WEBVTT 00:00:00.887 --> 00:00:04.345 So I'm starting us out today with a historical mystery. 00:00:05.037 --> 00:00:08.068 In 1957, there were two young women, 00:00:08.068 --> 00:00:09.512 both in their 20s, 00:00:09.512 --> 00:00:10.935 both living in the same city, 00:00:10.935 --> 00:00:13.771 both members of the same political group. 00:00:14.815 --> 00:00:18.587 That year both decided to commit violent attacks. 00:00:19.578 --> 00:00:23.361 One girl took a gun and approached a soldier at a checkpoint. 00:00:24.404 --> 00:00:29.070 The other girl took a bomb and went to a crowded café. 00:00:30.383 --> 00:00:32.082 But here's the thing. 00:00:32.532 --> 00:00:37.028 One of the those girls followed through with the attack, 00:00:37.028 --> 00:00:40.048 but the other turned back. 00:00:41.335 --> 00:00:43.353 So what made the difference? NOTE Paragraph 00:00:44.237 --> 00:00:45.786 I'm a behavioral historian 00:00:45.786 --> 00:00:47.569 and I study aggression, 00:00:47.569 --> 00:00:49.554 moral cognition 00:00:49.554 --> 00:00:52.220 and decision-making in social movements. 00:00:52.720 --> 00:00:53.970 That's a mouthful. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:53.970 --> 00:00:54.972 (Laughing) NOTE Paragraph 00:00:54.972 --> 00:00:57.156 So the translation of that 00:00:57.156 --> 00:01:02.246 is I study the moment an individual decides to pull the trigger, 00:01:02.246 --> 00:01:06.921 the day-to-day decisions that led up to that moment 00:01:06.921 --> 00:01:12.896 and the stories that they tell themselves about why that behavior is justified. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:13.651 --> 00:01:14.852 Now this topic -- 00:01:14.852 --> 00:01:16.964 it's not just scholarly for me. 00:01:17.442 --> 00:01:19.226 It's actually a bit personal. 00:01:19.530 --> 00:01:22.782 I grew up in Kootenai County, Idaho, 00:01:22.782 --> 00:01:24.785 and this is very important. 00:01:25.488 --> 00:01:29.385 This is not the part of Idaho with potatoes. 00:01:29.733 --> 00:01:31.796 We have no potatoes. 00:01:32.247 --> 00:01:34.132 And if you ask my about potatoes, 00:01:34.132 --> 00:01:35.341 I will find you. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:35.341 --> 00:01:36.407 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:01:36.901 --> 00:01:40.222 This part of Idaho is known for mountain lakes, 00:01:40.222 --> 00:01:42.163 horseback riding -- 00:01:42.163 --> 00:01:43.411 skiing. 00:01:43.804 --> 00:01:45.165 Unfortunately, 00:01:45.165 --> 00:01:47.021 starting in the 1980s, 00:01:47.021 --> 00:01:50.970 it also became known as the worldwide headquarters 00:01:50.970 --> 00:01:53.048 for the Aryan Nations. 00:01:53.468 --> 00:01:57.054 Every year, members of the local neo-Nazi compound 00:01:57.054 --> 00:01:59.920 would turn out and march through our town, 00:01:59.920 --> 00:02:01.308 and every year, 00:02:01.308 --> 00:02:04.435 members of our town would turn out and protest them. 00:02:04.672 --> 00:02:08.914 Now, in 2001, I graduated from high school 00:02:08.914 --> 00:02:12.470 and I went to college in New York City. 00:02:12.768 --> 00:02:16.426 I arrived in August 2001. 00:02:17.482 --> 00:02:19.790 As many of you probably are aware, 00:02:19.790 --> 00:02:21.736 three weeks later, 00:02:21.736 --> 00:02:23.726 the Twin Towers went down. 00:02:24.244 --> 00:02:27.289 Now, I was shocked. 00:02:28.567 --> 00:02:30.942 I was incredibly angry. 00:02:32.725 --> 00:02:34.403 I wanted to do something 00:02:34.403 --> 00:02:38.420 but the only thing that I could think of doing at that time 00:02:38.420 --> 00:02:40.623 was to study Arabic. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:41.955 --> 00:02:44.931 I will admit I was that girl in class 00:02:44.931 --> 00:02:49.237 that wanted to know why "they hate us." 00:02:49.650 --> 00:02:52.763 I started studying Arabic for very wrong reasons. 00:02:53.381 --> 00:02:55.245 But something unexpected happened. 00:02:55.245 --> 00:02:58.215 I got a scholarship to go study in Israel. 00:02:58.877 --> 00:03:01.486 So the Idaho girl went to the Middle East. 00:03:01.735 --> 00:03:06.204 And while I was there I met Palestinian Muslims, 00:03:06.205 --> 00:03:08.194 Palestinian Christians, 00:03:08.194 --> 00:03:09.270 Israeli settlers, 00:03:09.270 --> 00:03:11.501 Israeli peace activists, 00:03:11.501 --> 00:03:16.035 and what I learned is that every act has an ecology. 00:03:16.736 --> 00:03:18.165 It has a context. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:20.233 --> 00:03:23.809 Now since then I have gone around the world, 00:03:23.809 --> 00:03:27.649 I have studied violent movements, 00:03:27.649 --> 00:03:30.081 I have worked with NGOs 00:03:30.081 --> 00:03:32.693 and ex-combatants in Iraq, 00:03:32.693 --> 00:03:34.037 Syria, 00:03:34.037 --> 00:03:35.243 Vietnam, 00:03:35.243 --> 00:03:36.362 the Balkans -- 00:03:36.362 --> 00:03:37.418 Cuba. 00:03:38.510 --> 00:03:40.964 I earned my PhD in History, 00:03:40.964 --> 00:03:43.501 and now what I do is I go to different archives 00:03:43.501 --> 00:03:45.682 and I dig through documents, 00:03:45.682 --> 00:03:49.305 looking for police confessions, 00:03:49.305 --> 00:03:51.822 court cases ... 00:03:51.822 --> 00:03:52.862 diaries, 00:03:52.862 --> 00:03:56.766 manifestos of individuals involved in violent attacks. 00:03:57.332 --> 00:04:00.384 Now you gather all these documents -- 00:04:00.384 --> 00:04:01.670 what do they tell you? NOTE Paragraph 00:04:02.011 --> 00:04:05.889 Our brains love causal mysteries, it turns out. 00:04:06.237 --> 00:04:09.203 So any time we see an attack on the news, 00:04:09.203 --> 00:04:11.842 we tend to ask one question: 00:04:11.842 --> 00:04:12.955 why? 00:04:12.955 --> 00:04:14.523 Why did that happen? 00:04:14.523 --> 00:04:17.563 Well, I can tell you I've read thousands of manifestos 00:04:17.563 --> 00:04:21.930 and what you find out is that they are actually imitative. 00:04:21.930 --> 00:04:25.390 They imitate the political movement that they're drawing from. 00:04:25.598 --> 00:04:29.567 So they actually don't tell us a lot about decision-making 00:04:29.567 --> 00:04:31.561 in that particular case. 00:04:32.091 --> 00:04:36.367 So we have to teach ourselves to ask a totally different question. 00:04:36.646 --> 00:04:40.324 Instead of "Why?" we have to ask "How?" 00:04:40.324 --> 00:04:43.372 How did individuals produce these attacks 00:04:43.372 --> 00:04:48.440 and how did their decision-making ecology contribute to violent behavior? NOTE Paragraph 00:04:48.861 --> 00:04:53.203 There's a couple things I've learned from asking this kind of question. 00:04:53.871 --> 00:04:58.576 The most important thing is that political violence is not culturally endemic. 00:04:59.123 --> 00:05:00.313 We create it. 00:05:00.614 --> 00:05:03.099 And whether we realize it or not, 00:05:03.099 --> 00:05:08.303 our day-to-day habits contribute to the creation of violence 00:05:08.303 --> 00:05:09.687 in our environment. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:09.949 --> 00:05:14.631 So here's a couple of habits that I've learned contribute to violence. 00:05:16.322 --> 00:05:19.644 One of the first things that attackers did 00:05:19.644 --> 00:05:23.544 when preparing themselves for a violent event 00:05:23.544 --> 00:05:26.914 was they enclosed themselves in an information bubble. 00:05:27.239 --> 00:05:29.526 We've heard of fake news, yeah? 00:05:29.820 --> 00:05:32.229 Well, this shocked me: 00:05:32.229 --> 00:05:35.444 every group that I studied had some kind of a fake news slogan. 00:05:35.807 --> 00:05:39.169 French communists called it the "putrid press." 00:05:39.182 --> 00:05:43.302 French Nationalists called it the "sellout press" 00:05:43.302 --> 00:05:45.240 and the "treasonous press." 00:05:45.437 --> 00:05:48.721 Islamists in Egypt called it the "depraved news." 00:05:48.971 --> 00:05:52.059 And Egyptian communists called it ... 00:05:52.059 --> 00:05:53.331 "fake news." 00:05:53.434 --> 00:05:57.599 So why do groups spend all this time trying to make these information bubbles? 00:05:57.908 --> 00:06:00.397 The answer is actually really simple. 00:06:00.725 --> 00:06:04.849 We make decisions based on the information we trust, yeah? 00:06:05.380 --> 00:06:09.246 So if we trust bad information, 00:06:09.246 --> 00:06:12.110 we're going to make bad decisions. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:12.110 --> 00:06:15.200 Another interesting habit that individuals used 00:06:15.200 --> 00:06:18.268 when they wanted to produce a violent attack 00:06:18.268 --> 00:06:21.645 was that they looked at their victim not as an individual 00:06:21.645 --> 00:06:24.356 but just as a number of an opposing team. 00:06:25.173 --> 00:06:26.904 Now this gets really weird. 00:06:27.554 --> 00:06:29.289 There's some fun brain science 00:06:29.289 --> 00:06:32.025 behind why that kind of thinking is effective. 00:06:32.025 --> 00:06:35.508 Say I divide all of you guys into two teams: 00:06:35.508 --> 00:06:36.567 blue team, 00:06:36.567 --> 00:06:37.640 red team. 00:06:38.136 --> 00:06:41.282 And then I ask you to compete in a game against each other. 00:06:41.635 --> 00:06:45.587 Well, the funny thing is within milliseconds, 00:06:45.587 --> 00:06:49.578 you will actually start experiencing pleasure ... 00:06:49.578 --> 00:06:54.752 pleasure when something bad happens to members of the other team. 00:06:55.814 --> 00:06:59.974 The funny thing about that is if I ask one of you blue team members 00:06:59.974 --> 00:07:02.836 to go and join the red team, 00:07:02.836 --> 00:07:04.916 your brain recalibates, 00:07:04.916 --> 00:07:06.275 and within milliseconds, 00:07:06.275 --> 00:07:08.836 you will now start experiencing pleasure 00:07:08.836 --> 00:07:12.294 when bad things happen to members of your old team. 00:07:14.144 --> 00:07:16.932 This is a really good example 00:07:16.932 --> 00:07:20.741 of why us/them thinking is so dangerous 00:07:20.741 --> 00:07:22.379 in our political environment. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:22.694 --> 00:07:27.058 Another habit that attackers used to kind of rev themselves up for an attack 00:07:27.058 --> 00:07:29.098 was they focused on differences. 00:07:29.244 --> 00:07:30.238 In other words, 00:07:30.238 --> 00:07:31.571 they looked at their victims 00:07:31.571 --> 00:07:35.304 and they thought "I share nothing in common with that person. 00:07:35.304 --> 00:07:37.374 They are totally different than me." 00:07:38.953 --> 00:07:42.097 Again, this might sound like a really simple concept, 00:07:42.097 --> 00:07:46.173 but there's some fascinating science behind why this works. 00:07:47.377 --> 00:07:52.462 Say I show you guys videos of different-colored hands 00:07:52.462 --> 00:07:56.261 and sharp pins being driven into these different-colored hands, 00:07:56.261 --> 00:07:57.259 OK? 00:07:58.464 --> 00:08:00.413 If you're white, 00:08:00.413 --> 00:08:06.147 the chances are you will experience the most sympathetic activation, 00:08:06.147 --> 00:08:07.565 or the most pain, 00:08:07.565 --> 00:08:10.496 when you see a pin going into the white hand. 00:08:12.209 --> 00:08:15.471 If you are Latin American, Arab, Black, 00:08:15.471 --> 00:08:19.110 you will probably experience the most sympathetic activation 00:08:19.110 --> 00:08:23.688 watching a pin going into the hand that looks most like yours. 00:08:26.921 --> 00:08:30.335 The good news is that's not biologically fixed. 00:08:30.878 --> 00:08:32.673 That is learned behavior. 00:08:33.395 --> 00:08:38.050 Which means the more we spend time with other ethnic communities, 00:08:38.050 --> 00:08:41.216 and the more we see them as similar to us 00:08:41.216 --> 00:08:44.647 and part of our team, 00:08:44.647 --> 00:08:46.675 the more we feel their pain. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:47.016 --> 00:08:49.570 The last habit that I'm going to talk about 00:08:49.570 --> 00:08:54.699 is when attackers prepared themselves to go out and do one of these events, 00:08:54.699 --> 00:08:57.146 they focused on certain emotional cues. 00:08:57.372 --> 00:09:02.961 For months they geared themselves up by focusing on anger cues, for instance. 00:09:03.277 --> 00:09:05.863 I bring this up because it's really popular right now. 00:09:05.863 --> 00:09:09.571 If you read blogs or the news, 00:09:09.571 --> 00:09:13.574 you see talk of two concepts from laboratory science: 00:09:13.574 --> 00:09:16.675 amygdala hijacking and emotional hijacking. 00:09:16.931 --> 00:09:19.493 Now, amygdala hijacking: 00:09:19.493 --> 00:09:22.093 it's the concept that I show you a cue -- 00:09:22.093 --> 00:09:23.625 say, a gun -- 00:09:23.625 --> 00:09:28.413 and your brain reacts with an automatic threat response to that cue. 00:09:28.693 --> 00:09:29.838 Emotional hijacking -- 00:09:29.838 --> 00:09:31.276 it's a very similar concept. 00:09:31.276 --> 00:09:34.840 It's the idea that I show you an anger cue, 00:09:34.840 --> 00:09:36.389 for instance, 00:09:36.389 --> 00:09:41.419 and your brain will react with an automatic anger response 00:09:41.419 --> 00:09:42.568 to that cue. 00:09:42.801 --> 00:09:45.495 I think women usually get this more than men. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:45.495 --> 00:09:46.498 (Laughing) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:46.834 --> 00:09:47.827 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:47.827 --> 00:09:51.376 That kind of a hijacking narrative grabs our attention -- 00:09:51.376 --> 00:09:54.049 just the word 'hijacking" grabs our attention. 00:09:54.707 --> 00:09:55.756 The thing is, 00:09:55.756 --> 00:10:00.378 most of the time that's not really how cues work in real life. 00:10:01.084 --> 00:10:02.144 If you study history, 00:10:02.144 --> 00:10:07.430 what you find is that we are bombarded with hundreds of thousands of cues 00:10:07.430 --> 00:10:08.661 every day. 00:10:08.988 --> 00:10:11.239 And so what we do is we learn to filter. 00:10:11.239 --> 00:10:12.907 We ignore some cues; 00:10:12.907 --> 00:10:14.787 we pay attention to other cues. 00:10:15.071 --> 00:10:18.655 For political violence this becomes really important, 00:10:18.655 --> 00:10:24.590 because what it meant is that attackers usually didn't just see an anger cue 00:10:24.590 --> 00:10:26.470 and suddenly snap. 00:10:27.002 --> 00:10:33.197 Instead, politicians, social activists spent weeks 00:10:33.197 --> 00:10:34.204 months, 00:10:34.204 --> 00:10:36.987 years flooding the environment 00:10:36.987 --> 00:10:39.260 with anger cues, for instance. 00:10:40.056 --> 00:10:41.929 And attackers -- 00:10:41.929 --> 00:10:44.388 they paid attention to those cues, 00:10:44.388 --> 00:10:47.116 they trusted those cues, 00:10:47.116 --> 00:10:48.592 they focused on them, 00:10:48.592 --> 00:10:50.877 they even memorized those cues. 00:10:51.335 --> 00:10:57.489 All of this just really goes to show how important it is to study history. 00:10:57.677 --> 00:11:01.179 It's one thing to see how cues operate in a laboratory setting. 00:11:01.766 --> 00:11:05.218 And those laboratory experiments are incredibly important. 00:11:05.403 --> 00:11:09.492 They give us a lot of new data about how our bodies work. 00:11:10.269 --> 00:11:15.056 But it's also very important to see how those cues operate in real life. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:18.647 --> 00:11:22.478 So what does all this tell us about political violence? 00:11:24.075 --> 00:11:27.663 Political violence is not culturally endemic. 00:11:28.081 --> 00:11:33.099 It is not an automatic, predetermined response to environmental stimuli. 00:11:33.682 --> 00:11:34.865 We produce it. 00:11:35.436 --> 00:11:37.509 Our everyday habits produce it. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:38.914 --> 00:11:42.875 Let's go back actually to those two women that I mentioned at the start. 00:11:44.084 --> 00:11:49.622 The first woman had been paying attention to those outrage campaigns, 00:11:49.622 --> 00:11:53.361 so she took a gun and approached a soldier at a checkpoint. 00:11:55.477 --> 00:11:56.658 But in that moment, 00:11:56.658 --> 00:11:59.010 something really interesting happened. 00:11:59.131 --> 00:12:01.933 She looked at that soldier 00:12:01.933 --> 00:12:06.247 and she thought to herself, 00:12:06.247 --> 00:12:08.951 "He's the same age as me. 00:12:09.507 --> 00:12:11.251 He looks like me." 00:12:12.876 --> 00:12:14.056 And she put down the gun 00:12:14.056 --> 00:12:16.346 and she walked away 00:12:16.346 --> 00:12:19.086 just from that little bit of similarity. 00:12:20.199 --> 00:12:23.634 The second girl had a totally different outcome. 00:12:25.676 --> 00:12:28.583 She also listened to the outrage campaigns, 00:12:28.583 --> 00:12:31.458 but she surrounded herself with individuals 00:12:31.458 --> 00:12:33.269 who were supportive of violence, 00:12:33.269 --> 00:12:35.775 with peers who supported her violence. 00:12:36.819 --> 00:12:39.835 She enclosed herself in an information bubble. 00:12:40.875 --> 00:12:44.206 She focused on certain emotional cues for months. 00:12:44.484 --> 00:12:49.783 She taught herself to bypass certain cultural inhibitions against violence. 00:12:50.148 --> 00:12:51.918 She practiced her plan, 00:12:51.918 --> 00:12:54.079 she taught herself new habits 00:12:54.079 --> 00:12:55.331 and when the time came, 00:12:55.331 --> 00:12:58.368 she took her bomb to the café 00:12:58.368 --> 00:13:00.831 and she followed through with that attack. 00:13:03.656 --> 00:13:06.166 This was not impulse. 00:13:07.102 --> 00:13:08.656 This was learning. 00:13:10.463 --> 00:13:14.369 Polarization in our society is not impulse, 00:13:14.369 --> 00:13:15.715 it's learning. 00:13:16.391 --> 00:13:19.504 Every day we are teaching ourselves: 00:13:19.504 --> 00:13:21.456 the news we click on, 00:13:21.456 --> 00:13:23.523 the emotions that we focus on, 00:13:23.523 --> 00:13:27.883 the thoughts that we entertain about the red team or the blue team. 00:13:28.284 --> 00:13:30.658 All of this contributes to learning, 00:13:30.658 --> 00:13:32.497 whether we realize it or not. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:32.847 --> 00:13:35.570 The good news 00:13:35.570 --> 00:13:41.549 is that while the individuals I study already made their decisions, 00:13:41.549 --> 00:13:43.969 we can still change our trajectory. 00:13:45.323 --> 00:13:49.006 We might never make the decisions that they made, 00:13:49.006 --> 00:13:52.918 but we can stop contributing to violent ecologies. 00:13:53.664 --> 00:13:58.249 We can get out of whatever news bubble we're in, 00:13:58.249 --> 00:14:02.130 we can be more mindful about the emotional cues 00:14:02.130 --> 00:14:03.383 that we focus on, 00:14:03.383 --> 00:14:05.782 the outrage bait that we click on. 00:14:06.422 --> 00:14:07.634 But most importantly, 00:14:07.634 --> 00:14:09.801 we can stop seeing each other 00:14:09.801 --> 00:14:13.545 as just members of the red team or the blue team. 00:14:14.079 --> 00:14:17.017 Because whether we are Christian, 00:14:17.017 --> 00:14:18.018 Muslim, 00:14:18.018 --> 00:14:19.022 Jewish, 00:14:19.022 --> 00:14:20.080 Atheist, 00:14:20.080 --> 00:14:22.388 Democrat or Republican, 00:14:22.388 --> 00:14:23.568 we're human. 00:14:23.568 --> 00:14:24.843 We're human beings. 00:14:26.128 --> 00:14:29.312 And we often share really similar habits. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:30.328 --> 00:14:31.661 We have differences. 00:14:32.233 --> 00:14:34.400 Those differences are beautiful 00:14:34.400 --> 00:14:36.562 and those differences are very important. 00:14:36.857 --> 00:14:40.422 But our future depends on us 00:14:40.422 --> 00:14:44.628 being able to find common ground with the other side. 00:14:45.785 --> 00:14:49.255 And that's why it is so, so important 00:14:49.255 --> 00:14:51.747 for us to retrain our brains 00:14:51.747 --> 00:14:55.168 and stop contributing to violent ecologies. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:56.272 --> 00:14:57.524 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:57.524 --> 00:14:59.374 (Applause)