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FIERY CUSHMAN: Oh, man, I
am so excited to be here.

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This is my second Welcome
Weekend at Harvard

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because my first one I
attended many, many years ago.

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And I still have friends
that I'm in touch with

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and see at reunions that I met at
this weekend so many years ago.

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When I came here, I studied biology.

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But I kept taking
philosophy because I felt

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like in biology, somehow the questions,
they were really interesting.

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But they were a little bit small for me.

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In philosophy, the questions
were really big and exciting.

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But it felt like maybe we weren't making
as much progress on those questions

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as I wanted.

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And then I kind of
stumbled into psychology

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at the very, very end of my time
at Harvard, in my senior year.

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And now I teach social psychology.

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And I start that lecture by
trying to explain to students why

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I've organized my life
around studying this thing,

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why, like, every single
morning, I get up.

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And as soon as I've got the kids
at school, I race to the office

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to study psychology all day long.

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I come home to cook dinner for the kids.

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I put them to bed, pull out my laptop,
and get right back to psychology again.

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And although the thing that I've
studied for the last 15 years or so

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is mostly moral judgment, and I find
moral judgment really interesting,

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a fascinating part of our psychology,
when I teach undergraduates,

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I start with two slides that
are focused on those big,

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almost philosophy-level questions that
are the ones that really get me out

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of bed in the morning.

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And these two slides, they
can summarize in two pictures

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the question that I find so motivating.

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So here's the first picture.

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This is a picture of the
world at night, like if you

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were approaching it from outer space.

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For the first 3.5 billion years
that there was life on Earth,

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this is kind of what you would
have seen from outer space.

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And then the second picture
is the world tonight.

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So after all of this time
of life evolving on Earth,

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there's one species that
so radically transforms

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everything about what's going
on here that if you knew nothing

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about the planet Earth, and you
were coming from outer space,

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it would be the first
thing that you would see.

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And when you got here, it
would just be totally clear

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that there is one kind of life that is
doing something way different than all

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the other kinds of life.

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And I'm trying to understand
how did that happen.

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What is it that makes us so different
from all the other species on Earth?

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This is a question that people have been
asking for a really, really long time.

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And what I would say in my
corner of the literature

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and my corner of the
academic world, people

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have offered two different
types of answers.

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One of them is pretty intuitive.

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It says, look, we evolved very,
very big and powerful brains.

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They allow us to reason
and solve problems.

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And then the other
key thing that we have

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is culture, which operates a little
bit like a gigantic textbook.

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When people have smart
ideas, we pass them

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on to the people who
come after us in a chain.

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Like, I pass it to you, you pass
it to your kids, or the people

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that you teach in school one day.

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And so according to this view,
most of the heavy lifting

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is being done by our intellects.

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But culture and social
learning, they play a role too,

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like a textbook does, just getting
the information from generation

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to generation.

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It seems like that's got
to be part of the answer.

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I mean, there are textbooks,
and we do communicate that way.

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But recently, people have emphasized
another very different type

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of answer, which is that culture
is a little bit more like our DNA.

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Our DNA is modified by
random mutations, not

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by-- we don't have intelligent cells.

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We don't have intelligent transcription.

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There's just purely random accidents,
but some of them turn out to be useful.

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And because they're
successful, they get passed on.

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People have said, maybe
culture works that way too.

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Maybe we're kidding ourselves thinking
that we're coming up with great ideas

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using our intellect.

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We're just kind of randomly
stumbling into different ways

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of living, different
values, different beliefs.

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And the people who have
good values or good beliefs

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or useful values, useful
beliefs, they're more successful.

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So they get copied by other people.

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And it's just like DNA evolving
but through social learning.

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I want to give you-- this is a
kind of a weird way of thinking.

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And I'm not sure it's right.

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I just find it interesting.

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So I want to give you one of the
examples that people in the literature

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have used to suggest that something
like this could be going on.

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There's many different examples,
but the one that I'll talk about

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is called nixtamalization.

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So many people who came to the
Americas from other parts of the world,

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the way that we make corn
flour and eat corn, we just--

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we either eat the corn, or if we want
to make corn flour, we dry it out,

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we grind it up, and we bake with it.

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But if you look at
indigenous communities,

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they do something different.

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They make masa.

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They make hominy.

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These are things that take
a lot of work to make.

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Here's a little schematic of the process
called nixtamalization that transforms

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corn into things like hominy and masa.

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It has a lot of steps.

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It's a little bit complicated,
not that complicated.

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Why are they putting all
this effort into doing that?

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If you went to ask them, they would
say, well, it's a little easier to chew.

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Or they would just say,
like, look, this is the way--

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how else would you make a corn tortilla?

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This is the way that you do it.

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I want to draw your attention to one
particular part of this process, which

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is counterintuitive.

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See step two-- it says
add lime and cook.

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You might be forgiven that
thinking what they're talking about

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is like the citrus fruit lime.

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But that's not what they're
talking about at all.

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They're talking about calcium hydroxide.

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They're talking about a chemical which
is very alkaline substance, which

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actually, if you ate it
in a concentrated form,

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could give you chemical burns.

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It's not good for you at all.

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These indigenous communities are
getting it by burning things,

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and they take the ash,
which has a lot of this--

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different alkalines, and
especially calcium hydroxide in it.

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They combine it with the corn.

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They let it sit for a long time.

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And then they have to wash it out
because it's actually not good for you.

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And again, they don't
have a lot of explanation

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for why it is that you would want
to make your corn products this way.

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But when scientists went
and studied it, they

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realized that it literally quadruples
the nutrient value of corn to do this.

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In particular, it makes
available a vitamin B3

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which is otherwise absent in the
diets of the communities that

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relied on this practice.

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And the civilizations that
we knew about-- enormous,

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powerful civilizations in the Americas--

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would not have been
possible had people not

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been finding a way to get more nutrient
value out of corn than it would have

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had otherwise.

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But not only are these
communities not able to tell you

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that it's an alkaline substance
that unlocks vitamin B3.

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It might not be surprising
to know that that's not

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the explanation they would give.

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They wouldn't talk
about nutrition at all.

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They wouldn't tell you this
makes it more nutritious

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or this makes it healthier.

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They just say this is
how you make a tortilla.

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This is what makes it good.

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And so some people have
argued that this should

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be our basic paradigm for
understanding how it is

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that humans got to where we are today.

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The thing that makes us so
different from other species

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is just that we copy each other.

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And the rest is like natural selection.

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People are just trying different things.

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And if it works well, if it makes you a
little fitter, you have a bigger family,

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other people copy you.

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So we wanted to explore that in our lab.

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I teach this stuff in my
undergraduate lecture.

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And a few years ago, there was
this student, Danish Bajwa,

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who kept showing up to my office hours.

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And we were having
fascinating chats together.

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He thinks he wants to go to law
school or become a journalist.

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I think he should really
become a psychologist.

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I'm still trying to
convince him of that.

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I've got one year left.

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But Danish and I started
working on a project

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together that was a very new and
different kind of project for me.

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But it was exciting because
after all of these years

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studying moral psychology, which I
really do love, finally, with Danish,

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I was doing that research
project that felt

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like it was starting to address
the thing that got me up out of bed

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every morning, like the big
questions that I really cared about.

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And recently, I also
hired Linas Nasvytis,

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who will be staying in psychology
and going to graduate school

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at Stanford next year.

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So the challenge that we face-- because
we're experimental psychologists.

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So what we do is we try to bring
interesting things in the world

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into the lab and run experiments
on humans on those things.

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How are you going to bring
nixtamalization into the lab

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and run experiments on humans?

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It's not easy to figure out how you take
a cultural process that takes hundreds

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of years and generations of people
from childhood to adulthood, and then,

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like, over the course of
a weekend reproduce that

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and play with it in the laboratory.

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And it took a long time for Danish
and I to start to make progress.

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I don't think you're going to be
very impressed with the progress

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because we're still very much at
the beginning of this project.

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But it's exciting to me.

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So I want to share it.

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This is the first version that
Danish came up with after really

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about a year of work that started
to reliably work pretty well.

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And it's a very simple idea.

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There's this character
that's you in the middle.

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And you get to wander around this
environment and collect mushrooms.

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We tell you that you're
making a mushroom

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soup because you belong to a community
where people like to eat mushroom soup.

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The first people who participate in this
experiment, that is all we tell them.

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And they can go around and collect
whatever mushrooms they want.

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These people are very confused.

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They have no idea which mushrooms
they're supposed to collect

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or what the point of this experiment is.

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But that's OK with us.

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I'll give you an example of the
type of thing that might happen.

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Oh, I'll tell you.

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But we don't tell participants.

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So they don't know this.

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Only you know this.

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Those mushrooms are healthy and good,
according to us, the experimenters.

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And these mushrooms are
toxic and will kill you.

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But we didn't tell them, and
we're not going to tell them.

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At no point in the entire experiment
are we ever going to reveal that.

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Imagine that they're the kind of
toxins that kill you eventually,

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like after years.

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But it's not like you taste one,
and immediately, you get sick.

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So you don't know that
you're doing a bad thing.

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OK, so people just choose some
random path through this environment.

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They're, like, doing their best
to collect these mushrooms.

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You know, maybe this is like--

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you're not feeling great
at the end of this trip.

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But there could be somebody
else who does especially poorly.

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You know, there could be somebody who
maybe just through sheer dumb luck,

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they just happen to think that
these mushrooms look a little better

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than the other ones.

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Remember, there's no red and
blue indicating for them.

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And so this person does really well.

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So we just collect a
ton of data like this.

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And people are-- some people
are having good experiences.

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Some people are having bad experiences.

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But then what we do is we decide we're
going to kill off all the ones who

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ate the toxic mushrooms.

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We're going to assume that
they didn't do very well.

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I mean, maybe they literally died, or
maybe they just were a little sickly

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or they weren't having big
families or they weren't

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as successful in their communities.

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And so when the next
generation was born,

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they're only going to see the people and
want to copy the people who did well.

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OK?

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So we're going to show a new generation
of people the same experiment,

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but the difference is
first we say, I'm just

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going to show you how a couple of
other people in this experiment

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did this when we gave them the chance.

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We don't say that
these were good people.

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We don't say they were the survivors.

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We don't say you should copy them.

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We just say, like,
before you do it, we're

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going to give you a chance to
see what some other people did.

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And then it's going to be your turn.

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And then we iterate that over and over
and over, generation after generation,

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showing people the strongest survivors.

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If you've ever studied
natural selection,

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this should feel really familiar.

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If it works for your DNA, it
should work for culture too.

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And that's exactly what we find.

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On a scale from dead
to flourishing, we find

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that over the course of
generations, our population starts

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to do better and better and better.

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Now an interesting question we can ask
is, what are they saying to themselves

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and saying to us about why they're
doing the things that they're doing?

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Is it consistent with this
idea that they're just

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adhering to a rigid cultural
practice without much thought given

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to why it is that, in my culture--

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microculture that we've
created in the lab--

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we make soup this way?

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And here's an example of some comments
that were consistent with that.

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These participants are basically
telling us, look, I don't know.

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I just saw some other people do things.

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It seemed like I should
do what they did.

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So I copied them.

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That's consistent with the
basic model that I presented.

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But one of the things
that popped out to us

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is that there were also
a lot of people who

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were trying to make sense
out of what was happening,

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who were trying to extract
textbook style knowledge.

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They were looking at what
other people around them did,

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and although nobody said to
them these ones are poisonous

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or these ones are healthy, they
were trying to make sense out of it.

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And by trying to make
sense out of it, they

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were actually recovering true facts.

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It's kind of cool to me that, like,
of all the people in this experiment,

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not a single one was ever told that some
are nutritious and some are poisonous.

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But by the end of the
experiment, they know that.

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They figured it out for themselves.

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In social psychology, which
is the field that I sit in,

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we do think a lot about
this process where

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we find justifications for our
behaviors, our cultural practices,

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and share them with each other.

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And the predominant view has
been to call that rationalization

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in a kind of a pejorative sense.

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Like, I hold my values.

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And now, just to save face
or to look good to you,

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I'm going to construct
some reasons post-hoc

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that make sense out of those values.

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I have no doubt that
sometimes rationalization

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is a kind of pernicious
thing, the kind of thing

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that we should view in
through a pejorative lens.

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But on the other hand, like
an experience that I've had

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is that sometimes if I'm in
a conversation with someone

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about my deeply held values that I learn
from others, that I learned from people

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who came before me, I
learn something about why

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I hold those values by having
to explain them to someone else.

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And the things I learned feel true.

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It feels like what I'm reconstructing
is why those are actually

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pretty reasonable values to hold.

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And we think on a micro
scale, we're starting

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to pick up on that in this experiment.

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You can see that in the data as well.

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We ask people, I know we didn't tell
you that any mushrooms were good

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or any mushrooms were bad.

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But can you tell me, if you had to
guess which mushrooms are good or bad,

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what would you say?

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And we find that at the
beginning of this experiment,

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people are at chance,
where that red bar is.

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By the end of the experience,
they're showing a lot of insight

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because they're making sense out of
their culturally inherited values.

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I should also say that
there are some people who

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just decide to strike off
on their own and not do it

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the culturally inherited way at all.

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You know, they say things
like, hey, wouldn't it

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be great to have this
many mushrooms in a soup?

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It would be really expensive to have a
mushroom soup like this in real life.

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I hope these mushrooms are non-toxic.

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Obviously, these people
all died in our experiment.

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It emphasizes to me-- you know, to
come back to this big picture theme,

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you all know Newton's quote.

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Newton famously said, "If I've seen
farther than others--" you know,

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in inventing physics and calculus--
"it's by standing on the shoulders

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of giants."

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And for me, it's fun to be able
to take that phenomenon, that

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standing on the shoulders
of giants phenomenon that

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makes us so different
than all other species,

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and to bring it under
experimental control

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and to begin to be able to play with it.

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I will also just share with you
that my own experience at Harvard

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is one where I do feel
incredibly lucky to be

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00:15:25,320 --> 00:15:28,710
able to stand on the shoulders of,
for instance, the kinds of speakers

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that you just heard from this
morning, where every once in a while,

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you get that feeling
like you're seeing just

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a little bit further than other people
have seen in some direction or another.

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But the thing that I most love about
Harvard that I think Newton actually

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didn't capture--

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I love finding people like Danish around
me and hoisting them up on my shoulders

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00:15:48,420 --> 00:15:50,370
and then getting a
perspective on the world

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00:15:50,370 --> 00:15:52,810
that I never, never
would have had otherwise

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if I hadn't had their help looking in a
direction that I've never looked before.

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So thanks very much.

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Enjoy your time here.

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