Liane Young
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Liane Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Politicians have the opportunity to be able to create different narratives, particularly about people's intentions.
A lot of times people do engage in this willful misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the minds of people on the other side. But then in a lot of cases, I think this happens sort of automatically and unconsciously. We give people that we know and like the benefit of the doubt. And often those are the folks who are on our team or in our party.
And we can interpret or understand those events very, very differently. So if you imagine that somebody in your party is being accused of some transgression, you might start to seek alternative explanations for why they did what they were accused of doing.
Whereas if you heard the same story of somebody committing a crime on the other side, then you might automatically take that story description at face value that they're guilty.
We ran a series of studies in which we tested American Democrats and Republicans and also Palestinians and Israelis in the Middle East, and we gave them examples of acts of aggression in both of those cases and asked our participants to attribute motives.
And what we found, which is maybe not so surprising, but was very consistent across those different groups of people, was that people were more likely to attribute acts of aggression performed by their own group to in-group love. People are just trying to defend their own values and their own people, whereas people would attribute those same acts of aggression performed by an out-group
to outgroup hatred. They're doing this to retaliate. They're doing this to attack us. And so it's very interesting that we see this asymmetry in how people are attributing motives underlying the very same actions, depending on whether those acts are being performed by people on our side or people on the other side.
I think we do that all the time. And we do that in the ways that we interpret the intentions and actions of our friends as opposed to people we don't know or people that we know but don't like. We give our friends the benefit of the doubt. We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We don't want to see ourselves as... Bad people. We don't want to see our friends as bad people.
And so, again, if you encounter a friend doing something morally ambiguous, you might make up an excuse for why they did that in order to... read their behaviors as fitting with your narrative of being friends.
And so it's very interesting that we see this asymmetry in how people are attributing motives underlying the very same actions in very different ways depending on whether those acts are being presented as performed by people on our side or people on the other side.
I think it's really useful for both relationships and also for ourselves to give others around us the benefit of the doubt. I think it makes for smoother social interactions and also for happier selves, right? What I've told my students is that if you have a bad interaction with someone, chances are they're not trying to offend you or insult you. Maybe they're having a bad day.
Maybe they didn't get enough sleep. And I tell them to... sort of think about our one-on-one interactions in the same context, that if we have a bad conversation, it's probably because, you know, I am feeling bad that I yelled at a kid that morning and it has nothing to do with, you know, their paper or their project.
And so, again, we come back to this idea of giving people the benefit of the doubt and, you know, taking intentions into consideration. I also think about times when I'm on the road and I get upset when other drivers cut me off.
And there's really nothing that I can do about it aside from give them the benefit of the doubt because I know that when I'm the one who's speeding or cutting other people off, Usually it's because, you know, my three-year-old in the backseat says she needs to go to the potty or because we're rushing to an event and we're late.
And so to be able to extend that to other people, both strangers and the people that we interact with on a regular basis, I think just makes for happier interactions all around.
It's really hard. It's really hard to take that step back and think about what are the situational stresses and influences that could be leading to other people's actions, whereas it's sometimes easier to see those external pressures on our own selves and lives and interactions.
And so if we're able to pause in the midst of a tricky interaction and think about what that other person is experiencing trying to do or not trying to do, again, that will lead to much smoother, much more positive interactions and ultimately relationships.
Thank you so much, Shankar.
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