Are You Willing to Challenge Your Own Tribe? | Robert Wright
Robert Wright, author of "Why Buddhism Is True," discusses how mindfulness meditation, cognitive empathy, and engaging with opposing views can help humanity overcome evolutionary biases and tribalism to address existential global challenges. He emphasizes the importance of making friendships across ideological lines.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Introduction: Challenging Tribalism and the Apocalypse Aversion Project
Meditation as a Tool for Overcoming Biases
Confirmation Bias and the Role of Emotion
Navigating Social Media with Mindfulness
The Challenge and Pain of Bucking Your Tribe
Cognitive Empathy vs. Emotional Empathy
Developing Cognitive Empathy Through Media and Conversation
Understanding Attribution Error and Essence of Badness
How Natural Selection and Others Manipulate Us
The Apocalypse Aversion Project: Global Challenges and Solutions
Addressing Concerns About Meditation Leading to Apathy
Enlightened Self-Interest and Clear Seeing for Happiness
Optimism and Learning from Trauma as a Species
Robert Wright's Personal Meditation Practice and Evolution
Exploring Different Meditation Techniques and Loving-Kindness
7 Key Concepts
Cognitive Biases
These are built-in psychological impediments that often seem cognitive but are primarily driven by feelings. They lead us to notice and embrace evidence consistent with pre-existing views while rejecting or critically interrogating contradictory evidence, causing problems like tribalism and misjudgment.
Confirmation Bias
This is a natural inclination to favor information that confirms one's existing beliefs or hypotheses. It's often driven by an emotional 'affection' for supporting evidence and a 'hostility' towards conflicting evidence, leading to uncritical acceptance or rejection of information.
Cognitive Empathy
This is the ability to understand another person's perspective without necessarily agreeing with it or feeling sympathy for them. It focuses purely on comprehending their viewpoint and the reasons behind their actions, which is crucial for navigating disagreements and complex social landscapes.
Emotional Empathy
This is the classic form of empathy, involving the ability to feel another person's pain or share their emotional state. While valuable, it differs from cognitive empathy, which focuses on intellectual understanding rather than shared feeling, though the two can sometimes influence each other.
Attribution Error
This bias describes how we explain behavior: for friends/allies, good deeds are dispositional, bad deeds situational; for enemies, bad deeds are dispositional, good deeds situational. It's often driven by a subconscious 'sense of essence' we attribute to people, coloring our perceptions and judgments.
Emptiness (Buddhism)
A Mahayana Buddhist doctrine suggesting that we tend to attribute inherent, fixed 'essence' to things and people, but this essence is a projection. Things are actually 'empty' of such intrinsic essence, implying that our perceptions of inherent 'goodness' or 'badness' are often created by our feelings.
Non-Zero Sum Problems
These are situations where it's possible for all parties involved to achieve a win-win outcome, rather than a zero-sum scenario where one's gain is another's loss. Global challenges like climate change and arms control are examples where collective cooperation can lead to mutual benefit.
10 Questions Answered
Humanity needs to overcome cognitive biases to address existential problems like climate change, arms control, and bioweapons, as these biases prevent collective action and wise policy development at national and international levels.
Mindfulness meditation helps by making us attentive to the feelings that drive biases; for confirmation bias, it helps us notice the 'affection' for confirming evidence and 'hostility' for contradictory evidence, allowing us to respond more thoughtfully.
Pushing back against one's tribe requires courage to overcome fear of disapproval; mindfulness can help by observing and loosening the grip of fear, and practical 'tricks' like tweeting and then stepping away can also manage the immediate emotional blowback.
Cognitive empathy is understanding another person's perspective without necessarily sharing their feelings or agreeing with them, while emotional empathy is the classic sense of feeling their pain or sharing their emotions.
Cognitive empathy can be developed through mindfulness meditation, which reduces hostility and allows for clearer understanding, and by varying one's media diet to understand how events are processed by different groups.
Attribution error causes us to attribute good behavior of friends to their character and bad behavior to circumstances, while for perceived enemies, bad behavior is attributed to their character and good behavior is often dismissed or explained away.
Yes, natural selection designed humans not for happiness but to spread genes, leading to traits like craving and anxiety that were adaptive in ancestral environments but can become dysfunctional in modern contexts.
While some fear meditation leads to apathy, highly attained meditators often show deep caring and effective engagement with the world, using their practice to pursue passions constructively rather than with irrational rage.
Yes, for non-zero sum global problems, enlightened self-interest can motivate win-win outcomes, helping to keep the planet together and avoid widespread harm, even if it doesn't solve all problems of justice.
While total annihilation is unlikely, Robert Wright hopes humanity can overcome nationalism and tribalism without needing epic trauma. He sees encouraging signs in growing awareness of biases, the spread of mindfulness, and humanity's capacity to learn from past mistakes.
9 Actionable Insights
1. Cultivate Awareness to Overcome Biases
Practice mindfulness meditation to become aware of the feelings (affection or hostility) that drive cognitive biases like confirmation bias, allowing you to loosen their grip and see the world more clearly. This awareness is crucial for making wiser decisions, being a better citizen, and ultimately leading to greater happiness and reduced suffering.
2. Develop Cognitive Empathy for Understanding
Actively work to understand the perspectives of others, especially those with whom you disagree or feel hostile towards, without necessarily agreeing with or sympathizing with them. This understanding, which mindfulness can facilitate by abating hostility, is a critical strength for navigating complex social and ideological landscapes.
3. Courageously Question Your Tribe’s Views
Develop the courage to push back against your ideological group when they uncritically embrace views, take uncharitable attitudes, or overgeneralize about ’the other side.’ Mindfulness can help overcome the fear of disapproval from your peers, enabling you to speak out for more constructive dialogue.
4. Diversify Your Information Sources
Actively consume news and media from outlets that process events differently from your own ideological perspective. This practice helps you understand how ’the other side’ thinks, providing valuable insight into their mindset and avoiding the reinforcement of your own biases.
5. Build Cross-Ideological Friendships
Intentionally form friendships with people who hold different political or ideological views. Face-to-face conversation with those you disagree with has a civilizing effect, making it harder to demonize them and fostering mutual understanding and potential influence.
6. Recognize Attribution Error Bias
Be mindful of the fundamental attribution error, where you tend to attribute negative actions of ’enemies’ to their character and positive actions of ‘friends’ to their character, while excusing negative actions of friends by circumstance. Consciously consider situational factors when judging others’ behavior, especially those you dislike.
7. Engage Social Media Strategically
Avoid the urge to uncritically retweet content that demonizes ’the other tribe’ or confirms your existing biases, as this fuels an unhealthy incentive structure. Instead, notice the feelings driving these impulses, and consider disengaging temporarily or returning later to respond thoughtfully, rather than reactively.
8. Adapt Your Meditation Practice
Regularly reassess and adapt your meditation practice, as what works for a while may change. Lower expectations, experiment with different timings (e.g., evening sessions), or explore new techniques like intermittent awareness throughout the day, rather than adhering dogmatically to one path.
9. Cultivate Loving Kindness Meditation
Engage in loving kindness meditation, starting by sending good wishes to an ’easy person’ (like a child or pet) to build concentration and positive feelings. Once the ’engine is revved,’ gently include yourself in the practice, and then extend it to others, including those you find challenging, to foster compassion and a kinder relationship with yourself.
7 Key Quotes
I think that we need to move at least some increment in the direction of enlightenment. I think of enlightenment as being on a spectrum, kind of. Like, I know I'll never get to full-on enlightenment. I don't know how many people have, but I think all people can make at least baby steps toward it. And I think lots of people need to do that if we're going to pass these tests as a species.
Robert Wright
The phrase cognitive bias is kind of a misnomer. The word cognitive sounds so kind of detached from emotion and feeling, but I think what really drives these biases is feeling.
Robert Wright
The impediment to courage is fear, right? It's like fear of what people whose esteem you want will think of you, right? People in your ideological group. There's a kind of fear you have to overcome to step out and say something that may be unpopular.
Robert Wright
Understanding the perspective of someone, even someone you think has done abhorrent things, needn't mean absolving them of responsibility for what they've done. Even if it leads to compassion, we can be compassionate toward people and still think that as a practical matter, they need to go to prison.
Robert Wright
If you're using this website to only follow people you agree with, you're doing it wrong.
Ian Bremmer (quoted by Dan Harris)
Awareness is liberation. Awareness can be liberation. As they say in Buddhist circles, simple but not easy, right? It's a simple principle, but maintaining the awareness is challenging.
Robert Wright
The reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is that we don't see the world clearly. That's one of these amazing, if true, things, right? What it suggests is that this one key, seeing the world more clearly, can help you and can help other people.
Robert Wright
2 Protocols
Managing Social Media Engagement to Reduce Reactivity
Robert Wright- Notice the feeling that accompanies the inclination to retweet or embrace content, or to reject it.
- Recognize the 'affection' for evidence supporting your worldview and 'hostility' for contradictory evidence.
- Be more careful about what you retweet or accept by acknowledging these feelings.
- When tweeting something that might provoke blowback, tweet it and then turn off your computer to avoid real-time emotional reactions.
- Return to the conversation later (e.g., an hour later) to reply to those who need a response, rather than engaging immediately in a 'roller coaster ride'.
Spring Washam's Loving-Kindness Meditation Technique
Dan Harris (describing Spring Washam's teaching)- Start by sending good vibes to an 'easy person' (e.g., a loved one or pet) for an extended period, building concentration and positive physical sensations.
- Once the 'engine is revved' with positive feelings, gently 'shove yourself in' by directing loving-kindness towards yourself.
- If self-compassion feels difficult or 'dry', return to sending loving-kindness to the easy person to recharge the positive feelings.
- Repeat this cycle, using the easy person as a 'booster' to cultivate a kinder relationship with yourself and eventually extend compassion to others, including those you perceive as enemies.