Giday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.

Western civilization, liberal democracy, and your place in it, indeed your life, will thrive or

fail based not on the actions of individual human beings, but on the behavior of groups.

The way we think about ourselves inside a group, why we kick people out of a group, who gets

to have high status within our groups, that really everything that's going on in the world

can be boiled down to the way groups form their

boundaries and the way groups interact with each other. Yolanda Jettin is a professor of social psychology

at the University of Queensland and she is an expert on the psychology of inclusion and exclusion

how groups form, how groups form on social media, how groups form in the real world, how groups

conceive of themselves with regards to immigration and nativism. This was a fascinating chat.

I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one and only Professor Yolanda Yetton.

If you think about it, everything that we do is often with others, either in groups or, you know, with friends, with family members.

So the interesting thing is that if we, even if I would have to introduce myself, I often do that by talking about the groups that I belong to, right?

Or the categories that I belong to.

I'm a female, I'm Dutch, I'm an academic, a psychologist.

So, you know, these are the sports teams that I follow, etc.

So, you know exactly where I stand.

You never say, hey, I'm an individual who has these traits, so completely devoid of context.

And I find that fascinating, that we think of ourselves as unique individuals, but in many ways

we're simply the product of the groups to which we belong.

And for each of us, that's, of course, a very unique constellation of groups.

But, you know, often we talk about, you know, comparing the groups that we belong to.

...