ReThinking with Adam Grant
How to fight prejudice with Betsy Levy Paluck
August 13, 2024
[00:00:00] Betsy Levy Paluck:
This whole idea of how to think about prejudice is that that's what we're doing all the time, is we are scanning our environment to understand, you know, “Is this okay to say here? Will, will this get a laugh? Will this, you know, be approved?”
[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 Betsy Levy Paluck. She's a social psychologist at Princeton and one of the world's preeminent experts on fighting prejudice. Betsy's won a MacArthur Genius grant for her groundbreaking experiments on promoting reconciliation in post genocide Rwanda, and on reducing bullying in schools.
[00:00:52] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I want to change the thing that's gonna change your behavior. I wanna change the thing that is gonna reduce discrimination. That is people acting differently toward one another.
[00:01:02] Adam Grant:
Get ready to rethink your understanding of how to fight bias. Betsy's work highlights an approach that's more effective than trying to change individuals and faster and more feasible than trying to change cultures.
Hey, Betsy.
[00:01:23] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Hi Adam.
[00:01:24] Adam Grant:
What a joy to meet you.
[00:01:25] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Same.
[00:01:26] Adam Grant:
Were you the student in the front row who always got an A plus because the prep work you did was next level?
[00:01:34] Betsy Levy Paluck:
You know, I did get a lot of A pluses in my life, but I took the intro psychology class from Peter Salovey.
[00:01:42] Adam Grant:
Father of emotional intelligence.
[00:01:44] Betsy Levy Paluck:
And I got a B plus in that class.
So I dunno, like.
[00:01:49] Adam Grant:
You got a B plus in intro psych?
[00:01:51] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I got a B plus in intro psych. So.
[00:01:53] Adam Grant:
How is that possible?
[00:01:55] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Dreams still do come true. Like don't pay attention to your first grade.
[00:02:00] Adam Grant:
Wow. I'm shocked.
[00:02:03] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah, I was too. I was peeved actually. But you know.
[00:02:07] Adam Grant:
This is a whole research project waiting to be done. What happened?
[00:02:12] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Maybe I was just pushing the envelope like too far out for them. It wasn't a really glorious beginning, but you know.
[00:02:18] Adam Grant:
Well.
[00:02:19] Betsy Levy Paluck:
It was a beginning.
[00:02:20] Adam Grant:
I'm glad you didn't stop pushing the envelope. Well, you're gonna help us rethink prejudice today. As a kickoff, what is prejudice?
[00:02:28] Betsy Levy Paluck:
So prejudice in the words of the great Gordon Allport, who was one of these foundational professors, uh, studying prejudice can be both positive and negative.
So he categorized it as love prejudice, where it's a positive prejudgment of someone based on their group. Usually it's a group that you share, you know, if you went to college, other people who are alumni of your same college, you, you think of them more positively than other people, even if you don't know them.
And then there's also hate prejudice, which is, um, the much more used version of this word. And it's a negative prejudgment. It's um, it's resentment, it's bad feeling. It's distrust based on someone's group membership and, and nothing else.
[00:03:12] Adam Grant:
Why do people do this? Why are we that dumb?
[00:03:17] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Um, well we need to categorize the world, right?
And we need to quickly sort things, events, people into categories where we can process them quickly. So maybe the best entryway is to think about love prejudice. Like, “Oh, you and I share something. Oh, you and I are in the same group. Oh, that's, that's good. We're off to a good start.” Right. But you know, a lot of hate prejudice are sometimes fueled by this love prejudice.
“Oh, oh, you're not, oh, oh, you didn't? Go to that school or, oh, we, we don't share that in common.” Right? And so you can see how that can even grow out of something that is generally positive. You trying to take care of the people who are in your group, the people who are recognizable to you somehow.
[00:03:59] Adam Grant:
Where I struggle is, I think it's one thing if we're talking about a group that you chose to join, I can start to think about how you were drawn toward people who were like you and you wanted to affiliate with a, a certain set of tendencies or qualities, but like things that you don't have control over.
[00:04:17] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah.
[00:04:18] Adam Grant:
Groups that you didn't select for yourself, but you were just born into.
[00:04:22] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:04:22] Adam Grant:
Um, that are, you know, really accidents of birth or circumstance or culture. Why are we so quick to judge people based on those?
[00:04:32] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Mm-Hmm. Well. I don't think that just by nature of them being these categories that are more natural or longstanding to us, that doesn't indicate that we're born to hate or that there's something fundamental about those kinds of prejudices.
In fact, we have a lot of data showing that what we also need are stories. We need any kinds of societal, uh, frustrations and resentments to be channeled often by demagogues or by other leaders who really tell us stories about why these other groups are the cause of our problems are foreign, are, are unnatural, are illegal, right?
And so I think that actually a lot of things have to happen for us to have a real animus, a real antipathy. Being uncomfortable around people who don't share our group memberships, maybe that's more relatable, that this is someone who's different. “I'm a little bit more disfluent. I, I don't know exactly what you like or how to, how to treat you.” But a lot of things often converge to build these really big prejudices that we, we think about today, um, that drive so much of the conflict and violence in the world.
[00:05:43] Adam Grant:
The animus part is the weird part. I mean, gosh, which stereotypes to even pick. We know that women are stereotyped as communal and warm, and men as ambitious and assertive, and I object to that. I want people to be seen as individuals, but I get people holding those stereotypes. Um, what I don't get then is saying, “Well, I don't like women because of that, or I don't like men because of that.” What causes people to slip from, from stereotype to prejudice?
[00:06:15] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I think the stereotypes have to feed into that narrative in which your goals are being frustrated by this group. They have to provoke some sort of anger, some sort of resentment, some sort of offense to the self, and that's where we have to go beyond the basics of psychology, the stereotypes, and so forth.
You're right. They have to flower into this more elaborate narrative about why we're threatened by this group, why this group stands for things that are fundamentally against us. And I think that it's also a collective phenomenon. It's hard to have that much hatred and antipathy on your own.
[00:06:58] Adam Grant:
One of the many things I love about your work is that unlike most of the experts in our field who try to predict prejudice and explain it, you've actually undone it, and I want to talk about that journey.
Take us to Rwanda and how you started rethinking prejudice there.
[00:07:17] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah, Rwanda really caused me to rethink what, how I was trained to think about prejudice, the tools that I had to measure prejudice. I went to Rwanda as a grad student. So eager to try to add to what I saw as this real gap in our fields about some of the causes of prejudice reduction.
And I had been writing this big literature review trying to find as many papers as I could. And I was looking in the policy literature, uh, to see what kind of programs are people running. And I came across this Dutch NGO that was funding, uh, radio soap opera in Rwanda. About nine years after the genocide, they were going to produce this soap opera that educated people about the causes of prejudice and violence as a way to stop this in the future and to reduce the amount of ethnic tension and resentment in the country, nine years after the genocide.
I emailed them. I said, “Have you evaluated your program? I wanna add it to my paper, to my lit review.” And they said, “Oh, we haven't even started.” And I said, “Could I evaluate the radio soap opera?” And I sort of faked it until I made it. I wrote up a proposal and they said, “You can come out and see if, if that would work to evaluate the program.”
And I'm, I'm telling it's still running to this day, you know, 20 years out. So I had run it, kind of like a medical trial. Some communities were exposed to the radio soap opera that was about reconciliation and and ethnic prejudice. Other communities were exposed to also a soap opera, but it was actually about AIDS and women's health.
So they all had the same kind of process of like getting together as a community, which is how people in mostly Sub-Saharan Africa, listen to the radio together. Kind of almost like a movie theater kind of atmosphere. When I went to go interview them, what I found was that they actually really rejected a lot of the messages of the radio soap.
They said, “You can't tell me that all of this contact between ethnic groups is what reduces prejudice. I mean, come on. We were living together. Uh, I knew two men married to Tootsie women who killed their wives. You know, you, you are not gonna convince me of this theory.” However. I think that our society is changing.
I think that Rwandans are starting to let their children intermarry again. Critically, this radio soap opera, they were explaining this theory that we, psychologists hold dear, that contact between two groups reduces prejudice. They were explaining it through this Romeo and Juliet storyline, super popular storyline.
They did a live performance of it in the national stadium. They like filled the national stadium with all these fans. People loved this story. They loved the Romeo and Juliet part of it. They were watching, hearing all of their community members approve of this storyline. And so it changed their notion of the zeitgeist.
It changed their notion of like, what are the social expectations right now in Rwanda? Like, should we let our children intermarry? Um, that's what I observed changed, and that's super interesting where people said, “No, no, no, you didn't convince me.” Except that we found that their behavior was changing. And so I started wondering, “Okay, well how should I think about prejudice now?”
Because it was very similar even to the way that Rwandans talked about how the violence came, they really talked about it as kind of like an order from above, what everyone else was doing that it came suddenly, like a sudden rain during the rainy season. They said, “This didn't grow out of my built up resentments and my prejudices. And yeah, of course there were stereotypes, but that, that happened for a really long time without us killing each other.”
And so it, it really got me to start thinking about what it means to have individual beliefs, your own prejudices in your heart or in your mind, these stereotypes that you were talking about versus seeing prejudice out there in the world thinking that it's a norm, thinking that it's an expectation of your group.
[00:11:24] Adam Grant:
I re I remember when I first, read your original paper when it came out saying, “Wait a minute, so there's a radio program in Rwanda that encourage people to intermarry, um, across lines that previously could have led to murder, to argue respectfully with each other, to trust, to cooperate, to heal from their trauma, and it didn't operate by changing their individual attitudes.”
They don't like the outgroup any better. They're not let less prejudiced against them. They just think that other people are.
[00:11:55] Betsy Levy Paluck:
That's right.
[00:11:56] Adam Grant:
Can you explain the psychology of that? It's really weird, even, even as a fellow psychologist to think about, you could change my behavior without changing my attitude.
[00:12:07] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Right, right. Maybe we should start by thinking about the last time we were in a social setting and we did something and we felt a little odd or a little awkward, right? We all have a sense in a particular group of what are the bounds of normal here? And we all play with it differently, right? Like some people like to get really close to that bound, and some people really like to stay down the middle.
Like, this is what's proper. Like this would make people, you know, a little uncomfortable with me. We walk around the world like amateur scientists. Right. Actual social scientists, they're trying to figure out what is actually the norm. They wanna know how much domestic violence is there. They wanna know how many people believe that it's not okay to tell a fat joke.
They wanna know the actual statistics. And of course, it's hard to know the actual statistics. So we have tools and statistics to estimate what is the actual rate, the actual proportion of people who believe this or do this. We do this all the time, though. We're constantly looking around for social proof and updating our beliefs about how normal is this, how, how desirable is this?
How typical is this? And we are trying to make sure, usually, that our behavior falls within the bounds of what's normal and and desirable. We care about what people think of us, and I think we can all also relate to this feeling of maybe doing something or saying something in a situation that it might not even be totally us.
We might think on it later and say like, “I don't know why I said that, or, you know, that really wasn't me.” But these expectations of the group can often outweigh our own personal beliefs in terms of what we decide to do in a, in especially in a social setting.
[00:13:53] Adam Grant:
I don't always pick up the attitudinal change, even though the behavior changes, and I've often wondered is that because their attitude hasn't changed or is it just because we're bad at measuring attitudes?
[00:14:04] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I really love this old paper by Debbie Prentice that argues that beliefs are like possessions, right? Like we own them. You don't wanna give them up. It's almost a little bit of an endowment effect. “Like now I've arrived at this belief, it's mine and I'm not parting with it, right?”
I also think that because it's so difficult to change attitudes and it, it might take a longer time over a longer course, then we should go for what is easier to change and across a lot of different field experiments now what I'm finding is that these perceptions of what's normal in this context or in this group they're a lot more pliable actually, because we're picking up on signals of how often this is happening and, and who thinks it's good.
[00:14:48] Adam Grant:
I've often wondered if someone holds on to prejudice, but stops discriminating, are they actually a person of higher character than the person who lacks prejudice at all?
[00:14:58] Betsy Levy Paluck:
That's a deep question. One thing I like about social psychology is that it's very nonjudgmental discipline. You know, we're, we're here to describe what's in your mind, not to try to convict it. Right? And so it, it's very interesting to think about that kind of a person and why they'd be doing that, having prejudice in their heart, but not discriminating.
And my bet is always on the context. And the people who they're with, they probably don't feel that they can express those beliefs where they are.
[00:15:25] Adam Grant:
Well, I, I'm clearly more of a, a personality psychologist at heart than you are then, because I want to attribute that to them having principles and you wanna look to their environment and say, “Hey, wait a minute. The only principle they need is to be concerned about social disapproval and exclusion.” And that can be enough to motivate them.
[00:15:43] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I think that if you are someone who has the kind of character we can call it and, and the principle that would cause you to suppress biases that you have. I, I, I think that at some point you would maybe try to reconcile your principle with your bias.
Right. That's when I'd actually hope that the prejudice might be lessened when you can let go of that. Right. And it doesn't feel like such a possession anymore. But I, I see what you're saying. It is a way to think about character. Uh. And the tensions between your, your beliefs and your principles.
[00:16:16] Adam Grant:
Let's dive into social norms because one of the, the major effects of your research on not just psychology but on the world, has been to get us to realize there's actually a lot we can do to change people's perceptions of social norms.
And you've done it in, in settings with such high stakes, um, not only post genocide Rwanda, but also trying to stop bullying in schools. Talk to me about what's wrong with other approaches and why social norms might be more actionable.
[00:16:45] Betsy Levy Paluck:
So we actually just did a meta-analysis of all the stats from all of these prejudice reduction studies over the last dozen years or so, and what we find is the prominent approach to reducing prejudice is to target the individual and to target that individual's mental life.
Try to get you to change your mind about something. Revise your stereotypes. Imagine you have a friendship with someone from the other group and, and really try to simulate better outcomes.
That actually makes up about 76% of the literature on prejudice reduction and it doesn't seem to be working. We have zero evidence that those effects endure. Typically, people are measuring the effects of those interventions, even just like 15 minutes after they've happened. So long term it doesn't seem very promising if we're having such a tiny effect to begin with.
There's another class of studies and, and this is the class of research that I've been working on that really tries to treat the group together. And to, to treat prejudice as a, a social phenomenon. And so that's a different kind of attack that you could take.
[00:17:59] Adam Grant:
These individual approaches don't work, but it might just be bad training programs.
We've seen a lot of bias training programs fail because they make people defensive and they fail to reach the very people that most would benefit from change. Um, part of me thinks, okay, we already have a lot of energy invested in a lot of resources dedicated to individual training. Shouldn't we just try to make that better using what we know?
[00:18:25] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah, you do have to ask what's wrong with the marketplace of ideas, if we've got it right in psychology, but it's not being translated into the outside world. Or it might be that we have a lot of ideas in psychology, but they're just not powerful enough or they're, they're answering the wrong question, right?
They're answering the question of how can I change this person? Right? Let's change society by changing each and every individual in society. Let's put them through this educational program, this bias training and so forth. And I tend to come down on the, we are just answering the wrong question, or we have the wrong model of change.
[00:19:02] Adam Grant:
I think you're right and I think even in the rare cases where if where we're effective, it's too slow and it's too hard to scale. I think about all these training programs trying to reach one person at a time, and I think about all the prejudice people in the world and all the prejudices that individual people hold.
I'm like, there's no way we could reach even a fraction of the people and target all the different prejudices they hold. I think about deep canvassing is another body of work that is really powerful, but how many millions of people are you gonna reach door to door? What a lot of people do in response to that is they sort of, they say, “Well, what we need is institutional change. We need to change the fundamental structures of society that are broken.”
And I agree with that, but I'm also far too impatient to, to want to do that work because it could take a generation or more, and it's really hard to find the levers of influence. And what I love about your approach is you are situated right in between.
You have something we can do that that changes people at scale, that doesn't take decades or centuries. The Rwanda demonstration, you know, it couldn't get clearer than that to say, “Well, you could put this on a radio and you could have a whole country listen to a program if it was well written and and well performed, and you could change an entire nation's perceptions, perceptions of what's acceptable, what's encouraged.” How do we do that?
We're not all radio or TV program writers.
[00:20:24] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah.
[00:20:24] Adam Grant:
Uh, we're not all great storytellers. We don't all have those megaphones. Talk to me about how we change perceptions of social norms.
[00:20:33] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I wanna say as well that I think all of these things go together. Like I believe in the power and the importance of the individuals who are going to lead these efforts, right?
So we need people who have these transformational experiences and are fighting against prejudice. One of the ways that I understood what was even happening in the soap opera context in Rwanda was that it wasn't just this vertical influence. Your ideas about social norms were just changed by the soap opera.
It was not a hypodermic needle effect of media. It was also a very social process. People listen to the radio in groups, and then you think about the way we consume media, where we're not necessarily watching it in groups. We talk about it nonstop. I mean, what are you what, what are you watching lately?
And tell me what you think about it, and so forth. So we have this shared reality around these programs and we can observe like what really hits, like what other people really appreciate about the show and what they approve of and who they love. Who are the actors and characters they love. That made me think of this old literature in psychology on social reference.
These are the people who literally you refer to when you're trying to figure out the norm. Um, the contention is that some people get more attention from you as you're trying to figure that out. Um, and so I became really curious about, well, who are those people and how could we find them? Like, so if we're not gonna take over the media landscape, who are the people who have this outsized influence over social norms?
And that's one approach. We use that approach in a field experiment where we were trying to reduce bullying in, uh, middle schools and junior highs all across, uh, New Jersey. We actually used a formal social network analysis in each of the schools, and what we were looking for is students who got the most attention from other students at the school.
That could be positive attention, it could be negative attention. These students themselves might even be bullies. We were looking just for who are the, essentially the culture makers of the school. So using those people, what we tried to do was work with them over the course of the year to try to change their behavior toward conflict and toward treating other people with more respect at the school.
Notably, we didn't tell them what to do. We kind of just acted as their campaign managers and we said, “What if we gave you this responsibility to make your school a less stressful place to be, a better place to be? What would you wanna work on?” So we tried to ensure that these messages were genuinely coming from these students, and they all had different things that they wanted to work on across different schools that were different problems.
But we tried to just elevate their voices even more than than normal. We encourage them to use hashtag campaigns, you know, on their Snapchat and to post, you know, photos and posters around the school promoting their message. And what we found was that you could change people's perceptions of a social norm using a smaller group of influencers who have a lot of attention paid to them.
And we see that at in the schools where, you know, we randomly assign this to happen. We see the disciplinary events for peer conflict go down, and some of the less networked students also contributed to that effect. We talk a lot in our society right now about doing the work, improving oneself, reducing your own biases.
This was a model where these students were responsible for the group, for the school. They were doing the work on their community, and everyone kind of had a part to play in that actually.
[00:24:10] Adam Grant:
The idea of, you know, of going to role models or opinion leaders or influencers is compelling because it's, it's one of those things that we all have access to.
So I might not have the power, but I know a few people who others look up to. And if I can get them involved in campaigning or in modeling some of the change I want to see, then okay, I can't change my whole culture, but I can shift my group. So you've given us a, a few different ways already of, of changing perceptions of social norms.
I can't help but also think about the Bob Cialdini approach of just let's survey people and show them that they're misperceiving the norm. Where do you stand on just communicating statistics? It definitely irks me when people say, “Stories are more powerful than statistics.” I don't buy it. And I think that when it comes to social norms, showing people's statistics is one, one of the most powerful and also one of the simplest things you can do.
So am I right or wrong?
[00:25:05] Betsy Levy Paluck:
You're partially right.
[00:25:06] Adam Grant:
Oh, good. Um, I love being partially wrong.
[00:25:08] Betsy Levy Paluck:
You might get a home energy report that says, “You're doing really well on energy this month compared to your neighbors. This is how many of your neighbors are, are being as green as you.” So great job. Right. And this, as you said, stems directly from the Cialdini work, he, he actually ran this experiment himself, and then it was uber scaled up with O power and it, it's one of our all time greatest hits in psychology.
I mean, it really seems to have reduced energy use when people saw, either that they were doing well, but also that they weren't doing as well as their neighbors.
But what about something like if I told you 80% of professors don't actually believe in peer reviewed publishing anymore? They just wanna put their papers online.
[00:25:56] Adam Grant:
I don't believe you.
[00:25:57] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah.
[00:25:57] Adam Grant:
Or I don't care.
[00:25:59] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you've had tons of conversations with people about this, like you have plenty of social proof, like it, it's just not believable and, and a lot of people actually make up these percentages to try to get behavior to change.
They'll say, “Oh, 80% of people believe in this. You should do it.” Tho Those are some of the biggest flops of social norms, interventions, because we just don't believe you. It doesn't match up with our own reality.
So I, I think that for certain kinds of behaviors, hidden behaviors, what you see all the time in sexual assault awareness raising is that activists really try to reinforce the high percentage of people who experience sexual assault, that's a form of social norms marketing, because it's a more hidden behavior, so they want to raise awareness about how prevalent it actually is.
A lot of people used to just really not understand how prevalent it is, but for the behaviors that are out there in the open. We all have theories about how common prejudice is and how common discrimination is, and so sometimes that kind of intervention just falls on deaf ears. We just don't believe it.
[00:27:08] Adam Grant:
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and it, it does make me wonder then like how does, if we go back to Rwanda. How, how did you overcome that?
[00:27:18] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I think that people understand that times change and no one from the outside came in and told them, “Well, now people, we just did a survey and 75% of people believe in intermarriage.”
They saw it with their own two eyes. These stories, the, the soap opera caused people who are standing right in front of them to wax poetic about this Romeo and Juliet character. And so that's what is really convincing for people is social proof, is, is seeing it not being told.
[00:27:56] Adam Grant:
I wanna go to a lightning round now. What is the worst advice you've ever gotten?
[00:28:01] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Oh. Be very careful about what you do early in your career to, to ensure a success. Don't take so many risks.
[00:28:12] Adam Grant:
Why is that bad advice?
[00:28:14] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I would've hated my career if I didn't take the risks that I wanted to take.
[00:28:19] Adam Grant:
What is something you've rethought lately?
[00:28:21] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I'm really trying to think more about what AI has to teach us in psychology and what psychology has to teach some of these foundational models in AI.
[00:28:36] Adam Grant:
It sounds like you're rethinking your resistance to AI. If I'm catching your tone,
[00:28:40] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I am rethinking the resistance. Yes. Yes.
[00:28:43] Adam Grant:
Begrudgingly,
[00:28:45] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah. Yeah, I am trying to stay open to new tricks.
[00:28:51] Adam Grant:
Is there a prejudice that you've been working to overcome that you hold?
[00:28:55] Betsy Levy Paluck:
E every day. All my prejudices. I, I am a creature of this very prejudice culture and things spring to my mind, unbidden all the time, and I work all the time to notice them and figure out how to reframe and think of myself as a, a person living in this culture and why these thoughts spring to my mind.
[00:29:17] Adam Grant:
I become prejudiced against people who hold particular categories of beliefs. So I've discovered recently I'm prejudiced against people who are fans of the Myers-Briggs, of people who love astrology. I also have some prejudice against people who judge others for not being on time, and I, I guess that's reactionary prejudice.
Like I'm prejudiced against people who are prejudiced against me, but I, I don't mind occasionally categorizing people into those groups. I don't like harboring animosity or resentment toward them. Those are a couple that I'm working to overcome. What's your version of that?
[00:29:57] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Twitter users.
[00:29:58] Adam Grant:
You have prejudice against people who use Twitter?
[00:30:01] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I think so. I just, I just don don't, that's.
[00:30:03] Adam Grant:
Wait a minute, Betsy. That's.
[00:30:03] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I just don't wanna talk to them.
[00:30:04] Adam Grant:
It's hundreds of millions of people. That's a large group.
[00:30:11] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I just have love prejudice for all of us who are really just trying to get off of that rat wheel. It's a good life. You should come on over. It's nice over here.
[00:30:24] Adam Grant:
I, I don't think disengaging from where hundreds of millions or billions of people are is the best way to create change.
[00:30:32] Betsy Levy Paluck:
I don't know. There are other places to be. There.
[00:30:37] Adam Grant:
I respect that decision. Other, other lightning questions? Uh, I, I would love to get a prediction you have for the future. Uh, I was wondering specifically if like, if you can imagine a post prejudice society?
[00:30:49] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Mm. Um.
[00:30:51] Adam Grant:
And if so, when?
[00:30:55] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Hopefully by the end of my career, I'd love to come back on and we could just do a, a review of, of how it all worked out. I have a prediction that, okay, so I told you that I'm getting over my resistance to AI, but I have a prediction that we're not gonna get that much better at prediction, even using all the data that we have. I think there's a certain amount of chaos that is governing like the physics of our life, which isn't gonna keep me back from, from trying.
But I think that our lives have a lot more entropy than we're willing to admit.
[00:31:29] Adam Grant:
AI is trained on patterns of the past, and if, if you're in a dynamic fluctuating world, the patterns of the past are not that diagnostic of the future.
[00:31:38] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Even though some of the best predictors of our own individual behavior are what we've done in the past, and I think that that's driving a lot of what people are so optimistic about, at least in psychology.
[00:31:51] Adam Grant:
Okay. Last lightning question for you. This year we lost one of my intellectual role models and one of the greats, uh, in the history of our field, Danny Kahneman, who was actually one of the original guests on this show, uh, when we launched a few years ago, uh, you had the, the great privilege of working closely with Danny, uh, for a long time, or being around Danny for a long time.
Uh, what's the greatest lesson he taught you?
[00:32:20] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Danny said something to me one time that will always stay with me. I had just won the MacArthur and he wrote to me just something very simple about it. He said thr “The greatest thing in prizes like that is the joy that you give to others.” And it was so true.
He like completely and appropriately just reframed my experience on it. I experienced mortification from all of the attention that I got, I was nervous about and I didn't want it, but what I realized that he was right about was that people were just writing to me and they were just so happy. And I think that's what he experienced. To me, it's such a perfect example of Danny because he, um, kind of used a diamond to cut straight down to the core of this experience and, and found something really meaningful in it.
[00:33:16] Adam Grant:
That's really beautiful, and it captures so much of my experience interacting with Danny that I, I would've expected, given how humble he was, that he would've hated being affiliated with a Nobel Prize, and yet he saw it as representing the field.
He saw it as a chance to celebrate the work of all the people whose shoulders he'd stood on and all these careers that his thinking had spawned. I, I think in that way, he was comfortable being an ambassador for the field.
[00:33:44] Betsy Levy Paluck:
And, and it did give us so much joy to, to see him recognized like that, didn't it?
I mean, it was just.
[00:33:51] Adam Grant:
So much.
[00:33:52] Betsy Levy Paluck:
It was so joyful. And he was someone and is someone to be so proud of. Um, so yeah. Yeah, I think that's right.
[00:34:02] Adam Grant:
C’est la vie.
[00:34:02] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Yeah. Yeah. And what a vie.
[00:34:10] Adam Grant:
My top aha moment from Betsy is that one of the most powerful ways to fuel change is to change people's ideas of what's socially acceptable as norms shift, attitudes and actions follow.
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This 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 Allison Leyton-Brown.
Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.
What is a question you have for me?
[00:35:03] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Ah. Do you have a, a good connect for Taylor Swift tickets in the next, uh, few months?
[00:35:11] Adam Grant:
StubHub.
[00:35:12] Betsy Levy Paluck:
No
[00:35:14] Adam Grant:
Offline. I think I can help with that if, if you're desperate.
[00:35:17] Betsy Levy Paluck:
Okay. You're amazing. My 8-year-old son thanks you.