How Moral Grandstanding Is Ruining Our Public Discourse
Episode Stats
Summary
Brandon Warmke is a professor of philosophy and the co-author of the book, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. In this episode, he explains the difference between moral grandstanding and virtue signaling, and why it's important to distinguish between the two.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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It's hard not to notice how heated and divided our public discourse has gotten, especially
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online. People insult and vilify each other, take un-nuanced positions, and seem to be
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competing as to who can seem the most committed to a cause or the most outraged about an issue.
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You may have called some of this behavior virtue signaling, but my guest today says
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that it's better described as moral grandstanding, and he studied the phenomenon, not in terms
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of eye-roll-inducing antidotes, but through the lens of both philosophy and empirical research.
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His name is Brandon Warmke, and he's professor of philosophy and the co-author of the book
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Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Brandon begins by defining moral grandstanding
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as the act of engaging in moral talk for self-promotion and status, and explains why he thinks moral
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grandstanding is a better term for this behavior than virtue signaling. We then get into the
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difference between prestige and dominant status, and how moral grandstanding can be used to
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obtain both types. We then discuss why it's tricky to know if you or someone else is engaging in
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moral grandstanding, before turning to whether there's a personality type or side of the political
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spectrum that's more likely to grandstand. Brandon then delves into why moral grandstanding isn't
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just an annoyance on social media, but comes with real cost to society. And we enter conversation
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with what we can do about moral grandstanding. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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All right, Brandon Warmke, welcome to the show.
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So you are a philosopher, and you, no, literally, you are a PhD in philosophy. You specialize in moral,
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social, and political philosophy. And you co-authored a book with a guy named Justin Tosi
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called Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. And it's all about moral grandstanding.
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So let's talk about those definitions. How do you guys define moral grandstanding? What is that?
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The simplest way to think about, first of all, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I've been
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reading your blog for, I think, since the beginning. So this is actually really cool for me.
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So the simplest way to think about moral grandstanding, if you were to put it on a
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bumper sticker, is that moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. So
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people who get on Twitter, or a cable news channel, or even maybe around their friends,
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and they make a contribution to some conversation about morality and politics,
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largely because they want people to be impressed with them. They say something about immigration,
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or about COVID, not so much to say something true or to persuade, but because they want
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recognition. They want to impress people with their moral status. And so, you know,
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grandstanders can say all kinds of stuff. I mean, they might say something like, you know,
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as someone who has long fought for the poor, I find all these proposals to eliminate rent control
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laws disgusting. If you think these are even worth listening to, you don't care about poverty in this
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country, hashtag do better, right? You can imagine someone saying like that, saying something like
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that. And, you know, as we'll see in a minute, just saying something like that doesn't count as
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grandstanding. Grandstanding involves wanting to say something because you want to impress people.
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Okay. All right. So it's moral talk plus seeking status. I'm sure people listening to this description
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are thinking, well, that's virtue signaling. That's a word that's come to, you know,
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has arisen, become part of the common vocabulary, I'd say in the past five years.
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How would you all differentiate moral grandstanding from virtue signaling? Or is there even a difference?
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So this is a great question. For all practical purposes, I think that what people often mean
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when they talk about virtue signaling is just what we mean when we talk about grandstanding. I think
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they have the same basic idea in mind, which is people contributing to discussion about politics
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in order to show off their moral bona fides to try to impress others. However, I have to say,
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so we started, Justin Tosi and I started writing about this stuff in 2014. We were both PhD students
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at the University of Arizona. And around that time, you know, looking at Facebook or Twitter,
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it just looked to us like a lot of people started using social media differently. It was almost like
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they were releasing like corporate press releases, like I stand against this, I'm for this. And at the
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time in 2014, the only term that we knew of to describe this sort of behavior was moral grandstanding.
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I mean, President Obama had accused Republicans of it, Republicans had accused Obama of it. And the
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term actually goes back to the 1800s. It was a term that originates from baseball, where, you know,
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a player would like make some impressive catch on the outfield and sort of like roll around and played
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the grandstands. And so these, these were the grandstand players, these sort of showy,
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showy baseball players. So the term has been in existence for a long time. And so when we started
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writing about grandstanding in our philosophical work, that's all we knew. Now, flash forward to about
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2015 or 16, this new term virtue signaling, you know, it's sort of weird, it feels like it's been
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with us longer than it has, but it's a relatively sort of new term in public discourse, this term
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virtue signaling came into prominence. And for whatever reason, I think because it kind of sounds
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smart or sounds cool or something, that term has taken prominence. And so, you know, often when we talk
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about our work, people say, oh, you mean virtue signaling? And we have to say, yes. So, however,
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I have to say, I actually do think that virtue signaling is not the best term to describe this
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sort of behavior. And I'll just briefly mention a couple of reasons why this is why we think this is
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so. So if you look at how psychologists and biologists or economists use the term
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signaling, you can mean a couple different things by it. So one way to signal something is to
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intentionally try to get people to think something about you. So I recently turned 40, Brett, and you
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can imagine, you know, I go through a midlife crisis, and I buy a fiberglass speedboat in a, you know,
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convertible, and I, you know, I start driving around town, and I want to signal something about me,
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right? I'm still young. And that's something that I can do more or less consciously. I'm doing it
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deliberately in full awareness of what I'm doing. That's one kind of signaling. But there's another
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kind of signaling that people talk about. And that happens below the level of awareness. So think about
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like, you know, female chimpanzees, their rear ends, like swell up when they're when they're most
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fertile. And that's a signal to the male chimps that it's time, it's time to get to business. But
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that signal is not something that that chimpanzees are intentionally doing. They're not, they're not
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saying, okay, activate, you know, the butt signal. That's not what they're doing. It just happens
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naturally. And yet, it's still a signal. Okay, so why do I say all this? Because there's this
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ambiguity built into virtue signaling, people often say things like, well, what's wrong with virtue
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signaling? What's wrong simply being seen doing something virtuous or good? And we have no problem
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with people merely being seen doing something good. That's not necessarily a problem. Our complaint
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is when people use public discourse intentionally, deliberately to show off how good they think they
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are. And so virtue signaling, it's just ambiguous between these two different ways of saying something
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about yourself. And so for that reasons, and that, you know, that that reason and others that we go
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into in the book, we think that virtue signaling opens itself up to all kinds of confusion. Now,
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we're not going to get people to stop using that term that that ship has sailed. But we do think that
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a lot of the frustration or the confusion about the term virtue signaling, it's big, it's become
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conscripted into the culture wars. Those are good reasons to talk about grandstanding because it avoids
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And also, moral grandstanding, you all focus on moral talk. So it's not just behavior, because you can
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see, you know, someone who, I don't know, drives a Prius, for example. And so like, well, that guy's
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virtue signaling. You guys say, well, maybe, maybe not. If they talk about it and make a big deal about it on
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social media with their friends, that's moral grandstanding because there's like talk involved, whether
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that's talking to someone face to face or typing out text.
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That's right. Yeah, that's a nice point. I mean, one of the things we point out in the book is
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grandstanding just refers to your contributions to public discourse. But as you rightly know,
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you can, you can virtue signal simply with your non-linguistic behavior, you know, as you, as you
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said, you know, driving a speedboat or, you know, buying a Cadillac or something, those things can signal
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something about me without ever uttering a word. And because we're really interested in how people
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talk about morality and politics, that's another reason to avoid this talk about signaling.
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All right. So moral grandstanding, there's moral talk, and it's done with the desire for recognition
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or status. We want people to think something about us, some, some, particularly something good about us.
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And in the book, you talk about, there are two ways we can gain status. There's prestige and
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dominance. So I guess I think it'd be helpful to talk about the difference between the two
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types of status, prestige and dominance, and then how moral grandstanding can allow you to achieve
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Good. So one way to think about grandstanding is that grandstanders are in it for the status,
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right? They're in it because they're trying to promote their own brand or promote their
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reputation, make themselves look good. And what psychologists tell us is that there's two main
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ways to try to gain social status. I mean, we are status-seeking creatures. Like
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it or not, this is just what homo sapiens do. I mean, it's up there with like the drives for sex
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and food and relationships. And, you know, status-seeking is just one of these things we do.
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It's very important to us. And one way to seek status is by seeking what psychologists call
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prestige. And a very simple way to think about prestige is that when you have high prestige,
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people look up to you. And they might look up to you because of your talent, right? So you're a world-class
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tennis player. They might look up to you because of your knowledge. Maybe you're a Nobel laureate
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in, you know, chemistry or something, or they look up to you because of your wealth. You know,
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you were able to, you know, create something that lots of people want. And so when you're high
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prestige, people look up to you. And so that's, that's one way to gain status. Another way to gain
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status is a little darker, and that is by dominance. And whereas with prestige, when you
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have it, people look up to you. When you have dominant status, people fear you. And this might
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be, you know, with our ancestors, this, this might've been because you were physically imposing.
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I would not have had much dominant status in our ancient ancestors, but some people, you know,
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Shaquille O'Neal or someone would have had a massive dominant status because they're physically
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imposing. Now, what does this have to do with grandstanding? Well, if you think about what
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a lot of people do online, just think about what happens on Twitter or cable news. Some people use
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moral talk because they want prestige. They want people to look up to them for their moral insight.
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They want to be thought of as morally enlightened, somehow morally special, some kind of moral
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exemplar. They want to be seen often as being among the angels. They're really on the right side of
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history. So, so some grandstanders and in our, some of our social scientific empirical work,
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what we've discovered is that among the grandstanders, the grandstanders who seek prestige are the more
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common sort. They want to be seen as, you know, really morally impressive, but there is this darker
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form of grandstanding where people grandstand for dominance. They'll use morality as a cudgel to
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shame or humiliate doxing people, you know, maybe de-anonymizing someone on Twitter, posting their
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phone numbers or their emails. And they do this for status, right? They want to push, you know,
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their enemies down and they want to look impressive and powerful to their in-group.
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And so one helpful way to think about grandstanding is that people are using morality to seek status.
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And so you can think of this in terms of prestige and you can think of it in terms of dominance.
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Okay. And what do you guys have done research on this? Does, does grandstanding actually work
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as a way to get, get status, either prestige or dominance?
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Well, I'll be honest. We don't know from our studies so far, the extent to which grandstanding
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is successful. And by successful, I just mean that you actually get people to think things about you.
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And, you know, you can think of this in many ways, like bragging. I mean, you might think bragging
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sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't. And I think the same thing is true with grandstanding. I think
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sometimes it does work. Sometimes you are able to convince people and sometimes you're not. And
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we think there are two main factors that go into whether you're successful at grandstanding. One
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is you're more likely to be successful in your grandstanding among your in-group, among people
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who vaguely share your values, like you think you're on the right side and so on. The best,
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the best illustration of this, I think is a few years ago, you or some of your listeners may recall
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at the Golden Globes. Meryl Streep did a little speech shortly after the election of Donald Trump.
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And she said, you know, her voice, she'd lost her voice and she begged their forgiveness and pardon
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because she was screaming in lamentations and sorrow all week because of the election.
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And if you looked at the responses of this, so I don't know if that was grandstanding or not,
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it's hard to tell. But let's just suppose it was for the sake of discussion. The people in that room,
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the Hollywood people and on Twitter thought this was like the bravest thing. This was amazing. This
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was beautiful, speaking truth to power and so on. And then you look at, you know, maybe Republican or
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right-leaning media and you saw, oh, she's just grandstanding. She's, you know, of course,
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she's just hamming this up and making a big deal. Of course, she wasn't screaming in lamentation.
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She's just trying to impress people. And so you really saw this divergent reaction. And so I do
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think that your grandstanding is generally more successful among people who like you or like your
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values. Your grandstanding is also going to be more successful if it matches roughly what people
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already think of you. In other words, if your grandstanding is inconsistent with what people
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already believe about you, they're less likely to buy it. And the best example of this is Harvey
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Weinstein a few years ago. So Harvey Weinstein, this Hollywood mogul, you know, it came out that
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he had allegedly assaulted and, you know, dozens of women over the years. And yet throughout his
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career, he had been propping up and talking about feminist causes and how important women were to
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the Hollywood industry. And even after he got caught, so he released this statement where he said,
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you know, he's going to start a scholarship for women and he's going to do it for his mom. And I think a lot
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of people across the political divide thought this was just blatant grandstanding. And the interesting
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thing is that no one bought it. Like no one thought, oh, I guess he does care about women.
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Why? Because it was inconsistent with his other behavior that had come to light. And so I think
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grandstanding is like one of these, it's like lying, it's like bragging. Sometimes it works,
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sometimes it doesn't. Very, I hesitate to use the word skillful, but very skillful grandstanders
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know how to raise their status, at least with their end group.
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All right. So I'm sure people are listening to this and they, okay, grandstanding, it's moral talk
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with the desire to seek recognition. But people will be like, well, how do I know if I'm, or if I
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am, or if someone else is grandstanding or not? Like I could be talking this moral talk because I
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actually believe in this cause. I'm not grandstanding. So, I mean, how do you guys figure that out
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between the difference between actual legitimate moral talk or whether it's being driven by this
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Yeah, it's tough. So our hearts are a mystery, even to ourselves. It's often difficult to know,
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you know, we find ourselves doing something and say, well, why did I do that? Like, well,
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I told this to myself at the time, but was that my real motivation? I think that happens to us quite
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frequently. So it's true that our motivations for why we do the things we do, not just with
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grandstanding, but just in general are often opaque to us. So, you know, think about, you know, you're
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on a date, you know, maybe a first date with someone and you order a salad or you order something
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healthy, let's say, you know, iceberg lettuce. Now you might order a salad because you want to impress
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a date who wants to, you know, who happens to be a vegetarian, but you might also have this
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motivation like, oh yeah, but you know, it's also healthy. It's good for me. And so you, you know,
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you, you order the salad. And so in that case, you have these mixed motivations. There's lots of
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desires that go into doing the things that we do. And I think that's just part of life.
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That's right. Yeah, sure. This happens all the time, you know. So with grandstanding, you know,
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you might find yourself saying something because you want to seek status or impress others,
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but also because maybe you really do believe what you're saying. And, and so on our view,
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what makes something grandstanding is the strength of your desire to impress other people. If you're
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really strongly motivated to impress other people, that's going to be grandstanding. Now you may not
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be aware of this. I mean, this is just a tricky part of our psychology. And I, but I think this
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is true with lots of parts of our lives. When you think about bragging, sometimes you might say
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something that's a little self-serving or braggy in the moment, you don't really realize it. And
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you're laying at bed at night and you think, oh man, I was a jerk. Like that was really self-serving.
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And so you realize what your true motivations perhaps were. And so it's very difficult to know,
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even among our, you know, when you're reflecting on ourselves, whether we're grandstanding or not,
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we do give this test in the book. It's a kind of rule of thumb for determining whether someone,
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even yourself is grandstanding. And that is, would I be disappointed if I said this thing and no one
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walked away thinking I was morally special, morally enlightened? If you think you would be disappointed
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if no one thought that, chances are you're grandstanding. So yeah, you're, I mean, it's,
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look, it's very difficult to tell in our own case and it's even harder to tell. I mean,
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we can talk about this too. It's harder to tell in others. And this is why, you know,
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it's very impractical and probably unfair to go around just calling people grandstanders and
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accusing them of it. Yeah. We'll talk about that in a bit. You know, this idea of multiple desires
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driving behavior and it's sort of mixed in with like, it seems like a sense of altruism,
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but there's also some self-interest involved. It reminds me of the founding fathers,
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particularly George Washington. So I think the story we tell ourselves in America as Americans,
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like, well, these guys, they were all, it's all about freedom. They wanted rights to govern
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themselves, taxation without representation, all that stuff. But I interviewed a guy a couple of years
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ago who wrote about the concept of American honor. And he made this interesting case that
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that was part of the rhetoric that, you know, like the founding fathers really,
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they believed in that, but there was like some mixture of self-interest. And he talked about
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George Washington. The thing that really, for a long time, we always forget that George Washington
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was an officer in the British military, right? The thing that turned him was he finally realized he
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would never be able to advance in rank because he wasn't considered a full British, like he was a
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colonist. And once he realized that, he's like, I'm done with these guys. Sayonara. I'm going to,
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I'm going to start fighting against them because I'm not going to be able to get that status or that
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honor that I want. So there was sort of this mixture of, yeah, it was altruistic. He was fighting
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for higher ideals, but there's also, yeah, he wanted, he had some self-interest as well.
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Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a great story. I do think we often have a rosy view, a too rosy view
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of many important historical figures or moral reformers. I mean, I think a lot of these people
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certainly had good motivations, but you know, they also, people want to be famous. People want to be
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liked. People want to be accepted and have status. I think this explains a lot. I mean, so I'm an academic
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and if you look at what a lot of academics say about morality and politics, I often wonder,
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you know, do you really, do you really believe that? Or is this an easy way to fit in and seek
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status and conform? Because that's just the, that's often the path of least resistance. And so,
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you know, I think the takeaway from thinking about our psychologies is we are, we are complex and
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mysterious creatures, even to ourselves. And we can grandstand or brag or status seek,
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you know, or even deceive often without even in the moment knowing that we're doing it.
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Is there a type of person who is more likely to engage in moral grandstanding?
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Yes. Narcissists. It's probably not a surprise. So, you know, we've done over the past three or four
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years with the psychologist, Joshua Grubbs, who works on narcissism and entitlement. One thing we found
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is that people who are highly motivated to grandstand are also very likely to be narcissists. And there's
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a few different kinds of narcissism. One kind is what's called narcissistic extroversion. And these
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are people who, I'm sure you've met people like this, are always talking about their accomplishments.
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They're kind of, look at me, look at what I did. I'm so great. And narcissistic extroverts are very
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likely to grandstand for prestige. Again, this is not that surprising. There's also a form of
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narcissism called narcissistic antagonism. And these are people who are much less pleasant to be around.
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They tend to have what's called a darker sort of personality traits. You know, they seek power,
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they dominate others. They want to bring themselves up by pushing others down. And again, as you might
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imagine, narcissistic antagonists are highly correlated with grandstanding for dominance.
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And so, you know, chances are, if you meet someone who's a narcissist, or if you are yourself a
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narcissist, you know, you're probably going to be, you know, to the extent that you're talking about
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morality and politics, you're probably grandstanding. But there's also some interesting political
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correlations. Now, as it turns out, at least as far as our research goes, roughly speaking,
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people on the right and people on the left are no more likely to grandstand than the other. So,
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you know, if you're a conservative, you are no more or less likely to grandstand than someone who's a
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progressive or liberal. However, as it turns out, what we did find is that the more extreme you are,
00:24:04.100
in other words, the further to the right that you see yourself, or the further to the left that you
00:24:09.960
see yourself, you are more likely to grandstand. So, you know, if you think of it in terms of a U
00:24:15.560
curve, people that are roughly in the middle, or center right, or center left, are probably not
00:24:20.940
doing all that much grandstanding. The people at the extremes, the people that you do see on Twitter,
00:24:26.780
on cable news, or Facebook, the people that are on the extremes are contributing a lot of the
00:24:32.060
grandstanding. And so, you know, we do think that there are some problems here with political
00:24:38.040
polarization, and grandstanders are likely to be at the far ends of the spectrum. And the problem is
00:24:44.560
that these people are the most vocal about politics. I mean, people who are centrist,
00:24:50.220
center left, center right, these are not typically people who are spending lots of time on social media
00:24:56.300
talking about politics. And so, the problem is our discourse gets dominated by people at the edges.
00:25:02.380
And, you know, even to make matters worse, these people are often just grandstanding.
00:25:06.700
We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:25:11.200
And now back to the show. You also take a deep dive into the way people can engage in moral
00:25:17.400
grandstanding. And you identify five ways. Let's walk through some of those. Like,
00:25:21.060
what are they? And like, what do they look like? So, one form that grandstanding can take is what
00:25:27.480
we call piling on. And I'm sure most people are familiar with this phenomenon. So, someone says
00:25:34.660
something or does something, maybe it's wrong, maybe it's very wrong, maybe it's a slight, you know,
00:25:41.080
moral mistake, or maybe they're totally innocent, doesn't really matter for the purposes of piling on.
00:25:45.320
But what tends to happen is an avalanche of criticism, humiliation, shaming. And what happens
00:25:54.820
when you pile on is, what I do is I add my two cents simply to show that I'm on the right side,
00:26:03.840
right? So, I want to be seen as criticizing this alleged wrongdoer. I want to be seen as taking a
00:26:10.800
hard stand. And so, you know, maybe a million other people have already given this person,
00:26:16.460
you know, their comeuppance, but I'm going to be a million and one. Not because I think this person
00:26:20.760
really deserves all of this abuse, but because I want to, I want people to see that I don't tolerate
00:26:27.840
this, that I'm a good person, that I will punish wrongdoers as I see them, and so on. And so,
00:26:34.300
piling on often has this negative effect. There is also this sort of positive piling on, which is,
00:26:40.520
you know, maybe someone does something like a low, you know, they make a low-cost effort to take a
00:26:47.100
stand on something, and then you get a million comments like, oh, this was so brave, you know,
00:26:51.400
this is the most loving act I've ever seen, you know, you are, you know, you're my hero.
00:26:58.340
And so, you can also pile on in this positive sense where what you're doing is you want to be seen as
00:27:03.780
on the side of angels, recognizing the moral goodness among us.
00:27:07.920
So, that's one way that people often grandstand is what will be called piling on.
00:27:12.800
Another form of grandstanding is ramping up. And ramping up is a dynamic that happens in the
00:27:20.640
context of a conversation between often multiple people. So, you know, and it takes the form of a
00:27:27.600
moral arms race where people are trying to outdo one another. So, you know, Brett, you might say,
00:27:33.980
oh, you know, the senator's behavior was bad. She should be censured. And I say, are you kidding?
00:27:39.740
If you really cared about justice, you know, the senator should be, you know, kicked out of the
00:27:45.580
Senate and, you know, never hold office again. Do better, Brett. And then a third person chimes in
00:27:51.680
and says, Warmke, you know, I'm disgusted if you, you know, that you would tolerate this. If you
00:27:58.180
really, you know, cared about the poor and justice, you know, you'd think the senator should be arrested.
00:28:03.940
She should go to jail or something like that. So, you've probably seen these kinds of dynamics where
00:28:08.400
you start having a conversation and then, you know, 10 comments later, someone's a Nazi or someone's a
00:28:14.620
fascist. And so, there's a kind of one-upmanship that discourse often takes, and that's because
00:28:20.040
people try to outdo each other. You know, I might think that I really care deeply about the poor,
00:28:25.780
but if someone chimes in and says, you know, we should have a $10 minimum wage, I either have to
00:28:31.460
let that person get the credit or I have to outdo them. And I can say, are you kidding? Of course,
00:28:37.480
it should be $20 or, you know, $50 an hour or something. And so, ramping up turns moral discourse
00:28:45.760
into an arms race. A third form the grandstanding can often take is what we call trumping up. And I
00:28:51.220
have to say, we named this before the previous president, so there's really no relation here.
00:28:58.460
Trumping up in terms of, like, trumping up charges. So, someone does something innocent or maybe
00:29:03.600
slightly morally wrong. And then the grandstander concocts, you know, a massive moral problem.
00:29:11.000
You know, so, you know, you often see people make minor missteps with their language,
00:29:15.600
and this has turned into a crime against humanity. And what that signals about the grandstander is
00:29:21.660
that they're very sensitive. You know, what passes as morally innocent doesn't pass as innocent for me.
00:29:29.260
I'll stand up for justice. You know, I have a more sensitive moral compass than the hoi polloi.
00:29:35.180
Often grandstanding takes the form of, and this is the fourth form, what we call excessive emotions.
00:29:41.120
So, people will emotionally react to things far out of proportion to the wrongness of them.
00:29:48.880
So, often this occurs with outrage. You know, so, Brett makes a, you know, he says he uses the wrong
00:29:56.420
word, you know, or does something in a podcast. And then, you know, you have thousands of people
00:30:02.580
on Twitter. I don't know, I don't know how much abuse you've gotten on Twitter, Brett, but
00:30:06.880
someone says something on Twitter, and they're just outraged, and can't believe what you've done.
00:30:12.480
And people do this because outrage is a reliable signal of moral conviction. The more outraged you are,
00:30:18.920
the more things morally affect you. And so, when you're outraged about everything,
00:30:23.660
the signal is supposed to be, wow, this person really cares about morality. This person really
00:30:28.140
cares about justice. They're deeply affected and deeply sensitive to these things. And then,
00:30:32.720
finally, a fifth form of grandstanding is what we call dismissiveness. So, one way to signal that
00:30:37.820
you're morally superior to others is just by telling them that you aren't even worth talking to.
00:30:44.000
Like, if you can't see that the minimum wage should be $50 an hour, then I'm not engaging with
00:30:51.700
you any further. Go read a book, right? So, there's a kind of dismissiveness that grandstanding often
00:30:58.040
takes. And that's just a grandstander asserting themselves as a moral expert over others without
00:31:05.200
any argument, without any evidence, but just declaring it. I think all of them tap into basic
00:31:12.940
psychological, fairly well-understood psychological dynamics that we engage in with each other. And
00:31:20.540
that's mostly just having to do with social comparison. You know, we think of ourselves as
00:31:26.140
occupying a certain place socially. And when that gets disrupted by seeing someone challenge our
00:31:34.400
place in the moral hierarchy, you know, it's very tempting for us to reassert ourselves.
00:31:40.580
So, you delve in deep to the cost of moral grandstanding to us as a society. You mentioned
00:31:46.720
one earlier, polarization is one. You see that with the ramping up. But how else can moral
00:31:52.620
grandstanding have a cost on our culture and our society?
00:31:56.500
So, one cost, as you point out, is polarization. Polarization gets talked about a lot these days,
00:32:02.380
and there's a lot of confusion about what polarization is. Is it even happening? The basic
00:32:07.980
idea is polarization occurs about morality and politics when groups of people get pushed
00:32:14.340
further apart from one another. And there's a couple of different ways that you could be
00:32:18.620
pushed apart. So, scientists talk about what's called affective polarization, which is basically
00:32:25.160
just how you feel about the out group. So, if you're a Republican, it's how you feel about
00:32:30.620
Democrats and vice versa. And so, affective polarization refers to an increasing animosity
00:32:37.040
or hatred to people on the other side. And there is some pretty strong evidence that affective
00:32:42.080
polarization has been increasing over the past 50 years. People just have come to dislike and perhaps
00:32:48.200
even hate the other side more than they used to. There's another form of polarization called
00:32:54.120
ideological polarization, which doesn't have to do with your emotions or your emotional reactions to
00:33:00.220
the other side. It actually has to do with your beliefs. So, what passed for a respectable view,
00:33:07.400
I'll just pick at random, the left, is now, you know, basically fascism. In fact, I went to a
00:33:13.540
baseball, a Cleveland Indians game yesterday with, I will not name his name, but a faculty member at
00:33:18.840
Harvard. And, you know, he describes himself as a center-left liberal. And he says, many of my grad
00:33:26.560
students basically think I'm a fascist now. And so, there's a kind of ideological polarization where
00:33:33.000
the views that would have kept you in good standing with your, you know, with your political group 10
00:33:38.300
years ago now cast you out into the darkness. And so, there's a kind of pushing apart of what people
00:33:44.520
actually believe or at least report to believe about their political views. Now, what does this have to do
00:33:50.540
with grandstanding? On our view, grandstanding plays a role in pushing people apart. And we published
00:33:58.460
some empirical work last year that suggests not just a correlation between grandstanding and
00:34:04.340
polarization, but a causal link that the more grandstanding there is, the further we push each
00:34:10.820
other apart. And here's one very simple way of thinking about that. You know, remember the ramping up
00:34:16.100
dynamic where people are engaging in a moral arms race. And, you know, one way to polarize is simply
00:34:24.420
to keep outdoing each other so that we eventually end up with a much more radical view than we had
00:34:32.480
before. And this happens on both the right and the left. And it's like, how do we get here? Well,
00:34:38.080
one mechanism is this kind of discourse dynamic where people are pushed to extremes in order to show off
00:34:43.900
how morally pure or how morally committed they are. Now, you might think, well, what's the problem
00:34:48.860
with polarization? I mean, merely to be polarized, merely to be, as it were, radical does not mean
00:34:55.920
you're wrong. The problem is that status-seeking is not a reliable way to arrive at the truth of the
00:35:04.900
matter. So, there's a, you know, one question is, what's the best policy? There's another question,
00:35:10.740
what's the policy such that if I said it on Twitter, people would retweet me?
00:35:15.180
And those might be two very different answers. I mean, the truth of the matter may not be popular,
00:35:20.100
it may not be something that, you know, that gets you attention. And so, status-seeking and
00:35:25.580
grandstanding is just not a good way of arriving at the truth about these things. And so, that's one
00:35:33.240
problem with polarization that's driven by grandstanding, is that it not only pushes us further apart,
00:35:38.780
is that it pushes us further apart in a way that's unlikely to help us arrive at good policy or the
00:35:46.340
fact of the matter. So, that's one thing we talk about, is how grandstanding has this social cost,
00:35:53.500
and that's polarization. I'll just mention two more briefly. One is cynicism. So, I think a lot of people
00:36:00.800
are cynical about public discourse. There's lots of reasons for that, obviously. But, you know, we think
00:36:04.900
one reason is that people have spent a little bit of time on social media or watching cable news or
00:36:10.440
listening to politicians, and they think, these people are just promoting their brand. You know,
00:36:15.940
they're saying what sounds good. It's almost banal. It's trite to say this. But, you know,
00:36:21.140
politicians say things to get elected. Are they true? Well, that's a different question. But they're
00:36:26.420
saying things to get elected. And once enough people come to see that people are engaging in public
00:36:32.520
discourse because they're trying to manage their reputations, promote their brand, make themselves
00:36:39.620
look enlightened, then people say, look, I don't want to be a part of this. Discourse becomes a nasty
00:36:46.120
practice of people just dunking on each other. And so, many moderate people, moderate either by
00:36:52.280
temperament or by ideology, just check out. And that's bad. It's bad for people to get cynical about
00:36:58.520
this really important practice that we have of discussing moral and political issues.
00:37:03.320
And then we have a discourse that's dominated by the loudest and most radical voices.
00:37:07.580
And as you might imagine, that's not a good idea. So, thirdly, you know, one thing we talk about in
00:37:12.180
the book that's, I think, quite common is what we call outrage exhaustion. So, if you think back to one
00:37:19.860
of the forms of grandstanding is, you know, using lots of outrage to signal how good you are.
00:37:24.220
Outrage exhaustion refers to two things. One, I use outrage so often about so many things.
00:37:32.960
Some of them may be morally inconsequential, but it's actually harder for me to muster up the
00:37:39.040
outrage when it really is important. I mean, our emotions are kind of like, you know, we got to keep
00:37:43.980
them in reserve. You can't go around all day being mad about everything imperfect in the world. You'd
00:37:48.640
never experience any other emotion because the world isn't perfect. And so, when you use outrage
00:37:54.140
in that way as a tool for self-promotion, you stop using it in a way that is actually going to be
00:38:02.040
needed when something really bad happens, when you can use your voice. You know, you've got to keep
00:38:06.800
your powder dry and use outrage when it's going to be useful. But also, there's this kind of boy who
00:38:12.200
cried wolf problem. I mean, if you know, if you get as outraged about, you know, what's served in
00:38:17.960
the local school elementary lunch packet as you do about world historic injustices, people will stop
00:38:24.460
taking you seriously. I mean, if your level of outrage is like 11 for everything, people will come
00:38:30.960
to see you as an unreliable determiner of what's morally bad. And so, we, you know, we lose this really
00:38:38.600
valuable resource, outrage. I mean, I think outrage in minimal amounts is very useful. It can signify
00:38:45.760
serious injustice. But to preserve that signal, you can't use it all the time. And so, one social cost
00:38:54.780
of grandstanding is that outrage loses its reliability or efficacy at actually identifying things that are
00:39:03.220
truly horrific about the world. Yeah, it ends up devaluing moral talk. And this is the case you're
00:39:07.860
making. You guys are saying that moral talk is good. This is how we make progress. But if you engage
00:39:13.840
with this grandstanding, it can devalue and make people cynical about it or just people ignore it
00:39:18.760
completely. That's right. Moral talk, moral discourse is a tool, you know, and like any tool, it can be used
00:39:25.940
well or it can use poorly. I mean, think of the hammer. You can use a hammer to build homes. You can use a hammer
00:39:32.380
to crush people's skulls. And the hammer itself is not necessarily good or bad. It's how you use it.
00:39:39.800
And public discourse is the same way. All right. So, we talked about the cost of moral grandstanding.
00:39:45.200
Are there any benefits of moral grandstanding? Of course. I mean, there's benefits. I mean,
00:39:51.320
anything that can be used for good. I mean, lying can sometimes have good benefits. Bragging can
00:39:56.360
sometimes have good benefits. And so, you know, I think the question is, is what benefits does
00:40:04.720
grandstanding have? I think there are a couple. It can legitimately draw awareness to important
00:40:12.400
problems. It can start a conversation about some important new moral problem or moral value that we
00:40:19.880
should take seriously. It can have those effects. But I think the more important question is,
00:40:27.460
can you get those effects without grandstanding? You know, in the book, we go through lots of
00:40:33.660
arguments for why grandstanding is bad, morally bad, irrespective of the consequences. I mean,
00:40:40.200
consequences aren't the only things that make something bad. And so, even if grandstanding
00:40:45.320
had some good consequences, there's two questions we should ask. Do the consequences themselves outweigh
00:40:52.460
the costs? So, you know, if we're right that the grandstanding has lots of costs, does grandstanding
00:40:59.500
as a general practice outweigh the costs? It may or may not. But even if it does, there's lots of
00:41:07.600
moral considerations that we think tell against grandstanding that don't really have anything to do
00:41:13.420
with consequences. Gotcha. So, here's another question you explore because you guys are moral
00:41:19.640
philosophers. You get into some virtue ethics and you try to suss out, is the virtuous thing, does a
00:41:27.280
virtuous person not morally grandstand? What does virtue ethics say about that? So, virtue ethics tells us
00:41:36.700
that roughly the good thing to do is what the virtuous person would do. And how do virtuous people
00:41:43.780
act? There's three different kinds of motivations you might think you can have. Very broad families
00:41:50.380
of motivations. You can have altruistic motivations. You can be motivated to help people, do good to other
00:41:57.640
people. Or you could have what we call dutiful motivations. You're motivated to do what's right,
00:42:04.280
to follow the rules, act on good principles. A third kind of motivation is an egoistic motivation.
00:42:11.800
You're doing things for yourself. You're putting yourself above others and so on. And the question
00:42:17.980
is, so try to hold in your mind like a virtuous person. Okay. And then ask yourself, how would a
00:42:26.640
virtuous person contribute to public discourse? And what we argue is that the virtuous person would
00:42:32.920
contribute to discourse for one of the first two reasons, either to help other people or to stand
00:42:38.320
up for the right principles and do what's right. A virtuous person would not go into discourse asking
00:42:43.900
themselves, first and foremost, the following question, how can I use morality to benefit me?
00:42:50.140
That is not what a virtuous person would do. A virtuous person would not engage in this practice
00:42:54.800
of political discussion or morality in order to promote their own brand. A virtuous person would not,
00:43:00.780
at least in this instance, have egoistic motivations. And so, you know, we think one argument against
00:43:07.860
grandstanding is a kind of virtue-based argument. What would exhibit virtue in public discourse? Is it
00:43:16.740
helping others, standing up for what's right, doing good in the world, or is it the promotion of my
00:43:23.880
reputation so that I can seek status? And I think when you put it like that, it's pretty obvious,
00:43:28.940
at least to us, that the virtuous person is going to shy away from grandstanding.
00:43:34.260
Would a virtuous person, this takes a little step further, would a virtuous person even ask
00:43:37.360
themselves, okay, I believe in this principle, I think this is the right thing to do. Would they ask
00:43:43.580
themselves, would this benefit me, like my reputation? And if so, would I abstain? Or would I modify how I
00:43:49.720
approach this moral discourse? Because I would be, there would be like a conflict of interest.
00:43:54.000
I think the question that will occur to a virtuous person or a person on their way to virtue
00:44:02.420
would be this, would I still say this if it didn't increase my status, if it didn't impress people?
00:44:12.360
Would I still say this even if people thought less of me? I think that's the question that will often
00:44:19.300
be running through the mind of the virtuous person is, am I willing to help others do what's right,
00:44:27.280
stand up for the right principles, even at a cost to myself? And I think the virtuous person,
00:44:33.720
you know, unless the cost is way too high, I mean, we're not, you know, the virtuous person is not going
00:44:38.100
to take a stand on a minute issue if it results in their death. I mean, I don't think that's what
00:44:43.560
virtue is. Virtue requires being prudent and weighing all the considerations. But I think what
00:44:49.460
a non-virtuous person will often not do something if it doesn't increase their status. And so, I think
00:44:58.500
that often marks a distinction between people who are virtuous or on their way to virtue and people
00:45:05.280
have, you know, people who have less interest in becoming a good person themselves and have more of
00:45:11.440
an interest in projecting the image of being a good person.
00:45:14.660
All right. So, what do we do about moral grandstand? I think I would say most people
00:45:18.640
don't like it. They don't like their social media feeds just being filled with outrage.
00:45:27.660
So, the most important thing that needs to happen is a change of norms. And a norm is just a social rule
00:45:35.860
that people follow and expect others to follow. And so, the hard question is, how do you change
00:45:43.080
the norms about how people behave and how they expect others behave? And there's a couple different
00:45:49.880
ways to try to promote norm change. One is, first and foremost, to change your own behavior. So,
00:45:58.480
you know, I get lots of messages from people saying, you know, I used to be a Facebook war hero,
00:46:07.700
and then I read your book, and like, I hardly post on social media anymore. I don't know if I should
00:46:12.740
take credit for that or not. I sometimes worry that like, I'm silencing people who should be saying
00:46:16.820
things. But one thing is, you know, is to turn our attention on ourselves and ask, you know, am I
00:46:24.580
contributing something that's an overall net positive to public discourse? Or am I just spewing
00:46:31.100
my frustration and anger and hate out into the void and acting like it gets shot into space,
00:46:37.620
and it doesn't have to affect anyone else? That's just not true. And so, I think, you know,
00:46:43.580
there's a temptation, we talk about grandstanding, to turn our gaze onto others. And people ask, well,
00:46:50.120
how do I know when other people are grandstanding so that I can call them out and accuse them and like,
00:46:53.960
fix them? But I think that's like the totally wrong response. The right response is to look
00:46:59.740
ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves, how am I contributing to discourse? Am I doing this
00:47:04.280
to do good? Or am I doing this to look good? And there's various ways that we can do that.
00:47:09.740
We discussed several of them in the book. One of them is just to change your situation. So,
00:47:15.520
if you find yourself doom scrolling through Twitter or on social media,
00:47:20.000
and this makes you angry, you know, maybe the moment that you get frustrated or angry or feel
00:47:26.380
the urge to say something to someone, like shut off your phone, close the browser, open up Netflix,
00:47:34.580
like go make a sandwich, just do something that changes the situation so that you're not
00:47:40.760
continually tempted to lash out and grandstand and show off how good you are.
00:47:44.960
The other thing that we can do, you know, I mentioned earlier that our desire for status is
00:47:50.280
just fundamental and inherent. And I think maybe we can make some changes at some margin and how
00:47:56.640
strongly we feel that, but it's just true that humans desire recognition and want to feel important.
00:48:03.180
And there are more and less healthy ways of doing that. And so, one thing we recommend is,
00:48:08.500
you know, we have this desire for recognition. And one way to satisfy that is to get on Twitter or
00:48:13.900
social media and just like parade ourselves around like peacocks. Another way to discharge
00:48:19.180
that desire and get status and feel important is to actually do something where people can see you
00:48:26.300
and praise you for actually helping. So, you know, maybe it means like volunteering at a soup kitchen or
00:48:32.420
going to the Kiwanis club or like picking up trash on the side of the road. You know, if it's really
00:48:37.020
important to you to get status for it, take a selfie and like post it on Twitter. At least you'll be
00:48:42.620
doing something helpful to other people aside from just mouthing off on Twitter all the time.
00:48:48.400
So, those are things that we recommend people to think about in their own lives. And we don't want
00:48:53.020
to tell people how to spend their time. But, you know, I think a lot of people would probably,
00:48:57.680
myself included, be better off spending less time on social media. Now, a lot of people want to go
00:49:05.420
around and fix others. So, we want to accuse people of grandstanding. And as you alluded earlier,
00:49:12.500
we argue in the book at length why it's a bad idea to call other people out for grandstanding.
00:49:18.520
And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that it's really hard to know whether someone's
00:49:22.320
grandstanding because you don't know what's motivating them. It's much like lying. In controlled
00:49:27.840
studies, humans are not any better than the flip of a quarter at detecting lies. We're just really
00:49:35.920
bad at figuring out whether someone's lying or not. And I think the truth is grandstanding. And so,
00:49:40.120
mere fact that it's hard to know whether someone for certain is grandstanding is a reason to not
00:49:44.540
accuse them. I think it would be unfair to accuse someone of grandstanding without being certain that
00:49:50.800
they're doing it. And even if you are certain they're doing it and it would be fair to do it,
00:49:54.840
I think that there's practical reasons not to accuse people of grandstanding. I mean,
00:49:58.500
imagine how this conversation goes. So, like, Brett's on Twitter and he says something and I say,
00:50:01.980
Brett, you stop grandstanding, you buffoon. And he says, I'm not grandstanding. You're
00:50:08.000
grandstanding by calling me out. And then we're in, we're locked in this never-ending argument about
00:50:12.500
what's in my heart and what's in your heart. And we've just added more toxic waste to the,
00:50:17.920
you know, the pond of public discourse. And so, I think that calling people out just from a
00:50:24.000
practical perspective is not helpful. Okay. So, what do you do instead? I think there are a couple
00:50:29.480
of important social things that we can do to change the norms away from grandstanding
00:50:34.760
to more positive contributions. One is to set an example, right? So, do things on social media
00:50:41.840
that would be very hard to construe as grandstanding. Things that aren't about yourself. Things that are
00:50:48.100
hard to see how you can get status from. Posting good stories or positive things or praising other
00:50:53.600
people. I think praising people who are doing and behaving, doing good and behaving well in public
00:50:59.460
discourse is a way to change the norms. But there is, finally, one way, I think, to sanction or punish
00:51:07.900
grandstanders. And it's not by calling them out. It's by ignoring them. I mean, think about, you know,
00:51:14.080
you write some really detailed post about how you can't believe so-and-so did this and you're on the
00:51:20.800
right side of history and so on. And then, like, it gets zero likes on Facebook. For a lot of us,
00:51:27.940
that would be embarrassing. And so, what do grandstanders want? They want attention. They
00:51:34.540
want status. And so, one way to divert people's behavior away from grandstanding to more productive
00:51:40.680
conversations is simply to withhold from them the praise and status they seek. So, you know, if you see
00:51:46.620
someone that you think is grandstanding, just ignore it, right? In doing so, you are depriving
00:51:52.080
them of the thing they want, which is praise and attention, often for just taking cheap stands in
00:51:57.240
the first place. So, my co-author and I, Justin, we sort of vacillate between being optimistic about
00:52:04.580
public discourse and being pessimistic. I mean, I do think that social media has just given everyone
00:52:09.720
a soapbox. We all have these desires for status, and it's basically put in each of our hands an
00:52:16.680
opportunity at any given moment to speak to hundreds or thousands of people and get that instant status
00:52:23.260
seeking rush, get people to praise us. It's very difficult. It's very difficult to avoid that
00:52:28.560
temptation. And I actually don't know whether I should be pessimistic or optimistic. I mean, I hope
00:52:33.660
that what the book does is at least help people identify what the problems are so that other people
00:52:39.600
along the way can figure out better ways to improve our discourse.
00:52:43.560
Well, and the other thing you'd said, too, instead of calling people out individually,
00:52:47.180
instead of doing that, just make critiques of moral grandstanding in general, right? So,
00:52:51.580
you just say, this is bad. And so, people are like, yeah, that is bad. I'm not going to...
00:52:55.060
So, they at least start thinking about that's not something they should do.
00:52:58.460
I do think that's good. I mean, instead of calling someone out and responding to someone
00:53:02.640
for what you think is grandstanding, have a general conversation about what discourse is for.
00:53:07.400
Now, as it turns out, I'm a philosopher, and there's an old joke that, you know, for any
00:53:12.560
obviously true thing, there will be a philosopher who denies it. You know, there are several philosophers
00:53:17.360
who've argued that, no, actually, grandstanding is good and virtue signaling is good. But even,
00:53:23.100
you know, having those kinds of conversations about what public discourse is for and what are the
00:53:28.500
better and worse ways to behave, I hope that on balance, those things help us be more productive
00:53:33.780
and talking to one another and have better conversations about controversial issues.
00:53:37.880
Well, Brandon, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:53:42.180
Well, they can Google me. There's all kinds of interesting stuff there. On Amazon,
00:53:46.020
the book is for sale. It's in print, and it's on Audible. You can find it at a lot of Barnes and
00:53:52.420
Nobles. I don't know if you can find it at every one, but it's in many. And if you speak Portuguese,
00:53:57.500
Arabic, or Korean, those translations will be coming out soon.
00:54:00.460
And Brett, thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure. I really appreciate talking
00:54:04.680
with you and look forward to all the good work you do in helping people talk better to one another.
00:54:10.260
Well, I appreciate that, Brandon, and I appreciate you coming on.
00:54:13.980
My guest is Brandon Wormke. He's the co-author of the book,
00:54:16.600
Grandstanding. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more
00:54:20.160
information about his work at his website, brandonwormke.com. Also check out our show notes
00:54:24.100
at aom.is slash moral grandstanding, where you can find links to resources,
00:54:30.460
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:54:35.360
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00:54:38.860
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00:55:06.100
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