Dr. David Eagleman

But then the other monkey doing it gets a grape, which is a big treat for the monkey.

And the first monkey goes nuts and is shaking the bar.

He's so angry that the other monkey got a better reward.

There's this sense of fairness that's actually quite deep in our evolution about what's unfair and so on.

But I want to come back to this issue about rewarding people versus punishing.

To my mind, the reason I care so much about this issue of harm happening to people and when we don't care is because of when we look at what happens around the world.

I'm not even talking right now.

Let's just take the 20th century.

We constantly see people murdering their neighbors for all kinds of reasons, for religious reasons, for atheist, communist, you know, secular reasons.

For all kinds of reasons, people are perfectly willing to take their friends and neighbors.

Look at the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda.

They had lived together.

They were friends.

There was intermarriage.

And then the Hutu, you know, raised up their machetes and slaughtered Tutsi at a rate faster than the Germans were able to do with gas chambers and Jews.

How these things happen, it's so important for us to understand what are the elements that lead to in-group and out-group stuff.

One of the things I've been very interested in is propaganda.

And it turns out across place and time, all governments do propaganda in exactly the same way, which is you simply –

dehumanize the other group by calling them an animal or any like a virus, you know, a pestilence.

Rats nowadays, you can even call them robots, whatever.