Eric Oliver

And I try to get at the sense of how much people rely on their intuitions with a series of survey questions.

For example, I would ask somebody, would you rather stab a photograph of your family five times with a sharp knife

or stick your hand in a bowl of cockroaches and

You know, you would think, oh, well, the rational brain would be like, why would I want to stick my hand in a bowl of cockroaches?

But about 50% of people say, no, I'd rather do that than stab a photograph of my family with a knife, even though that's just a symbolic cost.

But because it resonates so much with their intuitions, it seems real to them.

And I think that's what a lot of our politics today are.

We have various kinds of political messages out there that really bypass or circumvent our rational minds.

and really trigger our intuitions to get us to think about things in ways that are oftentimes very contrary to the rationalistic demands of living in a democracy.

Well, I pride myself, I'm a university professor, so I pride myself on being a very rationalistic person.

But even still, I will see some injustice online and immediately get enraged.

And rather than seeing the complexity of the circumstances, I will immediately say, those people are bad.

Those are the ones who should be targeted.

That's my first, those people are evil.

They're horrible.

How could they be doing that?

And that's that intuitive sense, like wanting to scapegoat somebody, wanting to come to a very quick and easy conclusion.

And a lot of this goes back to what our animal brains are trying to do.

Remember, our animal brains are prediction machines.

They're taking in lots and lots of information from the world, and they're trying to map reality and make predictions about what they think is going to happen next.