Kit Yates

Why don't we both cool down?

Why don't we become neutral?

Yeah.

Instead of someone, it's not relying on someone spontaneously just giving up their hard-held beliefs, but it's when those clashes, those head-to-head clashes, you know, option A meets option B and tries to convert one way or the other, instead of trying to do that full conversion, it's about saying, let's meet in the middle somewhere and let's talk and let's reopen our views and then let's see where we go from there.

I think that's the message.

I think it would be something like consider neutrality as a bonus in order to try to make better and smoother decisions.

So thinking about adopting those neutral statuses.

Thanks so much for having me on, David.

Thanks for having me on.

So yeah, in mathematical biology, we're taking real biological systems that people are interested in, from the swarming of locusts to the development of embryos to the way that cats get their pigmentation patterns.

I work on all three of those areas.

And we try to build a mathematical model.

So that might be some computer code or...

an equation that we write down and we try to predict what's going to happen in those systems so that we can understand them better and do sort of in silica, what we call in silica experiments, so experiments in the computer or mathematical experiments where our collaborators who work with the real system actually just can't do that experiment because it's unfeasible or it's too big or it's too difficult to do.

So I think what we've discovered in this new study is that actually allowing people to be neutral.

So in the case of like a vote, allowing people to abstain from the vote actually can help a group to form a consensus decision more quickly.

And we've tried this out in a couple of different systems.

So one of them is in a locust experiment where we see locusts marching around in a ring-shaped arena.

and they go round and round together in one direction, and then they sort of suddenly spontaneously switch.

And for years, people thought, well, it was just left-moving or clockwise-moving locusts butting heads with anti-clockwise-moving locusts and just convincing them to come the other way with them.