On Opinion
45 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 9 ratingsWhere do your opinions come from?
Do we ‘think’ our world views, or ‘feel’ them? And what do our beliefs mean for politics and society?
In each episode of On Opinion, Turi Munthe asks thought leaders to share their perspectives on why we think what we think and what it means for the world today, discussing everything from the war on truth to how to argue with people you hate.
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Episodes
Our Stone-Age Brains, with Maren Urner
August 31, 2022 17:03 - 39 minutes - 858 MBS2 E29: Our Stone-Age Brains “We have mental mechanisms that have been there since the Stone Age and no longer function in this environment” Short-term thinking, lazy reasoning and stereotyping, and too much focus on what’s bad (the ‘negativity bias’)… all are throw-backs to our last major evolutionary stage, when humans lived in a world of scarcity, danger and constant tribal fighting. In today’s more clement environment where resources are plentiful and the likelihood of being murdered ...
The Spirituality Movement, with Jules Evans
January 12, 2022 18:27 - 59 minutes - 82.4 MBS2 E28: The Spirituality Movement “A lot of those who’ve left the church tend to be younger people, who nonetheless still consider themselves spiritual. They’ve been turned off by churches, but they haven’t necessarily gone full atheist, materialist…” Religion is declining around the world. Even in America, the great outlier of the post-Christian West, half the population doesn’t believe in organised religion any more. But the loss of our traditional beliefs has given rise to a growing nu...
Generational Politics, with Bobby Duffy
November 15, 2021 16:30 - 48 minutes - 66.3 MBS2 E27: Generational Politics “If you truly understand what’s different between generations, you have a much better idea of what’s coming up in the future.” It turns out there are very real differences between the generations. Key external events - a world war, a crippling global financial crash, 9⁄11, or even a pandemic - will mark a generation in a way that differentiates them from previous or later ones. But there are also slower cultural and technological differences that also make th...
Political Predisposition, with John Hibbing
September 21, 2021 13:36 - 54 minutes - 42.9 MBS2 E26: Political Predisposition “40% of the variance observed in political attitudes can be attributed to genetics” Twin studies have suggested that one third of our political orientation can be traced to our genes. But does that mean our politics are predisposed? John Hibbing is one of the greats of Political Psychology in the US. His work spans decades and has broken ground across multiple disciplines - from polling and representation, to the biology of political differences. John beli...
Emotional Politics, with Omar Kholeif and Jonathan Sklar
June 30, 2021 09:23 - 43 minutes - 59.3 MBS2 E25: On Emotion “The world that we live in today is fuelled by heightened emotion…” Over the course of these two seasons of On Opinion, we’ve looked at opinions through the lens of philosophy, psychology, social science, anthropology and evolution. But one area we’ve missed is that of feeling. Omar Kholeif and Jonathan Sklar take very different approaches to understand the world we live in, but both see emotion as something that can affect individuals and collective groups. Jonathan f...
The Journal of Controversial Ideas, with Francesca Minerva
June 23, 2021 10:41 - 36 minutes - 49.5 MBS2 E24: The Journal of Controversial Ideas “You can’t have a good education if you’re not exposed to ideas you don’t agree with” Twelve years ago, Francesca Minerva published an academic article in the Journal of Medical Ethics giving a moral defence of infanticide. She was overwhelmed by the reaction she received - for an academic article in the early days of Twitter and Facebook, it went ‘viral’. She received death threats from the public, academics refusing to shake her hand, and she fo...
The Evolution of Cooperation, with Nichola Raihani
June 16, 2021 09:43 - 51 minutes - 70.8 MBS2 E23: The Evolution of Cooperation “Every multicellular being is a collective that operates as a whole - the individual is an ‘invention’ of evolution” Cooperation is at work up everywhere - from our ‘selfish’ genes working together in the genome, through to the democratic societies that regulate our collaboration. Cooperation is what distinguishes us most strikingly from our evolutionary cousin, the Chimpanzee. It is what allowed us safely to descend from the tree canopy into the savan...
Psychometrics: measuring ourselves, with John Rust
June 09, 2021 10:40 - 44 minutes - 61.7 MB### S2 E22: Psychometrics: measuring ourselves > _“Psychometrics is one of the most important or influential areas of applied psychology”_ Psychometrics, the study of personality and ability, began with the Chinese Imperial Court exams, which measured intelligence and civility, as well as archery and horse-riding. Via the East India Company, testing - of intelligence as well as psychological traits - spread to the British and French civil service, and then onwards to education. Psychometri...
On Inhumanity with David Livingstone Smith
May 26, 2021 08:22 - 41 minutes - 57.2 MB“Dehumanisation both justifies and motivates acts of extraordinary violence - but it is not in any sense an innate disposition” Here lies the terrifying quandary: if humans are the most social of all primates and mammals, if our sociality and capacity for collaboration is at the very heart of our success as a species, how are we able to engage in such acts of hideous violence towards each other? “Dehumanisation is a psychological response to political forces” David Livingstone Smith expla...
The Neuroscience of Dehumanisation, with Lasana Harris
May 19, 2021 09:53 - 40 minutes - 55.1 MB“Dehumanisation is a psychological process, and every psychological process can be used for good or bad.” Humanisation (attributing motive and consciousness) and dehumanisation are flip sides of common cognitive processes, what Harris calls “Flexible Social Cognition”, which he has measured via fMRI scans. “I think of dehumanization much more as an everyday psychological phenomenon” Neurologically, dehumanisation is the ability to regulate one’s own social cognition. We grant more ‘humani...
Post-Privacy Politics, with Michal Kosinski
May 12, 2021 11:25 - 39 minutes - 54 MB“We often treat privacy as a quick fix for much deeper social problems - like prejudice and bias” Our lives are constantly documented. Our Facebook likes, our Tweets and even our credit card statements all reveal information about us. But what about our faces? Michal Kosinski has demonstrated that off-the-shelf, commercially available AI can analyse facial images and determine sexuality and political preferences with up to 91% accuracy. If our opinions and preferences are written into our...
Polarisation on the Couch, with Alex Evans
May 05, 2021 10:59 - 49 minutes - 67.5 MB“Our inner and outer crises are two sides of the same coin” There are many lenses through which to explain polarisation - economic, political, demographic, evolutionary… Alex Evans wants us to consider it from a psychological perspective. Alex has campaigned around inclusion and social justice for two decades, but researchers in Israel changed his mind about social fracture. Polarisation between Israelis and Palestinians is a mental health issue - driven by ongoing trauma, anxiety, hyper-v...
Conflict is Good, with Ian Leslie
April 28, 2021 09:55 - 43 minutes - 60.4 MB“The avoidance of conflict is actually the real problem” We traditionally view an argument as a symptom of a problematic relationship, but relationship psychologists have found that they actually lead to healthier and happier people. Children who grow up arguing with their parents do better in school, and couples who air their disagreements stay together longer. What holds true for the family, holds true for all groups of people: conflict is central to Democracy. Humans evolved to reason c...
Investing in Injustice - System Justification Theory, with John Jost
April 21, 2021 10:21 - 47 minutes - 64.7 MB“The disadvantaged don’t make the world, they cope with it” Since Etienne de la Boetie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577), we have asked ourselves why the weak, the poor and the marginalised accept injustice. Social scientists talk to economic and political oppression. John Jost’s work shows that the oppressed don’t just suffer the injustice, they commit to it. Across society, people “invest in their own unhappiness”. Black children prefer white dolls; women feel entitled to lower ...
Populism, with Jan-Werner Müller
April 14, 2021 10:19 - 42 minutes - 58.8 MB"Populism is a permanent shadow of modern representative democracy, and a constant threat" The last few decades has seen a democratic drift, as populist leaders emerge all over the world - from Bolsonaro and Trump in the Americas, through Orban, Kaczynski and Erdogan in Europe, to Modi and Duterte in Asia. Their policies have little in common, but in their approach to politics, in their populism, they share profound, and deeply undemocratic, tendencies. Jan-Werner Muller conceptualises po...
Infodemiology, with Jens Koed Madsen
April 07, 2021 09:41 - 34 minutes - 47.5 MB“The more we increase the connectivity of people, the more people get stuck in extreme positions and echo chambers on the extreme edges of our belief structures.” In December 2017, Jens Koed Madsen heard Mark Zuckerberg talking about the power of connectivity. Zuckerberg’s hypothesis was that the more people were connected, the more quickly we would filter out bad ideas - a reworking of John Stuart Mill’s classic theory of the marketplace of ideas. To test it, Jens built a computer model o...
Why we Believe, with Michael Shermer
March 31, 2021 09:49 - 38 minutes - 52.2 MBMichael Shermer is one of the world’s most prominent skeptics - founder of The Skeptic Society and editor of its magazine Skeptic. Once a fundamentalist Christian, Michael has spent his career uncovering the workings and causes of our 'Believing Brain'. “Our brains are wired to think more like lawyers than scientists - to win arguments, to bolster what we already believe...” We evolved to discern patterns in the world around us. When our ancestors ate the wrong mushroom, they very quickly...
The Backlash against Democracy, with Roberto Foa
March 24, 2021 12:32 - 47 minutes - 65.3 MBRoberto Foa's research on Global Dissatisfaction with Democracy and Youth Dissatisfaction with Democracy uncovered the highest rates of dissatisfaction in decades, particularly amongst young people. “The majority of Americans today are dissatisfied with Democracy” 2019 represents the highest level of democratic discontent on record. Around the world, the share of individuals who are dissatisfied with democracy has risen to 57.5%. In the biggest macro-survey on perceptions of democracy yet...
Bridging the Gap, with Stephen Hawkins
March 17, 2021 11:11 - 36 minutes - 50.2 MB“There’s a subtle but crucial difference between ‘Opponent’ and ‘Enemy’” If Polarization is on the rise around the world, it takes different forms. The “Ideas Landscape” in the US, UK, France and Germany is very different, with the US - unfortunately - most radicalised across its politics. There, political sorting amongst voters and inside Congress has seen a hardening of attitudes towards each side. In Europe, however, there’s more hope. “What seems to characterize the British political e...
The Securitarian Personality, with John Hibbing
March 10, 2021 11:31 - 54 minutes - 75 MB“The key division in all political systems is the result of two distinct perceptions of the most dangerous threats” Western politics have traditionally been divided into Conservatives and Liberals - tradition vs egalitarianism. John Hibbing, who more than anyone has put biology back into our understanding of politics, proposes an entirely new approach. John divides the world between “Securitarians” and “Unitarians”, and sees the battle between them as the ultimate source of political confl...
Collective Consciousness with Sarah Rose Cavanagh
March 03, 2021 11:10 - 48 minutes - 66.5 MB“We synchronise together through processes of emotional contagion and social conformity… This helps produce a shared experience of the world.” Human beings are social creatures. But is this social nature more than just a desire to be connected? Do we actually form one collective consciousness? Are humans more a ‘We’ than an ‘I’? In her book Hivemind: the New Science of Tribalism in our Divided World, Sarah Rose Cavanagh speaks to biologists, historians and psychologists to explore these qu...
Polarisation around the World, with Thomas Carothers
February 24, 2021 10:46 - 54 minutes - 74.3 MB“You really do have to do bridge building at the community level. People have to learn to talk to each other across sides” The Left and the Right today are miles apart. In the past few years, polarisation has become an integral part of our societies. But has it always been this way - is polarisation a natural part of democracy? Covering the politics of polarisation from Chile through India to Vietnam, via long-standing democracies such as the US and Germany, this week’s guest Thomas Caroth...
Dyadic Morality with Kurt Gray
February 17, 2021 10:40 - 43 minutes - 59.5 MB“Dyadic morality is ultimately about the link between perceived harm and immorality…” Why do we believe murder is “wrong”? Why can’t we compare the effects of a hurricane with the acts of a paedophile? Kurt Gray argues that human morality stems from “harm” - that moral acts have an intentional agent and a victim, and it is this perception of harm caused by one person to another that allows us to define moral evils. So could this explain political differences? Do we just all have different ...
Evolutionary Psychology and Politics with Hector Garcia
February 10, 2021 10:09 - 46 minutes - 64 MB“A lot of the human behaviour that seems perplexing, irrational (like politics or religion) is often most effectively explained by Evolutionary Psychology” We evolved to live in hunter-gatherer communities clustered in small units spread sparsely across the landscape. Existentially threatened by outsiders - who brought war as well as germs - humans evolved adaptive psychological behaviours to help negotiate our ancestral environment. Evolutionary Psychology seeks to understand human psycho...
The Problem with MicroAggression, with Regina Rini
February 03, 2021 11:14 - 45 minutes - 61.9 MB“Microaggressions are so hard because they typically don’t meet traditional philosophical conceptions of blameworthiness…” Microaggressions are the latest front in the culture wars - seemingly harmless comments such as “yes, but where are you really from…” or misused pronouns, over time, can cause profound damage to the receiver. But the idea of cautioning an act so seemingly harmless feels like thought-policing. In her book The Ethics of Microaggression, Regina Rini defines a MicroAggress...
Saving Liberalism, with Timothy Garton Ash
January 27, 2021 10:54 - 42 minutes - 59.1 MB“We need to borrow from both the Left and the Right to achieve a renewal of liberalism…” As a journalist and political commentator, Timothy Garton Ash took a front row seat watching Eastern Europe open up in the 1990s - the heyday of Liberal expansionism around the world. Today, faced with populist authoritarians and illiberal democrats at home, and the rise of China's new model of modernity abroad, Liberalism is on the back foot - we're experiencing an "anti-Liberal counter-revolution". ...
Negotiating with Warlords, with Hichem Khadhraoui
January 20, 2021 10:53 - 37 minutes - 51.3 MB“We have to come to the table, even if it’s just to say we disagree… then you have a chance to move forward” The number of armed groups created in the last 6 years surpasses the number created since WW2. States themselves have been creating them, globalisation has linked them up, and the population displacement driven by climate change has only exacerbated the problem. Through his work with Geneva Call, Hichem has worked all over the world - successfully convincing militias in Northern Syr...
How Cultures Think, with Julian Baggini
January 13, 2021 10:59 - 48 minutes - 67.2 MB"By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding" It goes without saying that the way we think is embedded in our own time and culture. The same is true even of Philosophers: our 'professional' thinkers. Julian Baggini's How the World Thinks is an exploration of the world's non-Western philosophical traditions (China, Japan, India, Islam and the oral traditions of Afric...
Equalitarianism - the fundamental Liberal Bias, with Cory Clark
January 06, 2021 11:09 - 47 minutes - 64.8 MB“In their desire for groups to BE equal, Liberals have a bias towards PERCEIVING groups to be equal… Inequality must therefore always be explained through discrimination and prejudice, rather than evolved or genetic differences” Turi talks with Dr. Cory Clark about the origins of bias - why it is so ingrained in our thinking, its evolutionary uses, and whether bias (or ‘motivated reasoning’) is equally shared by people on all sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives have historically...
Why Bias is Rational, with Kevin Dorst
September 30, 2020 14:23 - 39 minutes - 36.6 MB“When evidence is ambiguous––when it is hard to know how to interpret it—it can lead rational people to predictably polarize.” Turi talks with philosopher Kevin Dorst to understand why all our cognitive ‘flaws’ - from confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, through our selective exposure to media, even the prejudice we apply to our analysis of evidence that contradicts our beliefs - should actually be thought of rational behaviour. Ever since the 1970s, when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tve...
Rebuilding Democracy (Pt. 2) - Disagreement and Civility
September 23, 2020 13:08 - 51 minutes - 47.2 MB“Democracy runs on disagreement: it is by means of citizens hashing out their differences that democracy can achieve better political outcomes.” In Part 2 of their podcast, Turi and Bob Talisse follow on from their discussion of Equal Citizenship (and why polarization strains that ideal), to discuss Disagreement and how we build democratic ‘Civility’ to make sure disagreement is working for, not against, democracy. Disagreement is central to the democratic aspiration. Not only does it ens...
Rebuilding Democracy (Pt. 1): Equal Citizenship, with Robert Talisse
September 16, 2020 10:04 - 59 minutes - 54 MB"Democracy is the thesis that a decent and stable political order is possible amongst equal citizens who disagree, but only if that disagreement is made to work in the service of democracy through civility." In this two-part podcast, Turi and Bob Talisse explain these core ideas of Equal Citizenship, Disagreement and Civility, why they're so fundamental to democracy, and why they're at threat today. The radical idea of democracy is that a just and stable social order is possible in the ab...
Why we lie to ourselves, with Adrian Bardon
September 09, 2020 09:17 - 55 minutes - 51.1 MB“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670 The Mind is embodied - it is a bodily function. What causes it to function in the way that it does. What motivates it? And here’s the rub. Because the mind has two, often contradictory, reasons for working. Epistemic: we think for knowledge, truth, accuracy. Emotional / Social: we think to reinforce group bonds, gain status, find safety. This week, Turi talks to Adrian Bardon about Denialism: when the...
John Stuart Mill and Free Speech today, with Nigel Warburton
September 02, 2020 08:56 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MB“John Stuart Mill would be the kind of person who would argue for following people with whom you strongly disagree because they’re the ones that are gonna make you think.” Turi talks with the philosopher Nigel Warburton about free speech and its foundational text - John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859). Today, all sides of the political spectrum decry attacks on their free expression. Led by Donal Trump, the Right attacks the social networks for expelling them, and mainstream media for spr...
Why do we believe Conspiracy Theories, with Karen Douglas
August 26, 2020 12:52 - 34 minutes - 32 MB“People are drawn to conspiracy theories to satisfy particular unmet psychological needs - epistemic, existential and social.” Turi talks with Professor Karen Douglas of the University of Kent, to understand where conspiracy theories come from. Karen has surveyed all the literature on conspiracy theory. She identifies three core drivers behind the instincts of conspiracy believers, in each instance attempting to satisfy a deep psychological need. Epistemic: the need to understand the worl...
Can we trust what we believe, with Miriam Schoenfield
August 19, 2020 14:49 - 31 minutes - 28.4 MB"A lot of beliefs that are fundamental to who we are and to how we think about the world are influenced by things that appear to be arbitrary and irrelevant to the truth of the matter.” Turi talks with Professor Miriam Schoenfield, of the University of Texas at Austin, to understand whether we can have any kind of certainty about the truth of our beliefs. The children of Jews tend to be Jews, the children of Jains tend to be Jain, those brought up in the liberal agnostic West tend to be li...
Emotional Politics: how ‘angry populism’ made President Trump, with Karin Wahl-Jorgensen
August 12, 2020 16:43 - 55 minutes - 96.9 MBTuri speaks with Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen about how emotion drives the political agenda. What are emotional epochs? Are we all responsible for the growth of "angry populism"? Is it justified? How is social media putting emotion at the heart of the global news agenda? How is collective trauma shaping today's protest movements? More on this episode Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here. Meet Turi Munthe: https://parlia.com/u/Turi Learn more about Parlia project here: https://parlia...
How intelligence works, with David Robson
August 05, 2020 08:27 - 41 minutes - 57.5 MB"The more intelligent someone is, the more polarized their opinions on climate change become. More intelligent Republicans are actually more likely to be climate change deniers, while more intelligent Democrats are more likely to endorse the scientific consensus. So, at the extremes of intelligence, you really see a big strong divergence of opinion." Turi talks with science writer and author of The Intelligence Trap, David Robson. What is intelligence? How does it create inequality? Do IQ t...
How polarisation ends, with Eve Pearlman
July 29, 2020 09:00 - 38 minutes - 54.4 MB“The struggle [is]...because of some of the ethics and practices of traditional journalism, there's an inclination or habit to quote both sides. Even though there really aren't both sides." Turi talks to Spaceship Media founder Eve Pearlman about growing media polarisation, fake news and how we can combat the crisis of truth. What is polarisation? How might we overcome it? How does journalism deepen this problem? Is empathy scalable? More on this episode Learn all about the Parlia Podcast...
How technology rewires our thoughts, with Shumon Basar
July 22, 2020 08:36 - 54 minutes - 85.2 MB“You may think that the feeling you're feeling is happening because of you. But in reality that's actually a performance that's being scripted by some very clever search engine in Silicone Valley." Turi talks to futurist Shumon Basar about how technology is transforming the way we think and feel. What is the extreme present? How has the digital world rewired our experience of time? Are algorithms changing the way we perform emotions? How is that subverting the relationship between humans an...
How humans become moral animals, with Dr Oliver Scott Curry
July 15, 2020 10:24 - 51 minutes - 71.3 MB“When it comes to morality, we have our moral taste buds, most people are motivated to do good...But there’s still quite a lot of wiggle room...a lot of uncertainty...that creates an opportunity for decision making” Turi talks with Research Director for Kindlab, at www.kindness.org, Dr Oliver Scott Curry to find out how humans became moral animals. What is morality? How does it impact our choices? What is 'morality is cooperation'? How have we evolved to create moral values? Why are people ...
How lies became the world’s most powerful political tool, with Peter Pomerantsev
July 08, 2020 15:27 - 1 hour - 87.2 MB"You can write a blog, every time you do, you are distributing information - propagandizing. And, in that sense the day's propaganda is very similar to this virus, because what's been fascinating...is that you are very aware that you're not just a victim of it, but that you may [also] have spread it” Turi talks to writer Peter Pomerantsev about how globalisation has caused a communications revolution. Is all information propaganda? How is the internet destabilising the global axes of power?...
How extremists think with Gabrielle Rifkind
July 01, 2020 14:24 - 36 minutes - 63.9 MB“People are not born extremists. What are the social circumstances that have created the ground for radicalisation?” Turi talks with psychotherapist and conflict resolution expert Gabrielle Rfikind about what extremists think. What makes societies susceptible to radicalisation? Are people born extremists? How is Europe moving into a dangerous space? What does the UK response to coronavirus tell us about our political climate? More on this episode Learn all about the Parlia Podcast here ...
How our tribes fail us with James Mumford
July 01, 2020 14:22 - 32 minutes - 48.9 MB"We are responding in ways, which are...imaginative and potentially dangerous...terrifying...mass information surplus really destabilizes people's understanding of where they sit in the world. When you've got thousands of different competing narratives attacking you at all times it's extremely destabilizing and, therefore, could very easily prompt a rush to the safety of tribes." Turi speaks to Dr James Mumford to find out how tribalism limits our political agency. How do we choose our poli...
Introducing The Parlia Podcast
June 26, 2020 07:57 - 2 minutes - 3.35 MBWhy do we think what we think? Find out more about The Parlia Podcast with host Turi Munthe. The Parlia Podcast will ask: what is an opinion? Do we ‘think’ our worldviews, or ‘feel’ them? Are they inherited? What do our beliefs mean for politics and society? Our ideas make us who we are, and yet we almost never ask where they come from. In each episode of the Parlia Podcast eminent thought leaders share their perspectives on why we think what we think. Host Turi Munthe explores everything f...