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Welcome back to
our conversations

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about how different
disciplines relate

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to the study of ideology and
propaganda in everyday life.

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I'm here today with Richard
Tunney from Psychology

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to discuss how his discipline
explores these questions.

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Welcome, Richard.

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Thank you.

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You work on what motivates
people's behaviours towards

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other people.

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Could you talk us through
how psychologists go about

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explaining such behaviours?

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Well, psychologists explain
the way that we behave towards,

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and indeed the way that we
think about other people,

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in terms of attitudes and
lower-level motivations.

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So attitudes are a coherent
set of affective reactions

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towards external
psychological objects.

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Those might be other people
or they might be other groups.

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And indeed, they might
be other belief systems.

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Those attitudes in
a traditional sense

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tend to derive from
experience with

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those psychological objects.

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For example, people
may not like dentists

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because they've
experienced dentists

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and concluded that dentists
are likely to hurt them.

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Similarly, we receive knowledge
about other groups in terms

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of media and propaganda.

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So an unbalanced
media may very well

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demonise other groups,
which potentially

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could be internalised within an
individual from an early age,

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or indeed may form
part of the social norm

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that any one individual has to
to the outside world at least

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appear to conform.

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Those attitudes,
though, tend to be

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quite poorly predictive of
how we behave to other groups.

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So although somebody
might have an attitude

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towards another
group, the probability

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that they are going to behave or
act towards that group in a way

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that one might think they
should given the attitude

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is actually quite unlikely.

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So there are many more people
with unsavoury beliefs,

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and indeed positive
beliefs, within a society,

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but the number of
people who actually

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act on those beliefs
or those attitudes

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is relatively quite small.

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My own interest is in the more
dispositional or biological

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motives towards our behaviour
towards other people.

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So for example, I
have an interest

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in how we distribute
resources among other people

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to whom we're more
or less related.

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So in a sense, altruism
is a motive for behaviour

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that's actually quite
poorly understood.

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And it's poorly understood
because it presents

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as a paradox in neo-Darwinism.

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To be successful,
we should really all

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be selfish towards other people
and generally unpleasant.

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And the truth of the matter
is that actually we're not.

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We really tend to be quite
nice to other people.

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Now, the interesting
questions arise

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when we ask, well, who
is it that we're nice to

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and who is it that
we're not nice to?

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So if you've got a hypothesis
for explaining altruism, say,

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how would you go about testing
whether that's actually

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helpful or correct?

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Well, my own research has
involved asking people

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to impose pain upon themselves
or to distribute resources

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or, indeed, make
decisions among people

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who are more or less
distantly related to them.

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So that might be
related in terms

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of the proportion
of genes that one

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might share with another
person, or indeed

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their psychological distance.

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And we can measure that
in any number of ways.

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So for example in
terms of altruism,

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I conducted a study
a few years ago

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in which participants
were asked to impose

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a cost upon themselves
which results

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in a certain amount
of pain, and that pain

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was transformed into a financial
reward for another person.

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And essentially
what we demonstrated

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was that people are more
willing to impose a greater

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degree of pain upon
themselves when

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the recipient of
the financial reward

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was more closely related to
them than to another person.

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And indeed, what we
find who was that people

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are unwilling to impose
much pain upon themselves

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for somebody who they
are completely unrelated.

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The caveat, that, is that
if that unrelated person is

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a friend, in those
circumstances friends

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are treated much
like a full sibling

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with whom we have a 50%
genetic relationship.

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Now, that becomes
interesting when

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we start to think
about why it might

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be that we treat
our close relatives

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in a manner differently
from distant relatives

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or, indeed, strangers.

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And it seems to be
that the answer is

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that we become much more
irrational when we make

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decisions for ourselves or for
people with whom we're closely

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related, compared to strangers--
for whom our decisions become

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more rational, but
indeed, they're

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cold, hard appraisals of
the utility of the decision.

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And we think that that's
because we're essentially more

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likely to feel another person's
pain or emotional response

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to an outcome the
more close we are

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to them in terms of
psychological distance

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or relationship.

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That's very interesting.

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Thank you very much.

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We are going to discuss with
learners this week precisely

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this correlation
that Richard has just

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outlined for us-- the way in
which we define our "in group,"

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if you like-- who we
think of as our friends

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and who we think of
as outsiders-- affects

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our political decision-making.

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