Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll, and I don't know

about you, but most people I know think of themselves as good people as the good guys in the cosmic

struggle between good and evil. Most of us think that we are trying to be good, right? I mean, this

is a flaw in many movie villain scenarios is that they're doctor evil types. They're trying to be

evil whereas most people don't think of themselves as evil. People think of themselves as good, and yet

they end up disagreeing about what it means to be good and how one should act if one is good.

So there's a philosophy question here obviously. What does it mean to be good? To be moral, to do the

right thing? And we've had discussions about moral objectivity versus constructivism or what have

you. There's also a psychological and neuroscientific question about why people want to be good,

and what is happening in them psychologically when they think they are being good. That's where we

are today. In today's conversation, we're talking to Molly Crockett, who is a psychologist and

neuroscientist who studies morality as it is actually practiced in human beings. So not necessarily

trying to decide what you should do, but understanding why people are trying to do the things that they

should do or how they come up with the idea of what it is to do the right thing. Is it ingrained

in us? Do we learn it? Is it something where there are evolutionary explanations for this?

And very importantly, how can we change our personal views on morality? You know, we do learn

things as we grow up. Maybe there are things that when we were kids, we thought we're perfectly

moral behaviors, and now we've changed our minds. And as Molly points out, there's a very

crucial modern question about how technology and communication in the digital age is changing the

way that we think about morality. We're faced with a set of circumstances in an environment that

we were not evolved to understand where things are very, very rapid in how they appear to us and

how we can respond to them. And they are manipulated by politicians and algorithms and so forth,

...