that accumulates over generations, and I think that’s a critical difference. So of course, income and savings from income are inputs into wealth, but so is past wealth and the returns on past wealth, and that’s really the key difference.

David Edmonds: So that takes us to history. Let’s go back in time and see how this gap evolved. It obviously doesn’t make much sense to talk about the gap in times of slavery, but do we have data post-Civil War? Do we have good data from that moment onwards?

Ellora Derenoncourt: So data really is the key question here in researching the racial wealth gap over the long run. We have known that the gap has been around six to one for at least 40 years, but then there have been questions about what it was before that, before the advent of modern survey measures of wealth with also demographic information. Now it turns out that you can actually look at the Black-white wealth gap. Very historically in the United States, using Census data. The Census in the late 19th century had questions on wealth and the earliest post Civil War measure is from 1870 where we know that the wealth gap was more like 20 to one.

David Edmonds: So do they ask people to catalog all their assets? How do they do it?

Ellora Derenoncourt: So at that time in the United States, very comprehensive property taxation was common at the local state level, which means that we actually had a lot of information on wealth, because assessors were going around and assessing not just real estate, which is the remnant of the property tax today that we still have in the US, but also other forms of personal property. So you can imagine assessors actually walking into homes and assessing the silverware or the furniture and other items that are considered everything else that contributes to one’s personal property, beyond real estate in the home you own.

David Edmonds: And so how have you established this 20 to one figure? Have you taken a snapshot of African-Americans and compared that with a snapshot of the white population?

Ellora Derenoncourt: So in our study of white to Black wealth ratio, we actually go back to pre-Civil War, because around 10% of Black Americans were free even before the Civil War. So the earliest number that we can directly use data on individuals to compute comes from the 1860 census, and there, the wealth gap was more like 60 to one, because 90% of Black Americans were enslaved and as property themselves, had no legal right to own property. From there, you can already see the massive jump of Black wealth after emancipation, once some accumulation begins to happen in the newly freed Black population.

Our study looks at specifically the growth in Black wealth versus the destruction of wealth in the enslaved. Abolition in the United States was not accompanied by payment to former slave holders, so there was an entire category of wealthy people that actually disappeared. So there are two pieces moving here. One is that most Black Americans suddenly are able to legally accumulate property, and white slave holders lose their slave wealth. Now, which of those contributed to that big drop of the wealth gap from 60 to one to more, like 20 to one? Most of it is coming from new accumulation of wealth by Black Americans. Some of it, around a quarter, in a rough calculation, could be attributed to the disappearance of wealth in people.

David Edmonds: Right. So it goes from 60 to one to 20 to one to today, six to one. And I want to ask you, what’s happened from the 20 to one to the six-to-one period? But again, you can’t have gone through millions and millions of households. You must have just looked at a few thousand to get a general picture.

Ellora Derenoncourt: Well actually, we have access to, as researchers. So the US Census becomes declassified after 72 years. So we have access to what we call the complete count, historical US Census; we have data on everyone, and so those numbers are based on the entire population. It is important to account for the enslaved, because under slavery, Black Americans were not enumerated individually by the Census, but counts of slave holdings were, so we actually make sure to go back and count how many enslaved Black Americans there were in 1860, attribute zero wealth to that group to get an accurate picture of the wealth ratio for the whole population.

So we are able to use this very complete data in the 19th century, but unfortunately, the US Census phased out questions about personal property and wealth generally by the early 20th century. So we have this gap, that ends up being about 100-year gap, in information on wealth by racial group. And that was the goal of my team. We tried to fill in that missing set of years for the racial wealth gap. And the way that we did that was to make use of the fact that, again, most states taxed wealth and had very good records of their revenues and the assessed wealth in those states.

And there were six states in particular in the US South that not only reported on assessed wealth for their populations, but also reported it separately by racial group. Those states were a mix of — so they’re all in the South — but upper South and lower South, and the vast majority of the Black population in the US at this time was located in the South. So what we do is we use information on the growth in Black wealth in these states to extrapolate to the nation as a whole for Black Americans. And then we use existing estimates of national wealth to compute non-Black wealth and Black wealth, and then take the non-Black population and the Black population and estimate the racial wealth gap. What we are able to do is fill in the period post 1870 through the 1920s using this approach, and what we learn is that by around the 1920s,1930, the wealth gap further declines to around 10 to one, and then we’re able to extend measures from the 1940s onwards using, actually historical versions of a modern survey that is the bread and butter of wealth studies today, the Survey of Consumer Finances. It turns out that the Federal Reserve was actually conducting this survey all the way back in the late 1940s, and they became kind of this lost resource. Researchers had to go back and use very old data that was in out-of-date formats and bring it back into modern, digitized form in order to study wealth for this period. And so once that data is revived, we can actually extend our analysis and cover the late 1940s all the way to the present.

Now what we learned from that is that this six-to-one number that we’re living with today that’s not only been true since the 1980s it’s been true since the 1950s. So we’ve had this wealth ratio of six to one for over 70 years.

David Edmonds: So that’s very dramatic. Before I ask you about the last 75 years, as it were, where it’s been relatively stable. This decline from 20 to one to six to one — how do you explain that? And was there a period post-Civil War when that decline was at its fastest?

Ellora Derenoncourt: Absolutely. So one of the lessons of our paper is that the fastest convergence in wealth between Black and white Americans occurred in the first several decades after emancipation. You can see that from the numbers that I’ve given you so far. So how is that possible? It’s coming from that rapid growth in Black wealth, which was starting out at such low levels that if you add a little bit, that represents substantial growth, right, compared to the white population that had a larger base level. And yes, they’re accumulating wealth, but the growth rate is not as much. So the wealth ratio between the two populations is going to rapidly decline in that initial period.

A key contribution is savings from income. Income has its own growth process, and income between the two groups has been converging over the last 150 years, and savings from income helped Black Americans accumulate some wealth, driving the racial wealth gap down.

However, I mentioned these two components feeding into wealth accumulation. There’s what you save from your income, and there’s how your past wealth accumulates and returns on past wealth, and that ends up being kind of like two competing dynamics in wealth accumulation. As wealth levels grow, the return on existing wealth becomes more important relative to the return, or the savings, from income. And what that means is that, you know, we reach a point where convergence dramatically slows down. If Black Americans and white Americans had what we call, in our study, “equal opportunities of wealth accumulation,” they save at the same rates, they experience the same returns on wealth, we would see continued convergence through the present. We wouldn’t be stuck at that six to one number, but instead we are, and I’m happy to speak more about why.

David Edmonds: So although income gaps have continued to narrow, wealth gaps since the 1950s have been stable, and the reason is that the non-Black population have greater assets, which have been accumulating value faster than the income gap has narrowed.

Ellora Derenoncourt: Exactly. So as past wealth becomes more important in the wealth accumulation dynamics, and that’s a natural process as wealth levels rise, relative to savings from income, then you’re going to see convergence slow down naturally. And that’s this hockey stick-shaped conversion. So it’s kind of remarkable that if you model these two populations almost like separate nations. Then you think about the convergence in resources of one versus the other, they have followed exactly that pattern with this additional nuance that we are no longer kind of on a convergence path. We’re stuck.

David Edmonds: And if we were to drill down a bit deeper into the numbers, and were to compare working class whites with working class Blacks, or middle-class whites with middle-class blacks, would we get exactly the same pattern?

Ellora Derenoncourt: We get actually different patterns. So of course, focusing on per capita or average wealth misses any differences along the distribution, and we know that the average can be skewed or highly influenced by the tails. And in the case of wealth, average wealth is highly influenced by the upper tail. That might lead you to think that the average wealth gap might be overstating gaps between Black and white Americans, right? This six to one number. But it turns out that the median wealth gap, so that’s more thinking about the middle class and the middle of the population is even larger. It’s more like 10 to one. Now, why is that? In a separate study, this same group of co-authors and myself, we looked at these gaps along the distribution, and the key question here, if we think again going back to 1860, 90% of black Americans are enslaved. 90% of the population has zero wealth. The median certainly has zero wealth. That means that the racial wealth gap at the median is infinite.

When did Black Americans at the median come into some positive wealth holding ends up being the key question for the median wealth gap, and our study suggests that that’s around World War Two, or just after World War Two. So we go from a gap that’s infinite to some very, very high number, and today, again, following this sort of convergence pattern, we’re at a gap of around 10 to one, and have been for several decades,

David Edmonds: If I’ve interpreted that right, the gap between middle-class whites and middle-class Blacks in wealth terms is even larger than six. To one, it’s 10 to one. We’ve been talking about averages and aggregates. Does that mean that the gap between working-class whites and working-class blacks is less than six to one?

Ellora Derenoncourt: Not necessarily. It becomes a little hard to trace out these gaps as you go further and further down in the distribution, you have fewer people, just mechanically. But we do know, for example, that if you look at who owns homes and who doesn’t, there are major gaps. For example, the median Black household doesn’t own their home, whereas that’s true for white Americans at the median, and that’s the most important asset outside the top. So for most Americans, housing is their wealth. And we can keep going down the distribution to ask, “When is it the case that white Americans at this point in the distribution are mostly renters versus homeowners?” That’s where we’re going to start to see these dynamics of the wealth gap shift.

David Edmonds: I see. Very interesting. Now I’ve noticed that during the course of this conversation, both you and I have talked about, first the White, Black gap, and then the black, non-Black gap. And those are not exactly the same, because the non-Black gap can include Latinos and Asian Americans. I’m just wondering whether those populations confuse the situation at all.

Ellora Derenoncourt:  Absolutely. So this is a critical measurement question, and for the historical time period that we were focused on, really the best we could do was to create these estimates of Black wealth and then use national estimates of wealth to kind of difference out and measure non-Black wealth. Now in this period, historically, so we’re talking late 19th, early to mid-20th century United States, the non-black, non-white population is extremely small. After the borders open up to more countries in the 1960s, we get a growth in exactly the non-Black, non-white segment of the population. So fortunately, at that point, we have enough data to separate out these different groups. And although our main measure, just for consistency, continues to be the non-Black to Black ratio, when we focus specifically on the white to Black ratio in the years where we can separate out these other groups, we actually get even larger gaps.

So this suggests that the other groups that make up American society have wealth that’s somewhere in between. We did focus specifically on some of these other groups in the more recent data, but I would argue that an area for future research is to try to construct some of these measures going back historically, people have tried. It’s just really challenging, both because of changing racial classification and measurement in the US and the lack of comprehensive wealth data.

David Edmonds: OK, let’s talk a little bit about what’s to be done. Is the market going to sort this out? Do we just need to be patient. Is there something we can do in the property market, for example, because that seems to be the key ingredient here to the wealth gap.

Ellora Derenoncourt: Yeah. This is a great question. It’s useful to come back to this underlying model that helps rationalize our data and the shape of convergence and also why we’re not seeing convergence any longer. So again, there are these two key components, the degree to which existing wealth grows due to returns on wealth, and this savings component that’s driven and determined more by income dynamics. We know that the relative role has changed with respect to income versus past wealth, and past wealth is more important, so this piece of returns on existing wealth, or capital gains, is now the current driver of the racial wealth gap.

Now where do differences in capital gains come from? Essentially, what we show in our study is that the different portfolios of wealth for the average Black household and average white household can pretty much tell us why we’ve seen not only no convergence, but actually a widening of the racial wealth gap. To put it very simply, Black Americans are much less invested in stock equity, the average Black portfolio is much more exposed to housing markets, and white portfolios have a mix of stock business and housing. Stock markets have appreciated about five times faster or greater than housing markets. So that growth in the stock market, the takeoff that has been experienced in the last several decades, really pushed average white wealth up relative to average black wealth.

If we were to let the market run its course, we will see widening racial wealth gaps for this same reason. And so in the paper, we talk about well, if policymakers had a goal of racial wealth equity or closing the racial wealth gap, which is a phrase that you do here in the policy sphere, that would either require very aggressive policies on these determinants of wealth, so capital gains rates differences, or savings differences, or income growth differences, and we cite some numbers in the paper. Imagine that black Americans saved 30% of their income every year, or experienced income growth rates of 8% a year. That’s thinking comparing again, across countries, China, experienced income growth rates like that in the 2000s and by contrast, if we instead think about the origins of this slow convergence path that we’re on, which is the fact that most Black Americans at the eve of the Civil War had nothing, this comes back to debates about reparations.

So if we dealt with the wealth that you know, many argue Black Americans were owed eve of the Civil War, that type of scale would actually equalize wealth differences between Black and white Americans. And so I think that needs to be part of the conversation.

If I were to summarize, if we let the market do its thing, the wealth gap is going to increase if we take seriously the types of policies, financial literacy, or focusing on labor market gaps that do get discussed in terms of closing the wealth gap, it would take much more aggressive versions of those policies to make a difference. And then finally, if we start to think seriously about reparations, now we’re talking about eliminating racial wealth gaps.

David Edmonds: I’m guessing that the political climate at the moment is not conducive to talking about reparations. You say that you often hear people talking about the objective of narrowing the race wealth gap. I’m guessing that too is no longer a part of the conversation.

Ellora Derenoncourt: I think there are still a lot of people for whom it is an important policy issue. It’s true that, you know, it depends on the political regimes that are in place in terms of the feasibility of different policies. I think our role here is more to keep the connection between the data and policy efficacy alive, and to point out that when it comes to wealth specifically, we can’t ignore the history. If we do as a society want to address this, maybe not particularly right now, but in the future, then we need to reckon with the historical forces determining the wealth gap today.

David Edmonds: Ellora Derenoncourt, thank you very much indeed.

Ellora Derenoncourt: Thank you so much for having me.

There is a value to shared knowledge that tends to go unrecognized because it’s so ubiquitous. Nonetheless, experimental psychologist Steven Pinker explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, common knowledge underlies things like paper money, governance, and even coral reefs.

And common knowledge, he makes clear to host David Edmonds, “does not have its ordinary sense of conventional wisdom or an open secret or something that everyone knows, but rather something that everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and everyone knows that, and so on, ad infinitum.”

Possing that shared knowledge – and the knowledge that others share that knowledge – creates the conditions for coordination, and thus action beyond what an individual could achieve. That’s the reason, he says, “that autocrats fear common knowledge of the regime’s shortcomings is that no regime has the firepower to intimidate every last citizen.”

Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, details his understanding of the virtues and vices of common knowledge in his most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. The book, his 13th, continues his streak as one of the most publicly recognized of public intellectuals, including recognition as one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He is also only the second (so far) returning guest to Social Science Bites, having addressed violence and human nature in a 2012 podcast.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, https://traffic.libsyn.com/socialsciencebites/Steven_Pinker_on_Common_Knowledge.mp3 The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Common knowledge, as we’re about to hear from a returning Social Science Bites interviewee, occurs when we all know something and we all know that we all know it. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, argues that common knowledge is useful for explaining a whole range of social phenomena. Steven Pinker, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Steven Pinker: Thank you.

David Edmonds: We’re going to be talking about common knowledge. But before we get to what common knowledge is, there’s a puzzle in your book, which I absolutely love, involving spinach and teeth. So would you mind setting that out for us? Don’t give us the answer, just tell us the puzzle.

Steven Pinker: So this has been called the hardest logic puzzle in the world. It’s been around since the early 1950s. It was originally told in not-safe-for-work terms involving adultery, murder, in some versions, suicide. So, I have come up with a safer-for-work version.

It involves a conference of psychologists. Psychologists are socially skilled and garrulous. The meal consists of halibut and steamed spinach, with the danger that some people get unsightly morsels of spinach in their teeth, but psychologists are too polite to point out to another psychologist if they have spinach in their teeth, and there are no mirrors around. Finally, the chairman of the department can’t stand it any longer, and she stands up. She announces, “At least one of you has spinach in your teeth.” As it happens, three of them have spinach in their teeth, but all she says is at least one of them. “Those of you who know that you have spinach in your teeth, when I clink the glass, that would be a good time to clean your teeth.” She clinks her glass once, and no one budges. She clinks it a second time, and no one responds. She clinks it a third time, and the three psychologists with spinach in their teeth all clean their teeth at that moment. And the puzzle is, how did they know that they have spinach in their teeth? It’s a puzzle that requires the concept of common knowledge for its solution, right?

David Edmonds: I’ll leave listeners to think about that as you say, it is related to common knowledge. [Ed. Readers may skip to the end of the transcript for the answer Pinker gives in his boo.] Normally, when we think about common knowledge, we mean something that everyone knows. But that’s not what you mean by common knowledge. What is common knowledge in the sense in which you use it?

Steven Pinker: Yes, I’m using a sense that is standard within game theory and philosophy, particularly epistemology, economics, political science, in which common knowledge does not have its ordinary sense of conventional wisdom or an open secret or something that everyone knows, but rather something that everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and everyone knows that, and so on, ad infinitum. Hence the title of the book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows ….

David Edmonds: OK, now when I was at university, many, many decades ago, I studied for an undergraduate degree called PPE, politics, philosophy and economics. It seems to me that common knowledge can illuminate all three of those disciplines. And I thought one way to frame this conversation would be to go through them one by one. So let’s start with economics. The modern economy relies on trust in the banking system. We all know that. We all know that we can trust the banks to keep our money safe. Is that a fair description of what keeps the economy afloat? And if so, how can that go wrong?

Steven Pinker: Indeed, paper currency, the value of paper currency, exists by virtue of common knowledge. Why do you accept a piece of paper in exchange for something of value. Well, because you know that other people will accept it and in exchange for something else of value. Why would they do that? Because they know that still other people would accept it. So the value of currency is an example of common knowledge, and it can unravel when the common knowledge evaporates, such as during a period of hyperinflation, where merchants furiously raise prices because they think that their wholesale price is going to go up. Workers demand greater salaries because they know that the things they want to buy are going to go up. Employers are forced to increase wages to keep their employees, and so on.

Conversely, even a bank can fail when it is subject to, as we say, a bank run, where people furiously withdraw their savings, not necessarily because they think that the bank is insolvent, but because they fear that other people might think it’s insolvent, if only out of fear that still other people might think the bank is insolvent. And since no bank has the reserves to redeem all the savings of all the customers at once, a bank can fail if everyone wants to withdraw their savings at the same time. So it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like many phenomena of common knowledge, since people don’t have the brain power to actually hold in mind, I think that they think that the still other people think that still other people think your head starts to spin after a couple of levels of embedding. But in practice, what generates common knowledge is an event that is salient or public or conspicuous or out there. In the case of financial information, it can be a rumor, a declaration, say by a central banker, which is why central bankers watch their words very carefully, because they can become self-fulfilling, a signal that not only everyone perceives, but crucially, everyone perceives that other people are perceiving. That can generate panics, speculative bubbles and other economic phenomena. So when Franklin Roosevelt said, in the depths of the Depression, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” that wasn’t a feel-good bromide, that was a literal statement of the economic facts.

David Edmonds: But this is interesting, because this is an example where common knowledge is a bad thing, as it were, because when there’s a run on the bank, if we didn’t all know that other people were worried about the bank, then the bank would be safe.

Steven Pinker: Yes. And conversely, common knowledge can rescue the bank, and more generally, the financial system, if people know that other people know that their savings are secure, which is why in American banks, there is a prominent seal of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the government agency that backstops banks, sometimes a brass plaque next to the entrance of the bank, or a big decal in the bank’s window. When you see that insignia and it’s in a public-enough place that you know that other people are seeing it, you know that other people know that the government will backstop the bank, and there’s no reason to withdraw funds. Now, prior to FDIC, deposit insurance, depression innovation, banks would often flaunt conspicuous opulence, even in small towns. The banks would have ostentatious marble pillars and gilt lettering and big lobbies, sometimes a source of resentment, like, “hey, it’s our deposits that they’re using for this luxury.” But in fact, it was a way to reassure depositors that the bank had deep enough pockets that they did not have to fear a self-fulfilling bank run.

David Edmonds: So that’s just one example of the relevance of common knowledge in the economic domain. Let’s talk about politics. In totalitarian regimes, common knowledge is something that the government often wants to prevent.

Steven Pinker: Exactly. It is a bit of a puzzle why autocracies do not have freedom of the press, freedom of speech, even freedom of assembly, which are enshrined in the constitutions of democracies. You might think, well, the government has the guns; like let people bitch and moan all they want. It is bound to be ineffectual. But the reason that autocrats fear common knowledge of the regime’s shortcomings is that no regime has the firepower to intimidate every last citizen. I like to quote a line from the movie Gandhi, in which the eponymous character tells a British colonial officer, in the end, you will leave because 100,000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if the Indians refuse to cooperate. Now we could have said if they refuse to coordinate, and coordination is the gift that is granted by common knowledge. Common knowledge depends on it, people acting in concert on the same page toward the same common goal, must not only know that their counterparts are acting in concert with them, but know that their counterparts know that they know, because otherwise the counterparts may not coordinate out of fear that you won’t coordinate, if only out of fear that they won’t coordinate and so on, ad infinitum. So coordination of any kind requires common knowledge.

We’ve already talked about the financial system, which is a kind of large-scale coordination, but it’s also the case in, say, movements toward regime change. Everyone might be aggrieved with the government. Each one might be fearful that they’re the only one, that everyone else is content, and that’s what the establishment tries to enforce. If everyone knew that everyone else knew, no one would have to fear that if they were the only ones standing up, they could be picked off one by one by the government. If everyone stands up at once, the government can be powerless, which is why they often fear public demonstrations, for good reason.

Nicolae Ceaușescu, the dictator of Romania, held a public rally where he miscalculated that his adoring subjects would come out to bask in the wisdom of the Dear Leader. One person started to heckle Ceaușescu. It became contagious. The entire crowd turned against him. He was not only out of power, but shot and hanged within days.

David Edmonds: I remember it well. Christmas Day, I believe it was.

Steven Pinker: I think that’s right, yes. And so I like to illustrate this with a joke from the old Soviet Union, where a man is handing out leaflets in Red Square, and sure enough, the KGB arrest him, take him back to headquarters, only to discover that the leaflets are blank sheets of paper. They confront him: “What is the meaning of this?” And he says, “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” Now, the point of the joke was he was generating subversive common knowledge. He didn’t have to share a particular message. What he had to share was the knowledge that he and by extension, anyone who accepted the leaflets knowing why he was handing them out now knew that the others knew that there was a reason for discontent. He was generating a subversive common knowledge, which is also why, in a case of life imitating a joke, Putin’s police have arrested people for carrying blank signs.

David Edmonds: Is coordination impossible without common knowledge? Or does common knowledge just facilitate coordination?

Steven Pinker: In some circumstances, it’s literally impossible. In real life, we don’t have to guarantee coordination with 100 percent certainty. We can accept it with a certain probability. Also, I mentioned that conspicuous signals can generate the common knowledge necessary for coordination. In some cases, you can be hardwired that the conspicuous signal triggers coordination without the knowledge actually being entertained in the minds of the coordinators. I give the example of coral which don’t even have brains to think with which what’s called the Great Barrier Reef Annual Sex Festival at the full moon, they all release their eggs and sperm into the water. The problem being, how do they coordinate on a particular day to do it, because they’ve got to find each other in the briny deep. But by using the full moon as a coordination signal, they can synchronize the release of gametes and achieve the benefits of coordination, where they bypass the actual common knowledge because they don’t even have a brain to think with, but the conspicuous signal goes directly to the coordination.

Now, we humans, of course, are not hardwired with a few responses. Our social life depends on novel innovations, like currency, like governments, and many other rituals of social life, because we dynamically use conspicuous signals mediated by common knowledge to allow us to coordinate.

David Edmonds: We’ve touched on economics. We’ve touched on politics. I want to talk a little bit about philosophy, or rather a small branch of philosophy, namely ethics and norms, moral norms, which, again, seem to be grounded in the fact that we all understand this is the way we’re supposed to behave. You have somebody in the White House at the moment who seems to breach every norm. I suppose I’m getting a bit used to it, although he still has the power to shock me, but I wonder what that is doing to the common knowledge of norms.

Steven Pinker: Yeah, so a norm is something that exists because everyone knows it exists. So, it’s a phenomenon of common knowledge. And we have countless norms that regulate our social life. It’s not as if they’re enforced by the police, such as, you don’t flamboyantly boast and brag. You don’t tell obvious lies. You don’t insult people to their face. When you’re seated at a dinner table, you wait for other people, everyone to be served before you eat. You don’t blow your nose in the tablecloth. You don’t pass gas or belch. You don’t expose certain body parts. A long list, and they can change over time. You don’t tell ethnic jokes, which used to be commonplace when I was young, even on broadcast television, you can tell jokes about how stupid and bumbling Polish people were – that is now taboo. Now those exist because everyone knows they exist. If they are flouted in a public setting, in other words, it’s common knowledge that someone violates it and gets away with it, and everyone sees the violation, the norm may cease to exist, which is why a lot of social life consists of policing norms.

In a pathological case, you get social media shaming mobs for people who breach various political and racial and sexual niceties. The norm policing does have a function, but if the violation is public, the norm can cease to exist because it only exists because people think it exists. And indeed, what Trump has done repeatedly, to people’s shock, is he has violated norms that have existed in both sides of the political spectrum in the UU for decades, such as insulting war heroes and veterans and parents of deceased soldiers, insulting women’s looks to their face, calling his political opponents with schoolyard insults, constantly boasting about his own achievement, something that just people just you don’t do in public. Well, you don’t do them, because everyone knows you don’t do them, and when you do do them, and contrary to prediction after prediction, it did not mean the end of his political career, then there’s the danger that the norm itself may cease to exist. And there are some signs of it unraveling.

That it isn’t just Trump, but you have things like Elon Musk, for a while, his ally, doing things that would be unthinkable for the CEO of a major corporation to have done 10 years ago, such as blatantly lie, circulate fake news, conspiracy theories, insult his opponents. CEOs used to be a model of propriety, decorum, simply because any fear that there was instability at the top could lead to a self-fulfilling sell off of the company’s shares.

Anyway, Trump got away with it. Musk is sort of getting away with it. But other politicians, Pete Hegseth, supporters like Christopher Rufo, are insulting, bragging, trolling, so there is a fear that the norm is unraveling in front of our eyes.

David Edmonds: You touched on social media, and I feel a bit like a broken record on Social Science Bites, because I often end up asking about social media because it has such a powerful influence on so many of the topics we discuss. But you pointed to it there as a way of enforcing norms, as though perhaps that’s a positive aspect of social media.

Steven Pinker: Well, it can be, but for the fact that there are certain activities in human life where norms of propriety and conventional wisdom can get in the way of the mission of those institutions, in particular science, academia, journalism, where the truth is a superordinate goal, and just avoiding things that might offend someone can get in the way of what social science and academia are in the business of doing.

David Edmonds: In your description of common knowledge, one thing that I’m puzzled about in social science, and I used to ask lots of social science academics this question, is whether there’s a normative component in what you’re trying to do, or whether you’re just giving a descriptive account of various phenomena.

Steven Pinker: Well, I try to be clear as to when I’m doing what in a chapter called “The Canceling Instinct,” I look at academic cancel culture from two viewpoints which I distinguish. One of them is a participant in the academic freedom cause, in which I say I really do believe academic freedom is necessary for academia to do its job, and I explain why. But then I also switch into psychologist mode, and I ask, why do people even have the urge to cancel, to censor, to punish for the content of ideas? So that’s the descriptive part, after I set aside the normative part of saying, “I do think this is a bad development,” but then why are people tempted to do it in the first place, a separate question.

David Edmonds: OK, well, I think we’ll leave it there. I think listeners all know that, they all know what common knowledge is. I’m going to let them work out the solution to the spinach teeth problem. If they can’t work it out, they can read the answer in your book. [Ed. … or look below!] But Steven Pinker, for now, thank you very much indeed.

Steven Pinker: Thank you.

How did they figure that out? When the chair made her announcement, she wasn’t telling anyone anything they didn’t already know, because they could already see that at least one person had spinach in their teeth. … But how did the common knowledge allow the three spinach-toothed diners to know it was them.

Imagine a simpler version of the puzzle in which only one psychologist’s smile is marred. When the chair says that at least one diner has spinach in their teeth, the bespinached diner looks around, sees that everyone else’s teeth are clean, and concludes that he must be the one.

Now suppose that there are two psychologists with besmirched grins, Xavier and Yolande. When the chair makes her announcement, Xavier sees the Yolande’s blemished teeth, but not his own, so does nothing. Yolande does the same. But after the glass has been clinked and no one has stirred, Xavier realizes that his own teeth must be disfigured, because if Yolande were the only one, she would have known to clean her teeth. That she didn’t means she must have seen another spinach-flecked set of choppers, and sine all the others he can see are clean, Xavier concludes it must be his

The same logic applies in our example with three sloppy chewers: each one deduces from the lack of activity after two clicks, along with seeing two spinachful smiles, that they must have spinach in their own teeth.

A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that — at least in the India of that moment — elections were sacred. This was not a religious epiphany but a cultural one; at the center was not a figure, religious or political, but an ideal – democracy.

Banerjee has explored her insights in the years since in a variety or formats, but academic and popular, ranging from her written work like 2021’s Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India or 2014’s Why India Votes? to a 2009 radio documentary for the BBC specifically titled “Sacred Elections.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, the professor at the London School of Economics reviews much of the underlying scholarship behind those works, then explores with host David Edmonds the de-sanctification of democracy in both India and the Global North in the years since.

“I think what has happened … in the US and in the UK,” she explains, “is a complacency that regardless of whether you do your little bit, whether it is literally just turning up to vote or learning to organize and be informed politically, is going to happen regardless of whether you do it or not. And because of this complacency, is precisely why these degenerations of democracy have happened.”

Banerjee is the founding series editor of Routledge’s Exploring the Political in South Asia and is also working on a grant from the Indo-European Networking Programme in the Social Sciences on Explanations of Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India. This year, courtesy of a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Fellowship, she is on a research sabbatical studying the nexus of democracy and taxation.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: India is easily the world’s biggest democracy, and Indians take voting seriously. Almost a billion people are eligible to vote in Indian elections, more than in all the European democracies and the United States combined. Mukulika Banerjee is professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics, and is the author among other books of Why India Votes. Mukulika Banerjee, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Mukulika Banerjee: Thank you very much for inviting me.

David Edmonds: Today we’re looking at Indian elections. You’ve researched why people vote in India. Now, on the face of it, that doesn’t look very puzzling. After all, India is a democracy. So why is this a puzzle? What’s the issue?

Mukulika Banerjee: So when I first started, it really was a puzzle, because we found a particular trend that was puzzling. When we looked at turnout figures one election to the next, we could see that turnouts were going up from one election to the next. When we disaggregated that data, political scientists did a survey and they found, who are the people who are voting in such high numbers? What reasons for these rising turnouts? It turned out that the most socially disadvantaged Indian citizens — people belonging to low castes, living in rural areas, women — were more likely to vote than their urban counterparts. And this was the puzzle that I attempted to explain, because it was inexplicable on the face of it, because these were precisely the people whose everyday lives were not necessarily getting better with democracy from our one election to the next. So why was it that they were so enthusiastic?

David Edmonds: Now, you would have thought that this was a question for psychologists or political scientists. You’re an anthropologist. What does an anthropologist bring to the table?

Mukulika Banerjee: So a psychologist or an election analyst of any sort, whether it’s a political scientist or a journalist, tend to study elections. At elections, when they happen, they look at who’s turning out. They disaggregate. Look at which caste communities voting for which political party, vote shares, state shares, and so on. It’s a lot of quantitative data.

As a social anthropologist, it seemed to me blindingly obvious that how people behave at elections surely is determined by what has happened prior to that election, what has happened since that last election. In that inter-electoral temporality, what is going on. And a voter who turns up to vote at a polling station is also a mother. She’s a farmer. She may be pious, she may be fond of cultivation. She is a person with a variety of different impulses, and all of these we know as anthropologists that you have to understand them in the round. A holistic understanding about society is what we bring to the table.

Similarly with voting, it was really to understand a society that was socially disadvantaged, that was marginal, but had very high voter turnouts that we needed to understand to explain this.

David Edmonds: And your methodology? You mentioned surveys in your first answer. Is that how you are extracting information mainly?

Mukulika Banerjee: Yes. So the surveys, I think, often throw up very interesting ethnographic questions. So a survey told us this data point right, that poor people in India were voting in high numbers. And they can’t go beyond that in a survey, because in a survey, you can never ask a why question, why are people doing something? And that’s where the anthropologist comes in. And I chose a village, a couple of adjacent villages, in fact, where you got 98 percent voter turnout. There was a nice mix of social groupings. It was largely Muslim and other marginalized community in India. So they were perfect representation of the puzzle that I was trying to understand.

And then I did a deep dive in this society. I just lived there, and in fact, landed up going back to the same field site for over 20 years.

David Edmonds: That was one particular site. India is a vast country, different climate, different languages, geographically, huge, different religions. How confident are you that you can extrapolate from a couple of small areas to this vast nation as a whole?

Mukulika Banerjee: That’s a very fair question, and the question that every anthropologist always has to answer. You know, our long-term immersion in one place leads to insight, which we then share. And then the question always is, the one that you’ve just asked me: Is it really representative? So in this case, when I came up with these explanations, you know, I call the paper “Sacred Elections.” I said elections have become sacrosanct rights that people feel a duty to perform. People said, “Oh, yes, maybe. And then ask your question.” So what we did was we set up a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, where we set up field sites across India and anthropologists in every site tested the validity of the sacred election thesis working in the local language, which, of course, is key to anthropological research. We always work in the local language. And we found, when we regrouped again to share our findings, we found that this was indeed the case across India. So we could justifiably claim that what was observable in couple of Bengal villages was, in fact, true for large parts of India.

David Edmonds: I’ve been to India quite a few times. I spent quite a lot of time there. It seems, from my perspective, to be a vibrant political culture. Did you find that people are very open to talking about politics?

Mukulika Banerjee: They usually are. You can have a political discussion with pretty much anyone you bump into in India. Everybody has an opinion. They have their take on things. They have opinions about politicians and so on. In my particular field site, as it happened at the time the communist government was in power, they’d been in power for 20 years before I even arrived, and continued for another 14 years after. They had a hegemonic hold, and they had this capillary network of comrades across West Bengal who watched everyone very carefully, and there were repercussions if you spoke to strangers about politics.

So actually, when I arrived in my field site, even though I knew it was very vibrant politically, nobody would actually talk to me about politics. They were welcoming otherwise. So it was a real test of the ethnographic method, where you don’t go around asking questions with a clipboard and write down answers. You are just there. You’re observing. You’re participating in what’s going on, and the insight that elections are sacrosanct actually came from one of these non-verbal, non-discursive signs, which was because I’d been hanging around the village and attending weddings and been there for various Islamic festivals, I knew that women in the village saved one sari as their best sari, which they wore for weddings or to the festival, and that was their prize sari. And when I landed up at election time, they were wearing their best sari. So it was that kind of signal that gave me this insight.

David Edmonds: Was that your main finding, that voting had a kind of sacred quality to it?

Mukulika Banerjee: Yes, it did in those days. You know, it was studied nationally in 2009 and then it was published by the 2014 elections. That was it. But then I subsequently went on to write a wider set of arguments about democracy in India, which is to say two or three things. And I call the book Cultivating Democracy, because this was a play on the word cultivation. These were farmers who toiled in the fields, but also taught me something about what democracy is as a project – which I think is universally valid, that democracy is not something that happens every five years or four years at an election. It is an everyday activity that has to be performed by everyone with hard work, patience, vigilance and hope, just in the way a farmer does every day, toiling on growing their crops.

The second thing was that ideas about politics or participation or joining in in elections, or caring about the quality of your democracy, these are values of behaving democratically right, especially now in 2026 where there’s widespread discussion of the assault on democracy all over the world. What we find to be democratic values, say, learning to work with people you disagree, or forming solidarity with people you don’t know, or learning to strategize and seize opportunities when they arise to oust an incumbent. These are values that are not just created out of political life, but are also created in religious life and economic life and through kinship and friendship and marriage and so on. So if by studying a society holistically, you find that every aspect of society has important events or rituals that exemplify the kind of people we want to be. Those values then feed into creating a certain kind of political subjectivity.

David Edmonds: And that sense that the democratic process of which elections are just a part, that sense of the sacred which I don’t think people in Britain or the US feel so strongly. Do you think that’s because India is a newer democracy?

Mukulika Banerjee: Yes, that’s exactly right. It was a fight for independence. India’s fight for independence and fight to create a democracy were simultaneous. And that’s why, right from the beginning, it had universal suffrage. It had a recognition that all Indian citizens were equal in the eyes of the constitution. So it is relatively early days. And so therefore the opposite, therefore, of enthusiasm or cultivation, in the way that I was describing it, is complacency. I think what has happened in the context that you just mentioned, in the US and in the UK, is a complacency that regardless of whether you do your little bit, whether it is literally just turning up to vote or learning to organize and be informed politically, is going to happen regardless of whether you do it or not. And because of this complacency, is precisely why these degenerations of democracy have happened.

David Edmonds: One of the defining characteristics of modern politics in the US and UK is a kind of pervasive cynicism about politicians as well. When you were carrying out this research, did you find that in India too, or did they have a greater regard? Do they hold their politicians in higher esteem than we do over here?

Mukulika Banerjee: Identical. People think politicians are venal. Politics is dirty. It’s a game you should not get into. The reason why they thought it was sacred was not because they wanted to vote somebody x in power. That was, of course, also what they were doing. They were expressing their political loyalty to this party over the other, this candidate over another. But the reason why they thought it was sacred was because the polling station in India is unlike any other space in India — and you will know this from your visits — where nowhere else, absolutely nowhere else, without exception, do you get the kind of social mixing. In an urban neighborhood, say, a middle-class person, professional is queuing in the same queue with the man who drives his car every day, right, who is bound to be of a lower caste, a lower class, because they live in the same neighborhood. Number one, so you experience social mixing in an unprecedented way.

And the second thing is that, because the election commission up until 2014 at least, used to run elections in a way that made every single person feel valued, it was their only glimpse of what genuine political equality really looked like, right? So that’s why it was celebrated, because it felt like you lived in a democracy on that day. And so at a polling station, even though, frankly, members of the lower caste and lower classes are dehumanized in India, there are such deep social cleavages, and there’s such a ranking of status all the time, the polling station was the only place where an employee would never be told by their employer to go back to the bottom of the queue and give up his space. And people valued that.

David Edmonds: That sounds heartwarming. Was it matched by a level of political literacy? Do people understand the issues at stake? How fine-grained was their knowledge of politics, both at the state and the national level?

Mukulika Banerjee: Pretty good. I think there is quite a lot of research. I mean, Indian politics has been written about by political scientists, in particular, a lot, and it shows that people do vote according to ideas and ideologies. The Communists who I saw in Bengal kept winning every single election, even though they were running a pretty hegemonic party society, as it’s called, where the party had embedded itself into every aspect of people’s lives, simply because at the end of the day, they had recognized dignity of labor. They had raised the daily wage, they had attempted land reforms. And because very few political parties had done anything for the poor, if you did something for them, they were recorded.

So I think there is a recognition — people understand what they’re voting for. It can be ideological, not always economic factors. I think what is happening in India currently cannot be explained only by economic factors. It’s a cultural project that is being voted for and, of course, other things with elections. But people are politically literate on average, in a way that I find quite rare, for instance, in Britain.

David Edmonds: Right. Well, you mentioned India today. Much of your research was carried out over a decade ago. Is the political situation in India today much as it was when you were doing this research?

Mukulika Banerjee: No, is the short answer. And I have been, since 2014, still returning to the village every year, for instance, but also follow developments in India extremely closely all the time, and write about them. In 2014 with the BJP taking over the central government, since then, there have been incremental but radical changes to the electoral system in India. So firstly, the Election Commission of India, which was a constitutional body which was valued for its integrity and probity, is no longer seen in that light. The appointment of the three election commissioners, which was done in a nonpartisan way, was changed to a partisan election, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court being removed from the panel of three people. So it’s now the president, the prime minister and the leader of the opposition. And you know, so it’s already partisan towards the executive.

Electoral bonds were introduced, again without parliamentary discussion or debate, which allowed corporations to donate money to political parties completely incognito, except for the government knowing who is paying for which.

And there has been a weaponization of enforcement agencies, the enforcement directorate and other investigative agencies that every day we are getting this from a lot of brave investigative journalists still working in India, who show that corporate houses that haven’t paid money to the BJP, for instance, are victimized.

We could say up until 2014 that Indian elections were not perfect. But given the scale, I mean, we are talking of a sixth of the humanity in India, given its scale, it was improving year on year. But now there is a backsliding, not generally, only of democracy, but in particular, of the electoral procedures itself. And currently, as we speak, there is a new process that has been introduced called the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, and this revision is being done in the most slap dash and also designed manner to disenfranchise large parts of the population. And data is now showing that women in particular have been disenfranchised in very, very large numbers. The requirements for proving your existence involves so much paperwork that people who are illiterate and at the bottom of the heap cannot provide them, and so by design, it seems to be disenfranchising precisely, ironically, the people who possibly considered elections most sacred.

David Edmonds: The BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] is the government now in power. Not all listeners will know who the BJP are. They are the Hindu nationalist party. You talked about an erosion of democratic norms. Has there also been a polarization of politics in India as there has been in many Western democracies?

Mukulika Banerjee: Yes, quite severely. And frankly, the process started in India long before it did in Europe, for instance, or indeed in the US. Because the BJP’s parent organization is the RSS, which is 100-year-old organization, which has always believed that India is a Hindu nation. It’s a cultural project. So it is about treating minorities as second-class citizens. Now in India, the irony is that the Muslim population is just over 14 percent but that means 200 million people whose existence has been made fragile and unstable in today’s India. So it is a process of polarization between people who believe that India is a Hindu nation and support Narendra Modi and his BJP government in that project, and others who believe in a constitutional vision of India, which is about unity in diversity, which was about an unprecedented experiment in democracy. Unlike Europe, India tried to create something new in the democratic process by accommodating difference, by not making the society monochrome, by not imposing one language, by not saying there is a state religion, by accommodating diversity. That is what is being attacked at the moment.

David Edmonds: There’s this battle going on, as you describe, between those who are trying to erode democracy, and the constitutionalists. You’re sounding quite pessimistic. I don’t know if anthropologists have a crystal ball, but if you could gaze into your crystal ball, who’s going to win that battle?

Mukulika Banerjee: I would like to believe that my side will win, because I believe in that constitutional vision of India as an Indian [and] as one who has benefited from that diversity. I think India’s democracy can be nothing but diverse. There is no other way to accommodate difference, because by hammering down a single-nation, single-religion, single-language model on a country as diverse as India, you really will not be able to retain the entity of India. So if one believes in wanting India to survive, that’s the only way forward.

Whether it will be possible when there has been such widespread corruption of institutions, of the judiciary, of the press — India’s ranking on the press freedom indexes is at the bottom. So there is a consensus that is being created through the media, through court judgments, through its various executive branches, that is creating a sort of fear that any dissent is not going to be tolerated and so on. So it’s very difficult to fight back this huge machinery.

But as an anthropologist thinking and studying democracy, I hold out hope, because India had 70-odd years of democracy before the BJP came in. So there is also a sort of social memory of what democratic politics looks like. There is a certain competence of how to behave democratically, what democracy looks and smells like. One hopes that that social memory will, in fact, want to reclaim the best aspects of India’s constitution.

David Edmonds: And if there’s one lesson that the world’s largest democracy has for the rest of the democratic world, what would it be?

Mukulika Banerjee: The essence of democratic politics is accommodation of difference. How one achieves it at the party political level or at an everyday neighborhood level, living in a democracy is about self restraint in order to create collective goods, collective action. And if a country as diverse as India can use the democratic project to celebrate and work with this diversity, then any other nation should be able to.

David Edmonds: Mukulika Banerjee, thank you very much indeed.

Mukulika Banerjee: Thank you very much, Dave, for your questions.