Kurt Gray: Understanding Outrage to Heal America

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0:48And so part of, I think, managing outrage is just taking some time and space away. It's okay. It's okay to walk away from the situation and say you need a little bit of time to calm down and you think about it. and it's okay to schedule it for a different time when you're not feeling angry. Don't send emails in anger. Try not to talk about politics when you're filled with rage. But I think what I try to do, and to get to your point about thinking about the minds of others, is to think about how these folks that I disagree with might feel victimized and the harms that they see. Because once you see that the harms that someone else is worried about or how they feel like they've been victimized.

1:32Even if I don't agree with their position, I can at least see them as a little more human. And that goes a long way. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. So we bring in remarkable guests so that they can pass on their knowledge and wisdom and tactics and strategies. Today's remarkable guest is Kurt Gray. He earned his PhD in psychology at Harvard. He's currently a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Is that where Michael Jordan went to school? You bet. You bet. He's the second most famous graduate of the University of North Carolina, at Chaffel Hill.

2:21And he's the director of, I have never heard of academic labs named like this, but he's the director. I got to read this to make sure I got it right. He's the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. That's quite a mouthful. Yeah, we rebranded. I thought we study everyone's deepest beliefs, politics, religion, morality, and why not name the lab what we do? Yeah, I mean, it couldn't just be the University of North Carolina Neurosciences Lab, are we? Okay, so let's just ease into this interview, all right? And I'm inspired by something at the very end of your book where you discuss the work of John Sarouf.

3:12I hope I pronounced that right. And so you asked him a very easy question, which I'm gonna now ask you, which is what are the three easy steps to heal America? Could you just get to that in like 60 seconds or so? First he laughed and he said no. He's like, it's too hard. But then he tried to kind of lay it out. And so I figured the best three steps from what I could, and they are how to have better conversations with each other. And so those three steps are connect in conversations, invite in conversations, and then validate. So those are the three steps. It's a way of having conversations about politics that we frequently, well, we don't have.

3:57I'm happy to go through those steps. Yeah, because there were lots of things in those steps which I found counterintuitive. For example, you talk about it's better to ask too many questions than too few. So can you just tell us like connect? What's the power tips for connect? Totally. And all this is against the backdrop of like you're trying to have conversations across differences. It's hard. You want to do it. You want to talk to your uncle that you haven't talked to while you're a co-worker who disagrees with you sometimes. And so the CIV is the Civ, the beginning of more civil conversations.

4:33So that's where the kind of term comes from. So connect. The first thing you want to do before you talk about anything contentious is connect with someone as a person. There's so many things that you could talk about that aren't like politics or what you disagree about. Right. food, music, family, jobs, whatever, you know, weather. I mean, weather's boring, right? And let's get away from the weather and let's ask deep questions. So it turns out that people really like when you ask them questions, especially, surprisingly, deep questions, right? When we think of someone who's a good conversationalist, we think of someone who talks a lot.

5:09But what we really like is someone who asks us deep questions. So think about conversations as more like a date. Like if you went on a date with someone and they just talked at you forever, you'd think, oh my goodness, like what a windbag. But when someone asks you questions, follow-up questions about you, where'd you grow up? Oh, what was it like growing up there? How did that shape you? How did that make you who you are today? What hopes and dreams do you have about the future? When's the last time you cried? These questions might seem crazy to ask someone, but people really appreciate connecting deeply in conversations.

5:43And what about the quantity of questions? Yeah, more than you think. It's more than you think is better, especially follow-up questions, right? So you can imagine having a conversation with someone and lots of research to back this up. Someone says, here's this heartfelt story of me. And once my kid's fish just died, very tragic. We had to bury my daughter's fish out back. And imagine I told you the story of my fish dying. And then instead of you saying, wow, that must have been really hard. I'm sorry for your fish loss. You know, you're just like, oh, yeah. Anyways, I went fishing the other day and that this is what reminded me of fish.

6:20You know, like that would be terrible. And so you want to ask follow up questions, how your daughter's dealing with it. Did you have a special ceremony for the fish? And it's a funny example, but follow up questions show that you're listening. And so I think that is an important thing for connecting. we had a guest about a week ago who she cited many studies about speed dating and she gave us all these speed dating tips and she basically said exactly what you said maybe you guys are both talking about the same studies but she said in speed dating you gotta ask a lot of questions and you gotta go deep really fast to stand out from other speed daters yeah just human nature right?

7:03It's what humans want. Yeah. Because if you're just like, hey, pretty hot out, isn't it? Super, you know? Okay, sure. You're not connecting with that. All right. Okay, so that's connect. Now invite. Invite. So invite, if you want to talk about some like deep issues, the invitation is something that people appreciate. And an invitation means that something where someone can say no, right? So if I'm inviting you to a party, you can say no. But if I'm demanding you to go to a party, that'd be kind of a jerk move, right? I'm having this party and you better come or else. And I think when we talk about politics and we talk about moral questions, we often do demand, how could you vote for this person?

7:47How do you believe this? Explain to me, right? Like justify yourself. No one needs to feel like they're justifying who they are, what they believe. And so an invitation is really focused on understanding and the intention there is learning. So please, I'd love to learn what you think about immigration. And I know maybe we disagree, but I'm just like, I'm trying to understand and I want to understand where you're coming from and what experiences might be of led there. So I just really appreciate hearing kind of your views, even if they're different from what I think. How about if you say to the person, can I ask you a question about immigration?

8:25That's good. Yeah, that's a great place to start. And a question before the question. That's perfect. Yeah. Okay. Now, can I ask you about validation? Thanks for the invitation. I'm happy to share. See, like it worked. It just worked for us right now. So, you know, you invite someone to share something that is going to be hard for them to share. Invitation, you're like putting in kind of a little like grace. I like to say, you know, I talked to a lot of churches. So you're like putting in some grace, like I'm inviting you. And I know it's going to be hard for you to share this thing. And you're probably going to say something offensive.

9:03You don't need to say that to someone, but like come in with a mindset that someone might say something offensive to you and then they'll say something. And then maybe your first reaction is to say, I don't think that, or what about this? Here's this other thing you are considering. You want to say no right away. You want to like fire back something, but you should resist that impulse and instead validate. It doesn't mean agree. It does mean, thanks so much for sharing that. I understand it's hard to share. If I'm listening correctly, I think you mean this. And I'm going to rephrase it in a way that's very charitable.

9:34And then that's going to make you feel heard. It's going to make you feel seen. And it's going to allow us to have a better conversation after that. And it's not part of CIV, but you also make a very big deal about showing that you're vulnerable. So how does vulnerability play into this? Yeah. I guess taking a step back, the goal for all these conversations is to see the humanity in each other, right? To recognize that we're all good people. We're all trying to figure out our lives and our world. And oftentimes when we're disagreeing with someone, we, and this is John Saru's turn, we flatten them.

10:12We see them as two-dimensional. And so all this is a way of seeing someone in their rich three-dimensionality. you want to connect, you want to invite, you want to validate, and you want to let them see you as well as someone who is human. And a big part of that is vulnerability. So I'm going to share the stories after you shared with me, I feel comfortable with you now because we've had a connection. And so I'm going to share the stories of suffering of harm, my concerns. And so you can see that I'm really basing my moral judgments, my concerns in questions about harm, because that's That's where our minds are rooted when it comes to morality and politics and concerns about protection.

10:54So the name of your book is Outrage. And I have to ask a very simple question, which is what causes people to get outraged? It's a great question. It's a pretty simple answer. And the answer is we get outraged when someone rejects or challenges or defies our understanding of what is harmful and who is vulnerable to harm. So we get morally outraged when we see someone causing harm or rejecting our understanding of who or what is harmful. And would you say that being outraged is highly correlated with justifiable reasons to be outraged? Or is it like if you stepped aside, would it be irrational to be outraged?

11:49Here's the thing. So outrage evolves as a way of protecting ourselves. So if in our community someone did something that we thought was harmful, we would all band together in anger. We'd grab our pitchforks, our torches, and we would kick that person out of the community or we would punish them or censor them somehow. Except today, we're no longer faced as much with kind of things that we all agree are harmful. Instead, we disagree. Immigration, abortion, taxes, different people on the left and right disagree about what's harmful and what's worthy of outrage. And so going back to your question, it's really hard to know what's the rational right thing to be upset about because there are so many people on each side of an issue who have a legitimate point often.

12:41And so I think it's hard to say what's rational and what's not. We can all agree on some things, but other things we're very far apart on.

13:04As I was reading your book, this section about outrage, a moral outrage, I just thought, would you say that the United States reaction to 9-11 was the mother of all examples of moral outrage? I mean, it's certainly there's a case to be made. So we were harmed. We were harmed by someone we thought is a true villain, in this case, bin Laden, and like foreign folks doing harm on our soil, attacking our institutions. And certainly we were collectively outraged enough we came together and then tried to punish the folks who caused that harm. I think that's a good example. But isn't the point of your book that we should look at it from the other perspective and see what drove them to do 9-11?

13:55Or is that a stretch? I think the point of the book is to understand how everyone has the same moral mind and we're all driven by outrage. And so I think it's justifiable that many Americans were outraged at that act. But I do think that failing to appreciate the kind of mindset of, let's say, folks in Afghanistan, folks in Iraq, other folks in the Middle East is like, you know, America goes in there and causes a lot of harm. I think we maybe needed to think about how they might feel outraged at America in return. Right. There's always two sides of any issue and there's always people who take the other side.

14:34So at least we should have had a better understanding of what they're thinking and what they're feeling. So do you have a practical tip that when you're feeling moral outrage, you know, before you react, you should take these steps or do you just start launching B-52s? Well, you know, John Saroof has this other quote that I really like when he's working with divided communities. And he says, it takes a fifth of a second for your flight or fight response to be activated and 20 minutes for it to calm down. And so part of, I think, managing outrage is just taking some time and space away. It's okay.

15:17It's okay to walk away from the situation and say you need a little bit of time to calm down and you think about it. And it's okay to schedule it for a different time when you're not feeling angry. Like don't send emails in anger. Try not to talk about politics when you're filled with rage. But I think what I try to do, and to get to your point about thinking about the minds of others, is to think about how these folks that I disagree with might feel victimized and the harms that they see. Because once you see that the harms that someone else is worried about or how they feel like they've been victimized, even if I don't agree with their position, I can at least see them as a little more human.

15:59And that goes a long way. Author to author, I'd like to ask you this question, or maybe I should pose it as author to author. May I ask you a question? Yes, you bet. So did you consider titles for your book that were not quite violent or negative instead of outraged? It would be like harmless or something like that. The flip side of outraged. I did consider Harm less. I thought that would be nice. The original title, the kind of secret working title was The Victim Within, which is a negative and maybe less violent. It turns out no publisher wanted that book. You're a victim and no one wants to walk through the bookstore and be like, you know what?

16:46I am a victim, even if we might all feel like it at some times. But I think we thought that the one word title with the bright orange cover and the aggressive question or exclamation mark, rather. Maybe a question mark would have been better, right? Outraged. But I think we wanted people to resonate and many people are feeling outraged today and we wanted to help them make sense of that. Okay, fair enough. And now I'm going to ask you one more author to author question that I noticed. And you may find this really bizarre, but on page 190 of your book, I have a question. And let me read a quote.

17:27So on page 190, it says, most conservatives generally want to protect black men, and most liberals generally want to protect the police. Is that an error? Is that a typo? Was it transposed? No, no, because it is the case that when we think of progressive folks and conservative folks, We generally think of conservative folks being more concerned about the police, progressive folks being more concerned about protecting black men, black lives. But it is the case that most progressives do think that police officers are good and want to protect them. Oh, OK. I get it now. OK. So you were like busting two myths there.

18:11Exactly. Exactly. And where the disagreement comes is like the relative concern when those two groups, those two interests are kind of pit against each other. But most people want to protect most other people. I read that sentence about four times and I said, is this an error? What is he trying to say? So I stand corrected. I stand corrected. Thank you very much for clarifying. But you're right. We have these myths that the other side is so stuck in their political positions that they don't care about the other side or other interests. But most people do generally care for others and want a world where people are protected.

18:50It's just these disagreements come down to these trade-offs. The foundation of your book is something that I never considered, which is I've had many social psychologists on this podcast, and there are many explanations for this divide in the United States. But none of them have ever said something like harm is the key variable and the master key to explain human morality. So can you explain why harm is such a big deal? Because I never considered it. I never thought of it like that. I think the reason that harm is the master key of morality is because we as a species and as individuals, we're really concerned with protecting ourselves.

19:35And we evolve through time as being threatened. If you go out, I make the argument that we're a lot more prey than predator. if you go out into the forest and you strip down to your underwear and you wait for nighttime and you hear a twig snap behind you, you're not going to think, oh, good. I hope it's an animal that I can eat. You're going to think, oh, my goodness, right? Something's coming to eat me. Something comes to kill me. And if you walk through a dark alley and you hear some shuffling in the darkness, you're going to think, oh, no, there's something there. There's something trying to get me.

20:08So we are so attuned to threats because the revolution, the people who are not attuned to threats, they died. If you were like, oh, look, there's something lurking in the darkness. I'm going to go try to hug it. You got eaten. And so we're attuned to threats. And in the past, those threats were clear. The predators are people who might kill us. But today, those threats are a little more ambiguous, right? Are immigrants a source of income for America or are they threats? Are taxes going up? Is that bad? Is that good? So today we're divided by what's the most threatening, but at the heart of all our moral judgments is this concern about protecting ourselves from harm.

20:48And that's why it's the master key. And if someone from 100 years ago took a time machine and came to America today and saw what we considered harmful threats, would that person just be scratching their head and saying, listen, you guys, you got to have more serious things to worry about than, I don't know, not being able to get into Harvard. That's not the biggest threat in the world. I think you're exactly right. I often think going back in time, if you went to a parent in the industrial revolution and their kids were working in a factory, it's dark, it's hot, there's spinning machinery that could catch your hand and cut it off.

21:32And they're thinking every day, I hope my child's going to come home. and then as you say you tell them you're like maybe your kid's not going to get into this elite school or maybe your kid is going to look at the screen too much they didn't have a screen maybe don't understand right but look at the screen too much and not feel fulfilled the parent would be like i just hope they come home with their hands you know and so i'm not you know it's not saying that these harms we're worried about today aren't real to us and don't cause concern but it's certainly it's a stretch from days of yore. So let me ask you something so that if you are dealing with someone who you disagree with, should you be so transparent and ask them what harm they are seeing or what harm they're trying to avoid?

22:18Can you just be that blunt and ask what's threatening you? I think you can. I think I probably wouldn't start with that. Going back to the CIV, I would probably get into the conversation a little more obliquely, talking to them as a person. But I think it's totally reasonable once you're actually talking about politics, about morality, to say, what are you most worried about? What do you think the harm is of this policy? People will tell you. People have a gut feeling that the things they're against are harmful. And so I think they're very happy to tell you as long as you don't throw it back in their face, as long as you don't deny the kind of victims that they see.

23:00Okay, so I'm a hardcore liberal and probably most of my audience is liberal too. Maybe I have two or three conservatives listening to this podcast. So I got to tell you, a lot of the book was just eye-opening to me that there is another argument to be said about abortion or vaccination or guns. So can you just quickly explain to us, what's the other side of you, Guy? what harm do they see with too much abortion or vaccination or gun control? Yeah, good question. And I want to preface this with this idea of, look, there are like statistical truths of who or what is more likely to be harmed in some situations.

23:47And so I think vaccination, you know, as a scientist, I think vaccination, it's a good, it's a clear good. I'm a scientist. There's lots of evidence to support that. But I think that statistics don't always resonate in our minds. And in fact, they seldom do. And what does resonate are kind of stories about harm. And so even if we are all concerned about protecting the vulnerable from harm, especially kids, that you can have powerful stories, visions of what's harmful that contradict any kind of statistics. So let's say your kid gets a vaccine and falls terribly ill, that's going to be a personal experience that overwhelms how many scientists tell you that vaccines are okay.

24:35Or if you hear a story of a friend, I think guns are the same way, right? If you have experience and you've used a gun to defend yourself, that's really powerful. And guns is also an interesting case because we could argue about what's most relevant to the gun debate. If you're like, look, the real problem is mental illness, or it's not like taking care of your gun or putting them in safes, then we shouldn't be worried about how many guns are there. We should be worried about like responsible gun ownership. And if someone comes to your family, if the zombie apocalypse comes, right, you want to have a handgun.

25:06And so you see those threats and you see guns as a way of protecting yourself against those threats. So it just always comes down to this kind of this worldview about what best protects us and our family. Would you say that it's accurate that conservatives and liberals would almost completely agree on the desirability of protecting kids? Yes. I think we agree on the desirability of protecting most people. We just make different assumptions about what protects them. So a liberal would make the argument that vaccination protects kids and a conservative might make the argument that vaccination is going to cause autism.

25:49So they're both trying to protect kids. That's exactly right. Wow. But let me ask you, Kurt, is there a point too far? I understand seeing the other sides, but are you telling me I'm supposed to see the other side for Hitler and Putin and Musk and Trump? I mean, RFK says don't get vaccinated. Is there a point where you just say, I don't think so? I think there is a point. There is a point where you say this is a step too far, but I do want to separate the morality and humanity of everyday people from maybe political elites. This book is not written as being an apologist for Putin. In fact, in one chapter, I say Putin thinks he's a victim, and obviously he's not.

26:35That idea is crazy. But I do think that many people in America have so many kind of different assumptions about who's vulnerable to harm from social media, from cable news. And I think most people, left or right, just want to protect their family and want to have a better world to live in. And maybe some folks make assumptions or misunderstand the science. Questions of vaccination are probably more complex than most people realize, even if they're uniformly, I think, a good thing for society. And so I think we should just see the humanity in the other side, even if we want to argue against them.

27:13But that understanding of humanity doesn't have to extend to Elon Musk if you don't want it. This is about reconnecting with your friends and family and coworkers. And if people don't want to have a reasoned conversation with Kanye or Elon or Donald Trump, I think that's OK. This is about healing our kind of everyday fractures. Although I do want to say there are people who think that you can extend the bridge even further. So Daryl Davis is a black blues musician. Talk about him in the book. He devotes his life to befriending KKK members and getting them to hang up their robe. So should we require a black man to talk to a KKK member?