Morgan Freeman discusses the shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999 in New York City.
Peggy Mason studies the behavior of Sprague Dawley rats (albino) and black-caped rat (black and white).
Mina Cikara remarks that the ventral striatum is activated for individuals experiencing schadenfreude.
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#throughthewormhole
#season6
#episode1
#cosmology
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#spacetime
#spacescience
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#bigots
Peggy Mason studies the behavior of Sprague Dawley rats (albino) and black-caped rat (black and white).
Mina Cikara remarks that the ventral striatum is activated for individuals experiencing schadenfreude.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season6
#episode1
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#bigots
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00If you think you see everyone as equal, you're kidding yourself.
00:05We all have biases.
00:11And no matter how open-minded we think we are,
00:17stereotypes color our judgment of others
00:24and can lead us badly astray.
00:27We live in a society fractured by race, religion, even our favorite sports teams.
00:40We divide ourselves into rival tribes.
00:44The political divide between us grows deeper with every passing year.
00:50When did hate become hardwired into our brains?
00:54We live in two different Americas, one for the rich.
00:57Are we all born to discriminate against our fellow humans?
01:02Are we all bigots?
01:05Space.
01:10Time.
01:12Life itself.
01:16The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:19Have you ever thought about who you instinctively trust?
01:34And who you instinctively fear?
01:39Someone's walking toward you down a dark alley,
01:47folding something in his hand.
01:54I think of myself as an open-minded person.
01:57But scientists tell me I'm kidding myself.
02:00And so are you.
02:03We all look at the world with prejudice.
02:06And when you have only a split second to decide,
02:09your own snap judgments may shock you.
02:19Josh Carell grew up solving puzzles for fun.
02:22But now, as a psychologist, he's trying to solve the puzzle of racism.
02:29And his work is a matter of life and death.
02:33So my research was originally inspired by Amadou Diallo.
02:37He came home, went back outside to sit on his front porch,
02:41basically the stoop of the apartment building.
02:44It was the early hours of February 4th, 1999.
02:48Four New York police officers approached him.
02:52Diallo reached for his wallet when one of the officers shouted,
02:57Gun, he's got a gun.
03:05They fired 41 rounds, killing him at the scene.
03:09The police officers were acquitted of all charges,
03:13sparking a heated national debate.
03:16It was a tragedy that has since repeated itself.
03:20In the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri,
03:23the death of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio,
03:27the death of John Crawford in Beaver Creek, Ohio.
03:31And so that presented a puzzle.
03:34That presented a question.
03:36How can we determine whether or not race was actually
03:38what drove the officers to shoot?
03:43Some of them will be armed.
03:44Josh is about to run an experiment with live ammunition
03:48and with participants who are not policemen.
03:52He asks his white test subject to treat this simulation
03:57as if it is real life.
03:59A potentially lethal person is about to confront him.
04:03And he will have less than one second to make a decision.
04:10There's time pressure.
04:11They have to react quickly.
04:13And we can look and see whether when we change the race of the suspect
04:17from black to white or white to black, does that influence a person's behavior?
04:20The subject will see a scene appear on a screen downrange.
04:25Then a white man will appear holding either a gun or a cell phone.
04:31Or it will be a black man with a gun or a cell phone.
04:36The image of the man is only up for one second.
04:41Time to decide.
04:44Shoot or hold fire?
04:47Mistake the gun for a phone and die?
04:51Mistake the phone for a gun and kill an innocent person?
04:54So what we want to look at is in that situation where there's not good and clear information,
05:07where people have to respond quickly, do they use race to inform their decisions?
05:11The simulation cycles through dozens of confrontations,
05:16equally split between white and black male subjects.
05:20Josh records how long it takes subjects to make a decision
05:25and whether or not they kill an innocent person or die themselves.
05:30It's worth noting that in this game, people are pretty good.
05:34They don't make a ton of mistakes.
05:3610, 15% of the time they make a mistake.
05:39But when we look at those mistakes, we see racial bias in the errors.
05:44So they're faster to shoot the armed target if he's black rather than white.
05:47When the target's got a cell phone, they're much more likely to make that decision,
05:53to shoot an innocent target when he's black rather than white.
06:02Josh has run this experiment on thousands of people.
06:06On average, white subjects are quicker to shoot the black male
06:10and are 30 to 40% more likely to mistake his phone for a gun.
06:17When Josh performs this experiment with law enforcement officers,
06:22he finds that their expert training significantly reduced the occurrence of fatal mistakes.
06:29But no matter what their background or training,
06:32most participants are quicker to shoot at a black target.
06:36Does this mean that white Americans are inherently bigoted?
06:42An utterly shocking trend with Josh's black participants
06:47suggests that it's much more complicated than that.
06:50We see that black participants show the same anti-black bias that white participants do.
06:53We see that black participants show the same anti-black bias that white participants do.
06:56Actually, when we test to see if there is a difference in the two groups, white participants versus black participants,
07:03they are not statistically different from each other.
07:06So, we think this represents an awareness of a cultural stereotype.
07:07Not that our participants believe necessarily that black men are more dangerous than white men.
07:10but by virtue of the movies that they watch, the music that they listen to, and the music that they listen to,
07:16the music that they listen to in, the music that they listen to, the music that they listen to,
07:20which they listen to, and why they listen to the talk.
07:22So, we think that this is an anti-war group of political rights.
07:25And we think that this represents an awareness of a cultural stereotype,
07:28stereotype. Not that our participants believe necessarily that black men are more dangerous
07:34than white men, but by virtue of the movies that they watch, the music that they listen
07:40to, news reports, they're getting the idea that black male goes with violence. The group
07:47and the idea are linked together in their brains, whether they agree with that stereotype
07:51or not. Why would we make life and death decisions based on stereotypes we don't even believe?
08:01I've always thought we could overcome these bigoted ideas, but one neuroscientist says
08:07it's not that simple. Racist stereotypes hijack our subconscious minds.
08:14Neuroscientist John Freeman believes that we all carry around stereotypes in our subconscious.
08:24In fact, the instant you see another person's face, your brain first perceives them as a
08:31stereotype of their race, gender, or sexual orientation. So when you first lay eyes on
08:38a young Asian student, she might register as the stereotypical Asian overachiever, but only
08:48for an instant. The way we make snap judgments about others is nowhere near politically correct.
08:55Whether you like it or not, a well-groomed man may first trigger a stale stereotype in your
09:02subconscious mind until your conscious mind corrects you. John wants to understand precisely why first
09:13impressions conjure up cliches. Excuse me, John, I'm a docile white girl. And he wants to learn if there's a
09:24way for us to see through these cliches. It takes hundreds of milliseconds for that judgment to sort
09:30of crystallize and form. And a lot happens during that process. And we're only beginning to understand
09:36what the implications of that might be. John uses brain scanners to determine exactly what is going on
09:42in the brain during the first fraction of a second of perception, long before we are consciously aware
09:48of what we're looking at. The brain is like an office where two key desks handle most of the face
09:56analyzing workload, the fusiform face area and the orbital frontal cortex. When a visual signal arrives,
10:09they both get to work simultaneously to process it in their own specialized ways.
10:14The fusiform face area is involved in taking visual information and forming a coherent representation
10:21of the identity and, say, the gender and the race of the face.
10:28But across the way, the orbital frontal cortex is focused on associating that face with all the
10:34knowledge it has about the world. The orbital frontal cortex is retrieving all the associations
10:40spontaneously, without awareness. When it sees a black man's face, the orbital frontal cortex
10:47quickly looks up all the general information the brain has about black men, including many stereotypes,
10:55and alters the visual signal. So some brain regions can sort of convince other brain regions to be in
11:02line with them. Because of this, stereotypes can hijack the signal from our eyes and change what we perceive.
11:15When test subjects look at a black male with a neutral expression, their brains immediately light up
11:21as if they are perceiving anger. And even though they don't realize it, when they look at a white female
11:28with a blank gaze, their brain's instant reaction is to perceive happiness. These stereotypes take place
11:36in all of the brains John studied, no matter their gender, race, or sexual orientation. These prejudiced
11:45thoughts are quickly snuffed out by the conscious mind, but that doesn't mean that they are harmless.
11:51Those stereotypes can actually wind up impacting behavior. So for example, if individuals unconsciously
11:57see African-American faces as being slightly more angry than they are, that's probably going to impact how
12:04much they approach or avoid that individual at a spontaneous level. If we recognize that we are all prone to
12:11these biases, maybe we can compensate and avoid unintended acts of prejudice. But one biologist is attempting
12:20to go one step further to manipulate animal minds and override their bigotry.
12:31A stereotype is the brain's way of saving time. It looks at people or objects and makes quick decisions about them.
12:43Who'd want to eat this disgusting thing?
12:46Who'd want to eat this disgusting thing? But these mental shortcuts can lead us astray.
12:57Delicious. Can we look beyond appearances and see people for who they really are?
13:04Neuroscientist Peggy Mason knows that getting through her daily routine requires looking at everything as a stereotype.
13:21A basket of freshly plucked vegetables is a vegetable basket. Vegetable baskets contain vegetables. Don't they?
13:30We make expectations about everything. They smooth the way. They're shortcuts. They make our life happen much faster and much more easily.
13:41Without the ability to stereotype, everything we do would take enormous mental effort to understand.
13:50We could take nothing for granted. We have relied on stereotyping for eons to quickly tell our tribe
14:04from outsiders. For all the hurt that stereotyping causes, it's fundamental to how our brains work.
14:12So we're more likely to help those closest to us. And for complete strangers that we've never even seen the likes of,
14:20we're not so likely to help them.
14:22Peggy wanted to see if there might be a way to get the brain to overcome these biases.
14:28I think that we humans act in part due to our shared mammalian biology.
14:36And I think that we can increase social cohesion in modern society amongst humans.
14:44She began with a mammal that has a simpler brain than ours.
14:48Hey, little guys. How are you doing?
14:50You're okay, little buddy.
14:52The rat. A creature who typically only aids memories of its own strain.
14:59Peggy's experiment involves temporarily trapping a rat in a plastic tube. The tube is just one way out
15:06through a door that can only be opened by another rat. When another rat from the same strain is added to
15:13the chamber, it's not long before he works out how to free his imprisoned fellow tribesmen.
15:19These are all albino rats of the Sprague Dolly stock. And so while they're not identical,
15:28and they've never met each other, they also might look like the fifth cousin twice removed.
15:35If the rat looks familiar, the other rat helps. But then Peggy repeats the experiment with the rats of
15:41unrelated strains. Now it's a black-caped rat in the tube, and an albino rat has the option to free him.
15:50They've never met a black-caped rat before. They don't open for them. They have no affiliative
15:55bond, and therefore they do not act prosocially towards these very strange-looking type of rats.
16:02But can a rat ever change its ways? To find out, Peggy exposes a white rat to a black-caped rat.
16:10We took albino rats, we housed them with black-caped rats for two weeks,
16:17then we re-housed them with an albino rat, so they've known one black-caped rat.
16:23Does this experience make the albino empathetic to all black-caped rats?
16:32To find out, she places him in the arena with a trapped black-caped rat that he's never met before.
16:38The albino rat breaks through the color line.
16:54What that suggested was that just having a bond to one black-caped rat would allow an albino rat to
17:02generalize all the black-caped rats. They've known one. They've lived with one.
17:08Now they get tested with strangers. And lo and behold, they're perfectly helpful to the strangers.
17:13So that was really exceptional to me because it showed that experience was so powerful.
17:22It may not be as hard as you think for a bigot to have a change of heart.
17:26If any of us has a positive experience with someone from a different racial group,
17:31biology has the power to make us feel empathy for a stranger from that group.
17:36In fact, Peggy believes that empathy is a primal instinct for all mammals.
17:43What rats tell us is that we have a mammalian inheritance, which makes us want to help
17:51another in distress. But the amazing thing that we learn from the rats is that what the rats need to
17:58do is to have an experience with a different type of rat, and then that rat can be part of their in-group too.
18:06And that's really an amazing and hopeful message, I think.
18:10So, empathy has enormous power. Images of Nelson Mandela behind bars evoked such compassion from
18:21people of all races that they help in apartheid in South Africa.
18:29But there's another darker side to the human mind, one that allows us to take pleasure in the pain of others,
18:37and could make us addicted to bigotry. Bigotry is as old as human society.
18:49We persecute people of different skin color, of different religion.
19:01We discriminate between men and women.
19:03But bigotry isn't just about the circumstances of your birth. Even fans of rival sports teams
19:14can learn to hate one another with all the venom of a bigot.
19:18Harvard psychologist Mina Chikana has been thinking about how human beings move from individuals to
19:27groups to bitter, violent rivals. Imagine a group of perfect strangers. It takes very little for them
19:36to form devout tribal alliances. Well, one of the most amazing things about humans is how readily they
19:42form groups. In fact, psychological research has shown that you can randomly assign people
19:48to red team or blue team. And that's enough to make them show what we call in-group bias.
19:54They prefer their in-group. They treat them better. They devote more resources to them.
20:00And in general, it's just a part of human nature.
20:07Since the dawn of humanity, we have needed the support of others to thrive and survive.
20:14So when two groups come into direct competition, no matter how arbitrarily those groups were formed,
20:21the individuals will put the needs of the group above themselves. A line is drawn in the sand.
20:28Out! Nice job! Ow! Give me a break!
20:40All-out violence needs only a little provocation.
20:43You were out!
20:45Out! A dose of escalation, and both sides will charge.
21:01In general, people are averse to treating other people badly. But that's the thing about competition.
21:08Being a good in-group member means being a jerk to the out-group. It's not just that you want your own
21:15team to do well. It's that you have to make sure that the other team does it.
21:21Mina wants to know why this desire to persecute the other overrides our better judgment.
21:27Mina!
21:33These two are a couple of stand-up guys. They certainly would never beat each other into a pulp,
21:40unless it's game day. Today, Mina is going to scan their brains as they watch their rival team suffer.
21:49So what we did was we recruited 18 die-hard Red Sox and Yankees fans. And the idea was we wanted
21:55people to watch plays where their rivals did poorly against another third team, the Orioles as well.
22:01The Red Sox fan watches the video where Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees is pelted by a 100-mile-per-hour
22:08fastball.
22:09Oh, that's going to leave a mark.
22:13The Yankees fan gets to enjoy an embarrassing mistake that cost the Red Sox three runs in a single play.
22:24What a disaster. Oh, how embarrassing for the Red Sox.
22:30Mina discovered that this feeling of pleasure at our rival's pain, what the Germans call
22:36schadenfreude, is something our brains learn to crave.
22:41Well, when participants watch their rivals fail, what we saw that there was activations of this
22:47region called the ventral striatum. The way that this region purportedly works is that it basically
22:52tags positive information, rewarding events, so that people then can say, oh, I should come back to this
22:59in order to get pleasure again. The ventral striatum is at the core of many addictions.
23:06When a smoker sees a cigarette, their ventral striatum reminds them of its pleasures.
23:11And just as a cigarette a day can soon become a pack a day, couldn't seeing your rival suffer make
23:17you want to see it happen more and more?
23:20So the question then is whether or not watching your rival suffer a misfortune makes you then more
23:25likely to endorse harm or actually do harm to the rival team and affiliated individuals.
23:30Well, we have evidence to suggest that it does.
23:34What troubles Mina is that this line of group-oriented thinking extends beyond sports teams.
23:41In fact, we see everybody belonging to one of four social categories.
23:47The first time you meet a new person or a group, there are two questions you need answered right
23:51away. The first is friend or foe, and the second is how capable are they of enacting their intentions
23:57toward me, good or ill? First, there are the friendly groups. Bright young kids and doctors,
24:03for example, we usually see as competent. Less capable friendly groups, like the elderly and infirm,
24:10usually invoke pity. Drug addicts or teenage internet bullies we categorize as foe. But these groups
24:19aren't competent enough to spend much energy hating. It's the people seen both as foe and highly
24:27competent who stir the strong urges toward bigotry. This includes investment bankers, but also groups
24:34like Asians or professional women in domains where men generally dominate. Mina studied hundreds of
24:41subjects who report feeling pleasure when members of these groups suffer. You ask them who they're most
24:47likely to harm, to just hurt, not actually kill. They're mostly willing to harm these competent
24:53groups that are competitive with our own interests. So what's really interesting about these groups is
24:59that in times of social stability, people go along to get along with them because they control resources.
25:04But they're also the first ones to get scapegoated when social relations become unstable.
25:09Being part of a group is an unavoidable part of being human. But groupism does more than just block our
25:18natural implicate to others. When it involves a political agenda, groupism may actually hack our brains
25:27into perceiving a false reality. Do you see the world as it really is? Or how your political party
25:34wants you to see it? We're a tribal species, and we all want to be in the winning tribe.
25:46But surely humanity can aspire to rise above this, to bridge the divide between us. Democracy was
25:54founded in the principle of equality, that we could reach across the aisle and compromise. But with every
26:00passing year, political parties seem to be getting more and more divided. Maybe it's because conservatives
26:08are bigoted against liberals. I think you have it backward.
26:20Darren Schreiber is an American political scientist now working in Exeter, UK.
26:25If there's one thing he's learned from moving across the pond, it's that no matter where you go,
26:33liberals and conservatives are not from the same planet.
26:37Do you see yourself as being more liberal or more conservative?
26:40Definitely more conservative.
26:42I'd see myself more liberal. Military intervention in the Middle East. How do you feel about that?
26:46I think it's absolutely fundamental.
26:47Each country should be allowed to determine their own future. What do you think about immigration policy?
26:52The borders need to be slightly more closed. We should have an open border policy.
26:57Liberals and conservatives rarely see eye to eye. Could it be that they have different brains?
27:05Darren decided he would try to uncover the truth by using an MRI brain scanner to see how the brains of
27:12liberals and conservatives handled decision-making in a simple gambling game.
27:17Today, Darren and his students are recreating that experiment, but without the MRI.
27:25Each test subject is given one pound, about a buck and a half. They can keep the money or they can gamble with it.
27:34There's a chance to double the winnings, but also a risk of losing it all.
27:39You want to keep that one pound or you want to take a risk at potentially winning or losing two pounds?
27:44I will risk two pounds.
27:45All right, so open up the envelope and see what you get.
27:51I've won two pounds.
27:52Good. All right. So here's two pounds. Do you want to keep the one pound or do you want to risk
27:57potentially winning or losing two pounds?
27:59I think I'll take a risk at winning two pounds.
28:02Okay.
28:04I've won two pounds.
28:04Woohoo. Congratulations. So here's your two pounds.
28:08And I've lost.
28:09You've lost. All right.
28:10Well, you have to give me four pounds now.
28:13Thanks, Sophie.
28:15Darren doesn't care who wins or loses.
28:17His only interest is in how their brains deal with taking gambling risks,
28:23an act that has no intrinsic political slant.
28:27But to his surprise, liberals and conservatives processed risks with wildly different regions of their brains.
28:34conservative brains consistently use the amygdala to make the decisions to risk everything.
28:43This region is associated with gut feeling and fight or flight responses.
28:48Red brains experience risk as a threat with a potential reward.
28:53liberal brains consistently use the insulae when gambling, a region associated with perception of
29:02one's own feelings. Blue brains experience risk as a problem to be solved.
29:09Both brains end up at similar conclusions about taking risks, but their brains experience it differently.
29:16What it tells us is that being a political liberal or a political conservative influences everything that we see.
29:26That we see the world in really different ways. We use different mental tools when we're processing
29:31even basic things like gambling that appear to have nothing to do with politics.
29:36And that just blew our minds.
29:38So why is this?
29:39Are we born with our future politics already fixed in the structure of our brains?
29:46We're unsure about this and I actually have a study that we're going to be looking to see
29:50with the data set that has studied children from age four to 20, the differences in people's brains
29:55and do they change over time. But what we know right now is that people when they're around 20
30:02seem to have different sizes of amygdala and insulin depending on whether they're liberals or conservatives.
30:06Darren expects that by the time we're 20 most of us will have solidified the color of our political brain.
30:16The possibility of harmony between liberals and conservatives is therefore unlikely.
30:22Politicians and politically active citizens cannot truly see things from the other side.
30:28Their brains won't let them.
30:30Our intense partisanship is probably here to stay.
30:37But there may be a way to reshape our brains to cherish the greater good of all mankind
30:45and open our minds and hearts to one another.
30:48The world is full of hate. Eliminating bigotry seems hopeless.
31:07But there may be a way. Pure, unadulterated violence in an alternate reality.
31:20Professor Matthew Grizzard has spent a lot of time playing video games.
31:26But as a communications researcher, these mediated realities are more than just entertainment.
31:32We don't necessarily distinguish very much between mediated reality and real reality.
31:41We see visual elements. We hear things, auditory elements.
31:45And our bodies respond to those elements as if they were real.
31:49Immersed in a game, Matthew can feel his pulse pounding and his stomach churning from the intensity
31:56of the experience. But one day, a level in a game downright disturbed him.
32:08So I'm in an elevator and I'm looking around and there's a lot of armed men in military fatigues with me.
32:18At that point, elevator doors open.
32:19We step out into what appears to be a crowded airport.
32:29And at that point, the order is given and we raise our guns
32:33to point at innocent civilians surrounding this airport.
32:40And then we start firing.
32:42Matthew felt guilty for murdering so many innocent pixels.
33:02But as a social psychologist, he knows that guilt is a feeling that can profoundly change our behavior.
33:09We wanted to see if this guilt that was elicited from virtual environments could cause people to
33:15think more about real world morality and could actually increase their moral sensitivity to real world issues.
33:22Media pundits often accuse violent video games of destroying the morality of our youth.
33:28Is that really true?
33:30Matthew has a series of test subjects play a game where they can hurt simulated human beings.
33:36So Matthew gives the order to commit blatant crimes against humanity.
33:44So we set up a situation where people are going to play a violent first-person shooter,
33:49where they're engaging in terrorist behaviors, where they're committing genocides,
33:53they're killing innocent civilians, they're bombing areas.
33:56They're engaging in things that would be considered morally reprehensible in the real world.
34:00Matthew's subjects surrendered to the alternative reality of the game.
34:09Inside their minds, they are living through the experience of being a mass murderer.
34:18The game is guilt-inducing, to say the least.
34:21So we also had a control group because we wanted to see and distinguish video game-induced guilt from real world guilt.
34:34So we had individuals remember a situation in which they felt particularly guilty.
34:39Writing this out is emotionally taxing.
34:42It brings back painful memories, perhaps of the time they cheated on a lover,
34:48or lied and got someone else in trouble, or sabotaged a friend for selfish gain.
34:55In every case, real people were really hurt.
35:01Matthew compared this group to the murder simulator group.
35:05So our findings showed that individuals recalling a real world guilty experience actually felt more guilt.
35:14But that guilt solicited by video game was positively associated with increased moral sensitivity.
35:20Committing virtual mass murder gave his subjects a stronger sense of morality.
35:27It's a surprising result, but Matthew thinks he knows why it's the case.
35:32The players violated their own personal sense of fairness.
35:37They cannot right the wrongs they have committed.
35:41So they atone with a subconscious desire to be a better person.
35:47I think that's the real power of video games.
35:50You can think of them as kind of moral sandboxes,
35:52as areas where we can explore different aspects of morality,
35:55or even take viewpoints that are opposed to our very core morality.
36:00But it's hard to imagine everyone agreeing to play guilt-inducing video games.
36:06And there will always be sociopaths whose bigotry spreads through society like a deadly virus.
36:13Could it be that we're just too tolerant of intolerance?
36:18What would really happen if we cut off the worst offenders?
36:24Could we ever do it?
36:24Could we ever do it?
36:29In the past century, we've broken down a lot of walls that divided us.
36:36More social groups have been accepted into the mainstream.
36:40Segregation and prejudice are no longer the laws of the land.
36:44But there are still those who think they're superior because of their skin color, their age, or their gender.
36:50There may be a way to deal with these bigots and their bigotry.
36:58Build walls around them.
37:04Sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis is taking a bird's eye view of human society.
37:12From his perspective, when bigots flourish in a social network,
37:16it is partly the fault of the group itself.
37:19So we're embedded in these networks.
37:21How we act in the world is affected by how the people we know act,
37:25but also even by how people we don't know act,
37:28as things ripple through the network and come to affect us.
37:33Nicholas and longtime collaborator James Fowler are studying how social connections
37:39change the behavior of the group as a whole.
37:41When you add these ties between people, the particular number of ties, the particular pattern of ties,
37:48then confers on the group properties it didn't necessarily have before.
37:54Patterns and wiring matter.
37:57Think of the internet.
37:58It's a highly dynamic network of computers.
38:01If one area goes down, the data simply move around the blockage.
38:06But the electrical grid is more vulnerable.
38:10One bad node can damage all of its neighboring connections
38:16or even bring the whole network down.
38:20Nicholas is performing experiments to see if he can re-engineer human social networks to be more like
38:26the internet.
38:27His student volunteers form a single social network divided into four separate groups.
38:34Every student's goal is to make as much money as possible.
38:39Okay guys, so here's what we're going to do.
38:40Each of you has a dollar and a pad in front of you.
38:43In a moment, I'm going to ask you to write give or take.
38:45You can contribute to the collective or you can be a parasite and take advantage of the collective.
38:49Give or take.
38:50Then you'll be asked to reveal your choice and to contribute your dollar or not towards the middle.
38:55I will double the pot and then we'll divide the money equally amongst everyone at every table.
38:59If everybody shares, everybody makes a good amount of money.
39:04If nobody shares, nobody makes any money.
39:08So, reveal.
39:11All right, you're all givers, so make your contributions as well accordingly.
39:14And so what we're going to do is we're going to double that and share.
39:20At first, most are nice to each other and share in the rewards.
39:25But a few players choose not to contribute.
39:28When the pot is doubled, they get more than their peers.
39:33In these rounds, the students cannot change their society's social wiring.
39:38So you're assigned a position in the network and you're told these are your neighbors.
39:42These are your friends for the next hour.
39:45And you're stuck now interacting with these jerks and you don't like it.
39:48But all you can do is control whether you cooperate or defect, whether you share or take.
39:54And what happens after you've been sharing and some of the people around you are taking is you say,
39:58I'm not going to do that anymore.
39:59And you switch to taking as well.
40:02And sharing disappears from the system.
40:04Cooperation goes away.
40:06And what you find is that you have then a society of takers.
40:10But now, Nicholas adds one important rule.
40:15After each round, each student has the option of moving seats.
40:20Now, you can cut the ties to the people who are defectors, the people who are taking advantage of you,
40:26and preferentially form ties to other nice people in the network, to other cooperators.
40:31And if you do that, if you make that small change in the social order,
40:35what you find is cooperation flourishes in the system.
40:38The selfish people haven't gone away, but the society that everybody now lives in has a completely different culture.
40:50Nicholas believes humans and societies are like groups of carbon atoms.
40:56Arrange them one way and you get soft, opaque graphite.
41:00But if you rearrange those same atoms just right, you get strong, clear, sparkling diamond.
41:08And so these properties of softness and darkness aren't properties of the carbon atoms.
41:13And it's just like that with our social groups.
41:16Same human beings connected different ways gives the group different properties.
41:22Some corporations are experimenting with an open social network architecture.
41:27Employees are free to break bonds with any other employee they don't work well with and form new ones.
41:34Could a similar strategy work for our national or even global society?
41:39If we were all free to move around, would there be less hate?
41:45Network science doesn't offer one prescription.
41:48It's not as if there's one network structure that's optimal for everything.
41:52What I can tell you is that network structure matters to lots of problems.
41:56And understanding the rules of social network structure and function
42:00gives us a new set of tools to intervene in the world to make it better.
42:03We may not find a solution to bigotry soon, but science is at last exposing its roots.
42:13Our biased snap judgments of others.
42:15Our innate groupism, our rigid political filters.
42:20For now, our best tool to fight bigotry lies within ourselves.
42:28The courage to walk away.
42:31We all have bigotry inside us.
42:36Most of us work hard to suppress our innate prejudices.
42:40But some don't.
42:43And their bigotry is infectious.
42:46The solution to bigotry does not start with governments and laws.
42:50It starts with understanding and neutralizing its source.
42:53And with you and me doing our best to change.
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