The primary explanation for the contents of our political beliefs is not our moral values,
is not our support for, say, equality or diversity or authority. It's our political
alliances. It's who we view as our allies and who we view as our enemies.
Hello and welcome everybody to Game Changer, a podcast by TWS Partners. My name is Florian.
This is Simon.
And this is Miriam.
And in this podcast, we explore applications of game theory in business and everyday life.
Hi, Miriam.
Hi, Flo.
I'm really excited about today's episode because we'll be talking to David Pinsof,
and I'm a big fan. He's a behavioural scientist and he's author of the blog with the funny,
interesting title, Everything is Bullshit. It's a great blog. He explores how people
rationalise and explain their behaviours. And we'll be talking about that also in today's episode.
Sounds very intriguing. And I heard he also has a new podcast called Evolutionary Psychology.
Perfect. We'll put that link in the show notes as well. And now we'll dive into the episode.
Great. Let's go.
David, many thanks for joining us on the podcast today.
Yeah, thanks for inviting me. Glad to be here.
David, we want to talk with you today about how people form beliefs, how people build alliances,
but we thought we'd start with a practical example where we can see maybe how people do that and how
it sometimes has surprising or reveals surprising contradictions. Namely, we'd like to start with a
survey that you've done together with Cards Against Humanity. Can you explain a bit when you
did that survey? What was the purpose of the survey? And can share a few of the results that
you found out?
Sure. So this survey or this poll was a series of different polls. We did them monthly throughout
2017 to 2018. And this was one of several sort of surprise gifts or stunts that we gave people as
part of our Cards Against Humanity Saves America campaign. So this was basically in response to
the Trump election. We were all kind of scared about the direction that America was taking. So
we started the stunt. And so one of probably the most popular stunt that was part of this series
that you might have heard of was when we bought land on the US-Mexico border as a way of protesting
the border wall. And we got some high-powered attorneys to sort of litigate anyone who tried
to build a wall on that land.
Oh, wow. I didn't know about that. So that's, I guess, a subject for a whole different episode.
Yeah. So it was sort of a way of protesting the border wall. And then we did some other
things as well. So people basically paid for the stunt without knowing what it would get them. And
that was one of the things that got them. And another thing that got them was a year's worth
of public opinion polls. And this was called Pulse of the Nation. And I directed this poll. So I was
responsible for sort of coming up with the questions and doing some of the preliminary
data analyses. And my only directive was just to make sure it was funny.
That sounds like a good premise.
Other than that, I could just research whatever topic I was interested in. Fortunately, at the
time, I was very interested in political alliances and political contradictions and double standards
and inconsistencies in our ideologies and where they come from. So it was a perfect opportunity
for me to really get some good data on these inconsistencies. So we covered a lot of these.
So we would ask participants sort of one question or if they agreed with one statement. And then
there were a few distractor items. And then we would ask them another question that was sort
of inconsistent with the first one to see if we could document the ideological inconsistency.
So just to give you an example. So we first asked the conservatives in our sample,
do you think that nobody deserves a free handout from the government? And then after a few other
items, we then asked them if the government should do more to help small working class towns in
America's heartland. And it turns out that around 60 percent of the conservatives agreed with both
of these statements simultaneously. Another example would be people should be more respectful of
authority, but businesses should disobey government regulations that they think are unfair.
Another one is we should be more suspicious of foreigners, but we should trust Vladimir Putin
when he said that he didn't interfere in the 2016 election. Someone's on the left. It's unfair that
corporate CEOs make millions of dollars a year, but it's fair that Hollywood movie stars make
millions of dollars a year. We shouldn't promote negative stereotypes about a group of people based
on where they were born. But people from the South are racist. Another one would be men and
women are equal in their talents and abilities, but women are better at empathising and multitasking.
So we have a bunch of these and we showed the Venn diagram and we showed that there was like a
striking degree of overlap between people who endorsed both statements with most people being
in the middle of the Venn diagram. And that was a big part of Pulse of the Nation. We also asked
some other funny questions, but a lot of people remember those double standards and the Venn
diagrams. So of course that when you tell it like that, on the one hand, it's quite funny because
it feels like people are tricked into making statements that are mutually exclusive or that
don't go well with one another. But coming back to our quote research question, what does this tell
us about how people form belief? Are people just inconsistent? Are they not thinking logically?
Or is there anything you can draw from that survey that can shine a light on why people answer that
way? Yeah, so I don't think that people are stupid. I don't think that people are thinking
illogically or irrationally. I think there is a hidden rationality to it. So I actually cited the
Pulse of the Nation in an academic paper. It was the first academic paper to cite these results.
And in that academic paper, I argued that the primary explanation for the contents of our
political beliefs is not our moral values, is not our support for say equality or diversity
or authority. It's our political alliances. It's who we view as our allies and who we view as
our enemies. And so in that paper, I sort of take great pains to try to map the political
alliance structure in the United States, which groups are left coded, which groups are right
coded. And if you reflect on all the examples I showed you, they all involve taking a slogan or
a statement that is designed to advance the interests of one group that let's say is left
coded. And then you take it out of its proper context and you apply it to a group that's
right coded. And that's where the inconsistency comes from. So for example, corporate CEOs are
right coded. Hollywood movie stars are left coded. On the right, foreigners are left coded,
but Vladimir Putin, strangely enough, is right coded. And so virtually all of these double
standards came to me while I was trying to just sort of mix and match and pick group targets that
were left coded or right coded and show that the principle is dropped as soon as it's applied
to a right coded or left coded group or the opposite of what was applied previously.
And so I think this is pretty good evidence that our so-called values or principles are actually
tactics or slogans designed to advance the interests of specific groups. And when you
apply them to different groups, it disappears. So I argue in this paper, Strange Bedfellows,
The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems, that if you map the political alliance structure
of any society, you can do a really good job of predicting the specific political beliefs that
will arise in that society. And in addition, you can do a good job of predicting the types of
inconsistencies and double standards you'll see in the political belief systems. And so the
beliefs stem directly from the political alliances and moral values, contrary to a wide variety of
approaches in political psychology, aren't really playing a primary explanatory role,
or at least that's the argument in my paper. And I can understand that what you describe
can lead to these contradictions, but that also would mean you're making a very interesting and
strong statement. You're not saying normally, I guess people would believe that I form my
beliefs first. And based on these beliefs, my moral beliefs, my moral compass, based on that,
I choose my alliances. But you say it's basically we got it the wrong way around. We choose our
alliances first. And based on that, we form our beliefs? Yes, that's correct. So one analogy I
make is to the debate over heliocentrism. So there are two models of the solar system. One
is where the sun is at the centre. One is where the earth is at the centre. And they can both
predict the motions of the planets. It's just that the geocentric model has to do way more work
predicting the motion of the planets. There are all sorts of loop-de-loops that the planets go
in their orbit around the earth. These are called epicycles. And so one model is just more elegant,
more parsimonious. It makes fewer assumptions. And that's just the Copernican model, where it's
just a bunch of concentric circles. And so similarly, I think we have two ways of understanding
the solar system of our political beliefs. One is we put our political alliances at the centre,
and another is we put our moral values at the centre. And so what I argue in the paper,
this is the argumentative strategy I take, is that if you take this moral values-centric approach,
you wind up with all sorts of weird loop-de-loops and epicycles in your model of political beliefs.
You have all these inconsistencies that are really tough to explain. I presented you some
of them. There are many more. But if you put alliances at the centre of our political solar
system, all of a sudden, these epicycles go away, and you no longer have to explain them.
They fall out elegantly from the theory. And so what I argue is that the alliance-centric
view of political beliefs is the more elegant and parsimonious model, and we should favour it.
And do I also understand that then you can also predict or explain
why people draw certain coalitions? How do you get to that point?
Sure. So this part, unfortunately, is understudied at the moment, but we do have some
empirical evidence for at least a sketch of how we choose our allies and how we form alliances.
And so in the paper, I review evidence for three different criteria we use.
One is we choose allies who are like us in some way, who are similar to us,
who might live in the same place, who might worship the same god, who might have the same
skin colour, et cetera. That's one way that we choose our allies. I mean, there's plenty of
evidence for that, obviously. And then another way we choose our allies is based off of what's
called transitivity. So transitivity, you can summarise with four statements that will probably
make you dizzy, but I'm going to say them anyway. So the first one is the enemy of my enemy is my
friend. The second one is the friend of my enemy is my enemy. The third is the enemy of my friend
is my enemy. And the fourth is the friend of my friend is my friend.
Can you just repeat those just one more time? Sure, sure. I'll slow down a little bit this
time. So the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So this is an ancient proverb. You might be
familiar with it. If we have a common enemy, that's going to bring us together. That one's
pretty intuitive. The friend of my enemy. So this is if you're associated with my enemy,
then you're my enemy. So if you're a communist sympathiser, you're a communist. If you're a Nazi
sympathiser, you're a Nazi. The third one is the enemy of my friend is my enemy. That's if you piss
off my friend, you piss off me. And then the last one is the friend of my friend is my friend. So
any friend of yours is a friend of mine. If you say, hey, Dave, I really like this person. I'll
probably be inclined to like them because they're a friend of my friend. Got it. Okay. Makes
absolute sense. So similarity, transitivity, those are two well-documented ways that we
choose our allies. The third one is a little fuzzier, a little broader and a little more
understudied, but nevertheless, I think it's very strong and very important. This is called
interdependence. So this is the degree to which we have common interests. For example, if we're both
wealthy business people, we might have a common interest in promoting libertarian ideology that
might lower our taxes and our regulatory burden. So we have common interests. If we're both Christian
fundamentalists, we might have an interest in increasing the power and status of devout
Christians in society. So we would have common interests there. If we cooperate with one another,
if we trade with one another, countries who trade with each other are less likely to go to war,
then we're more likely to form alliances. So granted a little fuzzier, but still, I think,
very important and a powerful factor in our alliances. So you could think of this as kind
of collective self-interest, or if we both have the same self-interest, then we're going to form
an alliance. So those are the three criteria that I think there's strong theoretical and empirical
evidence for them. And fortunately, that's all we need to assume to get off the ground. As soon as
we assume that we have an alliance psychology and we choose allies who are like us, who share our
enemies and our friends, and who have common interests with us, that is all we need to explain
the diversity and dynamism of alliance structures across nations and across time periods. In the
paper, I go through some of that dynamism. I show how alliances have changed in America throughout
history and how they're different in different countries and in different contexts. And I use
these criteria, similarity, transitivity, interdependence, to explain how these alliance
structures unfold. And the way you describe it with these rules or interactions that you describe,
that only a few, three of these elements you need to explain coalitions or which coalitions form,
to me, this is a very game theory ring to it, because you describe the interactions and then
you can model how the dynamics play out. And I think you have done the same thing, right? So
you have created game theoretic models to analyse the forming and involving of coalitions. Can you
explain that model a bit? Sure. So I'm currently looking at a particular game called the Simple
Majority Game that I think really captures the logic of what an alliance is. So why don't we
actually just play the Simple Majority Game right now? It's a three-player game. I think it would be
fun. Here's how it works. So I have to choose between Flo and Miriam as an ally, right? Flo has
to choose between Miriam and me. Miriam has to choose between me and Flo. Those are the decisions
we all have to make. And if any two players mutually choose each other, they form an alliance
and win one point. And the excluded third player loses one point. Okay. And if we each choose one
of the other two players, let's say we form a kind of love triangle and nobody reciprocates
the other's choice, then we all get nothing. We failed to form an alliance. We get zero.
Okay. Are you ready? We have to choose simultaneously and we can only choose one
person, right? That's correct. And so why don't you go ahead and make your choice in your head
right now. Let's play it right now. Do you all have your choice? Yeah. Okay. So I chose Flo. Flo,
who did you choose? I chose Miriam. And I chose Flo. Okay. All right. That is exactly what I
predicted. You guys have a lot of shared history. You have a lot in common. You know that you're
more familiar with each other and are more valuable partners to each other than you are with
me. It's okay. I get it. And so for many reasons, you two make very strong allies. And so it's not
surprising to me at all that you two chose each other. You have similarity. You likely have
transitivity. You surely have interdependence. It makes sense that you chose each other as allies.
So that's what I think an alliance is. It's a mutually beneficial coordinated relationship
that comes at a cost to at least some others. And in this particular example, maybe there's
also a bit of a coordination game part of this because we were just thinking, well,
is there a situation, or at least I was thinking, is there a constellation that
shines out with respect to others? And since we are two moderators, that's a natural
connection. And in this coordination environment, that might be a good focal point to go to.
Yes, exactly. So the simple majority game is in fact, in large part, a coordination game. It's
just a coordination game where we have to coordinate on who receives the benefit and
who pays the cost. And since the person or the group or the subset that pays the cost is smaller
than the subset who receives the benefit, then really it's more about who to gang up against
than who to support. It's more about who we're against than who we're for.
There's a great quote by a game theorist, I forget his name, where he says that
alliances are primarily against and only derivatively for something. So in larger
groups, let's say we're in a group of 10 and we're ganging up on one or two,
it's much easier mathematically to deconstruct our choices just by saying who we're against
than by saying the eight players or the six or seven players that we're for. It's just simpler.
And so, yes, it's a coordination game on who is going to be excluded or pay the costs relative
to some subset of insiders. Or you could also think of it as who are the insiders,
who are the outsiders. Nice. So this really can explain a lot,
I guess. So in the beginning, we were talking about political alliances, but
you also mentioned other alliances, maybe according to religion and so on.
So how does this game theory part or this game theoretic model explain how a very new movement
or a social movement gets traction? Sure, I think it potentially can. So
I'm just thinking about all the different scenarios in real life that might qualify
as a simple majority game. You could think about forming a political party as a simple majority
game and political scientists have thought about it this way. If we all prefer a policy that benefits
us but inflicts a small cost on the rest of society or on someone else,
then we all benefit by forming an alliance and advancing our political platform. And people who
are excluded from that alliance or who lose the election, they will pay the cost, but they don't
get the benefit. And so that has the three outcomes that we discussed, forming alliance,
best outcome, failing to form an alliance, second best, and excluded is the worst.
Another really interesting example that has been on my mind a lot, just because it's kind of haunting
to me, is what you might call the witch hunt game. So let's say you two, Flo and Miriam and me,
we're all certain that one of us is a witch and we just have to figure out who it is.
This creates a really interesting strategic scenario because if we're all certain and we're
just going to keep making accusations until we figure out who it is, well, then we each have a
one third chance of being found guilty, right? One of us is guilty. We're going to figure it out and
we start out in the negative. We start out with an expected payoff of negative one third
burned at the stake, right? And the only way to get out of that negative expected payoff,
to unbury yourself, is to accuse someone else of witchcraft, right? And so we're going to assume
that if two players agree that the third is a witch, then that player suffers the cost. They
get burned at the stake or whatever. And the person doesn't actually have to be a witch,
obviously. The two just have to agree that they are. So we each start out with negative one third
of the cost, let's say C. So we'll start with negative one third C. If Flo and Miriam form an
alliance against me, then their payoffs will go up to zero and my payoffs will go down to negative
C. And so right there we have the three outcomes that are needed that are ranked in the correct
order. The best outcome is if you form an alliance and you get zero. The intermediate outcome is if
we fail to form an alliance and we have the cloud of suspicion hanging over our heads, in which case
we all have negative one third C. And then the worst outcome is if you're excluded from the
alliance and you pay the cost negative C. So that is a simple majority game. It has all the ingredients
necessary for being a simple majority game. What's interesting is that the best outcome is zero,
but that doesn't matter. All that matters is that the three outcomes are ranked in the correct order.
And so you have the exact same kinds of alliances and exact same kinds of strategies that will work
in the witch hunt game as will work in any other kind of alliance game, including forming political
parties or figuring out whose stuff we should take and redistribute. So that's what's interesting
about the witch hunt game. And so this suggests one possible avenue by which a social movement
might start is if there's paranoia in society about who is a traitor, who is an enemy, who's
a communist, that can get this witch hunt game started and get people forming alliances and
accusing others and ganging up on others merely to raise their payoffs to zero. And it's in everyone's
interest to do that, even if they don't really even think that there are witches necessarily.
It's still in their strategic interest to play the game and to accuse others. A similar thing
could occur if something bad happens, a drought, a famine, or flood, and we're looking to point the
finger at someone. We don't know who that someone is. In that case, people have a strategic interest
in blaming it on their political enemies, and that will often happen in the wake of various crises,
economic downturns, natural disasters, etc. And so you can lean back on your existing strategies
in the event of a witch hunt game. You're not going to accuse your allies of witchcraft. If
someone's similar to you, you won't accuse them. If someone shares your allies and enemies, you
won't accuse them. If someone is interdependent with you, you're not going to accuse them. At
the same time, if someone is in conflict with you, you're going to accuse them. There's some
interesting empirical evidence that in real life witch hunt games, so in sub-Saharan Africa where
witchcraft belief is still tragically widespread, there is some evidence that people are more
likely to accuse their competitors, that witchcraft accusations often arise from disputes over wealth
or status, or between co-wives in a polygynous marriage where there's competition over the
husband's resources. So it looks like in a real life witch hunt game, people are targeting their
competitors or people who are negatively interdependent with them, and that is the
same strategy you would expect in any other kind of alliance game, like an alliance game to form
political parties. Very interesting, yeah. It seems like this simple majority game has a lot of
examples. Yes, it really does. It's one of the most criminally understudied games, I think,
in the social sciences, and I'm trying to rectify that by writing a paper on it. Fantastic,
and then we're looking forward to more. Switching the topic slightly, you're also working on
something that might be related, which is humour, and we're very interested in that because it's a
very interesting topic to be studying that, of course. How are you studying it? Are you also
using game theory to do that? The short answer is yes. It's not quite as strategic. It's more just
about modelling the selection pressures behind it, but yes, I am using math models to try to figure
out what the function of humour is. It sounds like fun. It is a lot of fun. I remember I originally
had the idea. There wasn't any math. I just had the basic idea, and I mentioned it to someone at a
research conference, and they're like, that's a great idea. Do you have any math? I'm like, oh,
great. Now I have to figure out how to mathematically model this, or no one will take me seriously,
and so I eventually figured out how to model it, and I actually think it helped to clarify the
ideas in my head and make them more precise and led to some new insights that I hadn't otherwise
had just by trying to model it. This is a slightly different game. The commonality is it's also a
coordination game, but what's different is that nobody loses in this coordination game. No one
gets burned at the stake, thankfully. It's just we all win together or we all lose together,
and we win by just coordinating by getting on the same page. The simplest example of this kind
of game that I think humour revolves around is we're both trying to pass each other in a narrow hallway,
and so we have two options. We can either go left or go right. The other person has two options.
They can go left or they can go right, and the two players win if they go in opposite directions
and successfully pass each other and make it to their respective destinations. The players both
lose if they move in the same direction and bump into each other, and they continue losing if they
continue doing that and continue dancing back and forth trying to pass each other in the hallway.
What's notable about that is that when we're in that situation and we're dancing back and
forth trying to pass someone, what arises a lot of the time is laughter. We find that situation
humorous, and I think that is a very good microcosm of what laughter is and what function
it serves, and I think you can extend the logic of that hallway interaction to most, if not all,
of our jokes and our humorous interactions. All, I think, or most, I think, coordination failures.
Failures of one person or another to recognise what our social conventions are, what roles they
should be playing, who's high status or low status, what words correspond to which things, what the
person meant, what they didn't mean, what the right thing to do is in this situation. These are all
different kinds of coordination failures, and I think humour revolves around them, and so that's
basically the central idea is that we're constantly playing these coordination games. Our culture is
made up of them, and we need some kind of mechanism for figuring out when a mix-up has occurred, when
we're failing to coordinate, and I think that's what our sense of humour evolved to do. It evolved
to detect these kinds of mix-ups and coordination failures and rectify them, adjust, adapt, signal
them with laughter. We all know that there's been a mix-up, and we don't have to take this seriously
anymore. We know that we're not dancing with each other or trying to hurt each other when we're
passing each other in the hallway. This is all just a big misunderstanding. We know that we're
just play fighting. We're not real fighting. We know that this communication mix-up, we shouldn't
treat it as serious communication. We know that it was just a misunderstanding. That's what laughter
is signalling. It's signalling there's been a mix-up. I know that you know that I know that there's been
a mix-up, and we can nullify the costs or any costs that might have otherwise occurred from this mix-up
and just treat them as no harm, no foul. And so that's the basic idea of what humour and laughter
are all about. Well, great. Obviously, this very structured approach to humour
appears to us as Germans. I would like to study it myself. I'm very jealous of your research topic.
Another question, though, you said earlier the commonality is the coordination part, but could
it also extend beyond that? Could humour also be a tool to signal alliance or to test alliance or
be seen in a way in that alliance context? Yeah, I think that's probably true. So there's an
interesting alternative theory of humour that I think is actually quite complementary with my
approach called the encryption theory of humour. And the idea here is that we send encrypted
messages through our jokes that can only be decrypted by members of our subculture.
So getting a joke, that's a kind of decryption, right? So what the function of a joke is,
it is a covert signal of we're in the same subculture, we have the same shared information,
and you don't. So these are inside jokes. And what a joke can do is it can covertly
probe who's a part of your group, who's on your side and who's not without alienating anyone.
So Flo and Miriam can tell a joke that they'll get and I won't get. And that's going to piss
me off less than if they just said, screw you, David, go away. We're better than them. So it's
a way for Flo and Miriam to covertly establish their alliance without threatening me, or at
least I would be in the dark about what was going on. And so that's the idea there is that some of
our jokes function to covertly probe and test and establish alliances. And certainly a lot of
political humour fits this. I think another way in which humour intersects with politics is that
the target of a joke, the person who was failing to coordinate, who didn't get it, they're often
seen as a bad social partner. They're not the kind of person that you want to partner up with,
work with, marry, follow in a leadership context, et cetera, because they're just going to have a
bad time coordinating with you. They're going to misunderstand you. They're going to bump into
things, et cetera. They're a fool. And so often humour has a kind of offensive component where
it's mocking someone and it's belittling their status or their value as a social partner.
And so politics, because it's often about attacking the other side's reputation,
we often try to use political humour and political satire to make the other side look foolish,
to make them look like bad social partners. And that is obviously in our strategic interest,
because if the other side looks like a bad, foolish, or stupid social partner,
well, everyone's going to take your side in the conflict. And so both sides engage in this kind
of political mudslinging and use humour as a political weapon. So those are two ways in which
humour intersect with alliances. We might use it to covertly establish who is allied with whom,
and we might use it to attack our political enemies. I like the first one much better.
As a final question, maybe, do you have a favourite joke you would like to share?
Honestly, not a huge fan of the joke format. I just find it kind of cliche and tiresome. Although
I was a big fan of Mitch Hedberg. He's a comedian, sadly passed away, but he had a kind of style
comedy where he would just deliver these one-liners. And the way he delivered them was so
hilarious. It was often more in the delivery than in the content. And the jokes, they were kind of
hard to describe. They were kind of hard to explain what was funny about them. But I think what was
funny about them is that they were subverting the expectations about what a joke was and what
comedy was. I'm kind of into those meta-level jokes where I sometimes call them anti-jokes,
where they're sort of jokes making fun of comedy itself. And Mitch Hedberg was an expert
in those kinds of jokes. Let me see if I can remember one. So one of my favourites was,
he would say in his Southern Drawl, whenever I'm going to shave, I think to myself,
there's probably someone else on the planet who's shaving right now. So I say, I'm going to shave too.
Nice. I like it.
That one stuck with me for whatever reason. I sort of apply that to everything in my life.
If I'm going out, someone's probably on a podcast right now. I'm going to go on a podcast too.
Yeah. It feels like you're connected to other people. You don't even know.
Yeah, exactly.
Fantastic. Well, this was great. Thank you very much for your time and explaining all of your
research to us. It was great having you.
Thank you. It was my pleasure. Many, many thanks.
We were talking to David Pinsof. He's behavioural scientist, author of the blog
Everything is Bullshit, and co-host of the podcast Evolutionary Psychology, the podcast.
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