How to stop doom scrolling – and have a better experience online with Jay Van Bavel (from ReThinking)
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Hey, everyone, no matter who you are, you're likely to spend a lot of time on the internet. In fact, you probably needed a wifi connection to access this episode you're hearing right now. This week, we wanted to share with you a great episode of rethinking, hosted by organizational psychologist adam grant.

It's all about the ways we interact online. You'll not only hear from adam himself, but also renowned psychologist and neural science professor j. Van pavo.

They have a great discussion about why it's so easy for bad news to go viral, how to make online conversations kinder and what you can do to feel Better when you're scrawler through your favorite ite social media platform. I hope you enjoy IT. And if you like what you hear, you can find rethinking whether you get your podcast now onto the show.

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When I use social media, it's like your diet. It's like trust me, like i'd rather have like a chocolate cake right now, but like i'm actually going to go have like a salad for a lunch because i'm forty six. And look, if I have a chocolate cake for a lunch every day, it's like not onna work for me.

Everyone is adam grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the ted audio collective. I'm an organization of psychologist, and i'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guess today is jv and is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at n. Yu and an award winning teacher, researcher and writer. His book the power of us with dominic packer is a great reason how to overcome our differences. Jay is also a leading expert on why, what cos viral often makes us miserable and how to change that.

Like taking up the tiny tumor in your brain so you don't have seizure anymore. Like, that's how we do surgery. I think like, this is the level of which IT might help if people knew that and they could like figured what there was accounts were and unfollowed them, they might actually enjoy their online experience lot more.

Right, jay, i've to tell you, part of the reason that you're here among many is I find the news incredibly depressing. And I am hoping you're gna cure that.

okay? I don't know. I can promise that I don't try.

I've shown off watching T, V news altogether, and increasingly, I don't even want to read online news, and I just came across, ironically enough, a headline, which I guess means I haven't totally shut off the news. But the basic finding was twenty three million news headlines from two thousand and twenty eighteen showing that anger, fear discussed and sadness have all gone up, and emotional neutrality has declined. What's going on?

Most news now is intra wove in with social media. And so we're all in this universe where were engaging matrix is called the attention economy. And winning the attention economy means more people clicked on a news article, went to the website, and that increases ad revenue.

Human psychology is really old, its millions of years old, and our brains are basically wired for survival. And that means like social connection and belonging, but that also means things like avoiding threats and being hyper vigilant about things that could have killed us. And we are the, we are the offspring, and we are the ancestors of generation after generation after generation of people who like avoiding getting wiped out by, like a dangerous poisonous snake or eaten by bear, something like that.

And so we're like hyper tuned, and that type of information is typer engaging to us. And so what happens is when the news post some story about some tragedy, or corruption, or canal, or anything negative, disgusting, outrageous, we're more likely to want to click on IT. And therefore, the news company is producing out of the influencer who shared IT gets engagement and they're more likely to create and share more and more information that takes that form or uses those airlines.

And so we're now in this kind of like doom cycle where we're getting more, more of that feed back at us and we're engaging with IT more and more so. And that's why people like you are eventually, just like in a burn point and disengage like I don't want to see this. This is so depressing and that's where we're at.

IT reminds me of something that that live boris said not too along ago. He said that the problem with raging against the machine is that the machine begins to feed on rage ah .

that they're profiting of us. That reminds me of like the matrix, we're all like getting exploited for our energy here where our attention getting exploited.

This is not new, right? You're pointing out that this is a fundamental future of human psychology. Psychologists have been writing about this phenomenon for decades.

I think about paul rosen, negativity bias by western colleagues are bad, is stronger than good. And I feel like those ideas have long had a lot of evolutionary handwaving in them, right? And I think i'm guilty of that off.

And like, failed to notice the a lion and you might not survive to pass on your overlook in a adorable koala. Guess what? You live to fight another day.

But I think you've made a pretty compelling case that this is actually hardwired in us. And if that's true, IT all to start early. So do we see this with Young children? Do we see IT with infants? Walk me through the case that this is actually part of our our evolutionary wearing.

I'm not a developmental psychologist, although i've collaborated some developmental work. My understanding is that you see this in kids. You also see this in our primate ancestors.

So for example, if you show, I think this was done with my cock monkeys, if you show them, like, if they see like a snake, all they need to see is one other monkey freaking out to the snake. And they learned to fear IT instantly, whereas re's other things that are like harder for them to fear condition to. And so basically what that means is we have a prepared ness to learn that some things are more dangerous than others.

And so that seems to be something that is pretty conserved across species. We can have like news headlines and stories and videos and stuff that like exploit one another tendency to do this. I think that's what makes us special, is that we can figure out ways to push one and other's buttons to persuade and cajole and manipulate one another.

Well, that brings me to one of my puzzles, which is why do we keep falling for IT like surely we're smarter than this aren't yeah .

so i'll tell you a study that we finish, this was made by my he student clare Roberts son. And we got access to this huge data set, that of experiments that the website up the m and these are like your classic A B experiments, where they like, try a headline one way, tried another way, see which one people click on, and then, like, use that once. So they were like masters of using science and data and analysis to, like, optimize headlines. But when we analyze this twenty two thousand experiments, we found, if anything, the exact same news story when IT had a negative headline was generating more engagement, IT was getting more clicks. And if I had a positive headline.

IT was getting less clicks there. A couple of interesting new answers in your data. First of all, those data came from a particular period in time when, to your point, the internet was Operating based on a set of algorithms that kind of feed that. But at some level, IT seems to me that the dynamic hasn't changed even though the algorithms have.

So we have another paper where we analyzed about three million and news stories and and post by political leaders on facebook and twitter before was x and what we found there was a couple interesting things. One was that when people spread negative news about the political out group, when they share that content, IT was more likely to get spread. IT got shared about sixty seven percent more.

And that's one of the single most effective strategies we found for making things go viral, is just spreading bad news about other guys. So that's probably where they are coming from is just a data driven, probably not some top down evil strategy about how to make people met all the time. If anything, internal documents from facebook shows mostly they were trying to do the opposite. They're trying to like create community and stuff like that. But they were just like they are algorithm is is amplifying based on engagement, and that's the thing that was driving engagement.

What's troubling about this is that we're only measuring short term engagement. And in the long term, what a lot of people did is what I did, which is to say I don't want to get my news through social media because IT just makes me matter.

said I used to be actually like a technical optimist. I used to think a handful of people in silicon valley, if they wanted to, like, snap their fingers and change something and make the world a Better place, like at a level scale that we never have had in human history. And I often thought that they would get this data and hear these stories, isn't want to do more of that.

And I actually pessimistic. Now, I don't think they do, because they found what button depressed about the dark side of human nature. And then we just get more of IT. But again, these are like short of things. They are making more profit in the short term. But if they erode democracy to the level of massive educ conflict, then maybe they going to like damage out of the institutions and societies and communities that they actually care about.

Well, I think from my conversations with with a lot of those folks, I think i've landed somewhere in the middle. They're trying not to destroy their business. They're also trying not to destroy democracy.

And so what they've been testing a whole bunch is okay. Can we, for example, figure out some middle ground solutions? And one of those is dea prioritizing political news. I've seen to evidence that political news is much more negative than other topics. I think one example on the other probably ended that spectrum actually science news, which skills very positive, people are fired up, their inspired.

they're excited when there's a new discovery. Most of the in civil content that is spreading and including the stuff, not just that negative, that has lot of misinformation, is heavily in the political domain. So there was a big paper in science magazine where they analyzed misinformation and IT spreads further faster than true information.

This is the natal paper.

yes. yeah. And if you look carefully their data, they found A A couple of moderators. So a couple factors exceed to be driving this. One is stories that are loaded with emotion. So a lot of stories that have a lot of emotion tend to be in the political domain.

Part of IT, as our political leaders, as I was saying, like this, is data from rob wyler's lab that they've become less and less civil and more and more hostel over time in the last like decade or more. And so these people have massive, massive following. Some, you know, when trump was on twitter, he had like ninety million followers.

And most other political leaders have millions of followers, and they said norms they established like the tone of the conversation around issues. okay. Now i'm going to tell you an optimistic thing.

So this is a paper as unpublished for about just submitted in a couple weeks. It's LED by a host doc mine, Steve rathie, and we decided to take a scalpel to this problem. One thing that we've noticed is that a lot of this negativity online is driven by a small number of of accounts.

And so we're talking about the spread of antibes misinformation. Like on facebook. There was the disinformation dozen, which was like a dozen accounts that created fifty percent of the misinformation for the whole platform um and then he gets amplified by influencers and so forth.

But it's really a small number of people. So what we did is we identified the most polar ized accounts on twitter x and we hate people to and follow them for a few months. And in another condition, we pay people to follow some science accounts like NASA, where it's like, you see those amazing images, like the games web telescope.

This is the most powerful intervention we've ever run in my lab. First of all, IT reduces a sense of paris an animosity because you're not seeing this nonstop stream like the most negative people and the negative people. I I figured the data, but is something like ten percent of people share ninety seven percent of the method of social media posts about politics.

So when you're talking about politics is really negative, it's really only ten percent of people who are driving in. And then those ten percent of the people, on average, are the people at the extremes. So if you unfollowed couple of people and replaced instead with following some science accounts, people feel happier.

Here's the other cool thing. The facts lasted for six months, and i've never seen that before. And here's why, once they unfollowed just a hand full of these accounts. Once the studies over we say you're allowed to follow them again, they don't. They realized, I think that they are like learning the less I actually drain IT more without those handful of accounts, and i'm liking these science accounts and .

gonna keep IT as is everyone in a while, i'll share a study that upsets people. And then i'd noticed a bunch of people and follow me. Listen, like you just shot the messenger here.

The fact that I raised a hard question, or you disagreed with the finding of the rigorous research that I thought was worth knowing, even though I didn't like the result of IT either like I don't think that is a good reason to and follow someone you should not follow if their posts are disrespectful, if they're consistently spreading lies or bullshit, or if their content just ruins your day. And IT makes me wonder, should content creators have positivity ratios in mind? Should journalists have positivity quoters? How do you think about that dynamic?

Okay, that's a great one because I experience the same thing as you, but probably on a much lesser scale. And sometimes I just delete IT because I just here's the difference. I think you are a little bit like me, but I mean abbe even more sensitive, like if I should something controversial all like scale back the controversy for a week just for my own psychological well being.

Sometimes I don't know. It's controversial when I posted, I kind of start from the defauts assumption that the whole audience whose chosen to follow me knows that intellectually integrity is one of my core principles and i'm not going to bother to share something unless it's cleared my bar of I think this is credible information from credible experts.

And every once a while I have this jolt of someone accuses me of just posting research to get clicks that that goes against my core values as a science communicator, which is, i'm not just onna share what makes you feel good. I want to share what makes you think hard. I think that matters to know this information.

It's not fun, but it's meaningful or it's a helpful perspective. And I think that requires a long view from the audience. But IT also requires me as a contact create or a communicate to be clear about the principles behind what I share when .

I use social media. It's like you're diet. I think some people just want like the junk food diet version of IT and others of us like actually make an effort to use as a way to make yourself smarter or more informed about the world.

Sometimes I are study, and i'll have other scientists like critique or demount, and that actually informs the way I think about that research. And I might not cite that in the future because I didn't know of a critique IT that they brought up or they might connect me to another paper that I hadn't read. That kind of goes deeper. And so there's also a conversation thing where I feel like if i'm having million conversations, even if i'm wrong and what I share or i'm interpret thronging, I feel like i'm getting smarter about IT. And so it's kind of like that's like a healthy diet.

We need a badge for social media, for science communicators. That's the rosy envy of ignorance only applied to research methods as opposed to justice. I share content if I think the methods were high quality of regardless of the conclusions. yes. Yeah.

as a scientist are you care about is like the study was rigorous and then will update our thinking. And then will I get Better? And guess what, if we do solve some kind of biases and society, that's great.

Let's talk about how to on condition. That's not a thing. I guess you can you can do extinction .

of condition. yeah. yes.

So you mentioned over the earlier one of things i've really loved about their work is they have made a concerted effort to try to shift the baLance and say, we wants to be an organization that elevates people. And I think they've done some very clever things around activating positive emotions like joy, inspiration, curiosity, hope, gratitude, pride.

I thought to be interesting to get you to analyze a few of their success cases, i've listed an expert in my house to help with this. My daughter Joanna is actually in turning with up worthy right now, and she's picked some examples for us. John, can you hear us? Do you want to come over so we recording you on my mike, too?

Hi john. Nice to meet you.

I'm jay. Hi, I sweet to one person said, I need the people to know that olympic silver medalist georgia villa is sponsored by palma's on cheese and regularly post pictures of herself with giant wheels of cheese.

I love the wheels of cheese in that photo. You want to hold the up .

so j can see IT. Well, I saw her go viral. yeah.

And I love those pictures and they did drive palm Jones. okay. So here's some variables that predict why that works. First of all, there one of the things that that generates attention in the attention economy of law mi universe is surprise, and it's very surprising I didn't even realize the response red by cheese companies.

The other thing they caught my eye was the caption up worthy road that's big palma porta.

Okay, everything's Better .

when you have comedy.

Okay.

tell anyone to do another.

This guy's parents put on a cousin camp every summer for the grandkids. And for the past eight years, they've invited all the grandkids, ages five plus, to spend four days on the farm away from parents with their cousins. So they go all out and they make you feel like a real summer camp where they turn the bedders into cabin's and they say the pledged allegiance. There's arts and crafts, kitchen duty, talent shows, music times, swiming can't fires, field trips, even sports anything.

So you have a couple themes that are important to people, is family. It's like a beautiful family thing in the grandparents. Staying involved with the kid's lives also thought that was actually a story that I might have resonated with people because is useful, like a lot of grandparents or parents might see that and get an idea to do something similar.

So I also thought that that was one that connected that way and also shows love. Love is like one of those really strong cause of emotions. And we found, in terms of moral emotions tend to go viral, and most of them are negative, like outrage and discussed.

But one that does go viral is love. And so it's kind of like a show of love and and dedication for the grandparents to spend all year prepping this. In doing this for the grandkids, we ran a study like with five hundred americans, and we asked them what types of things do go viral and they, i'll say, like this, information, outrage, negativity.

And we say, what type of things do you want to go viral? And overwhelmingly, they say they want stories like this. They want stories that are heart warming, that show prosocial that was something positive and lifting.

And so there is this strong stated desire by people that they want way more of this in their lives, and they want social media defeat than this. And they just feel like they're not getting IT. So I think people are also feeling a little starved for a stories like this.

And he needs to be a good news podcast where you just analyze uplifting stories over and over again.

Maybe the closest thing is like the happiness lab by Lorry santos that you hail IT was just a happiness class and and like what you can completely do to be happier. And the think the most popular class in the history of the university. So is definitely like deep, deep desire to see my Young people who are super anxious and depressed rate out. They want stuff like that.

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Um you're ready for lightning. yeah. okay. First question is, what is something you've rethought lately?

Well, obviously been rethinking how to make social media Better. I used to think you have to change the algorithms and all that. And now i'm thinking that a small number of people are driving most of the problems, and we need to figure out how to navigate that issue.

I think that's very true. Reminds me of the Michael Peters and work on how trolls aggression to get attention.

If you have one jerk standing on the corner yelling at everybody, it's hard for them to cause lod harm. But online they can be harassing hundreds or thousands of people all day, or spreading misinformation to huge audiences. And then the other thing about my hael, bang Peterson's, worked that I thought that was really interesting as its high status seeking people who are doing this.

And so what has happened is we've given status to people who do this. We need to change what we give status to online. And we need to stop giving status to those folks and find a way to give status to do the people who are shipping their puffin sweater to strangers.

Please make that your next project, the world needs. U. J. What is the worst advice you have ever gotten?

The worst advice ever got was not to go to college. I group in a blue color town. My dad try to come with me not to go to college and work for his construction company, and very shortly thereafter went bankrupt. Thank god, didn't take his advice.

What's a hot take? You have an unpopular opinion.

I have so many unpopular opinions. okay? There's huge conflict in society and on social media age.

Where is millennial? S and boomers and OK boomer? And now everybody seems to be out of genes.

E, I tend to think that a lot of that is false conflict, that the differences between generations are real, but they're really small. And that the moment we start to categorize people into groups, we create the us. them. Dynamics that we can create in the lab by siny people do a blue team or red team. Once we start to put a label and attach jery types to IT, we create, instigate p conflict where .

IT doesn't need to be. Oh, that maybe an unpopular opinion, but it's actually one that I hold strong. The right I IT attracts from me with the brand Roberts at all findings that when people called millennial generation me, that was actually more of an age and life experience effect than a coward difference.

I read gene twenty years book generations, which I thought was excEllent and super compelling to me. But like there is more individualism. But it's not just one generation. It's just increasing individualism over time. And it's core later with technology used to, which just affords us more and more individualism. But it's the cut offs I and the labels and how people perceive those labels to me is it's like jodie, science or our strategy or something like that.

What's the prediction you have for the future twenty, thirty, fifty years down the road?

This is like my darkest one. It's a long climate change. In our book, we identified three problems that are can be related to identity.

And you think of identity as ways to like, find solutions and fix IT. One was on threats to share national identities. You're going to have more and more of that.

Other one was on inequality. When there's massive inequality, people start to identify with their economic group and in organizations. When there is huge and equality in salary, people no longer identify with the organza. So inequality, ode, social cohesion in ways that are chAllenging for society.

And the middle last one as climate change is that if we don't build some identity that's bigger, and we don't care about ourselves as humans and that highest level identity, then there's gonna be no way to solve that because I think IT requires us to care about one another and people in different countries, we're going to suffer worse than we are. And so that's my biggest concern actually. Don't think I think we're capable of IT and we're getting Better at IT, but I don't know we're going to solve IT. And like I have kids and i'm terrified about what their future looks like with another ten, twenty years of climate change.

I really hope you're wrong on that one.

Me too. I hope I I desperately hope that someone's looking at, read, listen this twenty years and saying, god, he had that wrong.

What is the question you have for me?

I would say that you are the most influential person problem that I follow because I don't really follow lot of politicians. And one thing i've noticed with you, you'll shares something from science and then you seems like you're very good at like also drawing a prescriptive piece of advice from IT. I think that's like a special skills that you have in your books, in your social media. So i'd love to know from you like how you find stuff that you think is useful for people.

Well, thank you. First of all, I used to say, okay, I want, basically, I want to share what's either interesting or useful for people. And I found I had a really hard time aging that because what I find interesting is not always interesting to other people.

If I if I were to draw like a big circle of all the things I find interesting and then put a tiny dot in IT, that's a number of those things that are interesting to my audience, i've discovered. And also, it's really hard to gauge what's useful for other people because what helps me is not necessarily was gone to help everyone else or anyone else. So i've learned a lot actually through posting things that didn't resonate.

And I think the first thing that I especially tell people who are kind of venturing into more public communication is you should post a lot because you're going to run a lot of reporters controlled A, B, and you will start to see patterns. And as i've done that, one of the things i've learned is the heroics that serves me Better than do. I think this is interesting is do I want to share this with other people that I know i'm interest? I'm sure you will also get a lot of daily journal alerts for studies and newspapers.

And when I get those alerts, I used to say, oh, like if this study blew my mind, i'm not opposed that. And now I don't do that. I put IT in a, in a word, doc. There's a dock of every study i've ever found interesting. And when i'm looking for something to post, I go into IT.

And my first test now is, is there someone specific I want to share with? And then the second test is, are there more people that come to mind? And if it's more than a few people like, okay, now this is interesting or useful to others, that's my strategy.

What do you make of IT? I think it's like a great strategy for just collating everything interesting and then the things that might be interesting right now that are very like timely to go up to the news. You've removed yourself from that by only posting them when you go back later.

So do they survive? Like right now is interesting, and four months later, when to open this is it's still interesting. Those who things are probably more like ever Green or enduring. The other thing is you do a theory of mind exercise where you are to imagine and other audiences. And I think like that, that sounds really use I always think like that's the key to communication is whether you giving a talk or writing a paper or not, bad or anything, is like stepping outside yourself.

The only thing I push I would ask you about IT is like, how do you avoid? So one one thing, I noticed some people on social media, they end up getting what I would call audience capture, that they end up getting like more and more extreme audiences and post more and more extreme content and tell they're posting like paranoid conspiracy theory. And we've gone down this like weird rabbit hall. And I see this, i've seen this for several people. How do you avoid doing that?

What makes you think i've succeeded?

Well, I haven't seen you posted .

anything crazy yet. Good, good. right? Please tell me if you ever do. okay. It's the same problem we faces, writers, which is you don't want to completely ignore the reader, but you don't want to be a slave to the reader either.

And this is actually why I tried to think of, who do I want to share this with? I'll read a study, and almost always the first person I want to share a study with is a fellow academic. Yes, I actually do send IT to that person or two.

And if I noticed that I can't find somebody who is extra critical descended too. Okay, maybe there's a problem here. Or if I noticed that all the people am sending you to are people who are just enthusiastic consumers of all knowledge and they don't have strong filters, then that's a red flag for me too.

As so I pay a little bit of attention to. Would I send this to the person that I know a viera tes ideas, or that I know I actually think psychology is you kind of junk science. And if so, all right, I feel much Better about that.

good. okay? I like that. Like thinking about your critics in advance and making shirts above that threshold. So like a good like quality control.

probably sometimes and other times you just cannot anticipate why a study will make me yeah there's .

different tribes you know in different in each place with different vibes.

Perfect segway. To our final discussion topic, I went to the olympics for the first time in paris. I took two of our kids, and we went to an olympic baseball game.

IT was t. USA. Against serbia and my finals. And IT was crazy to watch how far behind we fell before we came back in one.

But even crazy was when I heard half the stadium bowing in american player, and I watched ed, that happened the moment he touched the ball, the entire arena. And IT just felt completely counter to the spirit of the olympics. I ve always thought the whole point of the olympics is we're not just going to elevate excEllence.

We're gone to celebrate excEllence no matter who is doing great things, no matter what country they're from. And of course, you're onna root for your own, but you don't root against your opponent. We want to build solidity in peace. And I thought of this research on the olympic paradox, and I I saw that you also posted on this. So we clearly we're having similar reactions here .

yeah what we hope from olympics, obviously, that there's like the olympic spirit, which is which is unifying across countries. But what often happens in practice, and this is the research finds, is that people's national identities get activated. And when that happens, there can be animosity towards competitors, towards output, with members.

Or in this case, if I remembering was this, joe and beed, yes, it's because he could have played for the french national team. His national identity would have allowed him to, and he chose not to. By the way, this is the people who are treated worse in society are traitors.

And we have terrible terms for these in organizations, right? Like devils advocate, you think that we would understand the value of descent, but we give IT like literally the worst name on earth. He was seen as being a trader to france, and it's mostly french fans.

And so that something that transcend IT, they were talking about their national identity and he could have helped them, is one of the best players on earth. So I think like that, the unintended effect of the olympics, but that makes complete sense, because that happens in every competition on earth. The fan rivalry get intense and sometimes border line on violence, but there's often incredible acts of transcendence, identity and olympic spirit, one of the most beautiful ones in this olympics.

That was this great pitch, I think, with some omai who had won every olympic gold forever, never, and then SHE got, I think, silver in in one competition. I forgive us, like the flu routine or something. yes.

And this woman, I think he was from brazil on draw, I am to remember her and yeah yeah ah and SHE was amazing. And then Simon and the other american who got bronze bow down to her on the podium. And i've never ever seen that before.

And this is like to mobiles like the goat, one of the best athletes of all time period and obviously at the olympics, but anywhere. And then for her to lose and do that is just a sign of incredible sportsmanship and a sense that there's that you're cheering on, on their athletes and there's something bigger here that you're all part of and is beautiful. And you see that at every olympics is always examples of athletes like picking up someone who's like onna fame before they cross the finish line.

And some of the athletes, instead of running by them, like Carries on to the line that the competition of olympics happens within a broader CoOperation. To have good competition, you will require CoOperation that we all placed by some rules that we're not going to harm on another that were all in this. Together, we all benefit from this CoOperative environment of the olympics.

What I found so powerful about seeing this up close at the olympics was this was not just the athletes. The fans were like this. Two were in the pool, and two different divers failed dives, which is extremely rare, the olympics level.

And the entire crowd was cheering for for them to bounce back. The whole crowd had not just the fans of their countries. Everyone wanted to see them succeed.

I think we've been missing that. We often ignore that. Guess what? It's not is interesting to people, even though I think it's more beautiful and profound and useful for humanity. This was something we tried to capture our book because there's a lot of people are focused in the last five, ten years in american discourse about tribal ism and the downsides of parties and identities and other types of identities and identity politics.

And in no question there's a long history of interrogate conflict and violence that is launched that um but there's tons of evidence over and over again study after study experts you example after example how identities and groups can bring us together. We have to have focus more and harness like these healthy parts of identity and understand there there for a lot of people and then like maybe make norms and make that other part that's more potentially dangerous or violent or exeo bic, like that's not part of who we are. When we talk about identities.

yes, we need patridge sm without nationalism.

yeah. Just because you identify the group doesn't mean discriminate against oc groups. If the norm is inclusive ity, the more you identify with the group, the more inclusive you become and the more you embrace other people in difference in other groups and CoOperate law. And so it's really about, like identity is not a bad thing.

as long as we have healthy norms. Yes, you are just so full of knowledge that I could ask your questions all day. And I think that you, your rare psychologist, who is as insightful and brilliant in doing research as you are and communicating IT, and I really admire that.

Thank you so much. Feeling is mutual atam.

This olympic discussion reminds me that we need more patriotism and less nationalism in the world. P riot. Sm is taking pride in your country.

Nationalism is being hostile toward other countries in grave solidarity does not require outcurve prejudice. You can love your people without hating others. Rethinking is hosted by me, adam grant.

The show is part of a ted audio collective, and this episode was produced in mixed by cosmic standard. Our producers are handy kingsway mow in asia symptoms. Our editor is aliAndra sales zar.

Our fact checker is paul derbin original music by hand sale sea and elsa Brown team includes a lizer smith, j sama, atoms rox and high lash band ban chang, Julia dickerson and with a pennant Rogers. For more uplifting news, check out of these new book. It's called good people, stories from the best of humanity.

This is my favorite news story. Every year in olympics is at olympic village. They almost always run at a condoms. What's going on in the village is you have all these like super hot, like ripped athletes hooking up with one another, like the day after their events over ripe, they can party and cut loose.