SIO331: Study Shows Privileged People Perceive Equality as Unfair

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 331. I'm Thomas. That is Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How you doing?

0:00:18 Lindsey: You know, Midland Affair. How are you?

0:00:19 Thomas: Mmm. Know, I was just telling you, there's more COVID around me than I've ever seen at any point in the pandemic. I don't know if that's just coincidence Or if it's new. If str- I honestly don't pay attention that much to COVID anymore because I've had enough, like I'm still doing all the things, I just, you know, I'm not following it every day. It's been too long. Somebody tell me when something significant happens, so maybe I've missed something. Is there a new strain that's killing us or something is it, or was it the BA.5 one? It's like, that wasn't, there another one that they were talking about, I was like, blip b, I don't know, something, some other thing. No,

0:00:27 Lindsey: No kidding, yeah.

0:00:47 Lindsey: I think this is still that Omicron variant.

0:00:59 Lindsey: Yeah,

0:00:59 Thomas: I don't I didn't read enough, yeah, there you go.

0:01:00 Lindsey: I don't know. I haven't been following the news about it either. I keep up with the case counts, but otherwise, yeah,

0:01:05 Thomas: Whole daycare is like shut down with cases. I have Arlo home today. Phoebe somehow is in a class, but like, it's just cases and cases. My all my friends have it right now. This is the one time I don't feel like I have it, actually, which is weird. I still have not had it, that I know of. Every time I thought, think I do, I test negative, but yeah, weird.

0:01:14 Lindsey: Same.

0:01:26 Thomas: Anyway, so I don't feel like paying attention. Somebody message me if we're all dying, if this is new, I think I would have heard about it. It's fine. Anyway, that's what's going on over here, and excited about, uh, coming the very near future, next episode, tune in, it'll be, be lots of fun. That said, let's talk about how I just used this, uh, headline, it's perfect. Privileged people misjudge effects of pro equality policies on them. This

0:01:22 Lindsey: Yep, I've been lucky too, yeah Yeah.

0:01:37 Lindsey: Hmm. Boy.

0:01:55 Lindsey: This is super interesting.

0:01:56 Thomas: Is something I came across on the, in the wilds of the internet, and it's exactly the kind of thing where I'm like, wow, that headline in that article sure looks interesting, but does it hold up to the Linseeing treatment? It's the best we have, the best system here, everybody heard

0:02:00 Lindsey: Mm. Mm hm. Yeah, It's a good system. No, I'm really glad you passed this my way, way. It's, it's super interesting. It's a little bit of a mixed bag in terms of whether I think this is an optimistic note we're going to end on or a pessimistic one. So we'll see. But this paper is by Derek Brown and colleagues, just hot off the presses, published this year in Science Advances, which is a science magazine publication that specifically publishes major advances, as the name suggests, um, a range of scientific disciplines, so I'm guessing most people have heard of Science, but if you haven't it's like the public, the periodical, yeah, yeah, so,

0:02:41 Thomas: Of Science I'm gonna go ahead and say most people listening is this one of those, you're like, how far back do I need to reset okay, how do I explain this? Do you know about matter? Oh man, but matter's made up of other, okay, uh, no, Science magazine, Science, the, yeah, okay.

0:02:53 Lindsey: Science, yeah, the journal, yeah, it's, it's like the top, like, multi-disciplinary scientific journal. It's a very big deal if you can get publish in Science, I yeah, it probably is.

0:03:06 Thomas: Nice. Is the top journal of every subject just the name of the subject? You know, like if I, if the top math journal should just be called math or something. That's awesome. Yeah.

0:03:17 Lindsey: There's probably a journal called Mathematics, and it's probably the best one, yeah, so, great journal, very big deal. And the article, of or the title of the article is, "If You Rise, I Fall: Equality is Prevented by the Misperception that it Harms Advantaged Groups," and yeah, and I was excited to cover this because I think it speaks to a number of questions that you and I have been talking about recently about, you know, why people seemingly vote against their own interests, why policy doesn't seem to matter as much as it should, and so on.

0:03:19 Thomas: There you go. I love it.

0:03:33 Thomas: Oh boy. Yeah, Right away my thought was, oh, this sounds like Dying of Whiteness, which I can't, I always recommend, can't recommend enough. It's very, very depressing read. But I'm realizing now that that's a little bit different, because Dying of Whiteness is about how kind of actually the downtrodden, you less privileged white people in this country are essentially dying of whitenness because they're supporting stuff and they're opposing policies that actually would help them. So it's kind of similar, but I'm realizing now it's slightly different.

0:04:16 Lindsey: Related, though, actually. The question that inspired the nine experiments in this paper is why folks who are in advantaged positions in society often will support equality sort of verbally, but then they don't actually show support for policies that it would actually help to rectify inequality. And this lack of support is despite the fact that inequality actually does impose significant societal costs that are felt by everyone. So I think that is a connection to what you're saying here. I mean, obviously, members of disadvantaged groups suffer the most from inequality, and that should be centered in our conversations. But in a purely self -interested way, even advantaged members of society should care about enhancing equality. And toward this point, the authors cite evidence about the negative impact of racial and gender inequality, um, domestic GDP, which, fine, I think, right, I serious inquiry should, I should, I care about Gdп as an indicator of, like, individual well-being,

0:04:16 Thomas: Okay. Ooh, individual

0:05:11 Lindsey: Yeah, okay, yeah, okay,

0:05:12 Thomas: Well-being? No, not individual, individual well-being, it is broadly speaking, it is a measure of how well a country is doing economically relative to the rest of the world. I think, I think that's a pretty valid measure of that. No, no, not at all.

0:05:23 Lindsey: But as a measure of like direct human flourishing, it's maybe not yeah, okay, yeah, So fine, Gdb, but as I was reading this claim, my mind immediately went to, like, like, yes, we should raise the minimum standard of living. And that's important because massive inequality is an underlying cause of social conflict and crime. And like, yes please, let's fix that and have less of it. That sounds great for everyone, not the only consequence it has. But there are multiple ways in which trying to address inequality is actually good for all members of a society. It's not zero sum. So, again, the question that they're trying to answer is why equality enhancing policies don't get more support, particularly from members of advantage groups, obviously Republicans, but, you know, also, these authors think that a possible mechanism underlying this lack of support is that members of advantage groups mistakenly believe that policies which enhance equality necessarily are costly to them, the Advantage group, and that may or may not be the case, depending on what we're talking about.

0:05:44 Thomas: Yeah, Right. Yeah,

0:06:25 Lindsey: And so, you know, what might underlie this perception? The authors synthesize a couple of observations from past research to form a hypothesis about this. So first, they note a documented tendency for people to perceive situations as zero -sum even when they're not.

0:06:40 Thomas: I was just gonna guess that, yeah,

0:06:42 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, so for example, people construe everyday transactions like buying food or purchasing a car as resulting in a winner and a loser, even when that's not necessarily the case, and

0:06:42 Thomas: Yeah, I win, I have this car and you only have my money. Dummies.

0:06:59 Lindsey: I, yeah, but also, like, buying a car from a used car dealer is just like that was the worst experience of my life, and I was I did lose, yeah, right.

0:07:03 Thomas: That's true. Yeah. No, that's fair. Yeah, it's true, it's not as though it's always, but it can be, it doesn't have to be is the point, like there are things that people think of as zero sum that definitely don't have to be.

0:07:13 Lindsey: Exactly, yeah, if someone's good at making bread and I'm not, and I give them money for their bread, like, that's mutually beneficial.

0:07:22 Thomas: Yeah it reminds me of the old, oh it's so funny, it reminds of the Trump line about the trade deficit with Mexico or whatever it was. Whereas like, if you look at it, we've given them $60 gazillion more than, and you know, my joke was like, yeah, I'm at a huge trade deficit with the supermarket. See, I've just given them tons and tons of money over my life and they've never given me money.

0:07:22 Lindsey: Oh, that's a great great example.

0:07:44 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:07:44 Thomas: It's never, so the deficit is huge. It'S a huge def trade deficit that we're on.

0:07:47 Lindsey: Mm -hmm. That's a great example. Yeah, it really is. So, you know, the fact that we have this bias is probably because we have mechanisms that make us very sensitive to fairness and exploitation. You know, and that's especially true if we're dealing with, like, an unfamiliar party, right, versus somebody that we know and trust. But nonetheless, right? So that's one interesting thing to note. We've got this cognitive bias to perceive situations as zero -sum, even when they're not. And second, past research suggests that people actually show a preference for unequal distribution of resources along in -group, out -group lines.

0:07:57 Thomas: Yeah. Ooh.

0:08:20 Lindsey: So we prefer our in - group to have relatively more access to resources compared to out - groups, even when that means getting fewer resources in absolute terms. Yeah. So the illustration that they give here is Vladimir's choice, which is not a reference to Vladimir Putin at all. It's based on an Eastern European fable that I guarantee everybody has heard. I heard it in some movie at some point, but I can't remember what it was. But God appears to Vladimir, who is living in extremely impoverished circumstances, and God tells Vladimir that he'll grant him one wish, but that whatever he wishes for, he will give to his neighbor doubled. And so Vladimir says, do you happen to know the punchline?

0:09:00 Thomas: I actually haven't heard this. I don't think.

0:09:01 Lindsey: Oh, okay. Yeah. So the punch line is, okay, gouge out one of my eyes. Yeah, so that's a great joke joke about how Vladimir hates his neighbor. But not really, right? It's an observation about envy, which is the emotion associated with noticing that somebody else has more than us. And there's research confirming this intuition that we dislike it when other groups have more than our group does. And in particular, evidence suggests that we're motivated to do better than others when we perceive ourselves to be in competition with them. So when people perceive their group to be competing with another group for some resource, they show a reliable preference for maintaining more relative to that group. So, for example, in one study that they cite, researchers had white college students allocate hypothetical money to predominantly white student organizations and minority student organizations. And then participants had seven different options in terms of how they allocated that money that ranged between two extremes.

So at one extreme, they could choose to allocate very large sums of money to both groups, But minority organizations would receive slightly more than white organizations. It's like 19 million to white groups versus 25 million to minority groups. Or on the other extreme, they could choose to allocate significantly less money overall to each group, but the white organizations would received significantly more than minority organizations. It's

0:09:07 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:10:18 Lindsey: Like seven million to white groups versus one million to minority groups. And then there were gradations in between, and there was a middle option to provide an equal and moderate amount of money to both organizations. So if people want to maximize their own group's resource access, they should choose the option that allocates just the most amount of money to their group, right? And ignore how much is allocated to the other group. But what they actually found was that only 12% of participants actually chose that option.

0:10:43 Thomas: Oof. Only 12%. Look, I understand that humans' minds kind of work this way. Kind of sucks. I was rooting for higher than 12 % though. That's rough.

0:10:45 Lindsey: Mm hmm. Yeah. Right. But, you know, so the most common choice, this was made by 56 percent of participants, was to give both groups a moderate but equal amount of money. Right? And then it was like 16 percent that opted to take smaller amounts that ensured that white groups got more than minority groups.

0:10:59 Thomas: Ah, okay. Oh okay. OK, that's that that makes me feel better.

0:11:07 Lindsey: Right, yeah. Right, so that, I mean, that distribution of responses is interesting in a lot of ways. Right, but it is important to note that only 12 percent of participants chose the option that is rational if you care about absolute resource access. Everybody else's choices were pulled to some degree by this relative access thing. So to bring it home, the authors are pulling together these literatures on zero-sum bias and these findings about intergroup dynamics, and they're hypothesizing that the underlying reason that people in advantaged groups don't support equality-enhancing policies as much as we would like is that they mistakenly think that increasing equality per se will impose a direct cost to their own group. And the researchers think that our zero-sum bias is going to make that misperception very stubborn. So what they're going to do is set up a bunch of scenarios in which they describe policies that will increase a disadvantaged group's access to some resource or opportunity, and they're going to explicitly stipulate that it will not come at a cost to the advantaged group, and they expect people to nonetheless perceive that a quality-enhancing policy is harming the end group.

0:11:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to derail us, but I do think there are a lot of things we need to do in our society that will actually harm the privileged class. You know what I mean? Like if it's like, OK, white men run every corporation, if it'S like, well, we need TO not that, then clearly that like that is kind of zero sum. Like there's only so many CEO positions. There's only, so I think there are a lot of those scenarios that, I could explain why people oppose just overall, like a general attitude of like, ah, you know, let's not do anything to fix anything because things are fine.

0:12:11 Lindsey: Right. That's true, right?

0:12:29 Lindsey: Yes.

0:12:47 Lindsey: Yes. No, that's absolutely true. And it's a limitation in terms of applications that we're going to come back to. Because, yeah, you're right. I mean, if you think about a particular hiring decision, that is a zero-sum position. It has to go to one person and not another. I think that this is still an interesting question because it's like even if you get rid of the zero -some aspect of some of these things and you set up these scenarios that that are not that, people still sort of, perceive yeah, this as harmful. So it's interesting. One final note before we get to the studies. So very unsurprisingly, past work has documented that anti -egalitarian ideologies, like the endorsement of inequality as a positive or justified thing, lead to heightened perceptions of equality as being threatening to access to resources. And so some scholars might assume that this misperception of equality is harmful, that they're going to be looking at is just purely driven by ideology. But these authors are diverging from that perspective.

They think that even folks like you and I, Thomas, who deeply endorse equality, are going to misperceive equality -enhancing policies as harmful. To account for this alternative ideology explanation, they're gonna control for several ideological variables in all of their studies to show that this misperception exists independently of that. Let's talk methods.

0:13:04 Thomas: Right. Yeah. I love it when you talk methods to me.

0:14:03 Lindsey: They 9 experiments. And the first seven of them use the exact same methodology, just little tweaks. All their samples were collected through prolific academic, which I recently plugged. That's a platform for recruiting online research participants. And it's great. All of their studies had relatively large samples. So the majority of their studies had 200 participants per experimental condition. So the smallest group size was 100 per condition, and that's still higher than the minimum recommended. So across all of their experiments, they had 4 ,374 participants. Good a moment ago, each of their studies controlled for five ideological variables that predict opposition to equality. So they measured political political orientation.

And unfortunately, I'm not sure how they measure this. So they said in one of their studies that they measured social, economic, and overall political orientation, but they didn't give the exact items like in the paper or supplementary series. And that's a little bit of a bummer because it's kind of important. You know, I am assuming that these are liquored items. You know, they talked a little bit about the fact that they correlate with each other and they made a composite out of these three items.

Also measured something called Social Dominance Orientation, which is the belief that it is good or justified that certain groups have dominance or power over others in society. So this has items like, any ideal society requires some groups to be on top and other groups to Be on bottom. Or another item is it is unjust to make groups equal. So also measured global global zero -sum beliefs. So this is the belief that gains for one group necessarily come at the expense of another group.

So the scale has items like when one group gets ahead, others are held back, as well as decreased bias toward one group naturally means another group will experience more bias.

0:14:14 Thomas: Right. Oh man.

0:15:48 Lindsey: Yeah, right. So, this one in particular, I think, is an important belief to account for because it captures individual differences in the extent to which which people see these groups as a competition with each other.

0:15:55 Thomas: Yeah. You See Here's the thing, there's a set quantity of racism out there that just has to happen, and if we stop being racist towards certain groups, we're just gonna have to dial it up against other groups because it's a given, there's... there's X amount of racism in the wild. Wow.

0:16:03 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly.

0:16:13 Lindsey: Right. Sexism, the things. Yeah. So if they, if they find these effects controlling for this particular individual difference, I think that that is very interesting. Right? They also measured a system justifying beliefs, which measures the perception of fairness, uh, legitimacy and justifiability of the prevailing social system, whatever that is. So this particular measure of of it has items like, in general, the American political system operates as it should.

0:16:38 Thomas: That's just a measure of how ignorant you are, it's just straight up, like, yeah.

0:16:42 Lindsey: Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Another item is everyone has a fair shot at wealth and happiness. Yeah okay. And then finally they measured explicit prejudice. And this is another item that I'm not 100% clear. I'm like 90% sure I know how they measured this. So I think the item they used across studies was, quote, "To what degree is your opinion of minorities favorable or unfavorable?" And then in parentheses, they listed the following demographic categories. So race, sex, color, ethnicity, and national origin. And the paper that they took this item from was specifically making the case that like very sort of transparent items like this actually can be a very good measure of prejudice. So it's an interesting thing because, like, it's easy to fake good on items like this, but also the people who say, like, "Yes, I have very unfavorable opinions of minorities. Like they're telling you something meaningful. So, right.

0:16:50 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:30 Thomas: It's Sort of, like, the there may, may be false negatives, but no false positives, right? Okay, so

0:17:38 Lindsey: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so, so they measured and controlled for all of those variables in all of these studies. They can see if these misperceptions that they're anticipating are a product of beliefs like these or if there's something operating beyond ideology. So in the first six experiments, they had participants read scenarios that described the following six monetary and representational disparities. So the disparity between Latino and white homebuyers in receiving mortgage loans, the gender pay gap, the disability employment gap, the ex -prisoner employment gap. Startup fund discrimination for Black versus white entrepreneurs. And university admission disparities between first -generation college students, meaning students who are the first in their family to go to college, and generationally continuing education students.

As an example, here's some base language from one of these scenarios, scenarios, quote, "According to a recent report in 2018, white homebuyers received roughly $386 billion in mortgage loans from banks, while Latino homebuiers received only about $12 .6 billion in mortgage loans overall," close quote. So as we talk about each study, I'm going to keep using this example about Latino versus white home buyers to illustrate, but just keep in mind that the findings we're discussing are for all of those different disparities that we talked about.

So importantly, participants only saw scenarios in which they personally were a member of the advantaged in -group described. So for instance, only men saw the gender pay gap scenario. Only people who reported having no disabilities saw the disability employment gap scenario, and for most of their studies, they specifically recruited white, non -Hispanic participants from the U.S., which ensured that all participants would be in the advanted group in some scenarios. Scenarios.

After reading the description of the disparity, people then read about various policies that would decrease or increase inequality. And then the researchers' key outcome variable across studies is how participants think each policy proposal is going to affect their own advantage group's access to resources. Let's get to the individual studies. In the first experiment, participants read about an inequality, and then then they were randomly assigned to read about a policy that would either enhance equality, retain the status quo, or increase inequality.

So for instance, after reading about the inequality in mortgage loan access for Latino and white homebuyers, participants read one of the following policy proposals. So either an inequality enhancing policy that read, several banks propose increasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuiers by $7 .3 billion dollars and not changing the total amount of mortgage funding to white homebuyers. And ultimately, these banks predict that this proposal will narrow the gap in mortgage loans between Latino and white home buyers over the next year, quote.

So Latino homebuiers have their access to mortgage loans increased. White homeburiers have the same access that they've always had. So that was the first one in the status quo condition. Participants read about the homebuyer disparity and then read, quote, "However, several banks propose not changing mortgage loan funding over the next year." So everything stays the same.

And then in the inequality enhancing condition, people read the following, quote, "Several banks propose decreasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers by $7 .3 billion and not changing the total amountof mortgage loanfunding to white homebuiers. Ultimately, these banks predict that this proposal will widen the gap in mortgage loans between Latino and white home buyers over the next year." So that's like a mirror image of the equality enhancing policy.

0:18:08 Thomas: That's Like, if anyone picks that, they're truly an asshole. Yeah.

0:21:12 Lindsey: I wondered like how that last one would hit participants. It seems like it Would read a little weirdly, but I don't know. It works, I think, for what they're trying to do here, but it is odd. So participants read one of those three proposals, and then they indicated how they thought that policy proposal would affect their own advantage group's access to resources.

Answered the question, quote, "How do you think the proposed changes will affect white homebuyers' chances of obtaining a mortgage on a scale of greatly harmed to greatly improve?" As predicted, they found that despite the fact that all three policies said that access to mortgages for white homebuyers would not change explicitly, that participants still perceived the equality-enhancing policies as significantly harming their in-group's access to resources compared to a status quo policy or a policy that would actually increase inequality.

And to remind folks, this was even controlling for all those anti-inequality beliefs, like social dominance orientation and system-justifying beliefs. So the only part of the scenario that really should affect participants' answers to the harm question is that sentence that was in all of the policy descriptions, which is that mortgage loan access doesn't change for white homebuyers, but instead the information about the relative group access seems to be affecting their perceptions,

0:21:17 Thomas: Huh.

0:22:24 Thomas: Interesting.

0:22:24 Lindsey: Right? Next study was just, it was basically a direct replication of that one. They just changed some wording to make sure that that there weren't peculiarities, and they replicated the effect. So I'm going to skip the details of that one.

Their next experiment, instead of comparing an equality -enhancing policy to an inequality -enchancing policy, they randomly assigned participants to see either an intergroup or an in-group equality -enhancing policy, meaning that in one condition, there's a disparity being corrected between, say, Latino and white homebuyers, and in the other, the disparity is between some some white homebuyers and some other white home buyers.

They did this with the thinking that participants would be less likely to see equality as harmful if it occurs within their in -group as opposed to between their in group and an out group, which makes sense, right? Like, yeah. So these perceptions seem to be very much driven by this intergroup competition type thing. So here's how they manipulated this. In the intergroup policy condition, they read the following. So, quote, according to a 2019 report, while white homebuyers in a neighborhood received an average of $273 ,000 in mortgage loans from banks, comparable Latino homebuiers in the same neighborhood received and average of two hundred and forty nine thousand dollars in mortgage loans. And there was no available explanation for this gap in the in -group policy condition. They read the exact same scenario, but they replaced the word Latino with white.

0:23:10 Thomas: Yeah. So They both read

0:23:48 Lindsey: So? Right, so it was like, you know, white homebuyers received $273,000 and then comparable white homebuyers receive $249,000. There's no available explanation. Is it

0:23:49 Thomas: White, how Do they make That make any Sense just by, yeah.

0:24:00 Lindsey: Exactly. Okay, I'm glad, I'm glad that hit you strangely as well, because when I read this, I was like, that, how are people interpreting this? Because It sounds like they're like, okay, we had a distribution of Mortgage Amounts

0:24:08 Thomas: It Sounds Like A typo. It sounds like You'd be reading that, you'd be like, did they mess up? Well,

0:24:12 Lindsey: Yeah. I The same way, the problem is, is that in order to keep this completely standardized and not activate any kind of intergroup dynamics at all, you kind of have to do something like this. It

0:24:26 Thomas: Couldn't you just be like, in a comparable neighborhood or something, at least, or like, in a, I don't know, something that that at least makes it clear, like, these are two different groups of people, even if they're Both white. I

0:24:35 Lindsey: I I think you're right, I think that that could have worked. I mean, it's Possible people are going to fill in those gaps with something, but I Yeah, I do think that this, this reads oddly, um, probably works for their purposes. It does, it does prevent people from imputing any kind of specific intergroup dynamics there. So I think it works for that, but I do think people probably thought that this was odd. Read one of those two things, and then everybody read about inequality enhancing policy, which would give the disadvantaged group an additional $24,000 on average to eliminate that disparity and not change the total amount of funding to the advantaged group.

Once again, people, people misperceived a policy that would increase mortgage funding to Latino homebuyers as having a negative effect on white homebuyer's access to mortgages. But when the policy was to grant more funds to a group of disadvantaged white home buyers, participants correctly perceived that the policy would have no effect on the mortgage access of the advantaged white home buyers. So this does support the idea that intergroup context seems to elicit this effect that they're looking at.

Their next experiment, they went back to the equality versus inequality enhancing comparison. The only tweak that they applied was to add an explicit statement into the scenarios that the equality enhancing policy would be societally beneficial for everyone. And

0:24:39 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Wow

0:25:53 Lindsey: Then they had, yeah, and then they have a symmetrical statement about the inequality enhancing policy being detrimental to everyone.

0:26:00 Thomas: Are we ready to be bummed out here we go and

0:26:02 Lindsey: It. Yeah. But yeah, so they added this to see if you can get rid of that misperception of harm if you explicitly say equality-enhancing policy can be mutually beneficial for all groups. And so participants were randomly assigned to see either a societally beneficial equality-enhancing policy condition. And so this is what they read after reading about the existing inequality, quote, "Several banks propose increasing the total amount of mortgage loans to Latino homebuyers and not changing the amount of loan funding to white homebuiers. Ultimately, these banks predict that this proposal will narrow the gap in mortgage loans between Latino and white home buyers over for the next year. And these banks stated that this policy will have the additional effect of stimulating greater mortgage investment nationwide, increasing the total benefits for homebuyers of all racial groups." So that's pretty unequivocal.

0:26:46 Thomas: 100% of the participants said that's a -okay okay excellent let's make the world better end of episode

0:26:51 Lindsey: That's great. Uh -huh. Yeah. And so the societally, yep, we're all good. The societaly harmful inequality enhancing policy condition was just a symmetrical sort of mirror image of the other one they were gonna yep

0:27:04 Thomas: Like and we're closing the bank and we'RE foreclosing on tiny tim and his

0:27:09 Lindsey: Everybody suffers. It's great. And they found that even with the addition of these explicit statements about societal benefits and harms, they found the exact same effect. People perceived the equality enhancing policy to harm the in-group. Pretty the next experiment, they wanted to see if you could get rid of the harm misperception by changing whether the resource was presented as unlimited or finite. So if the zero-sum perception is contingent on the perception that resources are limited, yeah.

0:27:10 Thomas: Yeah yeah I was kind of wondering if in the back of everybody's minds it was like with the, you know, with the federal, uh, guarantees or whatever it was, if it's like, well, there is a budget, you know, and there's not infinite money in a budget. It's got to come, come from somewhere. I don't know if that's kind of what people are thinking.

0:27:37 Lindsey: Right? Mm -hmm. Yep. That in the back of my mind, too. Right. So they're going to address that explicitly right now. The same equality enhancing and inequality enhancing policies as the previous studies, but they also randomly assigned people to see one of the two following statements at the end of the scenario. So, they either saw, quote, "These banks reported there will be no change in profits for many years and they will need to reorganize their budgets to fund these mortgage loans for Latino homebuyers." So that suggests that the mortgages are finite. Or they, they saw this, quote, "The banks reported that there have been large and consistent increases in profits that will continue for many years, allowing them to fund mortgage loans for as many people as they want." So that's a pretty clear communication that these are unlimited, right? So this one actually surprised me a little bit. Not only did they replicate the effect in this study, but the unlimited resources condition didn't even weaken the effect.

0:28:29 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

0:28:43 Lindsey: Yeah. So people perceive the equality.

0:28:44 Thomas: Come on, people.

0:28:45 Lindsey: I know people perceive the Equality Enhancing Policies as being just just as harmful to the advantaged in -group, even if the resources were presented as unlimited. And I really do, I found that surprising. You know, I was imagining the same thing as you. Yeah, right. Okay, but, but they haven't given up yet. So in their next study, they try a different method of manipulating the perception of limited versus unlimited resources. So this time, instead of saying that the banks can fund as many mortgages as they want, they instead say that, quote, anyone who wants a mortgage can receive one. And so this is a subtle difference, but in the last study, they described the resource itself as being unlimited.

0:28:54 Thomas: Jeez. Yeah, I thought it would help a little.

0:29:16 Thomas: Hmm, okay.

0:29:24 Lindsey: In this study, they're saying that a group's access to that resource is unlimited, which I could see it being a substantive difference, because one way to read the previous statement is that, sure, banks can grant as many mortgages as they want, but they're going to dole them out as they choose.

0:29:36 Thomas: Yeah there's some like discretion in there. Yeah

0:29:38 Lindsey: That's right. So if they're giving more to Latino homebuyers, maybe they're getting fewer to white homebuiers, even though the scenario says they're not going to to do that, but whatever. And so then they also had this limited access condition, which said, quote, these banks reported that there will be no change in profits for many years. They'll need to reorganize their budgets to fund these mortgage loans.

And therefore, banks will provide a limited number of mortgage loans, and the proposal will cause some white applicants to not receive funding. So that's a pretty clear statement that there's a harm here. Found that in the limited access commission, participants perceived a relatively large harm to the advantage in group. And that makes sense because the scenario said that there's potential harm to white homebuyers.

Even in the condition in which participants were told anyone who wants a mortgage can receive one, participants did perceive the policy as harming the in group, but encouragingly, they perceived the harm as significantly smaller than in the limited access condition. And the effect itself was actually very small in an absolute sense. It was, like, right on the edge of what would be considered statistically significant, and it was smaller than the effects we've been seeing in these other studies.

And I went and looked at their supplemental materials in which they show all of these effects separately by the different inequality scenarios. And it looks to me like with the exception of the scenario regarding job access inequality for ex -felons, people actually correctly perceived that there was no harm to the advantaged in -group in the unlimited access condition. Yeah. So, I'd call this a win. Like, the authors kind of discussed this as though the unlimited access manipulation didn't entirely get rid of the effect. But it looks to me like it mostly did. And I think that there might just be something unique going on with the ex -felon result. Because

0:29:38 Thomas: Hmm. Huh.

0:31:17 Lindsey: That scenario looks a little bit different than the others across studies.

0:31:21 Thomas: Wait a minute, are you saying that once they successfully got this wording correct to where they just hammered it through everybody's thick skull, all these white boomers that are the ones who are targeted by the study, that like there will be no harm to you whatsoever, are you saying that then, and only then, did we finally get, like, people not being assholes, but to what degree were they not assholes? Oh,

0:31:37 Lindsey: Yep. Yes. So when you look at the individual effects, again, with the exception of this ex-felen thing, which could be a unique thing, it looked like, on average, people were saying like, "Yes, this will not harm the in-group. White access to home loans will not

0:31:59 Thomas: They Oh, it all, it did was get them to acknowledge that it wouldn't help the end group. We haven't gotten to the point of like, so, which, which policy would you choose? Ah, okay, gotcha. When you say it's a win, it's win in terms of you accomplished the thing statistically that you needed to do first, maybe.

0:31:59 Lindsey: Oh, Correct, yeah. We're going there next, yeah. Um, Well, That's fair, it's a small win, it's a small victory, but it's something. You, I'm actually a little bit surprised at how sticky this is, um, seems to be a very sort of sticky intuition. Uh, Yeah, I, I think that you can make the claim with a fair amount of confidence that this particular manipulation gets rid of it, um, Yeah, so anyway, um, being that, if you explicitly say access to the resource in question is unlimited, this appears to get rid of the misperception of harm to the in-group, which is a useful thing to know. All right, so we're done with the experiments that use the inequality vignettes. In their next study, they looked at perceptions of California Proposition 16, which was on the ballot in the 2020 election. It was ultimately defeated. And it,

0:32:27 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, all right.

0:33:00 Thomas: Oh,

0:33:00 Lindsey: Oh, Proposed removing the ban on affirmative action in public employment and public university admissions emissions decisions. Yeah, so I think this was a cool methodological choice because they're using this real world thingy that embodies what they've been trying to capture in their hypotheticals. This was an two session study. Participants completed one set of measures, and then about a week later, they completed a second set of measure. And importantly, they were collecting these responses between October 12th, 2020 and November 2nd, 2020, so the weeks leading up to of the election. Of notes about their sample, for all of the studies that we've discussed thus far, they've been using non -Hispanic white samples. But in this study, they also recruited Asian Americans, because both are advantaged in terms of their representation in public universities and public sector jobs in California. So all of their participants were white, non -Hispanic or Asian American California voters. Were able to get 79% % of their original participants to also also complete the follow-up measures a week later. So

0:33:01 Thomas: Yeah. What was this?

0:34:00 Thomas: Wow.

0:34:01 Lindsey: That's good to know. Yeah, it's not bad. Not bad. Participants read the summary of California Proposition 16 exactly as it was presented on the official California ballot.

0:34:01 Thomas: Seems good. Is that short enough for you to read it to us?

0:34:12 Lindsey: Yeah sure. Quote, Proposition16 allows diversity as a factor in public employment, education, and contracting decisions. Legislative constitutional amendment Oh,

0:34:43 Thomas: What I love about this is I bet you if you asked virtually everybody, they would have thought that this is already how things are, you know, Kind of like how conservatives think if you're Black, you just get into Harvard and go full ride. Doesn't even like a lot of them, just think that a lot of privileged people just think that affirmative action is just this thing that, like, it's the complete opposite of true and it's it strikes me that I wonder how much that plays, because it's that's almost like the effect we're measuring is thinking that that's the case, even though it isn't.

0:34:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

0:35:14 Lindsey: Yeah, that's a good point. Right. Yeah. So participants indicated whether they thought Proposition 16 would harm non -underrepresented people's chances of gaining placement in public employment, public education, and public contracting positions. And they also indicated whether they opposed or supported Proposition 16, as well as whether they would vote for Proposition 16, if they were voting that day. And then a week later, they remeasured perceptions of harm, policy support, and vote preference to get a sense of whether attitudes and voting preferences changed as the election approached. So, consistent with their experimental results, non -Hispanic white and Asian Californians perceived Proposition 16 as harmful to their own groups.

0:35:56 Thomas: Isn't that true, though? Like, that's a case where it might just be true if we have, you know, X number of positions within the state. And it's like, hey, let's get some diversity in there. I don't know, I feel like I might be the kind of person who would answer like, well, yeah, that's going to harm my in-group, but also I'll vote for it.

0:36:13 Lindsey: It's right. Entirely possible that this is not a misperception in this case, And they don't really claim that it is. They're just trying to, like, draw the line between the scenarios they've set up in this real world thing and showed that it's like the same mechanism that explains it. Right? So they perceived as harmful to their own groups, and this perception predicted less policy support. And importantly, remember, again, they've been measuring ideological variables, including political orientation, in all of these studies and controlling for them. And in this study, perceived harm of Proposition 16 predicted policy support and voting preferences even when controlling for those ideological variables, and it was actually a stronger predictor of policy support and vote preferences than those ideological variable were. Yeah, so this is, this is pretty good support for their idea that these biases are underlying these policy perceptions, and that it it runs deeper than ideology, right?

0:36:16 Thomas: Okay. Gotcha.

0:37:03 Thomas: This would maybe contribute to the explanation for why, you don't know if it's NIMBYism or if it's like California, you know? Know, why is California have a housing crisis? Isn't it so liberal? And it's like, well, you people who say they're on the left when it comes down to it, and there's some ballot measure or something like this at a local level or whatever, like, hey, let's increase housing here, let's do such and such here, they perceive it as harmful to their in -group and vote against it.

0:37:28 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, also found that, uh, changes in perception of harm to the in-group from time one to time two also predicted shifts in policy support and voting preferences. So, so most people, 85% of their sample didn't change their voting preference from time 1 to time 2. But for the 15% that did, this change was associated with shifts in their perception of whether Proposition 16 would harm their group's access to resources.

0:37:29 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

0:37:52 Lindsey: Yeah, so, so yeah, I think these are interesting results, how helps make the case that what they're capturing in these vignettes is actually reflecting something that meaningfully affects things like voting behavior, um,

0:38:03 Thomas: How, uh, how badly did that ballot measure fail by the way?

0:38:04 Lindsey: Um, Voted yes versus 57 no. Yeah.

0:38:10 Thomas: Ah, yep. And just goes to show, you kind of important because one of the biggest right-wing talking points is always like, well, you think liberal policies are so great. Look at the city, look at California. It's where they have the homelessness crisis and all that. And it's like, yeah, there's several things going on here. For one, there is going to be more people where people actually want to live. You the other thing that's going on is, yes, these states are blue. Yes, California is a blue state, but this kind of crap happens. You know, like this is people actually put their money where their mouth is, I guess, on on some of these policies. And it's not that doesn't prove that the policies are bad. It proves that the people are bad now. That's not the wrong word to use, but the people aren't flawed. Like who should be voting for these things aren't. And that happens at a larger statewide scale, like in this measure. And it happens on the local level, probably a billion times a day that we don't see.

0:38:11 Lindsey: Yep. Yeah, yeah, Right. And again, it's potentially for mechanisms like are being sort of highlighted in this study. Right? We're down to the last two studies, and these use a different research paradigm. So the researchers created a situation in which participants were actually in a position to choose a policy that would either either materially benefit them by increasing their chances of receiving a bonus payment or not, and see if people continue to misperceive equality as harmful even when an accurate perception is incentivized in a very direct and immediate way. So in this first of these last two studies, they told participants that a personality test would assign them to one of two teams, the Rattlers or the Eagles, and that each team would be engaging in problem-solving tasks. In actuality, all participants were told that they had been assigned to the Rattlers, which is going to be

0:39:13 Thomas: Exactly.

0:39:57 Thomas: I feel like they should have used Cobra Kai or Eagle Claw. It's close. It's closed.

0:39:58 Lindsey: Yeah. That would have been awesome. It is, yeah. Um, yeah, so, so everybody in actuality is assigned to the Rattlers, and that is going to be described as the advantaged group. So this is, this is a variation of something that's known as the minimal groups paradigm, in which people are arbitrarily assigned to groups and then nonetheless rapidly develop the sort of in-group favoritism It's very Very fun.

0:40:12 Thomas: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

0:40:22 Lindsey: Yeah, it's the best. They told participants that this study is something they do every week and that after the teams complete their cognitive tasks each week, the researchers select some subset of participants to receive a bonus payment. And that in previous weeks, Rattlers have been selected to receive bonuses more often than Eagles. So Rattler's have gotten 126 bonuses, I know, versus 79 bonuses to Eagles, right? They're very careful not to explain why this difference exists, which is important.

0:40:42 Thomas: Those snakes.

0:40:51 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:52 Lindsey: Then they asked participants to consider a new proposal for the bonus distribution procedure that week. So participants were randomly assigned to read one of the following two policies, one that would enhance equality between the Rattlers and Eagles, but actually be good for both teams. Another policy that would make inequality worse between the Rattlers and the Eagles, and actually be bad for both team.

So in the equality enhancing condition, they read the following, quote, we are implementing a new procedure to allocate bonuses more equally across the groups. With this change, we will provide 50 additional bonuses to eagles, which again are the disadvantaged group, and only five more bonuses to rattlers. So it makes it so the groups are about equal. It's 131 bonuses for rattlers versus 129 for eagles. And both groups are receiving more bonuses. So the eagles are getting a larger increase, but they were so disadvantaged at the beginning that they're actually still receiving a couple of bonuses less than the Rattlers, right? The inequality enhancing condition, they read, quote, we're implementing a new procedure to allocate more bonuses to whichever group previously received more bonuses. So with this change, we will provide 50 fewer bonuses to Eagles and only five fewer bonuses to Rattlers. So this makes the inequality worse. Eagles are now getting only 79 bonuses versus the Rattlers' 121, and both groups are worse off

0:41:41 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:42:15 Lindsey: Under this policy. The Rattlers are just suffering a lot less. As in the previous studies, they asked participants to indicate how the proposal would affect their advantage groups' resource access and assess their policy support, and they also had participants vote on whether the new bonus procedure should be implemented. So, consistent with all previous findings, participants misperceived the equality-enhancing policy as being harmful to the Rattlers' access to bonus payments and the yeah, right, even though you can literally do the math and see that isn't the case, right? If they choose the equality enhancing one, their personal chances of getting a bonus increase because they've increased

0:42:16 Thomas: I Would Argue

0:42:51 Lindsey: The number of bonuses by five

0:42:51 Thomas: That's Not even math, like, you're you Don't even have to do any math. You just, one of them is a negative sign and one of them's a plus sign. Like, that's that's as far as the math you need to go. Yeah.

0:42:54 Lindsey: True that's very true. Yeah, um, that was the perception of harm. The policy support and voting patterns were interesting, so if people were motivated to just increase, in absolute terms, their access to bonuses, then participants who read the equality enhancing policy should overwhelmingly vote in favor of it, since it increases bonuses for both groups. The participants should overwhelmingly vote against the inequality enhancing policy because it decreases bonuses for both groups.

But what they actually found was that regardless of whether participants saw the equality or inequality enhancing policy, participants were equally lukewarm in their support and voting preferences for both. So participants were around the midpoint of the scale on support for both policies, meaning they didn't really have support or opposition to it. They were like right in the middle. And close to 50% of participants voted in favor of both policies. So there was no significant difference between the support or voting for either policy.

A mediation analysis showed that participants' perceptions of the policies as harmful explained whether they would would vote in favor of it. So when people voted against the policy to increase equality and bonus payments, it was because they perceived it to be harmful to the Rattlers' access to bonus payments.

So they're interpreting this as evidence that even when you set up this relatively clear, isolated situation in which an equality-enhancing policy would increase absolute access to resources, people in the advantaged group have a hard time ignoring the information about relative access of a competing group.

0:44:28 Lindsey: All right. Final experiment. Did the Rattlers and Eagles paradigm again.

0:44:27 Thomas: Haven't We had enough, look, I get it, humans are terrible.

0:44:36 Lindsey: Yeah, humans suck. So they did the Rattlers and Eagles again, but this time they had one condition in which people were evaluating two equality enhancing policies side by side, one which actually would harm the in -group and another which would not affect the in -group. So not harmful.

0:44:36 Thomas: Okay.

0:44:53 Thomas: Interesting.

0:44:53 Lindsey: And the researchers thought that the ability to contrast the two policies might help people perceive the consequences of the policies more accurately. And, thus get rid of that misperception of harm for the benign equality enhancing policy. So in the joint condition, people read, quote, "After teams compete in the task this week, or complete the task, we randomly select participants to receive bonus for their efforts. In previous weeks, Rattlers have been selected to receive more bonuses than Eagles. We're considering implementing a new procedure to allocate bonuses more equally across the groups, and we're considering two options. Option A is to provide 50 additional bonuses to Eagles and not change the bonuses to Rattlers. So this one would improve equality by getting more to the disadvantaged group. Option B is to provided 50 fewer bonuses to Rattlers and not changed the number of bonuses to Eagles. So this would also improve equality, but it would do so by harming the advantage group, getting less to them."

0:45:00 Thomas: Yeah. We Haven't addressed, what are snakes and eagles doing with money, you know, is the thing. Yeah.

0:45:52 Lindsey: Ah, building a nest, I guess. I don't know, that was the joint policy condition. There was a single policy condition where essentially they only read the equality enhancing benign condition. So the one in which the disadvantaged group got more, but the advantaged group didn't get less. Then participants reported their perceived harm, their support for the policy, and then they voted on the policy change. Both the joint and single policy conditions, participants perceived the unharmful equality -enhancing policy, in which the disadvantaged group got more bonuses, as harmful to the in -group. Policy support and voting favored the unarmful policy significantly more in the joint evaluation condition. So 87% of people voted for the disadvantaged group getting 50 more bonus payments in the join condition, versus only 66% in the, in the single condition. So,

0:45:53 Thomas: But Was still a majority in the single condition, or maybe I'm misunderstanding what that would have been. Yeah.

0:46:45 Lindsey: It is nope. That's true, so it would have passed. You, um,

0:46:49 Thomas: Well, But were they given an alt what was the alternative in that one again? Maybe I'm mixing up which which ordering of asking things. Oh,

0:46:56 Lindsey: In the, the single position, it was like, that there's an equality hansi policy, are they going to vote in favor of that being passed, or just for status quo? Yeah.

0:47:03 Thomas: Status quo, okay, gotcha.

0:47:04 Lindsey: So, Essentially, I think these findings don't necessarily indicate that the contrast makes people more accurate it and their perception of equality, of the equality enhancing conditions. They indicate that people perceive the Eagles, uh, getting more bonuses as harmful, but they perceive taking away 50 bonuses from their own group is even more harmful. And, when you give them two options they perceive as harmful, they go with the lesser one. So, take, so take-homes, I think, in terms of the findings here, even when the researchers constructed specifically non-zero-sum scenarios, people in an advantaged in- group have the very strong intuition, and it appears to be very difficult to undermine it, that increasing equality per se is going to harm their own group.

And this does make some intuitive sense to me. The entire time I was reading, I was just thinking about, you know, kind of evolved intergroup architecture that we have, and the fact that, this is a little speculative, so I'm going to flag it as such, but virtually all resources for which human groups might have competed would have been zero -sum. Yeah. Know, you get the stag, we don't. You take all the berries, we won't get any berries. So my thought is that the non -zero -summ resource idea might be somewhat novel. And

0:47:04 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:48:16 Lindsey: So it might take some additional education or something to really get people to change this intuition. Intuition. Um, don't think it's the kind of thing we're going to be able to change easily.

0:48:17 Thomas: Yeah. I don't I don't really blame people. It's get that, that would be everybody's impulse, and it's also true sometimes, you know, it's still true, like a lot of the time, but you would just, you general with all these kinds of things, you're like, could people, I would just hope that they would think a little more clearly than they do. And who knows, maybe I'd be right there too, like in taking one of these studies. I don't know. Like I would hope humans would have the ability to like think a Little more rationally than we are able to. Yeah.

0:48:31 Lindsey: Yeah, I know. I, I think that you can probably get people there. It's just, um, yeah.

0:48:54 Thomas: You got to really line up the options next to each other in a way that is not always going to be possible, I think.

0:49:02 Lindsey: Think That's true. Right. For a variety of reasons. Um they make one important point in the discussion, which I want to highlight, Which is that the combination of the misperception of harm and the desire to support equality be an explanation for situations in which, as they put it, quote, progress outstrips public sentiment. And they give a couple of examples of this, including like window dressing type policies in which companies adopt the right official line about diversity and hiring, but then they don't actually do anything to change it.

0:49:21 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Right.

0:49:31 Lindsey: And that rings pretty true to Me. Um, So, I don't know, I think their analysis here is right, I think that these policies are probably reflecting like real motivations to rectify inequality, but these, these perceptions of unfairness to advantage group members is likely to prevent that from translating into real change. So, yeah, bummer. Do you feel pessimistic or optimistic? Oh, good.

0:49:32 Thomas: Yeah, totally.

0:49:52 Thomas: I never feel optimistic. You kidding me? What do we who do you think you're talking to? Too. No, it's very interesting to have this more formalized and stuff, you know, to put some numbers to this. Is there any way, I know this is perhaps not how anything works, Lindsay, but as a science person, can you tell us like, okay, X percent of people tend to have these biases or what, you Know, because it's always like, yeah, they found an effect and I never know what that means. You able to put numbers to this or no?

0:49:55 Lindsey: Yeah, Okay.

0:50:21 Lindsey: So, that's a, that's... have a couple of gripes about this paper, and one of them is that they don't include measures of effect sizes in their studies, which is, yeah.

0:50:31 Thomas: Seems pretty important, right?

0:50:33 Lindsey: Um, that was a bummer. I was explicitly looking for those. I went looking for them in their supplementary, the supplemental materials and I don't see those. I can't tell you about the practical significance of this effect. I think that based on what they're saying in their, in their introduction, they, they they assume that these are very, very prevalent cognitive biases. And there is, there is past work indicating that these Are pretty prevalent biases, at least on, you know, in terms of things they're drawing from in terms Of zero sum bias. So I Yeah, I don't have a great answer for you on that. But, you it definitely wasn't 100% of people that seemed to think that these, that these policies were harmful.

0:50:47 Thomas: Check. That but also in, I me if I'm wrong, we've kind of controlled our way to a different, so this is not like of any random person. We've kind of control. Have we taken out the people who are like, yes, I actively want to harm the out group. You did we already get rid of those people and the in questioning survey flow here, and then we're to the people who don't outwardly say that, but still...

0:51:32 Lindsey: No, those people would be in the set. It's just that those, those, are, are like statistically controlled for, but they should be in this set.

0:51:33 Thomas: No? Okay. Okay. Well, I guess that, yeah, six of one, half dozen of the other. I guess these results are still having controlled for that.

0:51:41 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

0:51:47 Thomas: So, okay. It's even more pessimistic, I guess.

0:51:47 Lindsey: Yes. Yep. Yeah. Kind of. Right. And I mean, especially given what they found in terms of what you have to do to correct these biases, because it's like, it has to be, it has to be a situation in which the the access to the resource is truly unlimited Um, it's just like I don't know like

0:52:07 Thomas: Right. No one's ever going to perceive government money as that. They just aren't ever I

0:52:09 Lindsey: Yeah Right, so I, it does seem kind of limited in terms of practical applications if you're actually trying to construct policies that people aren't going to construe as harmful, um

0:52:21 Thomas: Maybe we ought to just look, I don't know, there, maybe this is impossible, but so is everything, maybe what we need to do is really do our best in all of life and education, everything, to try to get people to not cling so desperately to what they have when what they had is way more than other people, you know, like If we could attack that side of it of like, yeah, okay, maybe we can't get people to recognize that this isn't a zero-sum thing, but maybe could we get people to recognize like, hey, if I have a billion dollars and somebody has a dollar, yes, it's a zero sum thing. Like if that's all the whole system, if I give them a million dollars, that's zero sum, but it's also better.

0:52:41 Lindsey: Yeah

0:53:06 Thomas: Maybe that's where we need to try to attack it. I don't know.

0:53:06 Lindsey: And I, I mean, I would, would also say that, like, there, there are ways that you can conceptualize that as not being zero sum, I mean

0:53:14 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, I guess so. So if it's like, if you have, if, if you talk about what the resources are for, and the things therefore are something that effectively you could never use. I was going to say that earlier with the, when you talked about, you, period of evolution where things, things would have always been zero, zero sum. I was going to suggest, but I didn't want to derail us, that I guess hypothetically, if you have a situation where, you, group of people or a person has more food than they could conceivably eat before it, like, rots, versus somebody who has no food, that side is a zero sum because giving them your food that you weren't going to use anyway is not a cost to you at all.

0:53:19 Lindsey: That Is very true, yes, um, actually this is, is a topic that I have saved as something in the to-do in the future Um, just like some really interesting evolutionary work on, on cooperation that kind of taps into those kinds of issues that you're, that you're alluding to, and it's, it's really good stuff and aligns with a number of things from this paper in ways that I think people would like, um, yeah, that's true, right, the, the ways, I guess, that um, these kinds of scenarios are, are issues, is going to, like, I think that that's specifically activating situations that were zero sum, right, it's possible that that there's some interesting applications of these findings in terms of how you frame issues that could, like, sort of decrease the extent to which people are in this intergroup competition mindset, that that could be a thing, I don't know Since I had so many gripes about the, about the paper itself, I actually, it says 1.5 palps in my notes, that's exactly what it says, yeah, it's a good science thingy, it was very interesting, yeah

0:53:55 Thomas: Ooh. Yeah.

0:54:35 Thomas: How how many palps? One and a half palps. Yeah, yeah A couple A couple flaws here and there, but a good science thingy, a depressing science thingy, but that But it's, you know, armed with knowledge as always, well That was really fascinating, um, for the breakdown, thanks everybody for listening, uh, support the show patreon.com/seriouspod and look forward to another episode in a few days that is gonna to contain an exciting announcement. I'm, I am super pumped for it.

0:54:46 Lindsey: Yeah Yeah exactly Yeah, me

0:55:10 Thomas: Cannot wait. So for listening, everybody.

0:55:10 Lindsey: Too, I'm On the edge of my seat

0:55:13 Thomas: Yeah. And we'll see you then. Keep your palps attached to everybody or don't, I don't know.

0:55:22 Andrew: Hi, this is Andrew Torrez of the Opening Arguments podcast, and this is a call to action. A way you can make a difference just by sending an email. Is a baseball story that's not about baseball. Gabe Kapler is the reigning National League manager of the year. Last year, he led the San Francisco Giants to 107 wins, which is the most ever. Ever. It goes back to 1883. year, the Giants are 25 and 21. They're one of the better teams in the league.

And yet, some people want Gabe Kapler fired. And as you might suspect, it's for reasons that have nothing to do with baseball. You see, last Friday, in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, Kapler wrote a heart -wrenching blog post called "Home of the Brave?" I was going to to read some of the most moving parts, but I realized it's all moving. Are his words. Day 19 children and two teachers were murdered, we held a moment of silence at sporting events around the country.

Then we played the national anthem, and we went on with our lives. Players, staff, and fans stood for the moment of violence, and the music was played. A moment of silent, grieving the lives lost, and then we, myself included, continued to stand, proudly proclaiming ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave. We didn't stop to reflect on whether we're actually free and brave after this horrific event. We just stood at attention.

I was the same age as the children in Uvalde, my father taught me to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance when I believed my country was representing its people well, well, we're to protest and stay seated when it wasn't. Don't believe it is representing us well right now.

This particular time, an 18 -year -old walked into a store, bought multiple assault rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, walked into an armed resource officer in its own police district, and was able to murder children for nearly an hour. Parents begged and pleaded with police officers to do something. Police officers who had weapons and who received nearly 40% of the city's funding their as children were being murdered. We elect our politicians to represent our interests.

Immediately following the shooting, we were told we needed locked doors and armed teachers. We were given thoughts and prayers. We were told it could have been worse and we just need love. We weren't given bravery and we aren't free. Police on the scene put a mother in handcuffs as she begged them to go in and save her children. They blocked parents trying to organize to charge in to stop the shooter, including a father who learned his daughter was murdered while he argued with the cops.

We aren't free when politicians decide that the lobbyists and gun industries are more important than our children's freedom to go to school without needing bulletproof backpacks and active shooter drills. Often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents.

We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country, and to move this country forward towards the vision of that shining city on the hill. Instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings.

We have our moment over and over, and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make those changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, recess celebrating their own patriotism at every turn. Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I'm participating in a self -congratulatory glorification of the only country where these mass shootings take place. On Wednesday, I walked out onto the field.

I listened to the announcement as we honored the victims in Uvalde. I bowed my head. I stood for the national anthem, Metallica riffed on City Connect guitars. Brain said, drop to a knee. Body didn't listen. I wanted to walk back inside. Instead, I froze. Felt like a coward. I didn't want to call attention to myself. I did not want to take away from the victims or their families. This was a baseball game. There was a rock band. There were lights, pageantry.

I knew that thousands of people were using this game to escape the horrors of the world for just a little bit. I knew that thousands more wouldn't understand the gesture, would take it as an offense to the military, to veterans, to themselves. I am not okay with the state of this country. I wish I hadn't let my discomfort compromise my integrity.

Wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you're dissatisfied with your country, you let it be be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this." That's it. Kapler announced he wasn't going to mindlessly trot out onto the field and place his hand over his heart anymore. He was going to use his position, his visibility, to do what he could to stand for change.

Now, you may know San Francisco as the town where an African -American quarterback, sending a similar message, got blackballed out of the league for quietly taking a knee during the national anthem. I don't know the full story there, but I do know that right now, the same people that drummed out Colin Kaepernick, led by ex -Giants ballplayer Aubrey Huff, a MAGA hat -wearing, true -believing Trumper, are organizing their followers to flood the Giants with complaints about Gabe Kapler, and they have.

Hate is a powerful motivator, and the Giants are a business. They care about their bottom line. The risk that Gabe Kaplan gets fired over this is real. It's happened before. We show them that courage and social change can be good for business too. Here's what I want you to do. Want you to take 30 seconds and send an email to the Gients. I'm going to give you the email addresses in a minute. And I want you to say three simple things in your own words.

They are, one, I stand with Gabe Kapler. I support the message. Two, applaud the Giants for having the courage to back their manager. Applaud the Giants for standing against gun violence, for not shutting him down. Number three, and this is the important part, I'll be supporting the team financially. To games, going to games, buying a Gabe Kapler jersey, telling my friends to do the same. Whatever. And that's it. I know a lot of you feel the same way I do.

Right now our voices are being overwhelmed. They are being drowned out by right wing hate monsters who are boycotting the Giants, threatening never to go to games. Threatening not to buy merchandise until Kapler gets fired. If you agree with Gabe Kapler's message, you were at all moved by what he said. Let's let his bosses know that we support him. The president of baseball operations, Farhan Zaidi, and the CEO, Larry Baer, B-A-E-R. Email addresses are, get out a pen and paper, your computer.

Fzaidi at sfgiants.com. That is F-Z-A-I-D-I at S-F-G-I-A-N-T-S dot C-O-M. And LBaer at sfgiants.com, L-B-A-E-R at sfgiants dot com. That's Fzaidi at sfgiants.com and lbaer at sfgiants.com. you so much for listening to this. Thank you for writing emails. We can make a difference.

1:03:26 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.