Episode 239 – Triggered! with Stephanie Preston

Macro N Cheese – Episode 239
Triggered! with Stephanie Preston
August 26, 2023

 

[00:00:00] Stephanie Preston [Intro/Music]: Your ingroup is the people you consider part of your tribe, your group, your family, your friends, and then the outgroup is whoever you do not consider one of your many overlapping identities. And it turns out that these are really powerful.

A lot of the population thinks it’s a sign of weakness to avail yourself of mental health support, which is problematic. There’s not that much funding. There’s a dearth of therapists and doctors, so there’s way more people who have autism or ADHD or anxiety or depression than there are people who have time to support them.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Have you ever wondered why people help people, and why people choose not to help people? Bernie Sanders had that famous line, “would you fight for someone that you don’t know?” These really great quotes that carried the campaign through, and I think a lot of us that were part of that movement, bought into those ideas.

But as Bernie vanished and went his own way, and we went ours, that altruistic urge to help one another, to fight for each other, to have student debt canceled, to have the environment taken care of, to provide healthcare for all… People get excited for a minute, they’re gone, and then they vote very strangely. They concern themselves with issues that don’t seem aligned with the values you once had.

And so, I’ve been very frustrated with the buy-in, for not only modern monetary theory; once you understand the government as a currency issuer, you know that the government can do all these things, and yet it doesn’t. So a book was recommended to me, and that book was called The Altruistic Urge, and I really got excited about this thing.

The Altruistic Urge, the subtitle, which is even more poignant, is “Why We’re Driven to Help Others”. The author, Stephanie Preston, is going to be my guest today. Stephanie Preston is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. She earned her master’s and PhD degrees in behavioral neuroscience at the University of California – Berkeley, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

She’s been a faculty member at ULM since 2005. She uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine how the brain evolved to guide decisions through emotions, in a variety of domains, including to feel empathy, offer altruistic help, support the environment, and to consume and keep material goods. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest, Dr. Stephanie Preston. Welcome to the show.

[00:03:59] Stephanie Preston: Hi. Thanks for having me.

[00:04:01] Grumbine: Your book was over my head. I listened to it. I tried to check other shows out, and interestingly enough, when you’re talking to laypeople, the conversion from the more theoretical base translates very well. It was much easier to understand. I was able to put a lot of the stuff together, but I still have so many questions.

Why don’t we just start off with an overview of what the ‘altruistic urge’ is, and what this book was about.

[00:04:32] Preston: Okay, sure. So the altruistic urge describes a way in which mammals that care for their offspring for a long time after birth, develop a neural system that’s highly attuned to others’ needs and distress, and responds with action in particular types of situations. So in the book I describe this animal model where a rodent – it could be a female or a male – or an unmated individual, can be listening to the ultrasonic cries of a pup, like a newborn rodent, who is distressed and separated from the nest and in danger of predation; and then they rush over and pick up the pup in their mouth and return it to the nest where it’s safe.

Under the right conditions, if a female is primed by the hormones of pregnancy, or a male is habituated to the pups, they have this indefatiguable effort. They’ll just continually pick up pup after pup after pup, and it’s supposed to reflect this idea in which we don’t habituate to this intense need when we know what to do and it’s an urgent situation that requires immediate response. Especially when there’s these signs of distress that are really salient to us.

So if you apply that to people, when we hear somebody cry out in pain, our attention is immediately directed towards it. And if we know the individual, we know the response, that they need immediate help, people usually actually do help. But on the other hand, there are a lot of times we all know where we don’t help. The conditions of an offspring needing aid, map onto when we do and don’t help in the real world. Because in your brain, you don’t just have an altruistic urge, you have a sort of opponent neural circuit approaches and avoids.

And then one of the circuits is more likely to be active depending on the situation. So when you know what to do, when it’s obviously urgent, when it’s immediate and you’re present and there’s distress and vulnerability, then people usually do respond. But unfortunately a lot of situations that plague us aren’t like that.

And so the book is kind of describing that gap and the features that associate with the urge to help, which is a great thing, strongly embedded in our bodies and our brains. Versus the apathy that’s also been described in psychology, which is regrettable, but has some adaptive features in evolution as well.

[00:07:25] Grumbine: As I was listening to your book, one of the things that jumped out at me was, we are given to help people that are like us. Whether it be having the same color skin as we do, or the same historical reference, or maybe went to the same school, there’s an affinity that we are attracted to.

And what do you suppose drives that, ‘you’re my tribe, I’m going to help you.’

[00:07:55] Preston: Well, you pinpointed one of the most profound and alarming effects in this area of research, which they call it the ‘ingroup versus outgroup effects’. So your ingroup is the people you consider part of your tribe, your group, your family, your friends, and then the outgroup is whoever you do not consider one of your many overlapping identities.

And it turns out that these are really powerful. It’s not just post-hoc human rationalizing, ‘well, I wanna support my own people and therefore I’m going to direct my resources this way.’ Because if you put somebody in a brain scanner and you expose them to someone, let’s say being pricked by a needle in the skin, normally our brains activate this pain system.

So you have this empathic pain response, where seeing you in pain makes me actually activate parts of my brain that I use when I feel pain. So it provides this immediate, empathic ability to understand another person’s pain. Which is also motivating, because if I can even just experience a little piece of what it must be like to feel this bad experience, I’ll be motivated to do something about it.

So that’s another one of these evolved mechanisms in your brain that’s very adaptive. It turns out this response is much lower if the person in pain is from an outgroup. And you can create outgroups in a variety of ways, like you have just said, for example, race is one way that we commonly think of in and out group in America.

But you can even just say, if you’re in the UK, well they support a different football team. Or if you’re in America, you could say they go to the rival school. You can even in psychology, create immediate groups where you just bring 20 people into the lab and they say ‘you’re the red team’, and they say, ‘the other 10 are the blue team’, and you’re going to compete on this game, and then you instantly reclassify these people.

And I think it’s alarming because in psychology a lot of effects are actually small, you need a lot of people to demonstrate them and they’re not actually of practical importance. You’re not going to base a policy decision based on a decimal change in some value.

But these effects in the brain of the outgroup, diminishment of empathy, are actually pretty large, which is concerning. So it’s almost like at a really intuitive, automatic and perceptual level, you are not attending to these individuals in the outgroup in the same way, and you’re not as concerned and feeling interdependent with their welfare.

So I think attention is probably one really big factor, but when you have a long time to deliberate and think about it, you can bring all these other factors into play. Save the stuff for the people like me. Because of this intuitive, empathic response, anybody who you’re familiar with or similar to, is easier to map onto your neural substrates for how you think about yourself.

And so, the way you look and its familiarity, or its similarity to all the other faces I’ve seen in the past 50 years, that is embedded in my brain as representations of what people are, and what their pain is like, and what it’s like to feel bad for them and to commune with them. And so all of this rich history of experience is embedded in your brain, and therefore limits who you’re going to feel empathy for, and enhances empathy for people like you, which evolutionarily, is pretty adaptive.

If you think about tribes who are warring and there’s limited resources, and one has to defeat the other, our ability to cooperate and help the people from our group, probably helped the more cooperative groups survive, they believe. Economists believe that. Ernst Fehr is an example of a neuro economist who writes a lot about this. So in theory, it’s an adaptive neural response, but it’s really not good in a global economy, where we want to be helping all kinds of people.

[00:12:29] Grumbine: Right. One of the things that, in this particular country – and we’ll look at the US, and the rest of the world has a little bit different experience with this, but specifically targeting the US – we’ve lost any sense of class consciousness in this nation. The vaunted working class, which was people that worked for a paycheck, versus those who have money and are not living in that realm. And then other minor classes, like the petty bourgeois.

These groups have largely been dissolved. We just don’t see each other in that realm. And if you are attacked, and you can see it through the stock market, and the federal reserve and interest rate hikes, and a host of other things, which academics such as Clara Mattei have written and called the ‘Trinity of Austerity.’

These are tools of class war that many of us are oblivious to, and you’re not in an economic world, you’re a psychologist. So some of these concepts may not be aligned, but they’re interdisciplinary. We’re trying to understand how your great work maps to some of the political work, and some of the organizing work and the economic work that we do.

The people that have money that are living well, they frequently brush off concerns that the people that are not doing as well, are suffering through it. They don’t hear each other, and there’s not that urgency, that need to rectify or make whole, the people that are suffering.

And so how do we create this altruistic urge within a class environment? “Class” being a construct of organizing and viewing and categorizing people. How do we make folks see themselves within a class, and how do we help them see others within that class as that affinity group, that we would like them to have that altruistic urge for?

[00:14:41] Preston: Well, obviously there’s a lot going on there, but we have some answers and then there’s some unanswerables in there. So, I think of the concept of meritocracy, which we’re studying in our lab with a grad student, Tanner Nichols. And people think, ‘well, if you work hard, you succeed. I work hard, and that’s why I succeed. You don’t succeed and therefore you must not work hard.’

So there’s a logic to people’s thinking along those lines, where you have really strong access to your own behavior. Especially your own behavior, that you’re proud of. So you’re super aware of everything you’ve done that was hard and difficult and that you suffered through and all the hours that you put in, and you’re not aware at all of the effort that people you don’t know put in or people doing jobs you’re not at all familiar with or people from neighborhoods you’ve never been to.

You just have no access to awareness of what their experience is like. And so people just make these blithe assumptions, and then political rancor supports these ideas. And so people are very astute when they’re coming up with these political campaigns, at painting people in poverty or immigrants or people of color, as trying to get a free lunch or trying to come over here and take your jobs. They know exactly what will turn you against those individuals without providing you any access to what it’s like to be in their shoes.

And so empathy, as we said, rests upon this idea of experience with ‘the other’, in their shoes… familiarity, kinship, collaboration. It rests on all these things that are just completely lacking in a situation like that. The more inequality there is, the more separation there is among these individuals. They’re not even riding on the same airplane. There’s some individuals making decisions for all of us, riding in a jet like ‘Well, what’s wrong with those people? Why don’t they just move across the country and take another job? Get on it.’

[00:17:01] Grumbine: That is a mindset. Looking at Ayn Rand’s ‘objectiveism’, and a lot of this ‘makers and takers’ stuff is being pumped down people’s throats…

[00:17:10] Preston: Right

[00:17:10] Grumbine: That there are some that are deserving and some that are not, ‘You’re lazy! Why don’t you just pick up and move your family away from 50 years of living in an area, and just go where the jobs are?’

It’s a mindset that I don’t believe is natural. I feel like it’s being manufactured through propaganda, and preying on some of the worst of our instincts. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:17:38] Preston: I think people who develop propaganda and people in marketing are incredibly astute. They know what will resonate with people and the way people tend to think. So if you have no knowledge otherwise, that people are working their buns off and they are really reliant upon their family support system, if you have no knowledge of what life is like that, then it’s very easy to receive those messages and think they’re accurate. You have no access to information that would tell you otherwise, and you don’t really have a motivation to want to know. That’s the problem here.

In psychology, we can think of a lot of ways to solve this problem. For example, if you spend a lot of time with people in situations other than your own, they’re not unfamiliar, they become familiar. You become knowledgeable about what their lives are like. But it’s not the lab, I can’t put you in a condition just because I know it would make you more empathic and understanding. So I love that show Undercover Boss, where the boss goes and works inside his own company without telling anybody.

 So the CEO will go and work in the warehouse or in the franchise restaurant, and just see how freaking hard the job is,of the people getting paid the least in the company. And almost without fail, the boss is changing their policies and their tactics, and giving more support to these individuals, and being more appreciative. But it took that sustained contact, in the shoes, literally, of the people that are under them. Which normally, they have zero access to, they’re in the top of a building somewhere, in a skyscraper thousands of miles away. And so, we know that would work.

I am recently interested in the idea of using fiction and art as a vehicle. People have their hackles up when somebody from the left tries to tell people from the right that they need to be more empathic. That’s just team warfare, which I do not think works. So going on Twitter and blasting people as being ‘fascist pigs’ is definitely not going to get them on your side. It’s going to make them believe you’re more of an outgroup than you were before, and therefore less relevant and worthy of fighting against, and undermining.

I think it feels really good in the moment, you get that kind of ingroup feeling of comradery and satisfaction, and most people are in their social media bubble, so 90% probably seeing it, already believed in that view anyway, but it doesn’t help the rhetoric that we have this kind of position.

So I’m thinking Netflix has done a really good job of presenting us with films that describe lives of people we don’t know anything about. As an example, I saw that movie The Swimmers, and it was about these two sisters who tried to leave their country, which was being bombed, and they were in Syria. Then they tried to cross the water on a boat and people died, as they do in these unsafe boats, where you gave all your money to a coyote type of person. And you just learn about that experience, and how horrible it is and how natural it would be to need to leave that situation.

And I think what develops empathy for somebody like an immigrant trying to cross into the US from the southern border. You conceptualize them completely differently. So I think that’s a possibility.

The book clubs in Ann Arbor are all reading books about other people’s lives that they don’t have insight into, and learning a lot about what other people’s experiences are like in other countries, and other classes and other social groups. But not everyone’s going to do that, and if you’re at the top of the pyramid, you literally have no motivation to change the pyramid.

That is what I see as the issue. Basically, if corporations are people, then they can influence the voting process, and the electoral process, and the judicial selection and all of these things, and the political action committee money. These things are undermining the democracy of it all, and I think the vast majority of people want there to be less inequality, but their voices aren’t being properly heard through our current system of “democracy.”

There’s a really cool study – Michael Norton from Harvard is one of the authors, where they ask Americans, ‘How much inequality do you think is appropriate; How much do you think is actually happening right now?’, and then they show the true amount. And so it’s the paycheck of a typical CEO versus the lower level worker, what is this ratio? And people want inequality, so they want there to be some hierarchical structure showing our primate heritage is there and intact. You want there to be dominance and subordinates, and people who get paid more and people who get paid less.

People don’t want socialism, which is fine, whatever. But then they suggest the amount that they’re willing, let’s say it’s like two to one, and then let’s say that the actual amount they think, is four to one. When in reality it’s a thousand or ten thousand to one. The graph is fascinating because they make like a spider web plot, where in America the actual amount is the outside edge of the spider web, and people’s current estimates is basically still at the epicenter. Because you can’t even see the distinction between what they think is appropriate versus current, is so distant. It doesn’t even show up on the graph.

People are okay with inequality, they just literally don’t understand, or know, the sheer magnitude of it. ‘I wanna be rich too, so don’t tax me because I’m rich’, or ‘I wanna be rich so let’s not tax the rich.’ But these classifiers like “rich” are just meaningless, because you can slide it around to mean anything. And so, we need to be a lot more precise with our language and be educating people about reality, and the reality of the people at the other end of these policies.

[00:24:36] Grumbine: I couldn’t agree more. You and I have not really had a chance to get to know each other, but one of the things that make up my story is that I came from a radical right wing background

[00:24:47] Preston: Yeah.

[00:24:48] Grumbine: And I had a drinking problem, and I was writing a term paper. My computer crashed at midnight and a hundred pages of writing were gone.

[00:24:59] Preston: Oh my God.

[00:25:00] Grumbine: I could type it again. So I really got upset, and being a good alcoholic I had every reason in the world to go out and start drinking. So at midnight I decided to get in my car, and go to a bar and get drunk. And I don’t know, I did a bunch of stupid stuff, I think I bought some weed at the bar, and that night I was held in a jail cell. Then they put me into a holding cell with a bunch of other kids. And there were young black kids that were in that holding cell and we’re talking and they said, “what are you in for?” and I said, “I don’t know. I think I had an ounce or two of pot or whatever, and got drunk.” I had no idea. I was in a blackout.

These kids look at me and I’m like, “what are you here for?”, they said, “oh, we had a joint and we’re going to be held for the next couple weeks because they want us to be held until the court hearing”.

[00:25:51] Preston: Oh God.

[00:25:53] Grumbine: I’m freaking out ’cause I’ve never been in trouble with the law like this before. So I’m sitting there, the commissioner pulls me back and says, “okay, Mr. Grumbine looks like you have a really good job and you’re well educated, you’ve got a family here. We’re going to go ahead and release you, just don’t make me look like a fool.” So they put me back in the cell… “how long are you staying?”, and I said, “they’re getting ready to release me.”

What?… And that really fundamentally changed me. That was the beginning of my leftward drift. I had experienced the inequality, firsthand for once. I paid attention.

[00:26:26] Preston: Right

[00:26:28] Grumbine: I hate to think that someone has to go through that to have their…

[00:26:34] Preston: Eyes opened.

[00:26:35] Grumbine: Is that traditionally what it takes, or is there another way of getting people there, because we’re facing polycrises. We’re facing climate crisis, we’re facing massive deluge of student debt, and people just don’t care.

[00:26:53] Preston: And they’re like, ‘well, you shouldn’t have gone to that school.’

[00:26:56] Grumbine: Ultimately, there’s something missing in my analysis here. This seems like it’s impossible to make a difference and move the needle.

[00:27:08] Preston: I think if you think about our altruistic urge, one possibility of ways to bring people together without having them have their ‘Come to Jesus’ moment in a jail cell, is, people at all levels of the SES [Socio-Economic Spectrum] are involved in philanthropy, in some ways. And so, the uber-rich are attending balls, and they want to be seen and they want to be associated with some causes. And they want a tax break of course.

And people in lower SES groups are participating in their church, and people are working at the soup kitchen, and people are working at the clothing donation, and the school drive and the bake sale. So people actually enjoy altruism. So that’s one of the benefits of this neural model, is that it’s rewarding. Physiologically rewarding to help other people. Especially if you can be participating in the moment with it.

And so, I think having philanthropies require, or involve, people of different strata is really important. So the new model of the nonprofit organization, for example, is not the ‘white savior’ model, where you come in and you tell people how it’s going to be done, and you give the money and then you disappear… But a more participatory model, where a person with the money, who wants things to be better for an outgroup, let’s say, or an unfamiliar group, says: “Well, what do you guys think is going to make your life better?… how do you think we should structure this organization?… what do you think your members are going to respond to?… and how can we set this up so it’s self-supporting for you to be in charge?”

And so if we adopt that kind of model, where we don’t just throw money where we think it belongs, in the manner in which we think it belongs. And we give some agency and interaction in the process, then I think people all come away feeling good and society is better.

I personally think structural solutions are better because they’re more powerful, and they don’t rely on the whims of people to feel like helping. This year, I saw charitable donations went down for the first time in decades. But you don’t have to rely on whims if you have a structural solution. But given our current economy, I think… Those kinds of shifts, in the way charitable giving happens, I think would be really positive.

And then one person who participates can go back to their community and say, ‘oh, well actually, it wasn’t like that… whatever your impression is of these people, is not what I encountered when I did my experience.’ So everyone doesn’t have to do it, and people are prone to talk about their altruism, which is a good thing in this case. People always think to denigrate that, ‘oh God, why do you have to blab about that one time you were helpful?’ But it works in our favor in this case.

So as an example of both learning something from the experience, and blabbing about it, I worked with my husband in a homeless shelter, where you have to sleep overnight just to make sure everyone is okay and has what they need, in a church.

In Michigan, it’s too cold to be outside certain weeks of the year, so they have warming shelters. And you go in with your preconceived notion of what these people are going to be like, and what their life stories are like and what their behavior is like… And that’s not at all what I found.

People had all different kinds of stories, and they were very relatable. And it was very easy to interact with people, and understandable how they ended up in this situation. So your eyes can be opened quickly.

[00:31:17] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:32:08] Grumbine: I was a deacon in a church in Washington, DC. And I’m not a particularly religious person, by the way, but my coming to sobriety brought about a spiritual element. It was a glorified service position that allowed me to be involved, and the more I felt like I was involved, the more I felt like I had a purpose, a reason to be there.

And there was a gentleman that I met outside the church in an alleyway, in a rough part of DC. And every Sunday after I would set up, I started meeting this guy there. He was a heroin addict, but he was also a brilliant physicist that had schizophrenia, and was incapable of going back into normal society. But he would talk to me, and I would get a full hour with this guy every week.

And then one day he just wasn’t there anymore, and it was devastating to me. I have no idea what happened. There was something there, I was getting something from, I don’t know whether it was just the bond, I felt like I understood a little bit of his world, I don’t know? Or whether it was, I saw possibilities in this other world and I wanted to help him? One way or the other, there was something there.

[00:33:29] Preston: It’s relational. Relationships and communing with somebody in some authentic way, is extremely powerful and rewarding in our lives.

[00:33:39] Grumbine: These are the moments coming from that recovery world. You’re sitting there in a room full of people that have a common interest, they want to get sober. Everybody’s there and loves each other in some weird way, because they have a shared mission. A shared sense of purpose.

[00:33:55] Preston: Also, you have a shared understanding of what this really dramatic event in your lives, feels like at a bodily level, that’s where that empathy comes in. You have a really powerful representation in your mind of what it’s like to be in addiction, and what it’s like to have a fall, and everybody there can share in this really powerful experience.

That is empathy per se, and it’s so important. And I think there’s a reason, speaking of the rewards of the altruistic urge, that those organizations promote altruism. To recover, you should be involved in helping other people, which, there’s a reason that’s so powerful, it feels good, and you’re supporting a community and you’re giving meaning to your life.

So it’s not just, ‘oh, a bunch of selfish people looking for tax breaks.’ Altruism comes in many forms, and it’s a good thing that it’s rewarding. We should be grateful that it’s rewarding, not denigrating it as philosophically bankrupt, because it feels good.

[00:35:05] Grumbine: This brings up a very important point, which is why I kind of went down my own personal lane there. In macroeconomics, we look at aggregates. Larger groups and flows, and how it happens at the macro level. These issues that we’re talking about at an individual level, how do we take micro and morph it to macro, without it being a ‘thousand points of light’ kinda thing?

[00:35:35] Preston: Right,

[00:35:36] Grumbine: I’m just trying to understand, because the transition between that micro and the macro, maybe they’re completely incapable of scaling. But we’ve seen groups like Occupy Wall Street get together for a common cause, for a common interest.

[00:35:55] Preston: But did they have the result? I feel like I support their mission, and I’m amazed and proud of their dedication to the cause and all the pain they went through camping for months. Did anything happen? This sucks.

[00:36:12] Grumbine: No! And this is where our group comes in with the macro side, because part of the problem is that folks don’t understand federal finance. They don’t understand the role of taxation. Taxation doesn’t serve to fund programs. Taxation is a way of driving a need for the currency, making you need the dollar. By creating a tax obligation, you now need to do something in order to achieve a way of satisfying that obligation.

[00:36:39] Preston: Right.

[00:36:40] Grumbine: Getting past all that, just how do you level up? How do you take these really powerful moment relationships and scale them quickly to meet these large scale problems, beyond just a simple, ‘I feel something for you, so I’m going to help.’

[00:37:01] Preston: Right. That’s the essential question. And here’s, for example, a structural level solution that has policy implications. If we funded schools, not just nominally or minimally, or to the degree of taxes in the district, if we fully funded schools to be great places of learning, safety and support, then everybody would win, in a way. Because you could go to your local public school and you would interact with anybody who is in this broader district, not just your close, close neighbors.

And you wouldn’t have to go to private schools, so wealthier people would actually benefit in some ways. If you could say, ‘well, think of all the money you’ll save on private school, if you could go to your local public school and it would be amazing, and you’d have great education, and you’d interact with people who are just like you.’ – assuming that border districts are drawn in some equitable manner, then people would be interacting with other people like them all across the spectrum, because there would be people who had a good education regardless of what neighborhood they lived in.

They would apply to the same college as you applied to, and they would get in on their merits. And because they learned just as much as you did and felt safe at school – and nobody would be, I don’t wanna bring up gun safety but that’s an issue in schools, obviously everybody’s terrified that something’s going to happen to their child at school someday – and it would level up society in a way that is by merit.

Because you gave them all an equal amount of access to resources, educationally, and they make what of it they can, and they can succeed just as well as you can succeed. And it solves some other problems too. Every parent in an upper middle class area drives their kid to school, and giant SUVs traversing the streets at breakneck speed are hitting people.

Kids are too scared to ride their bikes to school or walk to school, because they’re going to get hit by a car. And a parent wouldn’t let their little kid ride their bike to school like we did when we were young, because it’d be too likely they’d be hit by a car. But if you could go to your neighborhood school and they were all great schools, and you could have STEM education, even if you didn’t go to a special STEM school, then our lives will be simpler.

Our impact on the environment would be reduced. Everybody would have an equal access to education. You’d be interacting with people different from you, all across the levels of education and work environment. But currently that seems very far-fetched from what would be possible for voters.

[00:40:08] Grumbine: I used to walk from Penn Station in Philadelphia to the Comcast building on JFK Boulevard. And as I was leaving the train station, I crossed the main road to get onto the walkway, I saw what looked like a pile of clothes in the middle of the walkway, people just stepping over it. As I got closer, it was a body.

[00:40:32] Preston: Oh God.

[00:40:33] Grumbine: A dead homeless person.

I am the guy that calls the police and says there’s a dead body. It was freezing and this person had died of hypothermia. That devastated me. I still can remember it like it was five seconds ago.

[00:40:49] Preston: Right.

[00:40:51] Grumbine: What about that kind of environment, allows people to just step over one another like that?

[00:40:58] Preston: I think this, and the empathy and the climate change apathy, all stem from this same confluence of unfortunate factors, where you don’t really feel empowered to do anything. You don’t really feel like you know what to do. You feel like there must be somebody else who knows what’s going on, who will take care of it. And your own focus is myopic because of your stress.

You gotta go give the report at the shiny building. You’re worried about that and you don’t want to be late. And so people under stress, even in experiments in psychology if you say ‘you need to take this piece of paper from here to there’, and people feel like instructed to take it fast, they won’t stop to help the fake wounded individual in the experiment.

So people’s attention is highly focused on their own problems and they don’t feel empowered, or knowledgeable, or that they have access to the understanding of solutions that feel big. Big and scary. And dead bodies are scary.

[00:42:11] Grumbine: Yes they are.

[00:42:12] Preston: Yes. I wrote in my book about a time a bunch of drunken students smashed into a tree near my house in the middle of the night, and I got out and I went to help. And I’m a helpful person, I like to get involved in public situations. I’m not that scared, but I was worried that the unconscious person was dead. And without even consciously thinking about it, I was avoiding them. I was helping everybody on the scene and not encountering that individual. Because unconsciously I’m scared, I don’t know what to do. It will feel yucky and what if I make it worse, and let’s wait for the medics to arrive and they’re professionals.

All the reasons people give for not helping were present in my mind, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m scared, I feel overwhelmed, there’s gotta be somebody better to take care of this.’ It’s scary, that’s the avoidance route of your neural circuit that sometimes saves you from entering a truly dangerous situation, but also can sometimes create apathy where it wasn’t actually dangerous.

[00:43:19] Grumbine: I have a son, he’s seven years old and he’s autistic. And when he was born, all I could think of was, ‘oh, he is healthy, thank goodness.’ But he’s unable to do a lot of things that we just take very much for granted.

[00:43:38] Preston: Right.

[00:43:39] Grumbine: And the empathy and fundamental changes that occurred in me, having a child with special needs, I felt that transition occur.

I’m not sure how I would’ve reacted as a younger person. I’m terrified of the future because I feel like I gotta live forever to make sure my son is taken care of. And the fear of a libertarian style, objectivist style mindset. How do you take that microcosm of society ’cause autism is prevalent everywhere?

And I know, playing onto some of the stuff of your book and some of what you’ve just said, my son is demanding of me and there’s that feeling of resentment that I’m not proud of, but I recognize to be true. It’s pulling from a scarce amount of time and a scarce amount of mental bandwidth you have, and all of a sudden this person’s demanding they be the focal point of what you’re doing.

[00:44:47] Preston: Right.

[00:44:48] Grumbine: I’m putting it in very raw terms, and I’m hoping that is constructive. How can I move beyond my own selfish “I’m so tired and exhausted, I just don’t feel like doing anything.”

[00:45:01] Preston: Right, right. I think that’s real. And everybody’s feeling it, whatever the situation that they happen to be in, wealthy or poor. They feel put upon, and they can get frustrated, and they can be tired, and they can feel like ‘all I do is work and work, and then there’s more needs popping up.’ I think that’s kind of like a universal, American at least, experience. And it reflects back to your experience as the deacon, where another structural factor is mental health care.

We have terrible access to mental health resources. A lot of the population thinks it’s a sign of weakness to avail yourself of mental health support, which is problematic. There’s not that much funding. There’s a dearth of therapists and doctors, so there’s way more people who have autism or ADHD or anxiety or depression, than there are people who have time to support them. They legislate rules that limit the number and limit how easy it is to get access to care.

So if somebody with severe schizophrenia or with autism has more support systems that are structurally in place, they don’t have to be homeless and you don’t have to live in terror that if you die, who’s going to take care of this person that you love. You don’t have work yourself to the bone, to the point of frustration and regrettable behavior, if you have some more support systems in place.

I’m not going to say we should or shouldn’t have a universal living wage, but if people weren’t so worried about going to the doctor or the hospital, and becoming hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt overnight, then they could seek care. And we wouldn’t have so many catastrophic problems.

So, I do think there’s a structural solution to that, in that we have to show people it’s a win-win. It’s not a drain on you, it’s a win-win for society as a whole, and people at all levels would feel support. And that’s why you need things like caregiver support groups, just the way you need addiction support groups. Because it is tiring and exhausting and frustrating, and sometimes disorders are characterized by poor empathy.

Autism is one of them. People with frontotemporal dementia or frontal lobe damage can have a lack of empathy. If you have maybe a certain kind of psychiatric illness, it impedes your empathy. And it’s especially hard to take care of somebody who doesn’t really understand your pain, or can’t imagine what you might be thinking about right now and it’s not a good time to interrupt.

That’s difficult. My dad, I wrote in the book, had Parkinson’s and he took dopamine medication and he was naturally impatient. So he is losing his remote to the TV and his tablet every 10 seconds, and he is like ‘come and help me get the thing!’, and I’m like ‘in a minute!’

Then you lose your dad. ‘Why did I yell at him all the time? Why didn’t I just patiently go and get him the damn remote? Only thing left he had to do is watch some TV and play on his tablet.’ But you are in a situation, you are taxed, you are stressed, you are feeling like there’s too many people pulling at you at the same time.

So, we have to have compassion for ourselves also. And that’s one of those types of meditation I think is really cool, the compassion focused.

[00:48:50] Grumbine: Sure.

[00:48:50] Preston: A compassion focused meditation helps you feel better about yourself, but also helps you connect that sense of humanity to distant others. Which I think is the thing in the beginning we talked about is often difficult.

I have love for somebody different from me, somebody far away. It’s a literal feeling you can foster that even the ancient Greeks wrote about.

[00:49:19] Grumbine: I want to finish one more thing and then I’ll let you have the last word. As far as this concept – I do wanna say this organization is a champion of universal basic needs, not necessarily universal basic income, that’s an economic discussion for another show, but in terms of providing the base survival needs, as opposed to making them dog eat dog.

To your point, why in the world should I sit there and stress over where am I going to find some weird, abstract money, so that I can take care of my cancer? Ridiculous.

[00:49:55] Preston: Right.

[00:49:55] Grumbine: There’s just so many of these things that when you understand the currency-issuing nation could do it out of thin air. It’s not a tax driven thing.

This is 100% why we’re able to just throw a couple billion at Ukraine and we can do whatever we want, as long as it isn’t direct help to the people. And that’s another capitalist formation that we’ve gotta contend with at some other time. But as far as your work goes, the pressure of trying to take care of things that could be taken care of through institutional arrangements, the alleviation of those things.

What do you think that would do to the altruistic urge, should those kinds of things be largely taken care of institutionally, as opposed to being charitably driven? What do you think eradicating that precarity would do, in terms of the altruistic urge?

[00:50:53] Preston: I don’t think you can quench the altruistic urge, because it’s part of our nature to want to care in those specific kinds of situations of acute need, and there’s always going to be acute need. Even if you live in Sweden and all the refugees were given housing, or the homeless people all have access to free food and shelter. Someone’s going to fall down on the street. Somebody’s going to have a heart attack. Somebody in your family is going to have a mental health crisis.

There’s always going to be a need for us to have this response to devastating need in our presence, that we can do something about. But I think it would make us understand individuals as deserving, which would be a really important mindset change.

And so, if you just grow up in a country where people who are unhoused, are given access to housing and food, and even wifi and a phone, which at this point is almost a universal need, then you would understand those people as deserving of the humanity of those living conditions. And so, I think it would actually benefit our worldview to grow up in an environment characterized that way.

And so, I am really, lately, obsessed with the housing crisis because the worse inequality gets, and it just keeps getting worse, the more homeless people there are. And instead of saying, ‘these poor homeless people, what can we do to help them?’ … people are saying, ‘oh, that’s gross, get that out of my street.’

[00:52:40] Grumbine: I saw that the other day, yep.

[00:52:42] Preston: And so, if they’re not understanding the humanity of the situation, but if you grow up in an environment where they have access to a locker, a shower, and the mental health support, and it’s not considered a weakness and is readily available, then you see those people as deserving of this humanity, and everybody equally deserving of this.

I think that’s an important mindset change that we haven’t yet undergone in America, and I wish that we would support. It’s tragic what’s happening to all of America’s cities with this inequality, and nobody seems willing to vote to do anything about it. Which like you started the episode by saying is incredibly frustrating.

Why are we voting against something that would benefit all of us, not just the unhoused people, but all of us trying to make rent in big cities? Which are increasingly unaffordable. And the safety of our cities would be higher, and you would be able to walk down the street at night in any city, if everyone had access to their basic needs.

[00:53:55] Grumbine: Neoliberalism has done a number on us. This is one of the areas that we focus heavily on. You’ve been a wonderful guest. Tell everybody where we can find more of your work, and if you have any other closing remarks.

[00:54:10] Preston: Well thank you so much for having me. The book, The Altruistic Urge is available on Amazon, also Columbia University Press that published the book. And my local bookstore is Literati, which I love, you can order it through them. We also have a book on conspicuous consumption, and society, and psychology, and the brain; The Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption.

Those are chapters, and there’s one by an economist, Robert Frank, in the book that I think is super engaging. And Google Scholar is free. If you just type in Google Scholar to your search engine, you can write in my name, Preston comma S.D., and my articles all come up. Or my website, if you just Google Stephanie Preston, my University of Michigan website comes up. It has access to a lot of resources.

[00:55:01] Grumbine: Fantastic. This was really good for me. You’ve just got so much information and I love trying to understand a new discipline, something outside of my normal wheelhouse. And this seems to be that cog, that’s blocking me to be able to bridge other thoughts together, is this concept that you’ve done so much work on.

And so thank you so much for sharing just a little bit of that knowledge here with us today.

And with that, my name’s Steve Grumbine, I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. We are a nonprofit, funded by your donations. Please help us out at patreon.com/realprogressives and also come to our website, realprogressives.org. My guest, Stephanie Preston, thank you so much for joining us again. Check us out next week, we’ll have another riveting episode.

We’re outta here.

[00:55:57] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy. Descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.