Hacking Your Mind

[ Indistinct shouting ] -Today, we're a nation where many people see their political opponents as genuinely bad people.

[ Indistinct shouting ] And that is a serious threat to our democracy.

-Democracy requires us to compromise, but how can you compromise with them when they are so evil?

[ Indistinct shouting ] -But now, scientists are discovering why we almost automatically think in terms of us versus them, and we'll take you on a journey to see its evolutionary roots.

-And, look, look at what we're seeing right now.

-Right.

-This is one group charging in.

This is the moment of the decision... -Right.

-...based on his understanding of who's in there and who's not.

-Right, right.

-"Who's like me in this food corral, and who's not?"

-Right, right.

-We'll discover why groups of humans are even better at us-versus-them thinking than groups of monkeys.

-We call ourselves American.

We call ourselves white or black.

We call ourselves gay or straight.

-We'll discover how social media companies use us-versus-them thinking to hack our minds.

-Social media gives us this river of outrage that is constantly reminding us of what group we're in, which is good, and how evil and horrible the other group is.

-We'll see how politicians use us-versus-them thinking to manipulate us and explore what's been called the "Rise of Trump" study.

We'll see how Russia used it to hack our democracy.

Most important, we'll discover why us-versus-them thinking has become our nation's biggest challenge and how we can start to overcome it.

-"Hacking Your Mind" was made possible by a major grant from the National Science Foundation -- "Where discoveries begin."

-Hello.

I'm Jake Ward.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously called American democracy the Great Experiment.

Today, that experiment is facing an entirely new test because we Americans no longer get the same information from a few trusted sources.

Instead, each of us can choose from literally thousands of sources to get all the news that matters to me.

That sounds, well, democratic, but there's a dark side too.

With almost every major challenge we face, Americans today disagree not only about what the solutions are but about what the facts are.

What one side is convinced is true, the other derides as fake news.

Not surprisingly, that's left us unable to agree on how to deal with some of the most pressing issues of our time.

What's the solution?

It begins with discovering why we cannot agree on what the facts are.

That is the fascinating question Yarrow Dunham is studying at Yale's Social Cognitive Development Lab.

-So the first thing we have to do is figure out which group you're going to be in.

Are you going to be in the orange group or the green group?

How do you think we're going to do that?

-By spinning?

-Exactly.

Let's do it.

-Dunham divides young children into two groups based simply on the color of the T-shirt they're wearing.

Then he asks them to decide what's happening in two different versions of an encounter on the playground -- one in which the kid potentially in the wrong is wearing the same color T-shirt as they are and one where they're wearing the other color.

-Okay.

Here's a girl in your group, the orange group.

What do you think happened in this picture?

-She got hurt.

She pushed her off the swing.

-Hmm.

Why do you think she pushed her off the swing?

-Because she's wearing green shirt.

-The scenes are designed to at least be open to more than one reading, so in one scene, someone is standing behind the swing, and someone else has fallen over.

Did that person push them over, or are they getting ready to come help and lift the person back up?

-Amber is not going to help her because she's in the green group, and she's in the orange group.

-And in fact, what we have tended to find is that kids are more likely to make negative interpretations of characters in the other group... -What do you think happened in this picture?

-Randy steal the dollar from his pocket when he was like... And Mikey was like, "Huh?

Huh?"

-...and also are seemingly a little more likely to make positive interpretations of members of their own group.

What do you think Randy is going to do next?

-Give back the dollar.

-They're also almost like a confirmation bias, on the lookout for information that reinforces that initial idea.

I sometimes think of it as the effect of mere membership.

That's all it is, is membership in a group.

There's no information beyond that other than that it's your group.

-Because she's in my group?

-Who do you think really wants to give you candy?

-That one.

-He's rude.

He just pushed him off.

-One thing I would add that I think is really important about this kind of study is, it also relates to a way in which children can in some sense be manufacturing what seems to them subjectively like evidence in favor of their original bias.

So they start out with just a small bias in favor of one group over the other.

I show them a bunch of these scenes.

Once they've decided to interpret that scene as, "Oh, that guy from the other group pushed someone," now, when I later ask them about the groups, they have a little stockpile of what they think are facts to draw on.

"Oh, well, members of that group are just mean.

They're pushing people over all the time, right?

They're stealing people's money."

So now, they have essentially evidence in favor of their bias, and you can imagine this now leading them to think even more that that initial bias is justified.

-So their brain is using the information at hand, treating it as fact but really just constructing something to support their bias?

-Exactly.

-And I would assume that over time, right, as the years go on and we become adults... -That's right.

-...you do that enough times, and it begins to really feel like the truth.

-I think you have to think about it essentially iterated over hundreds of experiences across our life, right?

Again and again, you see your in-group through a little bit rosier glasses, and over time, the accumulated weight of all of that is a very entrenched view of your own group as positive.

-Yet when the kids are asked afterwards if they favored one group over the other, they seem to genuinely believe they treated both groups exactly the same.

How can they believe that?

The answer lies in how we humans make decisions.

Far from making them logically based on a careful analysis of the facts, a scientific revolution has revealed that we make many of our decisions so fast, we are not even aware of making them.

Decisions made when we're thinking fast are nonconscious, intuitive, effortless, shaped by our gut feelings.

It's as if we're operating on autopilot, and not surprisingly, when we make autopilot decisions about groups of people based on our own gut feelings and intuitions, those decisions tend to be biased in favor of whatever group we belong to.

How do our autopilot biases affect how we see other people?

[ Indistinct shouting ] In 2017, in Lake Oswego, Oregon, an anti-Trump young woman in a white hat confronted pro-Trump marchers in red hats.

This cellphone video of the event has been viewed over half a million times on YouTube, and numerous pro-Trump and anti-Trump viewers posted their analysis of what they saw.

[ Indistinct shouting ] [ Indistinct shouting continues ] [ Indistinct shouting continues ] [ Indistinct shouting continues ] Those comments aren't based on the facts because there aren't enough facts available in this video to allow anyone to figure out what was really going on.

Instead, they're inspired by the autopilot bias that behavioral scientists have called the single most problematic aspect of human decision-making -- confirmation bias.

Let's try a simple experiment together that reveals how confirmation bias shapes our experience of life.

I have a pattern in mind that's a sequence of numbers, and here are three numbers that fit my pattern -- two, four, six.

Now, name three other numbers that you think fit my pattern.

Done?

Okay.

Many people will say 8, 10, 12, but the pattern I had in mind was not even numbers ascending one after the other.

It was any three numbers where each one is larger than the one before, so 1, 57, 2,001 also fits the pattern.

Now, you might say, "What kind of stupid, confusing, hard-to-figure-out pattern is that?"

But that is the point.

Often, life is confusing and hard to figure out, but when it is, the only hope of finding the correct answer is to tap the brakes on our autopilot system and engage our logical slow-thinking system and put a lot more time and effort into it than we might like, and so we're biased in favor of easy-to-get satisfying patterns.

We're also biased towards satisfying explanations in the stories we tell ourselves to explain what's happening around us.

If you put just a bit of effort into it, you'll notice that throughout the day, your autopilot system almost instantly spins little stories to help you make sense of the people and events you're encountering.

And just like the commentators on the Trump rally, we love simple satisfying stories, which is to say -- stories that confirm our biases.

More than 100 studies done in countries around the world have shown that when most people are presented with a set of facts about a controversial issue, they only carefully consider the evidence that supports a position they've already taken, and they automatically without realizing it discount the evidence that doesn't fit their position.

Then after they've cherry-picked the evidence that suits them, they use the slow-thinking rational system in their brains to build what they're convinced is a completely logical argument for that position, and here's where it gets really weird.

When people in these studies are then presented with definitive evidence that the position they hold is flawed, it doesn't cause them to question that position.

Instead, it makes them believe even more strongly that they're right.

-It's very hard to get at the truth if you're partisan.

If I put three apples on the table, and I say, "How many apples are there?"

there's no disagreement, but if I show you an event that happened, and I say, "Why did it happen?"

each side comes at it with their pre-existing causal stories with their values, with the narrative that they want to see supported, and each side sees what it wants to.

Because of confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, each side is able to make a totally compelling case that this is why this happened, this is what it means, and this is why it shows how evil they are.

-The "Cloud Gate" in Downtown Chicago's Millennium Park reflects images in a way that turns what's really happening into a visual illusion, and when our minds see the world through lens of our biases, they also create illusions.

Earlier in this series, I quoted something that the founding fathers of this field wrote.

It's essential to understand, so let me quote it again.

"We make many of our most important decisions based on what can only be called cognitive illusions.

This is embarrassing for us to realize, but the evidence for it is undeniable."

And so in a way, we're experiencing not the world as it actually is.

We're experiencing the world our mind creates.

To figure out what's really happening around us, we have to, just like with the pattern of three numbers, tap the brakes on our autopilot system, slow down, gather the facts and try to make sense of them.

But as we've seen, that can require a lot of time and effort.

So why should we bother?

Because when we see the world through the lens of our autopilot biases, it's incredibly easy for others to hack our minds.

All they have to do is trigger one of our biases with the right cue... [ Bell dings ] ...and like Pavlov's Dog, we tend to react to it in the way they want us to.

Let's look at how social-media companies do that.

Dozens of times a day, many of us grab our digital devices and glance at our favorite social-media feeds to see what's happening, and those companies know that the only way they can make money is if what we see in that one glance automatically grabs our attention, and we start clicking.

-Your attention is very valuable.

There's a lot of people that want it, and without realizing it, you can easily lose control of your attention.

A million flashing lights, attractive objects, a garden of delights pull you in different directions throughout your day.

We flatter ourselves by thinking we can resist these things.

You're kidding yourself.

The truth is, we live in environments that are constantly plundering and seizing our attention.

-But while social media may be new, the strategy it relies on for plundering our attention was born here in New York nearly 200 years ago.

Early in the 19th century, the sellers of the first tabloid newspapers realized that all they had to do was put stories on the front page about murders and sex scandals involving people their readers did not trust, like politicians and rich kids who'd never worked a day in their lives, and average men would almost automatically cough up a penny to see them, and the stories didn't even have to be true.

-It was realized as early as the 1830s when tabloid newspapers got their start that the fake news frankly often sells better than real news.

I mean, why be constrained by the facts?

Why not feed people exactly what they might want to hear, and the mixture of it seeming true but having the freedom of fiction creates a perfect product.

[ Car horns honking ] -Of course, today, there is so much more to pay attention to.

Every grisly murder is streamed right to your phone, and we're exposed to a constant array of outrageous tweets and sexy clickbait.

But here is the key.

Though the technology has changed, the strategy for making money is the same.

Those tabloids?

Their product wasn't the news.

Their product was the attention of the men who automatically looked at those pictures.

The tabloids made huge fortunes selling that product, people's attention, to advertisers.

And today, you are not a customer of the social media companies.

You are their product, and they're making huge fortunes selling their product, your attention and that of hundreds of millions of other people, to advertisers.

-That's how Google is.

That's how Facebook is.

That's how Twitter is.

It's all about making audiences into products, bundling them in different ways and selling them to advertisers.

-To get your attention so they can then sell it, companies like Facebook try to make it feel like everything you see and hear on their site is coming from your family and friends.

-One of the reasons that social media is seen as a valuable advertising platform is this idea that it colonizes a continent which was previously undiscovered, which is the power of friends and family to recommend things to you, you know, in a way that you trust.

And so we have an entire generation of technologies built to take advantage of the influence of our friends, family and other peers on our decisional processes by mimicking those processes so much so that we don't realize anymore that the people we're listening to aren't really quite our peers, friends and family, but we still think they are.

[ Indistinct shouting ] -One way that Facebook makes it feel like the posts they send us come from our family and friends is to mimic the way actual families and friends tend to view the world through the lens of the same biases.

To pull that off, Facebook collects data on the political views contained in the posts that groups of friends share.

For instance, do they like Trump, or do they like Bernie Sanders?

Then the company starts sending lots more posts with the same political slant the group has already embraced with advertisements attached, and the company's algorithms filter out posts with opposing viewpoints, so the group never sees them.

Of course, our real friends keep sharing stuff with us too, but just like Facebook, they tend to only send posts with viewpoints that they are confident we'll agree with.

Think about it this way.

I'm getting nonstop stuff on this device that's been specially selected for me by a social-media company or by my friends.

Either way, it's guaranteed to confirm my biases, and so I am like a kid in a candy store.

And it's the most wonderful candy store in the world because everything here appeals to me.

They only stock the candy that I like and cannot resist.

And the other side has its own candy store, and both sides are convinced that the people who go to the other candy store must be idiots.

A former Facebook vice president recognizes the impact his company's business model has had on how we see each other.

"We have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.

That is truly where we are -- no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth."

-One thing Facebook and other forms of social media do is, they give us an opportunity, which then becomes an obligation to constantly be self-presenting, to be signaling virtues, signaling which side we're on on this, that or the other issue.

So we now are constantly taking sides.

That makes us more moralistic.

At the same time, social media gives us this river of outrage that is constantly reminding us of what group we're in, which is good, and how evil and horrible the other group is.

You put these two things together, and you get hypermoralism, hyperjudgmentalism.

People are constantly showing off and displaying their moral judgments, and they're bonding with their tribe to hate the other tribe.

-It's that level of us-versus-them divisiveness that made a foreign power think it could build a destructive virus out of our own biases and use it to hack our electoral system.

-Russian operatives are attempting to infiltrate and manipulate American social media to hijack the national conversation and to make Americans angry.

-Russia's efforts to use disinformation to influence the 2016 presidential election have received a great deal of coverage, but what's received less attention is that it was all aimed at confirming Americans' pre-existing biases.

-Muslim men are allowed four wives.

-This video, posted on Facebook by the Russians, was aimed at getting Michigan voters outraged about Muslims on welfare.

-So when they immigrate to America, they simply list wife number two, three and four as extended family to qualify for welfare and the myriad of other taxpayer-funded government programs.

Don't believe me?

Call for this number for yourself and press three for Arabic.

-The only fact in the video is that the state of Michigan makes forms in Arabic available to its substantial Arabic-speaking population.

The rest of the video is disinformation aimed at inflaming pre-existing biases against Muslims.

-If you don't like seeing US tax dollars spent to support multiple Muslim wives, call your congressman and see if this Michigan welfare system for large families is coming to your state and let him or her know how you feel about that.

-The video was viewed by almost a million people, and overall, 157 million Americans received Russian disinformation via social media.

This was one of the results.

In Texas, the Russians created a white nationalist Facebook group called Heart of Texas, which advocated for Texas secession from the Union.

They also created another Facebook group, United Muslims of America, which claimed that the CIA created both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The Heart of Texas group posted that it was holding a rally to stop the Islamization of Texas, and then the United Muslims of America group posted that it was holding a rally to defend the rights of Muslims, which just happened to be on the same date at the same location.

Thousands were duped into taking part in an angry confrontation between Americans orchestrated by the Russians.

-So if you have a media psychology environment in which people are wired up, constantly sharing information, and there's a lot of research now showing that the more emotion-rousing it is, the more likely it is to be shared.

So if that's the environment, and now you start injecting totally fake stories into this superheated environment, they're going to be sent around at warp speed.

And again, what was, you know, what was a river of outrage now becomes an ocean of outrage.

-Of course, Americans are not the only ones who can be easily outraged by what turn out to be fake stories on social media.

Consider Sri Lanka where Buddhist extremists regularly post phony stories about the Muslim minority on Facebook.

As reporting by Al Jazeera revealed, the fake stories were then widely shared on social media by other Buddhists, and suddenly, mobs began destroying Muslim businesses across the country.

An advisor to the president of Sri Lanka says, "We don't completely blame Facebook.

The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind."

How can it be so hard for the smartest species on Earth to tell the difference between what's fake and what's fact?

Well, according to decision scientists at Yale, one of the things that makes us the smartest species, being able to almost instantly act on what we learn from other people, can also lead us to behave like idiots.

-Oftentimes, when we think about what makes humans special, we think of all the good stuff.

You know, we think of literature.

We think of technology.

We don't think about the fact that we are often very, very irrational even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

We sometimes do really dumb things, and this is what my lab was really interested in looking at.

We wanted to understand, "Where do these dumb things come from?"

-At Yale's canine cognition lab... -First patient of the day.

-Welcome, Benjamin.

Come on in.

-...Santos is studying whether dogs or children are more easily fooled by disinformation.

-Okay.

-Focused on the rewards.

-He's ready for some science.

-"Where are the treats?"

-[ Barking ] -Oh.

[ Laughs ] -So the first thing I'm going to do is just open the box for him and see if he's comfortable getting a treat from inside.

-We're presenting him with a really simple box.

-Oh, good boy.

-It's just a transparent box with a red lid.

-Right.

-All he needs to do to open it is to lift the lid, but when Angie shows him how to open the box, she'll do something really silly.

-Just theatrical?

-Just theatrical.

She has a stick that's attached to nothing, and she'll wiggle that stick before opening the box.

We're trying to see if Benjamin gets messed up by the bad information he gets from a human.

-Okay now.

-Well, no interest in the stick there.

He's going from the front.

-There he goes, wow.

-The main thing is, even though he's having a little trouble solving it, he doesn't go to the stick.

I mean, that was what he saw.

-No, the stick is not part of it.

He knows the lid is the problem.

-Exactly, so... And there he goes.

-There he goes.

-I think he grabbed it.

-Good job, Benjamin.

-You don't see this just in one or two dogs?

-Nearly all the dogs that we see come through here show this.

-Wow.

-No interest in the stick, just run over to the lid.

-So what about children?

Are they as good at ignoring disinformation as a dog?

-Just like the dog version but, you know, subtly different.

That stick at the top is our stick.

-Mm-hmm.

-You can see Derek move that stick out of the way.

He even sticks his little tool inside the box.

And then he does the relevant thing, which is just to open the lid and get the toy out.

-Right.

-The question is, "Do kids gets messed up?"

Now, the dogs don't, but let's see what kids do.

And this child is showing pretty much what other children do, which is that they painstakingly copy all the things that Derek does.

You know, it takes this child a while to move the stick out, but he does that.

He even copies.

-He's doing everything he did in the order he did it with the same little movements.

-And the cute thing is, they take this really seriously.

-Yeah, they're like, "I have a job here."

-I got it.

-Wow.

-So far, all of the nonhuman species we have tested seem smarter than humans.

You just saw our dogs.

They seem to get it.

-Right.

-They ignore completely what humans do.

Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, they too ignore the bad actions we demonstrate.

-Even they know what we don't?

-Even they know what we don't.

-Wow.

-And this really shows us that humans might be unique in following the information of others even when we don't need to.

We seem to lack a filter for bad social information.

-Mm.

-When we watch people do dumb things, we don't have the right filter telling us, "Hey, these are dumb.

Don't copy these things."

-Interviews with the children after the experiment revealed that the disinformation was so powerful that it gave the kids a new and inaccurate understanding of how the physical world works.

Outside the lab, social media programs like Alex Jones' "InfoWars" take advantage of people's willingness to embrace disinformation to alter their view of reality.

-Sandy Hook doesn't add up.

-Alex Jones is the most prolific and influential conspiracy theorist in the United States.

-My gut tells me the White House -- people controlling the government, were involved in this.

-Jones' claims have included that the murders of the children at the Sandy Hook School in Connecticut were staged by the government.

-But to you what did he say?

-And he filled both his show and website with apparent evidence backing up the charge and calls for Americans to fight back.

-You don't think we're not going to fight you?

You don't think we don't know you're going to blow stuff up and try to blame us?

-How do we know for certain that Jones' statements are disinformation?

Because during a trial over custody of his children, Jones' own lawyers stated in court that Jones' performance is an act, one similar to the act put on by a movie star playing a deranged character in a fiction film.

-Randall Wilhite told the judge that using Jones' on-air persona to evaluate Alex Jones as a father would be like judging Jack Nicholson in a custody dispute based on his performance as the Joker in "Batman."

-But during his performances, Jones never mentioned that it was an act, and neither did distributors like YouTube.

In fact, YouTube calibrated its algorithm so that it recommended increasingly radical content like this to each of its more than a billion viewers.

As a result, posts like this one by Jones comparing Florida students in favor of gun control to Hitler Youth were seen by even more YouTube viewers.

-Authoritarianism is always about youth marches.

Here we go.

-[ Shouting in German ] [ Cheering ] -Only as Jones' posts became ever more outrageous and some platforms banned him did YouTube follow suit.

For YouTube, it was just a minor blip in its bid to make as much money as it can by capturing a billion viewers' attention... ...but it leaves the rest of us facing this question -- Why does disinformation that makes it appear that our group is locked in mortal combat with another group have such intense appeal to human beings?

To find the answer, Laurie Santos is taking us to a unique place -- Monkey Island, off the coast of Puerto Rico.

[ Monkeys chittering ] All of the island's 1,200 residents are members of the same species -- Macaca mulatta, rhesus monkeys, but the monkeys have divided themselves into six rival groups, and, just like human beings, monkeys have the ability to almost instantly, on autopilot, identify which monkey is a member of their group.

In the eyes of the monkeys, that's an "us" to be trusted.

Every other monkey is a "them" to be feared or attacked.

-So what we're seeing right now is a monkey feeding corral.

This is a spot where they get their main food on the island, which is monkey chow.

One of the bigger groups on the island is in the corral right now, and one of the smaller groups is coming up and trying to make the decision of whether or not to go in.

And there's a lot at stake.

There are moms holding their babies whose babies could get into a fray if they make the wrong decision.

-Right.

-There are little kids who don't have support.

And look.

Look at what we're seeing right now.

This is one group charging in.

-Right.

-The group in there has to make a split decision, like, are they going to run out, or are they going to hang out in there?

-Right.

Is there enough of my crowd here?

-...to back me up if bad things happen?

[ Monkeys chittering ] You can hear over the chaos here, they're trying to go in, and you see this other big group running out right here.

-Wow.

-Lots of screaming, and the screaming is in part because, you know, this is a dangerous time for the monkeys.

-Right.

Of course, our autopilot system is much more sophisticated than that of these monkeys, but according to Santos, that simply enables us to think even more in terms of "us versus them" than these monkeys can.

-We are constantly making decisions based on language, you know.

We use labels for who's in our group.

We have words for different race individuals, different genders, you know.

I'm wearing my Yale cap here, signaling which university I'm from.

-Right, and I have my donut shop hat on, so you and I... -Another university.

-...are a different strata.

-But we use markers all the time.

We call ourselves American.

We call ourselves white or black.

We call ourselves gay or straight.

I'm not talking to folks when I'm walking around a city to ask them, "Oh, which group are you in?"

but I quickly know who's of a different gender, who's of a different race.

I'm picking up on those distinctions incredibly fast.

-So it's not an accident that we humans tend to see the world through the lens of our "us versus them" biases.

It's an ancient autopilot instinct, and that's why, as numerous studies have shown, we're most likely to believe disinformation that triggers primal emotions like fear and anger toward another group of human beings.

-The us/them line is drawn so quickly, sometimes you don't even realize that you've drawn it, and that shapes how you understand the situation, which in turn shapes how you... the choices you make, what you take things into account, what you don't.

-According to Mullainathan, though we humans also have an entirely different way of thinking, slowly, logically, we tend to only put in the effort that requires when we're dealing with members of our own group.

-When we think about us, we tend to think that, "Well, us is like me -- infinitely variable.

There are many kinds of me.

There are many kinds of us.

I'm a complex person.

There are many people like us."

-But when we're thinking about them, we tend to stay on autopilot, making it almost inevitable that our view of them will be shaped by our biases.

-Them, well, there's just one of them, and so that's often what leads to, like, even when we use the word "they," it's usually a telltale sign that something is about to happen that's not good, like, we know that when we hear the word "those people."

You see this in international relations, like ask Indians, "What are Pakistanis like?"

"Oh, Pakistanis are..." Ask Pakistanis, "What are Indians like?"

"Indians are..." But, of course, there is no Indian person.

There is almost a billion Indians, and almost 200 million Pakistanis, so in some sense, what we really do is, we take the enormous, mind-boggling diversity of any group of people and embody them into one person.

It's almost like a cartoon character that comes to represent that group of people.

-But now, Mullainathan has come up with a strategy for enabling us to tap the brakes on our autopilot system and slow down so we can see more accurately what people who are different from us are really like.

He realized he needed such a strategy when it dawned on him he was thinking about the people he studies, poor people, as "them."

-I've worked on poverty for a long time, and I didn't realize until a little while ago that I was making an us/them distinction.

They are the poor.

We are the well-off, and even the most sympathetic people make that distinction.

We want to help.

I think for me, the big change was to instead move from sympathy to empathy, which then erases the them, and makes it much closer to, "How would I understand this situation if I were in it?"

-To help me use my slow thinking system to truly grasp what it's like to have to make decisions while poor, Mullainathan asked me to do something I didn't expect -- I had to come to his office really hungry.

-How are you feeling?

-I am hungry.

I haven't eaten since this morning.

I'm irritable.

I'm a little shaky.

-I'm sorry for that, but it's for a good cause.

-Okay.

-What I'd like to do now is to do a study on you.

-Mm-hmm.

Okay.

-It's actually fairly simple -- I'm going to put objects on the screen, and I want you to say the color of the object out loud as fast as you can.

-Okay.

Say the color of the objects I see out loud.

-Perfect.

-Okay, so... And I'll invite you at home to also do this.

We are looking at the objects and saying their color out loud.

-And say it as quickly as you can.

-Okay.

-Are you ready?

-Sounds good.

Yes.

Hit me.

Black.

White.

Green.

Orange.

Blue.

Yellow.

Brown.

Blue.

Ah!

Nope!

[ Chuckles ] That's not blue.

That's red.

Wow.

Wow.

Automatic.

[ Chuckles ] That's funny.

So what does this study teach us about, you know, my brain, and the brain of everybody else who participated here?

-There's two parts to your brain -- There's a part of you that sees the color and says, "Red."

-Right.

-But there's another part of you that says, "I know what that is.

B-L-U-E, blue!

Hey, hey, hey!

I got this one."

-According to Mullainathan, two autopilot processes were competing in my brain to give the answer, and some autopilot processes automatically override others, and so I said the word on the screen instead of what I was supposed to be doing -- saying the color of the letters.

-You also had trouble with this slide.

-I did.

That's funny.

I wanted to...I don't know what I wanted to say.

I think I wanted to say "chocolate," probably, but just I had to find my way to the word "brown."

-Here, the hungry part of your brain stepped in the way, and that part of your brain was like, "Yeah, I don't know what this study is all about.

Chocolate."

-Yeah.

"But that's chocolate right there."

-"Give me chocolate."

-If I'm hungry, thinking about food automatically overrides all other thoughts and makes it very hard for me to do what I know I'm supposed to be doing, and Mullainathan's research has revealed that, when you're poor, worrying about money automatically overrides all other thoughts.

-For poor people, thoughts about money, thoughts about, "How are we going to make rent?"

-Yeah.

-"How am I going to find the money for that utility bill?"

Those thoughts are constantly buzzing around their head.

-Wow.

-They're getting in the way.

They are the letters B-L-U-E, but they're not happening in some experiment done by somebody like me.

They're happening all over life.

-Wow.

-You walk into a grocery store, and what do you see?

You see salsa.

-Right.

-For poor people, they see a price tag.

It's not really true.

Just like one of the biggest effects of hunger is to reshape your brain to make you preoccupied with food, one of the big effects of poverty is to get you preoccupied with money.

-Wow, and everything costs money in this world.

-And, in fact, the effects are very large.

What we show basically in one of our studies is that the same person, when they're poor, loses about 8 to 12 IQ points.

-Hmm.

-Now, if you don't have a sense of how big that is, well, first I'll tell you it's huge, but that's also about 75% of what you lose if you pull an all-nighter.

-Oh, wow.

-So it's as if the poor are pulling an all-nighter every night.

-So if I slow down, I can discover that the one thing all poor people have in common is that they're experiencing what Mullainathan calls cognitive overload from constantly worrying about money, and so, according to his research, confirmed by others, it's not their bad decisions that prevent poor people from getting out of poverty, it's the reverse -- The stress of being poor makes it extremely difficult to make good decisions, and once you realize that, you might just see the next poor person you encounter not as a nameless, faceless "them," but as an individual who is in a really difficult situation.

Slowing down can help us overcome all sorts of other "us versus them" biases.

During the 2016 election, attendees at a Trump rally and Black Lives Matter protesters began to confront each other.

Then, suddenly, the leader of the Trump rally decided to tap the brakes.

[ Cheering ] [ Cheers and applause ] One key to overcoming "us versus them" thinking is to realize that while we tend to focus on the ways our values and morals are different than those of other groups, in reality, we all value the same things.

To help people grasp that, psychologist John Haidt uses the metaphor of world cuisines.

We tend to think the cuisines of different cultures, just like the cultures themselves, are unique, but, in fact, they're just different ways of combining the same ingredients.

Haidt invited me to dinner to explain.

-So this is a carne asada tacos.

-Okay.

-And kung pao chicken.

-Alright.

So I look at these two dishes, and they've got a lot of the same ingredients, right, and yet they're wildly different, and you're saying there's a moral parallel here.

-Yeah, that's right.

Basically, these are all meat, starch and vegetables.

That's what most of this is, and so you might even say they hit on the same taste receptors, but yet they can be put together in ways that end up looking very different.

So that's the point of the moral foundations and the taste bud metaphor is, we all have the same basic social receptors in our minds.

-Right.

-We can all understand each other's stories.

Everyone can understand compassion.

Everyone can understand a child or a vulnerable person who needs care, and then you see someone caring for it, and it feels good.

You feel satisfied.

Everyone can understand someone who takes without giving, and that's the villain.

That's the person we all love to hate.

-So if our morals are as similar as our food, why is it so hard for us to all get along?

According to Haidt, a major reason is that political leaders throughout history have encouraged our fear of others to gain and maintain power.

To do it, they continually dish out moral cues that trigger their supporters' biases in favor of us and against them.

-There's a lot of research that shows that when a group is under attack, or if you even just make people think about threat or attack, they become more groupish.

They respect authority more.

Their morality shifts to prepare them for intergroup conflict or tribal warfare, you might say.

Demagogues throughout history, especially if they have a military bent to them, tend to focus on the constellation of loyalty, authority, sanctity together, and this is the idea of the fatherland.

Our territory and our traditions and our honor have been attacked, so you have this thing about preserving our homeland, and then you also generally will bring in some sense of fairness or reciprocity.

"They've done this to us.

They cheated us.

They took our land."

And then you tend also to bring in ideas of impurity, so you see this very much in Hitler's "Mein Kampf."

-Right.

-You see it before the Rwanda Genocide, literally calling your enemies cockroaches.

"We must root them out.

We must kill them all."

-Mm-hmm.

-So demagogues tend to use a consistent set of moral taste buds, moral intuitions in that way, not a lot of compassion, not a lot of softness and care.

It's a morality which is going to bind the group together and get people furious at them and want to stamp them out, so file you mix those ingredients right, you can create a kind of a moral dish that, when you feed it to people, they all start frothing at the mouth.

-But citizens of the world's oldest democracy, the United States, can't be that easily manipulated by cues that trigger their biases in favor of us and against them, can they?

-The Census Bureau estimates that at least by the year 2043, and possibly sooner, the US will be a majority nonwhite nation.

-That's the question that the widespread media coverage of the 2010 Census projection that white Americans would soon be a minority triggered for Yale psychologist Jennifer Richeson.

-I was listening to the radio, noticed these reports about the changing demographics of the United States getting repeated.

-People of color accounted for 91.7% of growth.

It's like the future of our country on steroids, and it's happening now.

-And I would see it on my Twitter feed, or, you know, in social media outlets, these articles about this happening, and I'm thinking, "Wow, you know, social psychology suggests that this type of communication and how it's constructed as majority, minority, right, or this coming white minority, is probably going to be threatening to lots of white people, right?

Lots of, you know, people who maybe don't think of themselves in terms of their racial group membership, but this type of communication will suddenly make them think of themselves in terms of their racial group membership and in a very defensive way that's likely to lead to the expression of racial bias," and that's just where we started.

-Richeson and colleagues at Northwestern conducted a study that was released before the 2016 presidential election that was later nicknamed the "Rise of Trump" study.

First, the researchers asked nearly 1,000 white participants what kind of government they favored -- very conservative, very liberal, or somewhere in between.

Then they exposed half the participants to media coverage of the census forecast.

The news that white Americans would soon make up less than half the population had been covered by every network.

-For the first time, minority groups now account for about half of American children under the age of 5.

-Census Bureau figures show more minority babies now being born than non-Hispanic whites.

-The researchers exposed the other half of the participants to entirely different, neutral information.

Then they asked both groups what kind of government they now favored, given the information they'd just been exposed to.

The political views of the group that watched the neutral information didn't change, but the views of the group that watched the news clip about white people becoming a minority changed dramatically.

-It lead to greater endorsement of politically conservative positions on a broad range of policies, from drilling in the Arctic to tax policy to health care policies, and, of course, what you'd expect, policies that are most relevant to racial attitudes and policies, so, you know, immigration policy, affirmative action, those types of things.

-To confirm that the shift towards conservative politics was caused by fear of the consequences of being a minority, Richeson then conducted another version of the study in which participants who watched news coverage of the census were afterwards reassured about white peoples' future status in society.

-We say, "You know what?

Even in a future where whites are the less than 50 percent of the population because of, you know, any number of factors, including different access to education, to jobs, to training, whites, on average, will still maintain a dominant status, meaning access to resources, jobs, political influence, and so, you know, not that much is going to change, actually, in terms of how society operates in... despite the fact that the numbers are changing."

-When they were reassured that white people would remain dominant, the people who saw the census information no longer supported a more conservative government.

It was confirmation that it was simply being made to feel that white dominance was threatened which had caused them to change their politics.

So it turns out that even in the world's oldest democracy, you can get people to change their politics simply by giving them cues that almost automatically trigger "us versus them" thinking, and there is nothing unique about that.

Groups of humans throughout history have been vulnerable to having their decisions hacked by cues that trigger their biases in favor of "us" and against "them," but what's different today is that the hackers now have a tool that would make a 20th century dictator drool -- social media.

So maybe it's not surprising that the old certainty that democracy would eventually spread around the world is suddenly fading.

-Turns out, that's looking like it was wrong.

We're seeing far-right parties in Europe laughing at a democracy and the liberal order the way Mussolini did and subverting the mechanisms of control on their power, like the judiciary and the press.

[ Indistinct shouting ] Of course, the United States, there are also threats from the left.

There are threats of political correctness that are trying to restrict freedom of speech, so we are entering a period in which our certainties about democracy and freedom from the 20th century are being questioned from both the right and the left.

-And in the United States, the retreat by each side into its own social media echo chamber where they only hear from people who think just like them has become one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever faced.

-Now, because of social media, any time a swastika is drawn anywhere in America, or any time someone says anything rude or aggressive to a Muslim or an African-American, that can get picked up and made national, and since we'll never get to zero, these things are always going to happen somewhere in our country of 330 million, so there will always been a supply of between 10 and 1,000 incidents every day to keep the left in a permanent state of outrage, and same for the right.

It's very hard to have democracy under those circumstances because democracy requires us to compromise, but how can you compromise with them when they are so evil?

-One result is that amid the most avid consumers of social media, young people, fewer than 1/3 think it's very important to live in a democracy... ...and one in six think that, given what they've been told on social media about what a mess the United States is, it would be better if the military took over.

Maybe it's time we face the fact that it is very, very hard to run a country in which everybody has freedom of speech and freedom of religion and the right to vote, especially when that country is filled with people of different ethnic backgrounds and religions and political points of view.

Considering everything that we know about how vulnerable we are to our own biases and to manipulation, maybe the challenge here isn't, you know, spreading democracy around the world.

Maybe it's just keeping it alive.

And there's new hope that if we work at it, we can pull that off.

In our next and final episode, we'll discover that the same scientists who have figured out why it's so easy to divide us are inventing remarkable new tools for keeping a diverse democracy healthy, from new ways to overcome our biases to new strategies for uniting us so we can together tackle the greatest problems we face.

We'll find out why it may be the most important scientific revolution of the 21st century... -And this makes me incredibly happy about our species' future.

We are now armed with the tools of making our own lives better, both at an individual level and a society level.

-...on the next and final episode of "Hacking Your Mind."

-Learn more about "Hacking Your Mind" by visiting pbs.org.

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