How to stop doom scrolling — and have a better experience online with Jay Van Bavel (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Jay Van Bavel: 

When I use social media, it's like your diet. It's like, trust me, like I'd rather have like a chocolate cake right now, but like, I'm actually gonna go have like a salad for lunch because I'm 46 and like if I have a chocolate cake for lunch every day, it's like not gonna work for me. 

[00:00:16] Adam Grant: 

Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant.

Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Jay Van Bavel. He's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at NYU and an award-winning teacher, researcher, and writer. His book, The Power of Us with Dominic Packer is a great read on how to overcome our differences. Jay is also a leading expert on why what goes viral often makes us miserable and how to change that.

[00:00:56] Jay Van Bavel: 

It's like taking out the tiny tumor in your brain so you don't have seizures anymore, like that's how we do surgery. I think like this is a level of which it might help if people knew that and they could like figure out what those accounts were and unfollow them, they might actually enjoy their online experience a lot more.

[00:01:15] Adam Grant: 

Alright, Jay, I have to tell you, part of the reason that you're here, among many is I find the news incredibly depressing and I'm hoping you're gonna cure that. 

[00:01:28] Jay Van Bavel: 

Okay? I don't know if I could promise that, but I'll try. 

[00:01:31] Adam Grant: 

I've sworn off watching TV news altogether, and increasingly I don't even want to read online news, and I just came across, ironically enough, a headline, which I guess means I haven't totally shut off the news.

But the basic finding was, 23 million news headlines from 2000 to 2019 showing that anger, fear, disgust, and sadness have all gone up, and emotional neutrality has declined. What's going on?

[00:01:59] Jay Van Bavel: 

Most news now is interwoven with social media, and so we're all in this universe where we're engagement metrics.

It's called the attention economy. And winning the attention economy means more people clicked on a news article, went to the website, and that increases ad revenue. Human psychology is really old, it's millions of years old and our brains are basically wired for survival and that means like social connection and belonging.

But that also means things like avoiding threats and being hypervigilant about things that could've killed us. And we are the, we're the offspring and we are the ancestors of generation after generation, after generation of people who like, avoided getting wiped out by like a dangerous, poisonous snake or eaten by a bear or something like that.

And so we're like hyper attuned and that type of information is hyper engaging to us. And so what happens is when the news posts some story about some tragedy or corruption or scandal or anything negative, disgusting, outrageous, we're more likely to want to click on it and therefore the news company that's producing it, or the influencer who shared it, gets engagement and they're more likely to create and share more and more information that takes that form or uses those headlines.

And so we're now in this kind of like doom cycle where we're getting more and more of that fed back at us and we're engaging with it more and more so, and that's why people like you are eventually just like hit a burnout point and disengaged like, “I don't want to see this. This is so depressing.” And that's where we're at.

[00:03:26] Adam Grant: 

It reminds me of something that, that Liv Boeree said not too long ago. She said that, “The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine begins to feed on rage.” 

[00:03:34] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. They're, they're profiting off us. It reminds me of like The Matrix where we're all like, getting exploited for our energy here.

We, our tension's getting exploited. 

[00:03:42] Adam Grant: 

This is not new, right. You're, you're pointing out that this is a fundamental future of human psychology. I, psychologists have been writing about this, this phenomenon for decades. I think about Paul Rozin on negativity bias, Baumeister and Colleagues on bad is stronger than good.

And I feel like those ideas have long, had a lot of evolutionary hand waving in them. Right? And, and I think I'm guilty of that often, like fail to notice a lion and you might not survive to pass on your genes. Overlook an adorable koala. Guess what? You live to fight another day. But I think you've made a pretty compelling case that this is actually hardwired in us and if that's true, it ought to start early. 

So do we see this with young children? Do we see it with infants? Walk me through the case that this is actually part of our, our evolutionary wiring. 

[00:04:27] Jay Van Bavel: 

I am not a developmental psychologist, although I've collaborated and done some developmental work. Um, my understanding is that you see this in kids.

You also see this in our primate ancestors. So for example, if you show, I think this was done with macaque monkeys, if you show them, like, if they see like a snake, all they need to see is one other monkey freaking out to the snake, and they learn to fear it instantly. Um, whereas there's other things that are like harder for them to fear condition to and so basically what that means is we have a preparedness to learn that some things are more dangerous than others, and so that seems to be something that is pretty conserved across species. 

We can have like news headlines and stories and videos and stuff that like exploit one another's tendency to do this.

I think that's what makes us special is that we can figure out ways to push one another's buttons to persuade and cajole and manipulate one another. 

[00:05:21] Adam Grant: 

Well, that brings me to one of my puzzles, which is why do we keep falling for it? Like surely we're smarter than this, aren't we?

[00:05:28] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. So I'll tell you a study that we finished.

This was led by my, uh, PhD student, Claire Robertson, and we got access to this huge data set of experiments that the website Upworthy ran. And these are like your classic AB experiments where they like, try a headline one way, try it another way, see which one people click on, and then like, use that one.

So they were like masters of using science and data and analysis to like optimize headlines. But when we analyzed those 22,000 experiments, we found, if anything, the exact same news story when it had a negative headline was generating more engagement. It was getting more clicks, and if it had a positive headline, it was getting less clicks.

[00:06:05] Adam Grant: 

There are a couple of interesting nuances in your data. First of all, those data came from a particular period in time when, to your point, the internet was operating based on a set of algorithms, um, that kind of fed that, but at some level, it seems to me that the dynamic hasn't changed even though the algorithms have.

[00:06:26] Jay Van Bavel: 

So we have another paper where we analyzed about 3 million news stories and, and posts by political leaders on Facebook and uh, Twitter before it was X. And what we found there was a couple interesting things. One was that when people spread negative news about the political outgroup, when they shared that content, it was more likely to get spread. 

It got shared about 67% more, and that's one of the single most effective strategies we found for making things go viral, is just spreading bad news about the other guys. And so why is that? One thing we found when we looked at Facebook, when you look at like what emojis people click on, you know, you can have like the, the happy face, the laughing face, the crying face, the angry face, was most common when people shared those stories. 

And then we, we looked into it and we found that Facebook's algorithm was specifically weighting the angry emoji really strong. And so if I share something on Facebook and you're my Facebook friend and you click the angry emoji, then it gets seen by way more people in both of our news newsfeeds.

So that's probably where they're coming from, is just a data-driven, probably not some top-down, you know, evil strategy about how to make people mad all the time. If anything, internal documents from Facebook show mostly they were trying to do the opposite. They're trying to like create community and stuff like that, but they were just like, their algorithm is, is amplifying based on engagement and that's the thing that was driving engagement.

[00:07:48] Adam Grant: 

What's troubling about this is that we're only measuring short term engagement and in the long term, what a lot of people did is what I did, which is to say, “I don't want to get my news through social media because it just makes me mad or sad.”

[00:08:02] Jay Van Bavel: 

I used to be actually like a techno optimist. I used to think a handful of people in Silicon Valley if they wanted to like snap their fingers and change something and make the world a better place, like at a level of scale that we never have had in human history.

And I often thought that they would get this data and hear these stories and want to do more of that. And I actually am, uh, pessimistic now. I don't think they do because they found what buttons depress about the dark side of human nature. And then we just get more of it, but again, these are like short term things.

They're making more profit in the short term, but if they erode democracy to the level of massive intergroup conflict, then maybe they're gonna like damage all the institutions and societies and communities that they actually care about. 

[00:08:45] Adam Grant: 

Well, I think from my conversations with, with a lot of those folks, I think I've landed somewhere in the middle.

They're trying not to destroy their business. They're also trying not to destroy democracy. And so what they've been testing a whole bunch is like, okay, can we, for example, figure out some middle ground solutions? And one of those is deprioritizing political news. I've seen some evidence that political news is much more negative than other topics.

I think one example on the other, probably end of that spectrum is actually science news, which skews very positive. People are fired up, they're inspired, they're excited When there's a new discovery, 

[00:09:20] Jay Van Bavel: 

Most of the uncivil content that is spreading and including the stuff, not just that's negative, but has a lot of misinformation, is heavily in the political domain.

So there was a big paper in Science Magazine where they analyzed misinformation and it spreads further and faster than true information. 

[00:09:36] Adam Grant: 

Oh, this is the Sinan Aral paper, right? 

[00:09:38] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. Yeah. And if you look carefully at their data. They found a, a couple of moderators. So a couple factors that seem to be driving this one is stories that are loaded with emotion.

So a lot of stories that have a lot of emotion tend to be in the political domain. Part of it is our political leaders, as I was saying, like they, the, this is data from Rob Wheeler's lab, that they've become less and less civil and more and more hostile over time in the last like decade or more. And so these people have massive, massive following. 

Some, you know, when Trump was on Twitter, he had like 90 million followers. And, and most other political leaders have millions of followers, and they set norms. They established like the tone of the conversation around certain issues. Okay, now I'm gonna tell you an optimistic thing. So this is a paper, this is unpublished.

We're about to submit it in a couple weeks. It's led by postdoc of mine, Steve Rathje, and we decided to take a scalpel to this problem. One thing that we've noticed is that a lot of this negativity online is driven by a small number of, of accounts, and so we're talking about the spread of anti-vaxxer misinformation.

Like on Facebook there was the disinformation dozen, which was like a dozen accounts that created 50% of the misinformation for the whole platform. Um, and then it gets amplified by influencers and so forth, but it's really a small number of people. So what we did was we identified the most polarizing accounts on Twitter or X, and we paid people to unfollow them for a few months.

And then another condition, we paid people to follow some science accounts like NASA, where it's like you can see those amazing images like the James Webb Telescope. This is the most powerful intervention we've ever run in my lab. Um, first of all, it reduces a sense of partisan animosity because you're not seeing this nonstop stream of like the most negative people and the negative people, I, I forget what the data is, but it's something like 10% of people share 97% of the message of social media posts about politics. 

So when you're talking about politics is really negative, it's really only 10% of the people who are driving it and then those 10% of the people on average are the people at the extremes.

So if you unfollow a couple of those people and replace it instead with following some science accounts, people feel happier. Here's the other cool thing, the effects lasted for six months and I've never seen that before. And here's why, once they unfollow just a, a handful of these accounts, once the study's over and we say, you're allowed to follow them again, they don't.

They realize, I think that they're like.

[00:11:54] Adam Grant: 

They learned the lesson.  

[00:11:55] Jay Van Bavel: 

“I actually am enjoying it more without those handful of accounts, and I'm liking these science accounts, so I'm just gonna keep it as is.” 

[00:12:01] Adam Grant: 

Every once in a while I'll share a study that upsets people, and then I, I notice a bunch of people unfollow me, like, listen, “Like you just shot the messenger here. Like the fact that I raised a hard question or you disagreed with the finding of the rigorous research that I thought was worth knowing, even though I didn't like the result of it either.” 

Like I don't think that is a good reason to unfollow someone. You should unfollow if their posts are disrespectful, if they're consistently spreading lies or bullshit, or if their content just ruins your day and it makes me wonder, should content creators have positivity ratios in mind? 

Should journalists have positivity quotas? How do you think about that dynamic?

[00:12:41] Jay Van Bavel: 

Okay, I, that's a great one. 'Cause I experience the same thing as you, but probably on a much lesser scale and sometimes I just delete it because I just, here's the difference.

I think you are a little bit like me, but I mean probably even more sensitive. Like if I share something controversial, I'll like scale back the controversy for a week just for my own psychological well being. 

[00:13:02] Adam Grant: 

Sometimes, I don't know, it's controversial when I post it, I kind of start from the default assumption that the whole audience who's chosen to follow me knows that intellectual integrity is one of my core principles, and I'm not gonna bother to share something unless it's cleared my high bar of, “I think this is credible information from credible experts.” 

And like every once in a while I, I, I sort of have this jolt of someone accuses me of just posting research to get clicks, and I'm like that, “That goes against my core values as a, a science communicator, which is, I'm not just gonna share what makes you feel good. I wanna share what makes you think hard.” 

I think it matters to know this information. Um, it's not fun, but it's meaningful or it's a helpful perspective, and I think that requires a long view from the audience, but it also requires me as a content creator and a communicator to be clearer about the principles behind what I share.

[00:13:56] Jay Van Bavel: 

When I use social media, it's like your diet. I think some people just want like the junk food diet version of it and others of us like actually make an effort to use it as a way to make ourselves smarter or more uh, informed about the world. Sometimes I'll share a study and I'll have other scientists like critique it or debunk it, and that actually informs the way I think about that research and I might not cite that in the future 'cause I didn't know of a critique of it that they brought up or they might connect me to another paper that I hadn't read that kind of goes deeper. 

And so there's also a conversational thing where I feel like if I'm having those conversations, even if I'm wrong in what I share, or I'm interpret it the wrong way, I feel like I'm getting smarter about it. And so it's kind of like, that's like a healthy diet.

[00:14:36] Adam Grant: 

We need a badge for social media, for science communicators. That's the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, only applied to research methods as opposed to justice. I share content if I think the methods were high quality regardless of the conclusions. 

[00:14:52] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah, yeah. As a scientist, all you care about is like the study was rigorous and then we'll update our thinking and then we'll like get better and, and, and guess what?

If we do solve some kind of bias in society. That's great. 

[00:15:04] Adam Grant: 

Let's talk about how to uncondition. Um, it, that's not a thing. Um, it, I guess you can, you can do extinction of conditioning, right? 

[00:15:12] Jay Van Bavel: 

Extinguish, right? Yeah, yeah. Extinguish. 

[00:15:14] Adam Grant: 

So you mentioned Upworthy earlier. One of the things I've really loved about their work is they have made a concerted effort to try to shift the balance and say, “We wanna be an organization that elevates people.”

And I think they've done some very clever things around activating positive emotions like joy, inspiration, curiosity, hope, gratitude, pride. I thought it'd be interesting to get you to analyze a few of their success cases. I've enlisted an expert in my house to help with this. My daughter, Joanna, is actually interning with Upworthy right now, and she's picked some examples for us.

Uh, Joanna, can you hear us? 

[00:15:54] Joanna: 

Yep.

[00:15:54] Adam Grant: 

Um, do you wanna come over? So we're recording you on my mic too. 

[00:15:57] Jay Van Bavel: 

Hi Joanna. Nice to meet you. I'm Jay. 

[00:15:58] Joanna: 

Hi. Nice to meet you too. One person said, “I need the people to know that Olympic silver medalist Giorgia Villa is sponsored by Parmesan cheese and regularly post pictures of herself with giant wheels of cheese.”

[00:16:12] Adam Grant: 

I love the wheels of cheese in that photo. You wanna hold it up so Jay can see it? 

[00:16:15] Jay Van Bavel: 

Well, I saw her go viral. Yeah. Um, and I loved those pictures. They did giant parmesans. Okay, so here's some variables that predict why that works. First of all, there, one of the things that that generates attention in the attention economy of the online universe is surprise, and it's very surprising.

I didn't even realize they were sponsored by cheese companies. 

[00:16:35] Adam Grant: 

The other thing that caught my eye was the caption. Upworthy wrote, “That's Big Parma for you.” 

[00:16:43] Jay Van Bavel: 

Uh oh. Okay. 

[00:16:44] Adam Grant: 

That was hysterical. 

[00:16:45] Jay Van Bavel: 

Everything's better when you have comedy. 

[00:16:47] Adam Grant: 

Okay, Joanna, you wanna do another?

[00:16:49] Joanna: 

This guy's parents put on a cousin camp every summer for the grandkids and for the past eight years they've invited all the grandkids, ages five plus to spend four days on the farm away from parents with their cousins.

So they go all out and they make it feel like a real summer camp. Where they turn the bedrooms into cabins and they say the Pledge of Allegiance. There's arts and crafts, kitchen duty talent shows, music time, swimming, campfires, field trips, even sports, anything. 

[00:17:16] Jay Van Bavel: 

So you have a couple themes that are important to people is family.

It's like a beautiful family thing and the grandparents staying involved with the kids' lives. I also thought that was actually a story that probably might have resonated with people 'cause it was useful. Like a lot of grandparents or parents might see that and get an idea to do something similar. So I also thought that that was one that connected that way and also shows love.

Love is like one of those really strong, positive emotions and we found in terms of moral emotions tend to go viral and most of 'em are negative, like outrage and disgust, but one that does go viral is love. And so it's kind of like a show of love and, and dedication for the grandparents to spend all year prepping this and doing this for their grandkids.

We ran a study like with uh, 500 Americans and we asked them what types of things do go viral? And they all say like, “Misinformation, outrage, negativity.” And we say, “What types of things do you want to go viral?” And overwhelmingly they say they want stories like this. They want stories that are heartwarming, that show prosociality, that show something positive and uplifting.

And so there is this strong stated desire by people that they want way more of this in their lives and they want social media to feed them this, and they just feel like they're not getting it. So, I think people are also feeling a little starved for stories like this. 

[00:18:26] Adam Grant: 

I think there needs to be a good news podcast where you just analyze uplifting stories over and over again.

[00:18:32] Jay Van Bavel: 

Maybe the closest thing is like The Happiness Lab by Laurie Santos at Yale. It was just a happiness class and you, and like what you can concretely do to be happier. And it's the, I think the most popular class in the history of the university. So there's definitely like a deep, deep desire, especially among young people who are super anxious and depressed right now.

They want stuff like that.

[00:18:55] Adam Grant: 

Um, you ready for lightning? 

[00:18:57] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yep. 

[00:18:58] Adam Grant: 

Okay. First question is, what is something you've rethought lately? 

[00:19:02] Jay Van Bavel: 

Well, obviously I've been rethinking how to make social media better. I used to think you have to change the algorithms and all that, and now I'm thinking that a small number of people are driving most of the problems and we need to figure out how to navigate that issue.

[00:19:15] Adam Grant: 

I think that's very true. It reminds me of the, the Michael Petersen work on how trolls used aggression to get attention. 

[00:19:22] Jay Van Bavel: 

If you have one jerk standing on the corner yelling at everybody, it's hard for 'em to cause a lot of harm. But online they can be harassing hundreds or thousands of people all day or spreading misinformation to huge audiences.

And then the other thing about Michael Bang Petersen's work that I thought was really interesting is it's high status seeking people who are doing this. And so what has happened is, we've given status to people who do this. We need to change what we give status to online, and we need to stop giving status to those folks and find a way to give status to the people who are shipping their puff and sweater to strangers.

[00:19:54] Adam Grant: 

Please make that your next project. 

[00:19:57] Jay Van Bavel: 

Okay. 

[00:19:57] Adam Grant: 

The world needs you. Jay, what is the worst advice you've ever gotten?

[00:20:04] Jay Van Bavel: 

The worst advice I ever got was not to go to college. Um, I grew up in a blue collar town. My dad tried to convince me not to go to college and work for his, uh, construction company, and very shortly thereafter it went bankrupt. So thank God he didn't take his advice. 

[00:20:19] Adam Grant: 

What's a hot take? You have an unpopular opinion.

[00:20:19] Jay Van Bavel: 

I have so many unpopular opinions. Okay. There's huge conflict in society and on social media around age. There's millennials and boomers and, “Okay boomer.” And now it's, everybody seems to be mad at Gen Z. I tend to think that a lot of that is false conflict, that there are the differences between generations are real, but they're really small and that the moment we start to categorize people into groups, we create the us them dynamics that we can create in the lab by signing people to a blue team or a red team.

Once we start to put a label and attach stereotypes to it, we create intergroup conflict where it doesn't need to be. 

[00:20:58] Adam Grant: 

Oh, that may be an unpopular opinion, but it's actually one that I hold strongly. 

[00:21:02] Jay Van Bavel: 

Oh, do you? Okay. 

[00:21:02] Adam Grant: 

I think you're, you're exactly right there. 

[00:21:04] Jay Van Bavel: 

Okay, good. 

[00:21:05] Adam Grant: 

Exactly right. I mean, it, it, it tracks for me with the Brent Roberts et al findings that when people called millennials generation Me, that that was actually more of an age and life experience effect than a, a cohort difference.

[00:21:18] Jay Van Bavel: 

I read Jean Twenge book Generations, which I thought was excellent and super compelling to me, but like there is more individualism, but it's not just one generation, it's just increasing individualism over time. And it's correlated with technology use, which just affords us more and more individualism.

But it's the cutoffs, I, I and the labels and how people perceive those labels to me is, it's like zodiac signs or astrology or something like that. 

[00:21:42] Adam Grant: 

What's a prediction you have for the future 20, 30, 50 years down the road? 

[00:21:46] Jay Van Bavel: 

This is like my darkest one. It's around climate change. In our book, we identified three problems that are gonna be related to identity and I, you think of identity as ways to like find solutions and fix it.

One was on threats of shared national identities. You're gonna have more and more of that. Other one was on inequality. When there's massive inequality, people start to identify with their economic group. And in organizations when there's huge inequality in salary, people no longer identify with the organization.

So inequality erodes social cohesion in ways that are challenging for society. And then the last one is climate change. It's that if we don't build some identity that's bigger and we don't care about ourselves as humans and that highest level identity, then there's gonna be no way to solve it. Because I think it requires us to care about one another and people in different countries who are gonna suffer worse than we are.

And so that's my biggest concern. I actually don't think, I think we're capable of it and we're getting better at it, but I don't know if we're gonna solve it. And it's like I have kids and I'm terrified about what their future looks like with another 10, 20 years of climate change. 

[00:22:49] Adam Grant: 

I really hope you're wrong on that one.

[00:22:51] Jay Van Bavel: 

Me too. I hope I'm, I desperately hope that someone's looking at listening to this in 20 years and saying, God, he had that wrong. 

[00:22:59] Adam Grant: 

What is a question you have for me? 

[00:23:01] Jay Van Bavel: 

I would say that you are the most influential person probably that I follow, because I don't really follow a lot of politicians. And one thing I've noticed with you, you'll share something from science and then you, it seems like you're very good at like also drawing a prescriptive piece of advice from it.

I think that's like a special skill that you have in your books and, and your social media. So I'd love to know from you like, how you find stuff that you think is useful for people? 

[00:23:28] Adam Grant: 

Well, thank you. First of all, I used to say, “Okay, I want, basically, I want to share what's either interesting or useful for people.”

And I found I had a really hard time gauging that because what I find interesting is not always interesting to other people. If I, if I were to draw like a big circle of all the things I find interesting and then put a tiny dot in it, like that's, that's a number of those things that are interesting to my audience I've discovered.

[00:23:57] Joanna: 

Yeah. 

[00:23:57] Adam Grant: 

And also like, it's really hard to gauge what's useful for other people because what helps me is not necessarily what's gonna help everyone else or anyone else. So I've, I've learned a lot actually through posting things that didn't resonate. And I think that the first thing that I especially tell people who are kind of venturing into more public communication is you should post a lot because you're gonna run a lot of sort of poorly controlled AP AB tests and you will start to see patterns.

And as I've done that, one of the things I've learned is the heuristic that serves me better than, “Do I think this is interesting? Do I wanna share this with other people that I know?”

[00:24:38] Jay Van Bavel: 

Oh, interesting. 

[00:24:39] Adam Grant: 

Yeah. I'm sure you also get a lot of daily journal alerts. 

[00:24:43] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. 

[00:24:42] Adam Grant: 

For Stu, for studies and new papers. And when I get those alerts, I used to say, “Oh, like if this study blew my mind, I'm gonna post that.”

And now I don't do that. I put it in a, in a Word doc. There's a doc of every study I've ever found interesting. And when I'm looking for something to post, I go into it And my first test now is, is there someone specific I wanna share it with? And then the second test is, are there more people that come to mind?

And if it's more than a few people, I'm like, okay, now this is interesting or useful to others. That's my strategy. What do you make of it? 

[00:25:16] Jay Van Bavel: 

I think it's like a great strategy for just collating everything interesting. And then the things that might be interesting right now that are very like timely 'cause they're yoked to the news.

You've removed yourself from that by only posting them when you go back later. So do they survive? Like, uh, right now it's interesting and four months later when I open this, is it still interesting? Those are things that are probably more like evergreen or enduring. The other thing is you do a theory of mind exercise where you start to imagine other audiences, and I think like that, that sounds really useful.

I always think like that's the key to communication is whether you're giving a talk or writing a paper or an op-ed or anything is like stepping outside yourself. The only thing I push, I, I would ask you about is like, how do you avoid? So one, one thing I notice when people on social media, they end up getting what I would call audience capture, that they end up getting like more and more extreme audiences and post more and more extreme content until they're posting like paranoid conspiracy theories and they've gone down this like weird rabbit hole.

And I see this for, for, I've seen this for several people. How do you avoid doing that? 

[00:26:16] Adam Grant: 

What makes you think I've succeeded? 

[00:26:19] Jay Van Bavel: 

Well, I haven't seen you post anything crazy yet. 

[00:26:22] Adam Grant: 

Good, good. Alright. Please tell me if you ever do okay. It's the same problem we face as writers, which is you don't want to completely ignore the reader, but you don't want to be a, a slave to the reader either.

[00:26:32] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:26:33] Adam Grant: 

This is actually why I try to think of who do I wanna share this with? I'll read a study and almost always, like the first person I wanna share a study with is a fellow academic. I actually do send it to that person or two, and if I notice that, I can't find somebody who's extra critical to send it to.

I'm like, okay, maybe there's a problem here or if I notice that all the people I'm sending it to are people who are just enthusiastic consumers of all knowledge and they don't have strong filters. Then that's a red flag for me too and so I pay a little bit of attention to like, would I send this to the person that I know eviscerates ideas or that I know actually thinks psychology is, you know, kind of junk science?

And if so, alright. I feel much better about that.  

[00:27:19] Jay Van Bavel: 

Oh, good. Okay. I, I like that, like thinking about your critics in advance and making sure it's above that threshold. It's like a good, like quality control probably.

[00:27:27] Adam Grant: 

Sometimes and other times you just cannot anticipate why a study will make people angry.

[00:27:33] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah, there's different tribes, you know, and di in each place with different vibes. 

[00:27:37] Adam Grant: 

Perfect segway to our final discussion topic. I went to the Olympics for the first time in Paris. I took two of our kids and we went to an Olympic basketball game. It was team USA against Serbia, semifinals, and it was crazy to watch how far behind we fell before we came back and won.

But even crazier was when I heard half the stadium booing an American player and I watched that happen the moment he touched the ball, the entire arena, “Boo.” And it just felt completely counter to the spirit of the Olympics. I've always thought the whole point of the Olympics is we're not just gonna elevate excellence, we're gonna celebrate excellence no matter who is doing great things, no matter what country they're from.

And of course, you're gonna root for your own, but you don't root against your opponent. We wanna build solidarity and peace. And I thought of this research on the Olympic paradox, and I I saw that you also posted on this, so we clearly were having similar reactions here. 

[00:28:42] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. What we hope from the Olympics obviously is that there's like this Olympic spirit, which is transcendent, which is unifying across countries, but what often happens in practice, and this is the, the, the research finds is that people's national identities get activated and when that happens, they're can be animosity towards competitors, towards outgroup members, or in this case, if I'm remembering, was this Joel Embiid, who. 

[00:29:04] Adam Grant: 

Yes, it was, yeah. 

[00:29:05] Jay Van Bavel: 

It's because he could have played for the French national team. His national identity would've allowed him to, and he chose not to. By the way, this is the people who are treated worse in society are traitors, and we have terrible terms for these in organizations.

Right? Like devil's advocate, you'd think that we would understand the value of dissent, but we give it like literally the worst name on earth. He was seen as being a traitor to France and it's mostly French fans, and so that's something that transcended it. They were thinking about their national identity and he could have helped them.

He's one of the best players on Earth, so I, I think like that's the unintended effect of the Olympics, but it makes complete sense because that happens in every competition on Earth. The fan rivalries get intense and sometimes borderline on violence, but there's often incredible acts of, uh, transcendence identity in Olympic spirit.

One of the most beautiful ones in this Olympics, it was this great pitcher, I think it was Simone Biles, who had won every Olympic gold forever and ever. And then she got, I think, silver in, in one competition. I forget if it was like the floor routine or something. 

Yep. And this woman, I think she was from Brazil, Andrade. I'm trying to remember her name.

[00:30:13] Adam Grant: 

Yeah, Rebeca. 

[00:30:13] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. And she was amazing. And then Simone and the other American who got bronze bowed down to her on the podium, and I've never ever seen that before. And this is like Simone Biles like the goat, one of the best athletes of all time period in obviously at the Olympics, but anywhere. And then for her to lose and do that is just a sign of incredible sportsmanship and a sense that there's, you're cheering on other athletes and there's something bigger here that you're all part of and it's beautiful and you see that at every Olympics. 

There's always examples of athletes like picking up someone who's like gonna faint before they cross, like the finish line and some other athlete and kind of running by them, like carries 'em to the line.

The, the competition of the Olympics happens within a broader cooperation to have good competition, you require cooperation that we all placed by some rules that we're not gonna harm one another, that we're all in this together and we all benefit from this cooperative environment of the Olympics. 

[00:31:08] Adam Grant: 

What I found so powerful about seeing this up close at the Olympics was this was not just the athletes.

The fans were like this too. We're in the pool, and two different divers failed dives, which is extremely rare at the Olympic level, and the entire crowd was cheering for them, for them to bou bounce back the whole crowd, like not just the fans of their countries. Everyone wanted to see them succeed. 

[00:31:33] Jay Van Bavel: 

I think we've been missing that.

We often ignore that. Guess what? It's not as interesting to people, even though I think it's more beautiful and profound and useful for humanity. This was something we tried to capture in our book. 'Cause there's a lot of people are focused in the last five, 10 years in American discourse about tribalism and the downsides of partisan identities and other types of identities and identity politics and, and no question there's a long history of intergroup conflict and violence that is linked to that.

Um, but there's tons of evidence over and over again, study after study, ex per, you know, uh, example after example of how identities and groups can bring us together. We have to focus more on harness like these healthy parts of identity and understand they're there for a lot of people and then like maybe make norms that make that other part that's more potentially dangerous or violent or xenophobic.

Like that's not part of who we are when we talk about our identities. 

[00:32:27] Adam Grant: 

Yes, we need patriotism without nationalism. 

[00:32:31] Jay Van Bavel: 

Yeah. Just because you identify the group doesn't mean you're gonna discriminate against outgroups if the norm is inclusivity. The more you identify with the group, the more inclusive you become and the more you embrace other people and difference in other groups and cooperate more.

And so it's really about like identity's not a bad thing as long as we have healthy norms. 

[00:32:50] Adam Grant: 

Yes. Well Jay, you are just so full of knowledge that I could ask you questions all day and I think that you're, you're a rare psychologist who is as insightful and brilliant in doing research as you are and communicating it, and I really admire that.

[00:33:07] Jay Van Bavel: 

Thank you so much. Feeling is mutual, Adam.

[00:33:12] Adam Grant: 

This Olympic discussion reminds me that we need more patriotism and less nationalism in the world. Patriotism is taking pride in your country. Nationalism is being hostile toward other countries. Ingroup solidarity does not require outgroup prejudice. You can love your people without hating others.

Rethinking is hosted by me. Adam Grant, the show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Hsu and Leyton-Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers. For more uplifting news, check out Upwork's new book. It's called Good People Stories from the Best of Humanity. 

[00:34:10] Jay Van Bavel: 

This is my favorite news story every year in the Olympics is at the Olympic Village, they almost always run outta condoms. What's going on at the Olympic Village is you have all these like super hot, like ripped athletes hooking up with one another like the day after their event's over, right? 'Cause they can party and cut loose.