WEBVTT

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So I'm starting us out today
with a historical mystery.

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In 1957 there were two young women,

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both in their 20's,

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both living in the same city,

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both members of the same political group.

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That year both decided
to commit violent attacks.

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One girl took a gun and approached
a soldier at checkpoint.

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The other girl took a bomb
and went to a crowded café.

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But here's the thing.

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One of the those girls followed
through with the attack,

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but the other turned back.

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So what made the difference?

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I'm a behavioral historian

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and I study aggression,

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moral cognition

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and decision-making in social movements.

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That's a mouthful.

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(Laughs)

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So the translation of that

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is I study the moment an individual
decided to pull the trigger,

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the day-to-day decisions
that led up to that moment

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and the stories that they tell themselves
about why that behavior is justified.

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Now this topic --

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it's not just scholarly for me.

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It's actually a bit personal.

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I grew up in Kootenai County, Idaho,

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and this is very important.

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This is not the part of Idaho
with potatoes.

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We have no potatoes.

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And if you ask my about potatoes,

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I will find you.

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(Laughter)

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This part of Idaho is known
for mountain lakes,

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horseback riding,

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skiing.

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Unfortunately,

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starting in the 1980s,

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it also became known
as the worldwide headquarters

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for the Aryan nations.

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Every year, members of the local
neo-Nazi compound

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would turn out and march through our town,

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and every year,

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members from our town
would turn out and protest them.

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Now, in 2001, I graduated from high school

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and I went to college in New York City.

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I arrived in August 2001.

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As many of you probably are aware,

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three weeks later,

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the Twin Towers went down.

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Now, I was shocked.

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I was incredibly angry.

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I wanted to do something

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but the only thing that I could think
of doing at that time

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was to study Arabic.

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I will admit I was that girl in class

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that wanted to know why they hate us.

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I started studying Arabic
for very wrong reasons.

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But something unexpected happened.

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I got a scholarship to go study in Israel.

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So the Idaho girl went to the Middle East.

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And while I was there I met
Palestinian Muslims,

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Palestinian Christians,

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Israeli settlers,

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Israeli peace activists,

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and what I learned is that
every act has an ecology.

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It has a context.

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Now since then I have gone
around the world,

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I have studied violent movements,

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I have worked with NGOs

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and ex-combatants in Iraq,

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Syria,

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Vietnam,

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the Balkans,

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Cuba.

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I earned my PhD in History

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and now what I do is I go
to difference archives

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and I dig through documents

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looking for police confessions,

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court cases,

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diaries,

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manifestos of individuals
involved in violent attacks.

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Now you gather all these documents --

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what do they tell you?

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Our brains love causal
mysteries, it turns out.

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Any time we see an attack on the news,

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we tend to ask one question:

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why?

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Why did that happen?

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Well, I can tell you I've read
thousands of manifestos

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and what you find out is that they
are actually imitative;

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they imitate the political movement
that they're drawing from.

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So they actually don't tell us a lot
about decision-making

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in that particular case.

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So we have to teach ourselves to ask
a totally different question.

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Instead of "Why?" we have to ask "How?"

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How did individuals produce these attacks

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and how did their decision-making ecology
contribute to violent behavior?

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There's a couple things I've learned
from asking this kind of question.

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The most important thing is that political
is not culturally endemic.

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We create it.

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And whether we realize it or not,

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our day-today habits contribute
to the creation of violence

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in our environment.

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So here's a couple of habits
that I've learned contribute to violence.

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One of the first things that attackers did

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when preparing themselves
for a violent event

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was they enclosed themselves
in an information bubble.

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We've heard of fake news, yeah?

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Well, this shocked me.

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Every group that I studied
had some kind of a fake news slogan.

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French communists 
called it the "Putrid Press."

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The Nationalists called it
the "Sellout Press"

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and the "Treasonous Press."

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Islamists in Egypt called it
the "Depraved News."

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And Egyptian Communists
called it "Fake News."

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So why do groups spend all this time
trying to make these information bubbles?

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The answer is actually really simple.

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We make decisions based on
the information we trust, yeah?

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So if we trust bad information,

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we're going to make bad decisions.

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Another interesting habit
that individuals used

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when they wanted
to produce a violent attack

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was that they looked at their victim
not as an individual

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but just as a number of an opposing team.

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Now this gets really weird.

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There's some fun brain science behind why
that kind of brain science is effective.

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Say I divide all of you guys
into two teams:

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blue team,

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red team.

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And then I ask you to compete
in a game against each other.

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Well, the funny thing is
within milliseconds,

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you will actually start
experiencing pleasure.

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Pleasure when something bad happens
to members of the other team.

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The funny thing about that is
if I ask one of you blue team members

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to go an join the red team,

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your brain recalibates,

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and within milliseconds,

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you will now start experiencing pleasure

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when bad things happen
to members of your old team.

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This is a really good example
of why us/them thinking is so dangerous

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in our political environment.

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Another habit that attackers use
to kind of rev themselves up for an attack

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was they focused on differences.

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In other words,

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they looked at their victimes

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and they thought "I share
nothing in common with that person;

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they're totally different than me."

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Again, this might sound like
a really simple concept,

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but there's just some fascinating
science behind why this works.

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Say I show you guys videos
of different colored hands

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and sharp pins being driven
into these colored hands,

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OK?

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If you're white,

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the chances are you will experience
the most sympathetic activation

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or the most pain

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when you see a pin
going into the white hand.

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If you are Latin American, Arab, Black,

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you will probably experience the most
sympathetic activation

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watching a pin going into the hand
that looks most like yours.

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The good news is that's not
biologically fixed.

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That is learned behavior.

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Which means the more we spend time
with other ethnic communities,

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and the more we see them as similar to us

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and part of our team,

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the more we feel their pain.

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The last habit
that I'm going to talk about

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is when attackers prepare themselves
to go out and do one of these events,

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they focused on certain emotional cues.

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For months they geared themselves up
by focusing on anger cues, for instance.

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I bring this up because
it's really popular right now.

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If you read blogs or the news,

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you see talk of two concepts
from laboratory science:

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amygdala hijacking
and emotional hijacking.

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Now, amygdala hijacking.

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It's the concept that I show you a cue --

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say, a gun --

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and your brain reacts with an automatic
threat response to that cue.

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Emotional hijacking --

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it's a very similar concept.

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It's the idea that I show
you an anger cue,

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for instance,

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and your brain will react
with an automatic anger response

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to that cue.

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I think women usually
get this more than men.

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(Laughs)

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That kind of a hijacking narrative
grabs our attention --

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just the word 'hijacking"
grabs our attention.

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The thing is,

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most of the time that's not
really how cues work in real life.

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If you study history,

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what you find is that we are bombarded
with hundreds of thousands of cues

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every day.

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And so what we do is we learn to filter.

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We ignore some cues;

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we pay attention to other cues.

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For political violence
this becomes really important,

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because what it meant is that attackers
usually didn't just see an anger cue

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and suddenly snap.

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Instead, politicians, social activists
spent weeks, months, years

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flooding the environment
with anger cues, for instance.

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And attackers --

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they paid attention to those cues,

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they trusted those cues,

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they focused on them,

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they even memorized those cues.

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All of this just really goes to show
how important it is to study history.

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It's one thing to see how cues operate
in a laboratory setting.

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And those laboratory experiments
are incredibly important.

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They give us a lot of new data
about how our bodies work.

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But it's also very important to see
how those cues operate in real life.

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So what does all this tell us
about political violence?

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Political violence is not
culturally endemic.

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It is not an automatic, predetermined
response to environmental stimuli.

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We produce it.

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Our everyday habits produce it.

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Let's go back actually to those two
women that I mentioned at the start.

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The first woman had been paying
attention to those outrage campaigns,

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so she took a gun and approached
a soldier at a checkpoint.

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But in that moment,

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something really interesting happened.

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She looked at that soldier

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and she thought to herself,

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"He's the same age as me.

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He looks like me."

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And she put down the gun

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and she walked away

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just from that little bit of similarity.

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The second girl had a totally
different outcome.

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She also listened
to the outrage campaigns,

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but she surrounded herself
with individuals

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who were supportive of violence,

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with peers who supported her violence.

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She enclosed herself
in an information bubble.

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She focused on certain
emotional cues for months.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
She taught herself to bypass certain
cultural inhibitions against violence.

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She practiced her plan,

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she taught herself new habits

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and when the time came,

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she took her bomb to the café

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and she followed through with that attack.

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This was not impulse.

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This was learning.

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Polarization in our society
is not impulse,

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it's learning.

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Every day we are teaching ourselves:

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the news we click on,

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the emotions that we focus on,

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the thoughts that we entertain
about the red team or the blue team.

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All of this contributes to learning

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whether we realize it or not.

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The good news

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is that while the individuals
I study already made their decisions,

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we can still change our trajectory.

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We might never make
the decisions that they made,

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but we can stop contributing
to violent ecologies.

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We can get out of whatever
news bubble we're in;

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we can be more mindful
about the emotional cues

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that we focus on,

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the outrage bait that we click on.

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But most importantly,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we can stop seeing each other

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
as just members of the red team
or the blue team.

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Because whether we are Christian,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Muslim,

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Jewish,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
aestheist,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Democrat or Republican,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we're human.

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We're human beings.

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And we often share really similar habits.

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We have differences.

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Those differences are beautiful

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and those differences are very important.

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But our future depends on us

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
being able to find common ground
with the other side.

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And that's why it is so, so important
for us to retrain our brains

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and stop contributing
to violent ecologies.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)