Sentientism 170: "Think more like six year olds!" - Psychology Researcher Luke McGuire - Sentientism
Luke is a lecturer working in the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter. His research examines social and moral development between childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Between 2017 and 2020 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the Wellcome Trust, ESRC and NSF funded “STEM Teens” project. This project examined the role of youth educators in informal science learning sites, both by longitudinally following youth educators and by quasi-experimentally examining their role in these sites.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
- Previous guests Kristof Dhont (ep:47), Matti Wilks (ep:45)
- PHAIR Society conference https://phairsociety.org/
01:53 Luke Intro
- Social & moral developmental #psychology
- Human prejudice, discrimination - fairness, co-operation, resource allocation
- PHAIR symposium on "The Meat Paradox" "That was a big inspirational moment for me"
04:13 What's Real?
- "The beauty of this podcast is forcing people to wrestle with their own socialisation"
- Mum from Northern Ireland & dad from Scotland "culturally religious backgrounds"
- Going to church & "learning about the more scientific worldview alongside that... I wrestled with the conflict of those two things when I was younger"
- Rural childhood "being face to face with the natural world"
- "I sort of decided for myself when I was about 11 or 12 years old that the religious side of it was not really for me"
- "My parents were so respectful of whatever we wanted to do as kids"
- #punk and #metal
- "There's lots of people who come from sub-cultures into this animal rights movement... it's those sub-cultural spaces where these more radical ideas are first laid down and then expand out into the broader world"
- @moby 's Punk Rock Vegan Movie
- "I haven't gone as far as the full animal rights sleeve tattoo yet but there's still time"
- Peer influence "your parents might act as your early socialisers but a lot of what happens from when you're 6-7 years and older is down to the circles you're moving with in outside the home"
- A vegetarian friend at 13
- "If you work in science for long enough you stop believing that anything can be proven 100%... do not use the word 'proof'... you cannot use that word."
- "I'm with you - the more naturalistic view"
- Nature-facing spiritual movements "pagans are on the rise again... people are turning back to nature"
- Epistemological issues: #QAnon #antivaxx #flatearth #BigLie #trump #astrology #homeopathy #covid19 ...
- "There could be a rational computational model for how we interact with the world but that's just not how it works - the social world is impossibly complicated and the human brain is not very well set up to understand... so we have to use these more simple heuristics"
- "We see the importance of group membership time and time again - that identity aspect"
- #ReplicationCrisis
- "We have to use these simple decision-making processes because everything is too complicated"
- "We can dream of being the rational thinker but we're never going to get there"
- #misinformation , #disinformation , #conspiracy
- Genuine vs. performative belief?
- "What does it mean to really believe something?"
...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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