PODCASTThe Greater Good Podcast

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Today’s Guests:

JONATHAN HAIDT, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia. His article draws from his chapter in Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived (American Psychological Association, 2003), a book he co-edited with Corey L.M. Keyes.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN is the host of "The Greater Good Podcast."

Transcription:

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Welcome to The Greater Good Podcast. I'm Michael Berg Eisen. President Obama came to office promising to transcend partisanship and the culture wars. President Bush made the same pledge eight years earlier, but political debate in this country seems as acrimonious and polarized as ever. What explains these deep partisan divides are they simply a product of American political culture?

Or might they be traced to something deeper, something that's fundamental to human nature. Our guest today has some pretty provocative answers to these questions. Jonathan Heet is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and a leader in the field of positive psychology. Professor Heet is renowned for his work on the psychological basis of morality.

He's also the author of the critically acclaimed book, the Happiness Hypothesis, which examined human happiness through the prism of 10. Great Ideas from Ancient wisdom. His next book focuses on the psychological foundations of our moral and political views, exploring how recent discoveries in moral psychology might help us create more civil forms of politics.

Welcome Professor Heet. 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: A lot of us like to assume that our moral and political views come from rational recent thought and deliberation, but your work suggests it's not so simple. Where do you conclude that our morals come from? 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Um, I began my work in, in, uh, graduate school at, at the University of Pennsylvania in the late, late eighties studying morality, and at the time that meant studying Lawrence Kohlberg and, and the science of moral reasoning.

Uh, and it just struck me, I can only say intuitively, it just struck me right away that this somehow was missing the heart of the matter and that emotions and, and gut feelings were much more important. So my early research was on how people make moral judgements and I gave people all kinds of stories about people who do things that are harmless, uh, but disturbing or disgusting, like a family that eats its, its, uh, pet dog after the dog had been run over by a car or a woman who uses the American flag to clean her bathroom 'cause she has no other rag.

And I found over and over again that people had strong gut feelings and that most people went with those gut feelings. Uh, although well-educated secular liberals often overrode them, that is, they would say, well, this feels creepy, but I guess nobody's harmed. So, um, I guess it's okay, but I still wouldn't do it.

Like they, they, they would try to sort of condemn it, but they were reluctant to condemn it morally. Uh, and so since then I've, I've been, uh, examining, uh, the, all the various emotional and intuitive foundations of morality. Um, and when you pit, uh, emotions and reasoning together as I tried to do for many years, uh, I assumed originally there was a sort of a dual process model where both contribute and if you change the settings, you can get one to win or the other.

And I never succeeded in finding that. I always found that emotions, one, that reasoning basically was driven by. Uh, uh, reasoning was driven by emotions and people are really good at finding reason to support whatever they feel. Um, so that's, I think, the, where the foundations are. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Okay. Now you've written about five different psychological foundations for our moral and political beliefs that you believe, uh, are innate and universal.

Can you describe those foundations briefly? 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Sure. So my, my quest since, since graduate school was to put together two, two perspectives on morality that I would just, that I was just certain were right. Uh, the first is, is evolutionary psychology. It just seemed, um, um, from, from reading ethnography, from looking across cultures, it just seemed undeniable that, that human nature, there's so many commonalities and, um, so things like reciprocity and concern for suffering that were just things that were just obvious about human nature.

I thought evolutionary psychology has to be right. Um, but from reading ethnographies, I also saw, uh, that morality varied around the world and. Um, after graduate school, I spent, uh, two years working with, uh, the, the psychological anthropologist, Richard Schweder. Um, and learned that, uh, morality varies quite a bit as well.

And so I was always trying to put the two together and, and the approach that I finally took, I. Was to say, okay, let's look for matches between the two literature. Let's look at the sorts of things we find all around the world. It doesn't have to be universal, it just has to be widespread and see where there's a match, uh, to some, some theory, uh, discussed in evolutionary psychology.

And so the five that, uh, that I first came up with, I. This has work with, uh, Craig, Joseph, and some other colleagues here at UVA after that, uh, especially Jesse Graham and Brian Ick. Um, the five best matches were these, uh, the first is care and harm. Uh, we're all mammals. We all have attachment systems, and we, we recoil even young children, uh, recoil and, and feel pain when they see someone else hurt.

Uh, the second is reciprocity. We're all, we're very, very good at, uh, playing tit for tat at, at forming alliances, at exchanging things. And you can't find a human culture that doesn't go, really go in quite heavily for re reciprocity and reciprocal uh, uh, relationships. Um, and, uh, if you look at liberal morality and if you look at enlightenment, uh, uh, philosophy since the enlightenment, it tends to limit itself to those two issues.

And that's been mostly the, that's been sort of the limit of, of the western imagination, at least, uh, among secular liberals. But. Um, what I found from working in India and working with Schrader, uh, is that there are other, other ways of talking about morality. Schrader called the Three Ethics of Moral Discourse.

Um, so the, the third foundation, uh, is ingroup loyalty. Uh, people have a strong sense of of being on a team and, and of betrayal for anybody who, uh, double crosses the team. Uh, the fourth foundation is authority and respect. Uh, and we, we are a hierarchical species like most other primates, and we, uh, we think that deference should be showed.

Up people should live up to their obligations, uh, of their station. And the last one is, uh, purity and sanctity. There's a widespread idea that the body is a temple and that, uh, when people do things, um, just for when they treat the body as a playground. So especially in sex, it matters of sexuality and drug use.

Uh, many other people are disgusted, uh, creeped out or even outraged. And this is. Uh, the foundation that we found empirically is, is, uh, the main one at play in reactions to, uh, gay marriage, gay sex, things like that. So you might think about it as though human beings have, uh, five kinds of taste, bud. Let's say they can pick up five kinds of properties in the social world.

And, uh, what we found is that liberal morality really hyper develops two of the taste buds. Uh, and liberals then don't pick up a lot of other. Sort of wavelengths or flavors, let's say, that activate conservative tongues, I suppose, to push the metaphor, 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: and as I understand what you're saying, the the last three.

Foundations that you mentioned tend to predominate in conservatives, is that the, the distinction you've seen? 

JONATHAN HAIDT: It's not that they predominate, um, because everybody left, right or center cares a hell of a lot about harm and suffering and violence and everybody cares a hell of a lot about fairness. So it's not that the other, that the other three, uh, the more tribal ones, let's say, in group authority and purity, it's not that they predominate, but relatively speaking, what we find is that conservatives care a lot about all five.

Uh, and liberals care overwhelmingly about just the first two. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Okay. Now, you mentioned before this survey that you've, um, that you've given, and as I understand it, you have this survey, uh, on the website so that listeners could, could go to the site and take it. 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Yes. If, if listeners, uh, listeners can, uh, find out their own scores on these foundations, if you go to.

www.yourmorals.org. Uh, you can register that just takes a minute. And then we have about 40 or 50 questionnaires, but you'll see the featured studies include the Moral Foundation's questionnaire, um, so people can get their scores there. Uh, now I would like to point out that. Um, we talk about these five foundations and everybody gets a score on them, but I just wanna make the point that the foundations are really supposed to be foundations.

They're not the actual building themselves. So people don't live in a world of just these five things. Uh, morality is constructed and we can't construct a morality for ourselves anymore than we can construct a language for ourselves. So what happens is, uh, liberals, uh, read liberal. Uh, publications such as, such as Greater Good.

Uh, not that it's slanted, it's just that it focused so much on compassion that it, it, it surely is a, something that would appeal much more to liberals, um, conservatives, you know, listen to Glenn Beck and read, uh, and listen to Fox News. And, uh, so we construct a set of meanings. That is based on these five foundations.

Um, but morality can still vary quite a lot, uh, uh, from decade to decade, from country to country, even if people have the same, let's say, settings or, or sensitivities on these five foundations. No, 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: I, following up on that point, I, I wanted to raise the US Constitution and explore that with you a bit in terms of the moral psychology that's reflected there.

Mm-hmm. I mean, for example, and to. To make light of it a bit, I mean, if the foreign founding fathers had taken the, the survey, which of the five foundations do you think would've shown up the, the most? And, and I would add, does considering the Constitution in these moral psychological terms give us any additional insight into what we might call the, say the fundamental psychological foundation of our, of our American political culture?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yes. Yes. That's a great question and I'm, I'm glad you asked it because it points up a flaw in, in, in my original theory, in the original version of Moral Foundation's Theory, as we call it. Um, so, uh, my, the listing of five foundations that I gave you came out of our review of evolutionary psychology and anthropology, and it wasn't intended to be a complete list of, of everything that people care about.

It was intended to be a set of what are the best. Candidates for being, uh, universal foundations based on what we see, especially in the evolutionary psych writing. And, and there wasn't much an evolutionary psych on liberty and autonomy. And so when I would talk about my theories, some people, particularly conservatives, would say, well, where's Liberty?

Where's freedom? Where's autonomy? And I'd say, well, I, and I think it's probably derived from a sense of reciprocity, is, you know, we, we develop a notion of rights as we engage in exchange with each other. But I wasn't very satisfied with that. Uh, that answer, and especially as the culture war has shifted from, uh, being the, uh, religious right versus the secular left.

To being the economic, right, the tea party movement, economic right. Versus the, um, uh, economic left, uh, you know, accused of being socialists, let's say. Um, it's been really clear that, uh, that we have to think about liberty autonomy as, as a, as an, as something separate, as an additional foundation. And, uh, and I have found plenty of justification for that in, in, um, in writing on evolution and, and, uh, animal anthology.

Just, you know, animals don't like to be caged, they don't like to be trapped. Um, so in the last, uh, few months we've, we've been collecting data and, and, uh, readers can, listeners can, uh, take these skills on the website. Uh, a bunch of additional questions on different kinds of fairness and different kinds of liberty.

And what we find is that, uh, everybody left, right and center endorses what we can call lifestyle liberty. This is especially say John Stewart Mill's famous Liberty principle. Everyone has a right to do what they want as long as they don't infringe on the equal liberty of other people to do as they want.

So everybody favors that. Liberals favor it a bit more. Um, but when we look at economic liberty, basically the right to be left alone, to, uh, manage your affairs, to spend your money to to, to earn your living. There we find a big political difference, uh, where liberals don't seem to really res, have much respect for private property, uh, and for economic liberty for the, um, so if we were to look at the founding fathers, we would find them very, very high on what's called negative liberty.

That is the right to be left alone. Don't tread on me. Um, and, um. That is something that conservatives and libertarians are much, much higher on than liberals. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: And so are you, are you saying that that liberty would, liberty autonomy would be, uh, a sixth foundation? Yes. Or do you, do you see That's 

JONATHAN HAIDT: right. This, so, um, the list of five that I gave you was the first draft of what we can call a, an outline of the moral mind.

And we've been working with that for a couple years and based on, on a lot of research we've been doing and criticism we get, we, we, uh, uh, request criticism on our, on our websites. Um, we are reformulating the theory this summer and we're gonna add a liberty foundation and we're also gonna change fairness.

We'd focus on fairness as equality and liberals were scoring higher, but now we're finding that there are, um, several kinds of fairness and the main kind of fairness really has to be seen as equity. That is, are you getting out proportional to what you put in? And, um, this is really what started the Tea Party rant.

The whole tea party. Well, the Tea Party was started by a, a rant by, uh, A-C-N-B-C reporter, Rick Santelli, who was outraged. He said, do you wanna, you know, should I have to pay for my ne my, uh, my neighbor's mortgages? You know, if he's a loser who made a mistake and overbought, why should I have to pay for it?

Um, the idea that people should somehow get what they deserve, uh, both on the positive and negative side, that is a very deep conservative, uh, and I really say human intuition, but especially strong and conservatives. Um, whereas liberals actually don't care that much about it. They're much more interested in fairness as equality, especially quality of outcome.

And this, I think, is so that plus the difference on liberty, that's really what the current culture war boils down to. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Mm-hmm. So I, I gather, uh, liberals and conservatives would have very different results on, on compassion. Um, 

JONATHAN HAIDT: uh, yeah. So that's not quite as different as, as you'd expect. So. What we find is that liberals always score, um, higher than conservatives on, uh, compassion.

So for example, one of our surveys, we asked people to make trade offs. How much money would it take to get you to do something? You know, one of the questions is, how much would it take to get you to kick a dog in the head? Hard. That's an awful thing to think about, but would you do it for a hundred thousand dollars?

How about a million? Uh, and most people have a, a price, um, although it's awful to think about. And, uh, so what we find is that, uh, liberals do have a higher price, let's say, than conservatives. Um, uh, liberals think that these things are more awful than conservatives. But now that we've started also looking at our data in terms of libertarians, what we find is that, um, yes, liberals are the most compassionate, uh, conservatives follow behind, and it's really the libertarians with the odd men out.

They. What we find is that libertarians basically look like liberals on most measures, except that they are very low on compassion. Li libertarians, uh, just don't seem to feel the suffering of others nearly as much. Um, so it's not so much that conservatives are hardhearted deep down, it's that the network of meanings they construct doesn't really value compassion all that much.

In fact. Uh, if you listen to Libert, uh, to conservatives talk, they kind of make fun of compassion in that compassion can lead liberals to do what they see as crazy things. Mm-hmm. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: The, the bleeding heart liberal, like 

JONATHAN HAIDT: excusing, criminality, deviance, selfish, uh, you know, uh, um, excl, um, um, inequity, uh, all sort, all sorts of unfairness can be committed in the name of compassion.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Mm-hmm. Yeah. The, the bleeding heart, liberal stereotype, soft on crime, those kinds of things. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Shifting a bit. Um, do you think that having a better understanding of these deeply rooted differences in moral psychology can actually help foster a less partisan political culture? Like that is greater understanding, um, by each side of the other?

JONATHAN HAIDT: Uh, yes, I do. Um, I've found, I found it enlightening. To, well, I guess I, I first found it enlightening to spend some time in India where, uh, it's a very, it's a very conservative, traditional Indian culture. Is, is fairly similar in many ways to the culture, the moral culture of the religious right. Uh, so, um, highly religious, highly sex segregated, highly stratified.

Um, so from learning about Indian morality, I, I, when I came home, I, I found myself suddenly much more able to understand conservative Republican morality. Um, I'm a liberal myself, although doing this work has brought me much more to the center than I used to be. Um, so I think, uh, having analytical tools that allow you to say, oh, I see what they're getting at, at least, um, I found that that's been extremely helpful to me.

I wanna give talks on this. Um, I haven't yet really addressed any conservative audience. It's very hard to find if you're an academic. Um, but what I find is that when I address liberal audiences, um, many people, especially, uh, graduate students and younger people come up to me and they say. Wow. Now I see.

Oh, you know, I always just thought that they thought these things 'cause they were stupid racist bastards. Um, but I mean, okay, now I, you know, I kind of see what they're after. So I think that, um, the very nature of morality is to bind us together into teams to compete with other teams. Morality by its very nature, blinds us to the motives of others.

It makes us, um. Um, commit the fundamental, the fundamental attribution error and attribute, uh, the motives or enemies to selfishness and, and greed and evil. Um, but if you have an alternate story, then it, that is a first step towards. I'll even say developing compassion for them. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Mm-hmm. Alright. I'd like to get your reaction to an argument that I think could be presented against that conclusion, at least to a degree.

So one could argue that tolerance for a political opponent's views depends on the, the substance of those views considering. How those views look from your perspective and, and that the psychological foundation of your opponent's views by itself shouldn't make any difference or that much of a difference in your tolerance.

For example, if, if you're a liberal, and this may be a bit of an extreme example, but if you're a liberal, you could believe that a former Vice President Cheney's willingness to, to allow suspected terrorists to be waterboarded stems from. The dominance of the, the in-group loyalty foundation, one of your, your five, uh, in, in his psychology, yes.

But, but this wouldn't necessarily make you more tolerant of those views. If you, as a liberal thought and believe really strongly that water boarding is torture and that torture is immoral and counterproductive, would it? 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Uh, no, I think the, the crucial concept that has not been brought out that much in discussions of morality in recent years is the concept of sacredness.

That there are sacred values and each team is united around sacred values. And, um, uh, to the extent that the liberal team is united around sacred values of compassion and non-violence, um, it would be asking an awful lot, uh, of someone to. Somehow become more compassionate of a torturer of somebody who advocates torture.

Um, also in this case, uh, given, I mean, Cheney arguing for this, it kind of strikes me, it's almost like somebody arguing that we should go back to Jim Crow laws or something like that. I mean, it's just so both, you know. Illegal and, and, and repugnant. Um, now here, I guess I'm not being very, you know, I, I could try and force myself to be more compassionate or, but let me put it this way, at least I understand, um, what he's getting at and his view, I, as I understand it, was if there's even a, you know, 1% chance that some action could, or one a thousand chance that some action could avert a nuclear bomb going off the United States, it's worth killing or torturing anybody to reach that end.

Um. I guess in this case, my understanding, it, maybe it does give me, it makes me demonize him a little bit less. I, I don't think I could ever feel compassion for him. Mm-hmm. Um, if you give me an example that doesn't involve asking, you know, asking me or others to, to violate their most sacred values, then I think we could probably get a little further with this exercise.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Yeah. I, I think, I think that's a fair point that while just considering the views by themselves, um. Uh, and taking into account the psychological foundation might not cause you to have a different perspective on the view being expressed. It, it might cause you to, in to, to make less intense your personal antagonism towards the, the person holding those views, like you said, you Well, 

JONATHAN HAIDT: that's right, because it was very popular on the left to say that everything the Bush administration did, they did for money or for oil or oil interests.

And I think that's just not true. Uh, I think these people were deeply patriotic, uh, patriotic in a form that. That many people on the left don't, don't recognize, or don't, don't, uh, respect. Um, but they, this is a sort of a tribal form of patriotism, which is that the, the most important, the sacred obligation of the, of the leaders is to protect the group.

And, um, so here's an example. There's a, on this recent survey, on this new, this new data I'm getting in. Um, so here I identify more closely with the people of the world at large than with the people in my own country. Correlates hugely with politics. Liberals say yes, conservatives say, no. My government should treat the lives of its citizens as being much more valuable than lives in other countries.

And once again, when conservatives say yes, and liberals say no. So, um, if you, if you think that the purpose of, of the American government is to make the world a better place and to treat everybody as equal. Well, that's gonna lead you to some sort of odd conclusions about what American policy should be.

Certainly odd in the eyes of most Americans. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that would dovetail with your, your having seen the link between the in-group loyalty and, and conservatives having seen that link more strongly there. 

JONATHAN HAIDT: That's right. I mean, a useful heuristic for, for liberals, I think is, is this. Um, don't sit around trying to explain conservatives.

Uh, this is what we've been doing in academics for 50 years now. We're all liberal. Everybody who studies politics and real is liberal. And we all try to come up with these. There's so many theories. Why, why are people conservative? Is it, is it that they were abused as kids? Um, is it that they're afraid of death?

What is it with these conservatives? Um, and everybody's trying to puzzle that out. You get a lot further if you say. What is it about these liberals? What is it about us liberals? What is the historically unusual circumstance or the psychologically unusual circumstance that leads us to have these very unusual views in, in the context of world history and, and, and the current world population liberal views on, on politics and government and redistribution are, are, are the things that need explaining.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Mm-hmm. You know, along these same lines, professor height, you've, you've written about how. Liberals can take into account the psychological foundations that predominate in conservatives to, to present arguments that that might be more persuasive to conservatives and moderates. And I, I was wondering how do you feel liberals have been doing in that regard in the last year or so and issues like health reform and global warming and.

Financial reform, all the, the, the, the hot button issues. 

JONATHAN HAIDT: Yeah. Not very well. Um, so we, we've got a couple of conflicting things going on here. One is that political psychology studies generally show that liberals are higher on cognitive flexibility, openness. Uh, conservatives are, are a little bit more cognitively rigid.

So it ought to be the case that liberals can take conservatives perspectives quite well and conservatives would have a harder time getting out of, out of their own mindset. That's what you'd expect. On the other hand. What my group has found, uh, is that, um, because conservatives respond to all five, or let's now call it six, because conservatives really sort of get all six moral foundations.

If you ask them to think like a liberal, and we've done this, we say here, now please fill out our surveys pretending that you're a liberal. Um, and we ask. And if you're a liberal, we say, now please fill out a survey pretending you're a conservative. And we look to see who's more accurate. And what we find is that conservatives are more accurate.

That is conservatives understand all six foundations. They can. They pretend that they're a liberal and they have all the equipment they need, but if you ask a liberal to pretend he's a conservative, they can't do it because they simply don't get the in-group authority and purity stuff. And when you ask them to answer these questions, they, they sort of know what a conservative would say and they then kind of just attribute it to being just cruel and hateful.

Um, so I, we've, we've found that liberals actually have a hard time getting into conservative heads more so than vice versa. I. When we look at what the Democrats are doing nationally, um, they've made some progress since, uh, um, George Lakoff's book, well, his, his book's in the nineties, and then don't think of an elephant in 2004.

Um, liberals now all understand framing and they've tried to use, they, they, they've tried to couch appeals, for example, uh, global warming. Now there's a lot of effort to, uh, make it clear that, um, do you wanna strengthen America's enemies? Uh, these are the people who hate us. We've gotta get rid of our oil addiction, uh, because it's, it's strengthening our enemies.

So those sorts of appeals, I think that's progress. I think that's probably better than just saying, we've gotta get rid of oil because it's hurting the fish, you know, and the marine birds. Um. So there has been progress, but um, I still think Democrats tend to have a, a 10 year when it comes to moral appeals.

They tend to focus too much on, um, uh, too much on um, compassion. And then they try to also put things in terms of self-interest as well. Um, I think conservatives generally do a better job going for the gut. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Um, you know, following up on a comment you made earlier, um, you, you've said elsewhere. Um, as well, and, and I know this is a bit of a simplification of your views, but that one could look at things as that the mind or the human mind is designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and in that process, often to blind us to the truth.

And, um, that would suggest that we as humans are, are not very well equipped to deal with issues like global warming that require each team, each country or region to sacrifice for the collective good of all of the teams. Do you have any, any thoughts about that? Absolutely. 

JONATHAN HAIDT: No, absolutely. That's right. The big evolutionary idea here that I think is gonna transform our thinking of the social sciences in the next 10 years is group selection.

That is, um, many pe, anybody who's read Richard Dawkins book, the Selfish Gene knows all about this. The idea that, um, I. Are, are we humans shaped by, just by the competition of individuals with the neighboring individuals and whoever beats out their neighbor is the one who, um, you know, is the one who you know, is able to reproduce and survive?

Or are we shaped by a process in which groups competed with groups and, uh, the most cohesive groups are the ones that survived? Um, uh, there's been a lot of recent work, uh, arguing that in fact we are products of group selection. That this view was. Sort of heretical for about 30 years since stockings, uh, work in the seventies.

What this means is that we actually have all kinds of mental equipment for joint, for, for suppressing self-interest, for working for the common good, but that's only. When we are basically at war with another team. So, um, yeah, we are not, we, we can be unselfish, we can be cooperative, but that is activated by intergroup conflict.

Um, if we are attacked by space aliens, I think we, humans will unite pretty well. But until then, um, it's just very, very difficult for us to solve, uh, commons games, common good games, uh, any sort of dilemma that requires people to sacrifice for the greater good, unless it's the greater good of their team versus another.

Mm-hmm. So it's really a shame. That, um, it's a shame that global warming has become such, uh, so politicized. Um, I mean, we are capable of solving something. It's know, like taking lead outta gasoline. I mean, there are some regulatory changes that have been made that weren't so politicized and, and, and people can kind of understand, okay, we need to do certain, some things, but once it becomes politicized, um, people really don't wanna, there's, there's no, it's very difficult.

Global cooperation. Lemme put it that way. 

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: Alright. Fair enough. I think we'll have to leave it. Uh, there. Professor Het, thank you very much for speaking with us today. 

JONATHAN HAIDT: My pleasure, Michael.

MICHAEL BERGEISEN: The Greater Good Podcast is a production of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley. Jason Marsh is the producer of the Greater Good Podcast. Alton Doe and Bernie Wong are interns. Special thanks to the University's Graduate School of Journalism and Milt Wallace for production assistance.

You can listen to more Greater Good Podcasts and find articles, videos, and other material from Greater Good at www.greatergoodscience.org. I'm Michael Bergeisen.