On this episode I speak to Sarah Stern Lubrano who describes herself as “a nice American Jew from New York, who accidentally transplanted to United Kingdom.” Among other things Sarah has done a lot of work for the School of Life is a global organisation that helps people access ideas related to wisdom and resilience, and especially those sorts of qualities in times of difficulty.
We talk about having an ‘elite education’ and how when Sarah went to Harvard she ‘saw how the sausage is made’. “And by sausage, I mean, how elite people are made, and who runs the universe, so to speak.” Sarah also explains how through her studies at Oxford she has seen that “the way that political thinking is just not very much like other forms of thinking. It's deeply tied into our sense of who we are, whether we're good people. And not only that, but it's tied up in our sense that we need to kind of feel okay about the immediate opportunities for action available to us in the future.” We also discuss how the School of Life shaped Sarah’s thinking, whether there are ever any ‘new’ ideas as opposed to a reshaping of those that have existed sometimes for centuries, we explore nudges and the extent to which they are all that they are cracked up to be and many, many other topics.
More about Sarah.
Sarah is a writer, content strategist, learning designer, and researcher at Oxford University. Her academic research focuses on the role of emotion in political communication, and specifically on cognitive dissonance. Another string to her bow is that she’s the Head of Content Strategy at the Future Narratives Lab where she works on projects related to policy and politics. She also serves on the Institute of Imagination’s Global Imagination Board. For many years she was also the Head of Content at The School of Life, where she is still a faculty member and learning designer. To read more about Sarah click her to go to her website.
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Fiona
Great. Okay. So, despite a bus crash, yeah, you're not where you expected to be. Sarah, it's fantastic to have you on. Thank you so much.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, of course a pleasure.
Fiona
So, Sarah, I always like people to say a bit about themselves as an intro, because I could say lots of things about you, but you know you better than I know you. So,
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Hopefully, hopefully
Fiona
Yeah, I'm a psychologist, but I'm not a mind reader. So, tell us a bit about your background, because it is fascinating. You definitely don't fulfil a stereotype of any sort. Really?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Well. Yeah, let's see, I'm not a psychologist. So that's, that's a starting point. I am, where to begin. I'm a nice American Jew from New York, we got accidentally transplanted to United Kingdom. And I wanted to study history, I wanted to be an academic. And then I discovered that the department I was in was not suitable for me, essentially. And I left and I by accident, ended up filling out a job application that wanted something very nerdy, which is an essay on a very obscure theorist, for most people called Theodor Adorno. And after I did that job application, the people invited me back and asked me to write more obscure essays. And eventually, the essays I was writing became the research materials for the YouTube channel for an organisation called The School of Life, which lots of people are familiar with, especially because of that YouTube channel. And the school of life is a global organisation that helps people access ideas related to wisdom and resilience, and especially those sorts of qualities in times of difficulty. Why think about it as a place that teaches emotional intelligence. And I've worked with the School of Life in various capacities for years and years and years. I think it's been eight years now. And it will be nine soon. So, a really long time, especially if you're a millennial. And in addition to that, I am a researcher at Oxford University, I study. I study political theory. And in particular, I'm looking at an intersection between psychology and politics that is under studied, in my view, which is the research on how we change our minds how difficult it really is for us to change our minds and how that tends to affect a lot of our ability to think through political ideas.
Fiona
Amazing stuff. I mean, there are so many things in what you've just said there that I want to, I want to explore more. But if we start with, we start with school of life. Yeah, that's Alan de Botton. Is it not?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yes. Yeah. It's our creative director. He's been there since the founding; it was founded with a couple of other people. And it was always run as a team, let's say adventure. But Alan is the creative. Yeah, like creatively.
Fiona
Um, I love his writing. It's fantastic. For anyone that hasn't read any of his work, you need to get stuck into it. But you say, I mean, you've underplayed to an extent your journey there as well, because you say you're a good American Jew from New York?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Well, probably about you by most measures. You know, I am very much that.
Fiona
Whereabouts in New York?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
The first question, I was born in Manhattan, I actually am saying, I'm from New York, because my family are, but I grew up in DC. So that's a couple of hours south, starting the age of five, before that, we were in New York. And I guess what I'm really signifying there as the kind of American that I am the sort of culture I grew up in where reading was hugely privileged as a mode of thinking about the world. And, and, and also in the sense that you are like a minority in a very large and very diverse country. And you have your own sort of interior world and all of that.
Fiona
And then you went to Harvard?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah. And then I went to Harvard. Yeah, and you know, I got a really good education. But I also think one of the things that happens when you go to an elite school, is you see how the sausage is made. And by sausage, I mean, how elite people are made, and who runs the universe, so to speak. So how do we end up with people in power who think the way that they do which is a question I think a lot of people are asking in Britain this week that we've got a couple of people who are immensely ideological and economic I've sort of beliefs and are not really that interested in having their minds changed about it at all, even though they've crashed the economy. So I guess I would say I had a really excellent education and even in the departments that I was in before a Cambridge, which is also an elite school, I had lots of really amazing educational moments, but it's not just an educational institution is it's a it's an institution for reproducing certain kinds of power, and I got to have a little P get that as well.
Fiona
That's really interesting, and my only foray into politics was when I wrote a policy paper with the head of the British Psychological Society who was a clinical psychologist and their lead policy director. And it was talking about this decision making and decision-making errors that came after the Chilcott report. And it went to all the party conferences. And I generally work with execs in leadership positions, within private sector, some public sector. And when you talk about these sorts of things, they want to know more straightaway tell us more. What can we do differently? What can we learn? How can we use this? We didn't hear a peep from a single politician. At which point I'm like, I don't I don't have my coffee energy for this probably backed off too quickly. But I think what you're saying is interesting that it's there clearly don't want to change their minds. And in the same way, it's a, it's a blinkered perspective that can often be taken and then entrenched, I believe, through social norms and expectations and puffing themselves up and reassuring each other that it's the right thing to do, which ends up can end up quite well, hubristic, but also dangerous outcomes for a nation.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I think about a lot in my research, is the way that political thinking is just not very much like other forms of thinking. It's not, it's deeply tied into our sense of who we are, whether we're good people. And not only that, but it's tied up in our sense that we need to kind of feel okay about the immediate opportunities for action available to us in the future. Right. So it's very difficult for people, for example, to believe that the organisation that they work for is doing harm in the world because they have to get up, you know, at some ungodly hour, usually brush their teeth, take their screaming children to some institution, and drives us to work. And if they're doing that every day, holding that in their head, with the idea that what they're doing in the world might not actually be a good thing is nearly impossible. So, a lot of our political thinking, even our very day to day banal thinking, if we're not politicians, is limited by the difficulty that we have. Reconciling it with the choices we make in life, many of which are not really choices, right? I don't think we really most of us have a choice about whether to go to work, not a meaningful one, because we have to earn a living. So similarly, politicians face a huge series of constraints, it's not really that they can run around freely thinking about what they want, and saying what they think, obviously leading to disastrous consequences in places like Iraq, but they're massively constrained by their funding, the shape of the party, the sort of Overton window of what the population expects, as a whole, and the influence of others. And it turns out that much of our thinking is not an independent activity at all. And it can't really be it's, it's a dependent activity. Thinking is probably always a dependent activity, but especially when it comes to politics, we're dependent on those around us, and the people that influence us and the effect they have on our lives.
Fiona
I'm fascinated by your viewpoint. And I am envious of the way you articulate things. And I think on your website, you said you like to make things seductive, memorable and fun. Yeah. And I was going to ask you what you meant by seductive. And I have watched all sorts of bits and pieces that you've done. But talking to you now I can see what you mean. It's your it's, you put your point across very, very eloquently. So, it's people like you who I think are incredibly important, because we have a lot of very good communicators, who are who lacked the substance behind it. Now, this is one of my bugbears where you have people going out and convincing people of a certain viewpoint, whether that's political, or whether that's populist, whatever that is. And then we have people who know a bit more about what they're talking about, but maybe can't articulate it in the right way. Do you feel the responsibility as someone who is interested in articulating ideas to educate other people in how to do that?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, absolutely. And that's actually what I do. You know, I also teach, I mean, I call it learning designers to clunky horrible term and, and maybe the first instance that we can mention where I failed at my own ideals, but I teach how to convey ideas to the public and to anyone really, because I studied the psychology of how people learn. And you know, learning is kind of an everyday thing. It's not we have a lot of negative associations with it because school is often a really bad experience for people but every time you drive to a new place As we're having a conversation with somebody or learning something, it's just kind of the activity of the mind. And as it happens, many of our cultural ideas about how learning works are wrong. So for example, much of our education system is set up around the idea that what happens when someone learns is that you give them a piece of information, and it gets into their brain like a bucket, and it just sits there. And of course, they will have that piece of information forever, unless they are stupid and forget it, but otherwise fantastic. And that is nearly the opposite of how people actually learn things, which is to do them most of the time, and to do them repeatedly, and to build essentially, the neural infrastructure where they can access that thing. But also, whenever we access information, we also end up rewriting it to some degree. That's why our memories are very faulty, there's a lot of research on how faulty our memories are. And so in short, without getting to all the interesting details, it turns out that communicating is much harder than it looks and learning is much harder than it looks. And neither of these things are as intuitive as we might guess. And I have worked really hard to get better at this. It's not natural at all. I worked really hard at it. And now that I think I'm at least lucky enough to have a job doing it and maybe somewhat good at it. I, as you say have also really thought about what it means is a responsibility, right? If people are going to ask me to be on a podcast pretty much every other week, and lots of people are listening. And nowadays, my in my inbox on my Instagram, especially for some reason, it's full of people saying, Oh, I just listened to this podcast, then what is it? What does it mean to say something because, you know, the thing that I, the industry that I'm in, technically speaking, is contents. So, this idea that people need their brains filled up with information. And that's a lovely thing. And obviously, I'm all content. I'm a big fan of ideas I want to spread. But I think we have to think really carefully about what those ideas are. And this is part of the reason that I did something extremely wonky and probably financially foolish in a way, which was to work part time for six years to go back and do a PhD in something that no one really wanted or cared about except me. And, yeah, I do feel that responsibility very strongly. I think it's really challenging because it requires a kind of juggling of two types of thinking that are not actually that closely aligned. One is figuring out what is the right idea. And the other one is figuring out how to communicate it. And honestly, I think if I were completely blunt with myself, I'm better at communicating the ideas and having them but every year that I do the PhD and right, I get a little bit better at thinking for myself.
Fiona
When you come out with the idea, what do you mean by that?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Well, for example, when I started my PhD, I think I was a lot better at knowing what I found wrong with politics than being able to articulate what it would even look like if it got better, right. And actually, I think a lot of people are in this position and whatever topic it I mean, maybe you see this, as a psychologist, a lot of everyday human thinking is sort of like, this is bad, I don't like it. But a lot less of it is about solutions. And even less of it is about thinking about how does this problem fit into a larger spectrum of problems, right? So like, a psychologist might have a lot of people who come in and say I'm really not getting along with my spouse, and probably many fewer who say, well, here are the six things I've tried. And I wonder why these three didn't work. And this one worked a bit better. And even fewer people probably have people who come to them and say something like, you know, I've realised that overall, I used to think about my relationships in terms of harmony, but actually what I need to get out of them is x, right? Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say here is something about what is lovingly termed metacognition is, the reflective process of thinking about one's own thoughts. And I think essentially, weirdly, you can be a good communicator without really engaging in high level thought, if you are just given a plate of ideas and told to present them to the world. And I'm trying very hard to be good at communicating ideas, but also to be properly constructive and critical and self-reflexive about what it is I'm saying, and battles, but contorted. But I guess to go back to your point. Yeah, it's a big privilege, but it's also much trickier than it looks to say something worthwhile.
Fiona
I agree. It's much, much trickier than it looks. And my favourite word that you said there was 'Wonkey'. Yes, I think I think I'm going to borrow that one. And my favourite term you use there was metacognition, but of course, I'm going to say that because I'm a psychologist, but that ability to step back and reflect and think about, well, in a mindful way about our own thoughts, but also about the ideas and the impact those ideas are having on us and how we're approaching them whether we're approaching them from an unbiased perspective, whether we've got our own history and narrative that's being played into it. And sometimes That's okay. Sometimes it's not appropriate. So, it's really interesting that you said ideas there, because I was fascinated by what you mean by that. Because I guess another argument would be that, are there any ever-new ideas? Or are ideas? Simply a reconstruction of what's going on in the world? We live in your hands-on stuff that's happened before?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
That's a great question. Um, look, I think let's, let's first go to the School of Life, because, you know, they've deeply shaped my thinking. And also, I think they're kind of right about this, which is it to a significant degree, there probably aren't that many new ideas, let's say, right. And this is part of why we were very open about the sort of background in the school of life, because we don't want to be, you know, mysterious, or cultlike, or anything. And one of the key things that we tell people is, if you look in the books of the School of Life, if you come to any workshops, etc, we're very clear that we're essentially gently stealing from the giant expanse of human history and repackaging ideas into small bite sized chunks for people that have to work nine to five. But we're not embarrassed about this at all. And the reason is that we consider this to be what we would call cultural mining, right? So there are probably only a certain number of extremely good ideas in the whole of human history. And many of them are hidden in very, very long books that unfortunately, most people are not going to get to read. But we should go and take those ideas and examine them, especially as they relate to our own life. And if you look at them long enough, you begin to sense that these ideas are recycled and reborn, kind of every generation or two, right. And that's why you kind of get like, I don't know, somebody like Schopenhauer or a serious German, grumpy intellectual. But if you look at what Schopenhauer is doing, he's really reading Buddhism, admittedly, through a very western lens, right. And then Buddhism is probably building on something even further back in human history, and so on. So, you know, as somebody who's interested in history, I'm very content to say that there are very few good ideas. Sorry, well, there may also be very few good ideas, but they're also very few ideas that are original. And I think that's okay, I actually think we're living in a very specific period in human history, where we suddenly got very good at technology. And as a result, we have this over estimation of the value of new things, right. And the way we talk about this at the School of Life is about the romantic versus classical paradigms. So, a lot of classical traditions, most notably, in the West, the Roman and Greek traditions, emphasise that many of the good things in life are almost timeless, they've been around for literally millennia. They're things like, you know, loyalty to the people that you care about the tradition of scholarship, etc. And, you know, there might be some nice new things each generation, but that's not the emphasis of, of the grid in life. And then, very recently, we had something called the Romantic movement, which is, of course, deeply bound up in our concepts of literally romantic love. But it's also about an emphasis on feeling and emotion as the source of truth in life. That's why people say, you know, our eyes met across a crowded room, and I just knew he was the one. But but also things like, you know, trust your guts and your intuition and, you know, things that are don't feel right, can't be right for you, and so on. And, basically, between the heritage of the Romantic movement, which emphasise this immediacy of the sort of now, and the emphasis that we have on the brilliant things technology has brought us recently, I think that we've little bit lost the thread of whether the newest things are really the best thing. So we've constructed a narrative where progress is always happening, and probably whatever we're at now is better than whatever happened 30 years ago, and look, in one sense, from a political perspective. You know, I'm so so left in many ways that I fall off the Overton window down the cliff into, you know, a valley, but so I obviously do think there are certain forms of political progress. I think it's very excellent that women can drive cars and vote. And we could go on and on. But, but in another sense, I think it's worth pointing out that most things in the canoe are recycles. And that's a relief, actually. Because if we really had to come up with new things all the time, we'd be lost. And not just answering your question, but I did it.
Fiona
It completely answers my question. It's really thoughtful and thought provoking. What's interesting. What's interesting is the perspective you're giving on it. In terms of we do want new things the whole time now.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
And if the phone is the best example, like updated every two weeks,
Fiona
Yeah, absolutely. And some new things are good. But actually, the new phone is only building on the old technology. It's an iteration. So again, it's what's new. I have a specific question for you out, out, out of this. And this is one of my geeky things that I think you'll have a view on but doesn't matter if you did. Gustav Le Bon. So the theory of the theory the crowd, I might have got his title wrong on that. Have you heard of good stuff? Le Bon?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, yeah, he's very important for people thinking about sort of whether intelligence is an individual activity, but he's such a niche figure that like, this is a delightful question.
Fiona
Well, I read, I mean, I read it because I read his work. Because the reason I got to it was I was interested in why and how Hitler could become the person he became, and how someone who's so sinister in many ways can be so effective at communicating. And so I was mining my own sort of little rabbit holes around this and found that's when I found good stuff with mum, because obviously, you'll know but for people that don't hit the base, some of Mein Kampf on Gustave Le Bon’s work, and also Mussolini, read Gustave La Bon, even Freud read…..so I was interested in going back and reading his I work. I will add, I did not read it in French, I read it in English. But in some of his work, which as you say is it's about how we don't think for ourselves to an extent we were pulled along with the, that's what's happening around us the crowd. And I mean, he made very interesting comments like the IQ of an individual drops, many points as soon as they're in the company of other people. But when I was reading through the book, apart from the fact that I laughed out loud at times where he referred to men, and then the next was women, animals and children, I think, something like that. It was something of that nature. But you just have to laugh, don't you? Because you think, Wow, that's amazing. Like you say, ‘How far have we come?’ And he was writing at the end at sort of 1895. I think he wrote that roughly,
Sarah Stein Lubrano
If you think about it, really not really that long.
Fiona
But the other thing I found interesting was the extent to which I was writing my second book at the time, and I'd been doing a lot of work with a neuroscientist at UCLA. And I was looking at what he'd written, and I was reading it, through the lens of neuroscience and thinking, well, actually not I mean, obviously, the men, women, animals and children was a different matter, but a lot of what he was saying, and the spirit of what he was saying, could be confirmed now through neuroscience. And I found that really interesting. Yeah, I think it's not a new idea. And I often think when we're talking about neuroscience, we're not nearly as far ahead as some people like to think we are or portray that we are. But a lot of the time, we're only proving what we already thought was true.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yes, yeah. Absolutely. Right. I mean, I think here's the thing. Firstly, it's worth pointing out that, I mean, I think neuroscience is fascinating, but most neuroscience that Most neuroscientists that I speak to tell me that we're, we're not there, right? That we're just about we've kind of like found the neurons and like maybe where they are in the brain. And some of them seem to be speaking to other ones. But we're really at a very primitive level compared to the way we understand the digestive system, let's say,
Fiona
But also at a very primitive level, compared to a lot of what populace would have us believe. So, we're looking at sort of books that tell you, we've figured everything out now.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, exactly.
Fiona
So, you know, we're looking at fMRI studies that they're looking at blood flow, they're not looking into individual neuron neuronal activity. And when we do look at individual neuronal activity, it'll be in about 20 patients, and it will be undergoing some very unusual treatment for epilepsy or something like that. So yeah, I think I Yeah, I'm with you. And I think the thing that my bugbear on that is that people go, alright, I can tell you all about the neuroscience, it's like, you're not really telling us that much. Because like you say, we are in its infancy, but sorry, I'm butting in this is me talking to you. So you tell me
Sarah Stein Lubrano
A really interesting methodological question, right? And actually, it's something I think about a lot, because my research project, my PhD is, is about a field in psychology called cognitive dissonance theory. And in that study, and I found that in the many studies that make up this field, what we're looking at are not neurons, although they're occasionally brought in to these studies, but largely, the way people seem to behave when they notice a contradiction between two or more of their beliefs or actions. And then there's lots of interesting stuff about what people do they seem uncomfortable, they engage in rationalisation and what we would term confirmation bias. So, you value and rate sources that are telling you you already believe more highly and that's more reputable than those that disagree with you, right. And there are many, many, many ways of trying to sort of catch this phenomenon, this dissonance phenomenon and our response to it but Most of them don't have to do with neurons because to be honest, we're just not there yet. Now, in the last 10 years or so there's begun to be studies where we can see people having the discomfort of dissonance, or something that is probably the discomfort of dissonance in these scans. There's one study, I think, where they actually managed to turn off part of the brain very temporarily. And they can see that people don't experience this. And if so, we have lots of, you know, nice science reasons to think this phenomenon is real, and that it is basically a form of discomfort that people have about noticing contradictions. And we can have theories about why it's happening. But I guess what I'm saying about this is, not only is this still pretty rough stuff, compared to the way we can research, I don't know how to make Iron tubing or something. And, but also, it requires a kind of thinking that we don't generally associate with science, and that I think the public has come to distrust, which is a real shame, because firstly, it means that they don't understand how science works. And secondly, it means that they disregard a wealth of thought that they should be paying attention to, and that is that when we're talking about the science of humans, we are always also engaging in a sort of theoretical approach, we have to kind of define all of our terms, think about what we even care about set up parameters by which we would deem something to have been a success, right? In dissonance literature. We, we can't just think like, this is neurons. The question is, what are these people even observing what's causing the neurons to do this thing? What is the overall thing that people are going for in their lives and make them uncomfortable with contradictions and their sense of self? Could this be however much it's also in their neurons? Something about the way we frame the self and modern life? Right? And by the time you've got to the end of intelligent question, by the time you've shaped a good question, you're already very deep into things like philosophy, and political theory and history. And you're not really just doing pure science, right? I think we're gonna have to leave that to people like my brother, who's a particle physicist. Yeah, so we have very different research frames. And we're gonna have to accept that when we're looking at human beings and their brains, we're doing something that is both less certain and more contingent and more historical and more situated than other kinds of research. But the good news is, I don't think that makes it any less interesting. And if anything, it requires us as thinkers to be much more interesting people.
Fiona
Sorry, sorry. It's brilliant. And I think the contextual piece is so important. Because however much we're looking at, one of the one of the big issues, I believe, with psychology, is, whilst we have social psychology, we haven't married up different areas of psychology. So we're not looking at things within the context with which they happen. So, I'm an organisational occupational cycle. So, I look at things in, I'm always looking at things in settings. Now, that doesn't mean that it's scientific, because I'm not running science experiments. There are no randomised control studies or anything like that. Yeah. But the fact that we can try and study psychology and get answers by looking at particular strata of the population, i.e. students, in a completely different context to 99% of the other people in the population. It does, it raises questions, and I think they're what you're talking about, and what my interest will be is, how things are becoming more and more multiple need to become more and more multi-discipline plenary. I'm not using the right term there. You see, this is where I'm not as articulate as you. This is where I asked the questions rather than answering them.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
It's really both activities are required in all cases.
Fiona
I feel like there's an there's more of a need that we we crossed boundaries in terms of the disciplines and not just get siloed within each area, and within each sub area of a discipline. What's your thinking about that?
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I, you know, this is something that really struck me in the research I'm doing at Oxford is that there's obviously a group of psychologists that are very curious about oh, like, look at these human beings rationalising away evidence that their views are wrong? Why are they doing this and researching it and discovering that it's at least very possible that the reason that they do this, in a lot of cases is that there's literally a visceral feeling of discomfort in the body, when we even unconsciously notice contradictions? Possibly because it makes us feel insecure in our sense of who we are maybe in our sense of what we are able to do in the immediate future as options, right? That's a cool theory. And there are groups of people in the politics departments around the world trying to understand you know, what's happening when we talk about things like echo chambers and polarisation and, and, and none of these people are usually talking to each other very much. And they also don't, the way we set up academic research, they're not really incentivized to write so it might be that they are actually answering a very related question, but there's no benefit to them in terms of how their careers progressed necessarily from talking to each other, there's not really a field in between, unless you go to a couple of nice, you know, exciting little, I don't know, especially funded centres. And, and more importantly, in a strange way, we've also made it very prestigious, you know, that you sort of your political theorist, and don't get your hands messy with this empirical stuff that maybe is dubious, anyway, and you're, you're a psychologist, and like, why are you talking to these people who haven't even got a lab? Right? And I think that's, that's a huge problem. And I think that the other problem is that, you know, academic research privileges, the new just as much as anything else. So, so we are looking for innovation all of the time, right. And I think that that can often mean that we're prioritising to sort of coming up with original heartaches taking other people down, if you're in a theory world, or you're privileging, you know, like a unique lab finding that no one else was founded for the p value that's very small. And these are very small kinds of questions. And if you think about it, right, just finding an original finding is incredibly difficult and science. And we stupidly don't reward whatsoever people who show that this theory is wrong, I have a theory and my theory was wrong, even though that's just as valid. If you think about it, philosophically, it's important to pursue the ends and discover that they're false, as much as it is to find one thing. That's true. We have to do that work, it's necessary, we should be rewarded for it and get to have careers. But the other thing is they're just they're really small questions, right? That if you want to build an academic career these days, to significant though, of course, limited degree, the things you will be rewarded for answering very small questions in a large number of papers that are published as quickly as possible. And that doesn't give a lot of room for the kind of very big thinking that needs to be done, especially in questions about like our current society, and what we should be doing now. Right. So I don't want to put down all of academia too quickly. And that's not really what I'm trying to do. But I do think that there is a perverse set of incentives, in some ways to find tiny little solutions to problems. And this is even true when people agree to combine psychology and politics, for example. And one of the most successful interactions between psychology and politics, from the perspective of being very broadly applied, is has been the use of essentially behavioural economics, and nudges, to deal with political issues. So, for example, there's all of this lovely stuff from Kahneman and Tversky, about, you know, heuristics and biases and people's faulty reasoning patterns. And then it was taken up by people like Cass Sunstein, and temporarily forgetting his co author, which is slightly embarrassing, but anyway, they're not
Fiona
I can't remember off the top of my head either Chicago based economist, right, so
Sarah Stein Lubrano
All of these people are discovering mostly valid, still research findings about how we make shortcuts in our decisions that are often not that helpful, and how we can use that actually kind of perversely engineer that in some ways to help people make better decisions in their day to day lives. And, let's say fairly innocuous use of this is that since you know, these people have published these books, we now have default opt in savings mechanisms in people's retirement accounts. So, people are saving more in cafeterias and schools, they're set up so that people automatically take healthy food and barely even see the desserts or whatever. And that's, in my view, I'm not that fussed about that, you know, I understand a libertarian would say, this is messing with people's choices, or whatever. But, you know, those kinds of interventions are essentially banal useful policy interventions, about trying to nudge a population towards, towards certain healthier behaviours. But it was really taken over by politicians who saw this as an opportunity to somehow dodge the difficulty of on the one hand, you know, having a bunch of people who are trying to create a neoliberal order, where everyone is just making individual choices, and that's the only policy available. And on the other hand, the fact that the state has an invested interest in people behaving in certain ways for the whole thing to function, right? And nudges are a perfect intersection of those two things, because he says people make individual choices, but the state can influence them. And therefore, you can have a welfare state where people eat their vegetables, and the NHS has fewer costs, but also people are individuals, and no one's forcing anyone to do anything. And look at my point isn't really about this. My point is, that's a very small question. In my view, compared to the other research questions, we could be asking, like, why do people become Nazis? Or, you know, is capitalism going to work? And this is a this is a small question. It's been immensely value, even outside of academia, and certainly within it, but it's not the kind of question that I think we really need to face if we want our own human species to survive the next couple of 100 years. And I think that's especially obvious and impressive when it comes to something like climate change. I don't believe that we can nudge our way out of climate change. Right. But it's true in lots of other areas as well. So I guess now that I've talked for many, too many minutes, I think you're onto something about the kinds of questions that seem possible right now and how frustrating that is.
Fiona
And I must say that I have respect for behavioural economics. And I have huge respect for Kahneman and Tversky. But they were actually psychologists. But it's their issues. I mean, there was actually a paper published recently by two of the people who set up the behavioural Nudge Unit in the UK, replicating.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Right, right, but people are also getting more averse to it. Yeah, yeah. 'You're nudging me. Stop that'.
Fiona
Yeah. Which makes sense. But the thing that worries me about behavioural economics is it's not taking, say genetics, epigenetics, contextual, not in the same way. Emotion is unitized. It's an it's not looking at a personal narrative. And so there are so many other factors that are still missing, even when you're looking at that. But then I have a bit of a problem, because you know, I'm a psychologist, and we don't like that behavioural economists are far more prominent than we are because we're so bad at communicating our work.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Well, and also because our current society values capitalism and economics is more seen as the handmaiden to capitalism than psychology. Right?
Fiona
Yes, very true. And, but lots of interesting points there as well. And I could really geek out with you on some of that. But I'm not sure everyone would want to hear my, my geeky train of thought on that. But one thing, taking a slightly off course, but also not. It's about cognitive dissonance. And it's about I noticed, there was one piece of work you did, or podcast, and I haven't listened to it. But I saw the title, and it fascinated me 'Bombing you to help you.' in the context of Ukraine. Som tell us a bit about that.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Sure. Great example of dissonance at work in the world, or potentially just in the tech world. I mean, nobody has gone and done the complicated lab study. So, we're hypothesising. One of the many horrifying and bizarre phenomena early on in the war in Ukraine, in was when, you know, the boundaries between these two countries are quite porous from a personal point of view. And many people were, let's say, living in Russia, but their children, Russian, basically just people who migrated from Russia some time ago, we're living in Ukraine. And there will be stories, many stories of instances where people, let's say, had their mother called them up and say, you know, how are you doing? And then the child would say to the mother, like, Mom, you know, like, they're bombing us. It's horrible. The kids’ school has been bombed. How can this happen? What on earth are Russian people thinking in the mud, the mother in this story would be in, you know, Russia would say, oh, but they're bombing you to help you like this is a special military operation to save you from the secret Nazis and Ukrainian government. And, and these two people would see the world very differently. Right, to put it mildly, but also that that's immense from a psychological perspective. I mean, I obviously, also, personally, very pro Ukrainian independence from this, this invasion, but, but you know, even putting all of that aside, this is an immense amount of dissonance for an individual to hold to believe that someone is bombing their child's country that their child is currently in. But that's a good military operation. I mean, if you think about what that would require any of us to think that it's fine that bombs are falling on the heads of the children that we raised. It's good, actually, that's immense. And yet, there were lots of stories like this, this was a common phenomenon. So, the cognitive dissonance space explanation for this is essentially that when we notice a contradiction between two or more of our beliefs or actions, it causes physical discomfort in our body, pretty much all discomfort is physical, at some level, I'm saying the mental discomfort. And we need to resolve that as quickly as possible, which is essentially the same that we have when we have physical discomfort. You know, if your foot hurts, you move your foot back or you, you touch a hot stove, you move your hand away, or if you're thirsty, you go seek water, right? We're drip, we're driven, we have drivers that that we need to reduce discomfort as much as possible, and that includes the psychological discomfort. And so what happens when we face painful discomfort is that we immediately look for ways to reduce it. And if this is something much more minor, like we know, we were supposed to go to run today and we're gonna go on a run. We'll just find creative ways to rationalise this away. So, we'll say something like, oh, well, it rained a little bit. I could have slipped and fallen that would have been bad. So, it's good. I didn't go on a run today, right? Smokers are classic with like, a tonne of different studies are about smokers. smokers will say well, it's bad that I'm smoking and it will cause me to shorten my lifespan, I guess I suppose in theory, but in practice, it actually keeps me from eating too much. So, it's keeping me slim. So, it's actually good for me that I'm smoking. I mean, this is patently untrue at any level. But we come up with these kinds of creative rationalisations. And so, what we're seeing in Ukraine when this kind of thing happens is that people who are Russians are their lives are bound up, day to day and being a part of Russia, right? I mean, they kind of have to be. And many, many people look at the discomfort between the fact that their child or a relative or whatever is in danger, and the fact that running around and living their lives in Russia, and they end up closing that dissonance by reaffirming the beliefs they already have about why Russia is more or less a good state and one that they're okay to operate in. And they are capable of doing this even with extremely creative rationalisations for the other facts in the matter. So we're using this case, firstly, just to talk about how strange this particular phenomenon is and how difficult it is for people. And secondly, how it might even be possible. How can we rationalise these kinds of things away? Yeah, and that's really what that podcast is about, although I obviously encourage you to go listen to me and Jonathan talk. But it's also obviously more, more of a general point about modern life, which is that lots of it is really unbearable, right? I mean, obviously, it's much worse to be being bombed by Russia than to be sitting in a cafe in London. But there are lots of aspects of modern life that are not really that tolerable. And our minds seem to be set up to mostly tolerate them until we fall into some form of mental illness. Right. And the branch of political theory that I study is called critical theory. And one of the main questions of the School of critical theory that started in Germany, including right after World War Two, and the Frankfurt School is that they asked, you know, essentially, the world is pretty bad, why aren't there more revolutions? Like why aren't people furious? You know, and it's something I think we could all be asking this week about what's happened to the UK economy as well. And people are going to freeze and starve this winter, lots of people. And whatever your particular political alignment on the spectrum is, this is a failure by nearly any measure, and for many, many, many, many people in our existing economic setup. But we're not seeing a revolution. No one is out on the streets burning things yet. And that's a very interesting point from a psychological perspective. So yeah, this is kind of at work and all of these complicated political questions.
Fiona
It's really fascinating. There's, there's a book called 'The Myth of Sanity', I don't know if you've heard of it,
Sarah Stein Lubrano
But it's a great title.
Fiona
It's a great title, really, really good book written by a psychiatrist. But it just, it just made me think of it when you were talking then. And she says that people won't seek to heal themselves or to learn more about themselves at a psychological level, until they get to that point where the pain is impossible to bear. And that's when they see a psychiatrist. But like, you say, well, more and more people are suffering from mental health. But it tends to be, I guess, with your analogy to the pain, the physical pain as well, although emotional pain is physical, as you said, it's it, you know, we can carry on walking on an ankle, that hurts for a long, long time until it becomes unbearable, and then we go and see the doctor. But you're bringing in with the politics, a huge number of other factors that are playing into who we are, how we're operating what that means to us. And a level of complexity that some people will say, well, that's kind of all over my head, and I don't get that. What would you say to those people? Because that obviously, we one thing we also know about humans is that we like to boil things down and create stereotypes.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Yeah, I think you'd like to add more complexity as much as we can, while still steering ourselves around the course of our everyday lives. That's part of what's in learning theory. And so, I guess, just so I understand the question in a way is, well, someone might say, you know, really interesting, Sarah, fun podcast. Cool, cool. But you know, look, honestly, that's a lot. And I'm already kind of set up thinking about interest rates, why do I have to now go and learn all this stuff about psychology, which sounds more complicated than I expected? Is that kind of a question about?
Fiona
I mean, it's not just it's not just that I think it's also the it's whether people want to explore and understand these things within the context of not just themselves, but within the context of economic systems and political systems, and how those things are, in turn impacting them and who they are and how they're living their lives because we know it on, like you said, on, to the extent that it's like, well, look at what's happened to interest rates or, you know, I think,
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Interest rates until it affects them directly. So how confident are you Maybe they also want to think about their own minds in this way, right? Yeah, I think that's a great question, I think. So, I'm also the creative, sorry, the content strategist for a place called The Future narratives lab. And we work with organisations that are talking about some of these really big political questions, things like climate change, and worker ownership of companies and so on. And we, we talked about narratives as this nice level in between some other stuff in the human mind, right? So, at the very bottom, let's say, of the human mind, and this is just a metaphor, of course, it's more complicated than this. But at the bottom of our mind, let's say that the firm foundation, there's the values that we have the sort of deep assumptions like are people good or bad, etc. And then, at the, you know, the top, we would have individual statements like I might say to you something like, you know, I think that Liz trust is such and such. But in the middle, we have what we call narratives, and we're using this term to try to encapsulate something about the shape of the story based roughly assumptions that we have about the world. So you could say that the dominant narrative for the last, I don't know seven years has been in economics, something like, and there are many versions of this the neoliberal narrative, right, where people are individual rational agents, they need a system of incentives that causes them to go out in the world and seek work and better themselves and compete against each other. So to refine their thinking and ultimately, to work very, very hard to make the economy function and as much as we can, we want to reduce the often state imposed barriers to this process, by essentially making economic pressure high not subsidising too many things, not regulating too many things, and not taxing too many things. That's roughly a neoliberal narrative. Right? Beneath it, our values about independence and individualism and above it are probably individual statements, but in the middle is this narrative. So I would say that it's probably for nerds like me, and lots of other nerds, and also social movements and people who are oppressed and lots of other groups to think about the whole system. But the reality of how this functions day to day for many people is that they need new ish narratives to work with because they are busy doing other things, they are not thinking about politics all day long. They are, you know, taking the children to school and figuring out what on earth happened with the plumbing and so on. And I don't mean to diminish either of these activities, they're really important, you know, and many other important things besides and the level at which they're going to engage in politics is at this level of narrative. And so, I guess my answer is, yeah, we do as a collective whole, as Sony halftime, people are thinking about all the bits. But when I think about what I want to do with my research, I don't actually assume that most people are going to read through the complicated, you know, academic manuscripts I'm putting together right now in the hopes that someone will eventually release me from my PhD programme. I instead think, how could I summarise this in a way that somebody who's intelligent, and hardworking and interested, could listen to a podcast for 30 minutes, and come to agree with me on something and do something differently in their life? But they might never read, you know, the full book, or if they can't read the book, they probably still won't read the PhD or all the things it's referencing, right. And I'm comfortable with this in a way that I think a lot of academics are not I agree with you people are tired. And that's okay. I mean, we probably do still need to build a society where people are less tired.
Fiona
Sara, thank you so, so much, I have thoroughly enjoyed talking to you.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
This was one of the more intelligent conversations I've had on the podcast. So I really appreciate it.
Fiona
That's That's very kind of you to say, but you've really made me think you've stretched my view. And my you've stretched my cognitive muscle as it were. And I know you'll have done the same for other people really appreciate your time, particularly you were kicked off a bus because of an accident and found your way into.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
We're all good now.
Fiona
But still it I appreciate it all the more and says thank you so much.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
It was really a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, stay in touch. You can follow the School of Life and see all the new books that we have out
Fiona
Oh and your website. Your website is
Sarah Stein Lubrano
My website is just my name, Sarah Stein lubrano.com. And the school of life is the School of life.com.
Fiona
And I really, really would recommend that people go to School of Life is a fantastic resource. Really fascinating. never ceases to amaze me with the new but repackaged classical philosophical ideas at times but with it in a very palatable way, a very user friendly way, but also in a way that sparks your imagination and makes you think, but your website as well and all the fantastic things you do. We haven't even talked about many of the things that you do. There are so many interesting angles.
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Invite me back, you know.
Fiona
I'll well. I will take you up on that. Sarah, thank you so much.