This episode is part of our fantastic collaboration with the University of Technology, Sydney's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,

spearheaded by its fearless dean, Professor Alan Davison, who's committed to making UTS the place for independent thinking on Australian campuses.

I'm a visiting fellow there, and we team up for a series called Permission to Think,

of which this is the latest installment.

Expand your mind and enjoy.

Goody, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

Here's a dangerous idea for you.

You are inconsistent in judging other people.

You give people who agree with you more of a pass than people who disagree with you.

You judge your enemies more harshly than your friends.

I suppose that's not that controversial when you put it that way.

But when you shift that into the political and cultural arena and say that you are probably more forgiving of people who are doing bad thinking, as long

as they end up where you are, and you're probably likely to jump in on a pile on against people

you disagree with, even if they're being reasonable in their thinking, then it becomes a

little bit more uncomfortable.

Corey Clark is a behavioral scientist.

She does research into bias, social contagion, especially in relation to academic research.

She looks at the evolutionary behavioral roots of being ostracized from tribes,

and she's done serious, hard, scientific research into the different ways in which people

either forgive or condemn other people or even something as abstract as an academic paper

if the conclusion doesn't accord with their pre-existing beliefs.

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