I'm going to give you two questions and your job is to tell me what they have in common? One. Why is wearing revealing clothing a bad choice for a job interview? Two. What is the best way to escape punishment when you've been caught doing something bad red-handed?. Now these two different questions may seem very different, but in fact, they both have their answer in mind perception. If you remember from the last segment, minds are mostly a matter of perception. And we perceive minds along two dimensions. Agency or thinking, and experience or feeling. Now although some people, adults like you and me, are perceived to be both thinkers and feelers. It turns out, that we often see people as either thinkers or feelers. Now this tendency to split people into two groups is as old as humanity itself. You may have noticed how easily it is that we separate men from women. Black people from white people. Christians from Muslims. And even UNC students from Duke students. What my research shows is that we also split people into two groups in terms of mind perception. Separating those who think from those who feel. As a good example, what do you picture when I mention the word mathematician? You probably think of someone who's brilliant, but who's also pretty out of touch with their emotions. And who has a difficult time relating to the feelings of others. In other words, you picture someone who's a great thinker, but a bad feeler. Now, what do you picture when I say the word artist? You probably imagine someone who's very in touch with their emotions. Who's sensitive and passionate, but who lacks a good sense for business and other practical concerns. In other words, you picture someone who's a great feeler, but a relatively bad thinker. So this tendency to view others as either thinkers or feelers gets at our first question. Why is it a bad idea to wear revealing clothes to a job interview? Now maybe this question comes as a surprise to you. Maybe you think that the best thing to wear for a job interview is a tank top and short shorts. But I'm here to tell you that this is a bad choice. How come? Well, you or your parents might say that it shows a lack of professionalism. But what it really shows is that you're a feeler instead of a thinker. How come? Because our bodies are for feeling. Picture the last time you were sad. You probably crawl back on yourself. You felt some emptiness in your stomach. Now picture the last time you are happy. You probably pop up yourself and jump around. What about the last time you made out with someone? Chances are they are also pretty significance signals from your body. In each of this cases our feelings are deeply grounded in our bodies. And it seems that we recognize this fact when we perceive others as well. Such that the more we see of their body, the more we focus on what they're feeling, and the more we ignore what they're thinking. Consider what happens when you're on the beach and you see an attractive person walk by in a skimpy bathing suit. Do you think of their physical desire? Or do you think of whether they're good at algebra? I'm most certainly in the former. Now beyond these thought experiments we've done real experiments to test this effect. We've studied does showing skin make others neglect your mind? Your ability to think. In one study we showed people either these folks or these folks. And we asked them to rate their capacity for feeling, things like desires and emotions. Or for thinking, things like planning ahead or remembering things. And as you can see these pictures are actually pictures of the exact same person, just with one showing a little more skin. Now importantly, the people who are showing mores skin were rated as more capable of feeling, but less capable of thinking. Now to double check our effect, we ran the study again with some people who are often showing a lot of skin, adult film stars. Now sure enough, when these film stars were shown completely naked, they were seen as fillers. But when they were shown with clothing on, people thought they were much smarter. So that's exactly why you should dress conservatively while interviewing for a job. Because feelers, those who have bodies, don't seem to be thinkers. This dichotomy between thinkers and feelers is also the key to reducing punishment. So let's imagine for a moment that you've done something naughty. Like you've eaten someone else's lunch from the fridge, and they catch you with their sandwich all over their face. Now clearly, you can't deny eating their lunch. But what's the best way to escape their wrath? It turns out that this is the exact same question that confronts defense attorneys when their clients are found guilty. But they want to keep their sentence light. In general, there's two strategies that these defense attorneys use. The first blame escaping strategy is the hero strategy. Now this is the strategy that they use when they call up character witnesses to the stand. They call up people to take the stand to attest that their good character, or they've done good deeds in the past, they've done charity work, they've helped out old ladies or donated money to starving children. In contrast to the hero strategy, the second strategy is the victim strategy. Now this is what they do, what defense attorneys do, when they get you to take the stand, the defendant, and talk about all the terrible suffering that you've endured. About how your parents neglected you, your lovers abandoned you, and how even your pets were mean to you. Now the question is, which of these works better? The hero strategy, or the victim strategy? And the answer's important, because it has implications for the very structure of morality. The hero strategy supposes that morality is like a bank. In which you deposit good deeds over a period of time, and then later on, when you need it, you use these good deeds to offset your bad deeds. In contrast, the victim strategy supposes that morality is not like a bank. Instead, it's a supposes that morality is based upon how people see our minds. The victim strategy grows out of the ideas that we've been discussing that we see others as either thinkers or feelers. Here's how. If you remember from before, we link more responsibility and the deservingness of punishment to the ability to think to agency. That means that the key to escaping blaming is to reduce our apparent capacity for thinking. And one way to do that, as we just saw, is to seem like a feeler. This is exactly what the victim's strategy does. In highlighting our past suffering it emphasizes that we are a feeler, which should help us escape blame. So to test the relative power of the hero or the victim's strategy, we designed a study in which participants assign blame and punishment to other people who have done something wrong. Bad things ranging from little things, like taking $5 that someone drops on the streets, to larger things like vandalism and finally to almost killing someone. Sometimes these people, these bad-doers, were framed as victims, and sometimes they were framed as heroes. Other times they were framed just as normal people. Across the board, we found out that victims were almost always blamed less than the heroes. And here's the kicker, heroes sometimes got even more blame than normal people despite their good deeds. How come? Because they were seen as greater thinkers, and so they were seen as even more responsible when they did something bad. Now these finding may seem strange when you think of morality like a bank of good and evil, but they fit exactly what we'd expect if people make moral judgments, based upon mind perception. So next time your parents yell at you for doing something naughty, don't remind them of all the good you've done. Instead, just let the tears fall. As we've seen throughout this section, when it comes to punishment, or who to hire for a job, the key is recognizing that others perceive our minds. And that you can help shape that mind perception.
