Dr. Coltan Scrivner

You got the Stanford prison experiment where they tried to see how far the guards would go to enforce rules.

You got, you know, the Boba the Clown aggression experiments where you see how do you make kids aggressive.

because psychologists were really trying to answer basically how did World War II, how did the Holocaust in particular happen?

And they didn't really come up with a satisfactory answer for that.

And I think they hit on some of these answers, but I think the answer is that under the right circumstances, humans can narrow their empathy such that they only care about those who are immediately close to them, right?

This certainly happened, again, with the Germans who were involved with the Nazi party.

It's not like they didn't care about their family.

They certainly cared about their family.

And something we struggle with understanding is how could someone, how could Hitler have a dog that he loved and still do what he did, right?

How can he be capable of both of those things at the same time?

And I think that the answer to that is there are certainly personality predispositions that predispose someone to be more violent or more psychopathic or have more psychopathic tendencies.

But under the right circumstances, many people can narrow their empathic circle such that they focus their care only on those around them.

And other people become not only neutral, but maybe even targets, right?

And I think that's part of what's going on.

And I think it's really important to understand how that works, because that obviously matters for these large scale events like wars in particular, where we can often demonize other individuals with ease.

very quickly, especially airborne viruses.

I think there's sort of an analogy there with social media and empathic narrowing or psychopathic tendencies coming out.

You can more quickly and effectively, and especially now with AI creating, generating certain kinds of images or mass producing propaganda, there's a lot of really scary things that could happen.

And I think it's important that we understand how people's

minds can go through these sort of cognitive switches where they switch into a mode that is more focused on just a few individuals and it may be goal-directed and that ignores what's happening to other people who are outside of their circle.