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“Futures Conversations” brings you thought-provoking dialogue showcasing the intersections of disciplines, ideas, and possibilities being tackled at the University of Edinburgh's Edinburgh Futures Institute.
[Electronic beat]
[Enda:] Welcome to Futures Conversations,
the Edinburgh Futures Institute podcast
that showcases
all the wonderful research taking place
at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Research at the Futures Institute
is challenge-led and interdisciplinary
addressing many of the greatest challenges
we face in the world today.
I'm your host, Enda Delaney,
the Director of Research at the Futures Institute.
[Electronic beat]
[Enda:] In this episode,
I'm joined by Professor Liaura Cram.
Laura is Professor of Neuropolitics
and Director of Neuropolitics Research Lab
at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Laura, could you tell us a little bit
about your background, where you grew up,
who inspired you,
what values were important
to your family and social group?-
[Laura:] Yeah, sure.
So, I actually was born in Edinburgh.
And, I did go to school
just down the road from here.
So I went to Tollcross Primary for a while
and then across to Gillespie’s.
And for me, in some ways, it's not at all
surprising that I would end up somewhere
in education.
Education has always played a really,
really important role in my background.
I had a very, very challenging early
childhood.
And my mum basically ran away
with us as three children.
And we came to Edinburgh,
lived in a one bedroom flat
with my granny and granddad in Leith,
and was there having to find a way
to look after
and bring up her children
in this new environment.
She had taken her Highers
and could have gone to university, but
had- they had now expired,
so that that was an issue.
But one positive thing that I always took,
even from the very earliest part,
from the time we did live with my father,
who I don't have a relationship with, was
there were always books in the house,
there were always encyclopedias
in the house that were always pointed to.
And for my dad, his aspiration
to get out of
what had been a very difficult
childhood for him was education.
And his belief for me
as the oldest child was always,
“you’ll go to university, you will be one of
those things” and those things sort of,
I think, stick with you.
When we moved to Edinburgh,
my mum re-did her Highers,
while she was taking like a typing course
to just feed us,
and then went back
and trained as a teacher.
So education
always, always was part of us.
There was always somebody
studying at a table late at night.
Over the years, my grandmother,
who obviously her life would have gone
into disarray, having all these kids
come and live in her house [laughs]
Then she trained.
She was a civil servant by day,
but she trained as a yoga teacher.
And also always, always was at night school.
So she was always up at Edinburgh University
actually doing things
like Indian philosophy courses.
And so, yeah, for me,
the notion of education was always,
it was about aspiration and escape.
It was about, erm, a way of survival
and feeding people.
But it's also always been
about a way of life, curiosity,
learning, expanding your horizons.
So, like my granny in the sort
of early 80s went off to study in India
to- to progress her yoga studies.
And that was really unusual
for a woman of those generations.
So I've always been really surrounded
by people who saw education and learning
as critical, but also who really went
for the sort of curious and unusual.
And I think that that probably
is reflected in where I've ended up.
And although I did well at school,
I was always one of these people
who kind of, I did well but
I was always looking for something
a bit more exciting or,
where the next thing was.
And at 17, obviously being Scottish,
I could do my Highers in my fifth year.
So I had done enough Highers to know
that I could get to university and,
but I just,
I didn't want to, to stay on at school.
I'd really outgrown it.
But I wasn't at all sure
that I wanted to go to university.
So I went and worked in the Bank
of Scotland in Saint Andrew Square.
And I began even doing my banking
exams there.
But it didn't take me very long to realise
that wasn't the job for me.
And even during that year-
and now when I look back,
I think that's quite unusual.
Like I was 17,
but I went and did modern Greek classes
at night school at Edinburgh University.
So my very first learning experience at
Edinburgh was in the Appleton Tower
doing modern Greek as a- as a night class.
Then I went off and worked in Greece,
and at that point
I decided I would apply to university,
completely pivoted and I applied to do
Modern Greek and Political Science.
I wanted to do Modern Greek.
I loved living in Greece.
And, at the time, you could only do
Modern Greek at Oxford, Cambridge, London Kings,
and Birmingham, but the others
would only let you do it with classics.
So I went to Birmingham.
I studied in Thessalonica for a year
and then worked on an EU project
up in the mountains, in a village in Crete,
where a letter came through the door.
In those days you still got letters,
that said, we're starting this
brand new master's degree.
It was from Bath University and it was run
with 5 or 6 other European countries.
So with Tilburg in the Netherlands,
with the University of Crete.
What the cohort did was they came
from all different countries in the EU
and we traveled together.
We did three months in Maynooth,
three months in Tilburg and
then three months at your home university.
So that very much cemented-
so that was my European Social Policy Analysis.
And that's how I then came to be studying,
European Public Policy for my PhD-
[Enda:] Because your earlier work
was on sort of European politics.
And I can understand now listening to your biography-
[Laura:] [Laughs]-
[Enda:] But could you tell us a little bit
about what drove you into that sort of
set of interests?-
[Laura:] Yeah.
So I was- so it was European Social Policy
Analysis was what I was studying.
So, my dissertation was on,
the development of European Union social policy.
In those days,
again, things were really different.
So like as an undergraduate,
I had a full grant.
And when I did my master's degree, I had,
an ESRC grant for masters
you could apply for, for one year.
And then I was applying, for PhD funding.
And I decided that I would
continue the study in the area
of European Union Social Policy.
And I was really privileged
to have Rudolf Klein as my supervisor.
And he was a- he was a really great person
for me at that time because not only
was he really good at saying to me “Laura,
I don't think you're an ideologue.
I think you need to question
some of these things that you’re doing.”
He also really, offered me opportunities.
I went very early on in my-
I think my first three months of the PhD,
I went off and gave a paper in Italy,
with some really,
senior people like Jean Blondel,
and Giandomenico Majone.
And that really changed my career
because it meant I had connections
and people who then could vouch for me.
But I didn't show any great loyalty,
because just about six months
after starting my PhD,
a job came up at Warwick University
with Jeremy Richardson,
and he was starting the European
Public Policy Institute.
And for me,
it was just one of those things
where you look at it
and go, that's got my name all over it.
This is what I'm interested in.
And yeah, so I took that job as a
as a research assistant at Warwick,
so I never really was a PhD student.
I always worked full time,
while I was completing my PhD.
And I think about a year into that post,
I got a lectureship at Warwick,
and then about a year later
I moved to Strathclyde,
all as European Politics-
[Enda:] The field of Neuropolitics
that you've been a pioneer
in, I’m fascinated by,
but can you explain it for our listeners?
How would you sum up the field?-
[Laura:] Over the years working on European Public Policy,
I became really interested in the way
that the creation of a policy
in an international organisation
might shape
the way that the public
saw that organisation.
And so that that developed
into a question about
how we come to identify
with different levels of government,
whether we're prepared to shift our identities,
what are the factors that, erm,
help to- to explain that.
And at the time,
when I was at Strathclyde,
I had a lovely colleague: Stratos Patrikios,
who was working in Political Psychology
and experiments, and it was quite unusual,
really hard to get published experiments then
[laughs]
but we started then saying, well, you know what if
we had a look at how these symbols affect people
and there'd been terrific research, erm,
in psychology, political psychology,
looking at the effect of things
like flags.
And so we worked on that in- in the European Union.
And then when I came to Edinburgh,
I cheekily asked the principal,
who was then Tim O’Shea,
if they would give me time,
because I really had this hunch
that the ways we were trying to get at it
weren't sufficient to fully understand
the mechanisms
that were underlying these processes.
And I felt that there were insights
from cognitive neuroscience
that would help us to explain that.
But I knew that I wouldn't have much
credibility if I came in with no training.
And so he, erm,
agreed, that I could have half of my time
when I first moved to Edinburgh University
to study Cognitive Neuropsychology and
Neuroimaging, I kind of split the degrees
between Brain Imaging Research Centres
Master's degree and Psychology
Master's degree here.
And always knowing that would never give me
enough to do the work myself.
But that would give me enough to know what
I didn't know when I was talking to
fabulous postdoctoral researchers
and other researchers
in this interdisciplinary field.
You know, like all of these things,
fields developed from
lots of different angles at the same time.
So at the same sort of,
period, there were people like Darren Schreiber working in that area.
There are fabulous colleagues
in New York working,
from a psychological perspective,
looking at these questions.
And now there are-
there are a growing number of centres
our colleagues in- in
London Center for Politics of Feelings.
So there's a-
you know, there's a whole body of people
coming at this from,
from different angles.
But I would say what everybody shares,
whether we come as a- as neuroscientists,
as political scientists
or as psychologists,
is, erm, an understanding that-
that what's going on under the hood
might help us to get better insights
into some of the mechanisms
and patterns that- that we've recognised
in each of our fields.
So insights from political scientists
might help the psychologists,
some of the questions that they're
looking at or the neuroscientists to,
to, to target some of their investigations
and insights from the,
the cognitive neurosciences
and political psychology could help us
as political scientists to say, look,
we've seen these patterns emerging.
Why do they keep happening?
You know, what helps us maybe to-
to identify some of the underlying mechanisms
for some of the theories and practices
that- that we observe.-
[Enda:] Historically, it's about more sort of behavioural
approaches.
Looking, to use your phrase, under the hood.
It seems to me, you know, a strikingly
original way of doing-
Did you meet resistance when you- erm,
or was everyone,
was embracing this sort of new way
of thinking about how people acted?-
[Laura:] Yeah, it's interesting, is interesting.
I think, it can go either way.
I think either it can be quite appealing
because it's quite blingy
and something new.
And there's also another side where
almost immediately where we're always,
faced with the questions about ethics, erm,
and it can, erm,
that that's entirely correct and, and,
and appropriate and, and it really does
require very, very careful,
ethical consideration, but also,
it can sometimes
come with a little bit of a fear factor
because it can be a bit associated
with, being used against people’s will.
So maybe I'll be a bit
more like neutral marketing
or capturing people
when they don't know they're being seen.
Insights like, which isn't
the kind of research that we do,
as with all things that come up for real,
sort of cutting edge, it's remarkably
hard to get through traditional peer
reviewed journals, because that's hard
to find somebody who has the expertise,
who can comment on it.
And if you get people from one side,
maybe more from the politics
they often find, maybe
there's too much neuro in the paper.
If you get somebody
from the cognitive neuroscience side,
they'd be like, all would be expecting
much more coverage of the-
of the- the underlying story
and the- the analysis here.
So I've kind of resigned myself
now over the years that- that possibly
my place is just to kind of
take that tough turn and hopefully it's
just a bit easier for the next set
that come along behind you.-
[Enda:] In many respects,
an incredibly brave thing
to do, retraining, exploring,
you know a whole new area,
which itself is developing
very fast, obviously cognitive neuroscience,
that there is an inherent risk in doing that-
[Laura:] For sure.-
[Enda:] I'm sure you felt that at the time?-
[Laura: For sure.
But on the other side, I guess
right from the very beginning
where we said, you know, for me, education
education is all about curiosity
and pushing your boundaries and I think
the best part of being an academic
is the ability to reinvent yourself.
For me, it was probably less brief
than just a necessity.
I don't think I could just keep going
in the same route.
And I, I really admire people who can
and you can find new angles on things
that they are interested in.
And can you tell us a little bit
about the new your Politics research lab
that you direct at the Futures Institute?
What does the lab do on a daily basis?
I mean, that's shaped very much on the
daily basis, depending on what projects
we're running on.
And you know, how many postdocs
we have at any given time.
We have people who are already based
at Edinburgh University
who've been with us for, about ten years.
So Claire Llewellyn, who originally came
from Informatics, but now is employed
by Social and Political Sciences
and the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
So that's a quite an interesting,
kind of process where actually
institutionally, it begins to see the,
the pattern of recruitment
and we actually get genuinely
interdisciplinary posts.
And that that I think is,
is an interesting outcome.
Robyn Hill,
who is still based in informatics
but has worked really closely with us.
We work very, very closely
with Adam Moura from psychology.
So we've always worked
across, the disciplines, and then we have
postdocs.
At the moment we have cost associated
suppliers Luke Stevens and Sarah Dale job,
all with very different, backgrounds
because we need those,
different backgrounds looking at things
like large language models, biometric
testing and, large survey experiments
and on a daily basis, you know,
if you just come in, we have people
either running experiments
or analyzing experiments.
They're all setting up this morning
for a really nice journal club
that one of our postdocs is organizing.
Because, again, what if I, if I had to
summarize something about the lab
is it's really about developing,
a shared language.
So what we recognize is,
is that each of us
comes from each of our disciplines, and
we don't even use exactly the same terms
for what are ostensibly the same things.
And it's very easy for people
to talk past each other.
So what we consider
sort of really praying for all of us
is to have that communication environment.
So we're probably quite unusual.
People are in the lab more than than
maybe people often order as a postdoc.
But part of that is to have
that conversation between people
so that if somebody is working
maybe on something biometric,
somebody else is working on something
that's a survey experiment.
They can actually see the crossovers
and the links
and advise each other on techniques
and and ideas.
We've done a number of, fMRI.
So it's functional magnetic resonance
image studies.
And we're really privileged here
to have at Edinburgh University.
Brain imaging, Edinburgh imaging.
And they have the facilities out
at the hospital,
where we can do volunteer, research.
And we've worked closely with different
people as they are over the years.
Obviously, fMRI for us
is the the more expensive end of our life.
So so we tend to
we often talk about it like a tunnel,
like a funnel, rather,
where we start out wide.
People like, like clear, might work
on social computational analysis.
So maybe finding
what mechanisms we think are at play
and then bringing it down a little level,
maybe doing a behavioral experiment,
our survey experiment lab,
to see if those mechanisms
are the mechanisms
that we think are happening.
And then once we really come down
to where we think something
might be happening in the brain,
then we might take it into an fMRI study.
We in terms of neurophysiological studies,
though,
we also do, use, an emotion suite,
which is a biometric set of measures
that lets us measure things like,
heart rate,
skin conductance, to look at eye tracking,
and in fact, we have just got,
an electroencephalography,
set, which we haven't used yet,
but we will soon.
And that will allow us to do
some of the actual brain imaging in lab
before we maybe go out and spend
more money on an MRI, for example.
In this case,
we are looking at how your identity
affects your perception of exclusion.
So we'll look for something
that's a very well normed, protocol.
So there's something called the Cyber Bowl
where it's almost like a bowl
playing game.
It's like a bowl playing game.
And, you are either included
or excluded, by a partner.
And in the case of the experiment
that we did, your partner,
you know, their identity.
And so we will look at how you respond
in your brain when you are included
or excluded by a partner
of a particular identity group,
and then see if there are any differences.
And on the, you know, the spoiler.
That one is. Yes. That are
that it
that we
tend to actually think of ourselves
as more excluded by somebody
who's not from our identity group.
And, and in this particular study,
we found that their, their, percept
of being included and excluded, were more
similar between the control group
and the other identity than they were
with their own identity group.
So they thought they were they were more
excluded by the other identity group.
But, we actually no, they were not.
There was no difference in the exclusion
because we set the exclusion rate.
So we know that objectively,
it's the same, but our,
our identities actually give us
a different perception of that.
What would you see as being the, the, the,
you know, the takeaway for the,
for the field of, of politics, from,
from using
cognitive neuroscience to help explain
issues of identity and belonging.
Yeah. So I think the first thing
is always proceed with caution.
Remember a lot of these, studies
will we will be talking about a very,
very small
sample size. We are just beginning to,
chip away
at some, some ideas,
maybe give some alternative lenses.
And I think that's really important.
So, yeah, in terms of simply
taking that away
and thinking you can manipulate people,
you up to be really,
I probably wouldn't be as confident
that you could could quite do that.
However, I think it does help to,
to give us some means in a really nicely
triangulated environment, which we should
all be doing is good scientists,
obviously.
Well,
perhaps it is a different understanding
of what is the mechanism
that has been driving something and a
from for me that, that, that is,
that is the really,
important insight.
And if it begins to help us to see, well,
when you behave in this particular way
as a politician voter,
then these are the types of information
processes that are taking place.
Then it might help us to understand
a little bit
about why some things backfire
or why some kind of intervention.
So for example,
there's been a lot on our misinterpreted
misinformation interventions
and actually found there's
been quite a lot of backlashes
to those misinformation intervention.
And sometimes understanding how that
information has actually been processed
and how identity and identity triggers
can affect that,
might help us
to get a better understanding
of how you could make a more effective
and to misinformation intervention.
That's an interesting tongue twister that
you've
you've shifted this very nicely along to,
I guess, the practical consequences
or the practical findings, eg,
Liberal democracies across the West
are facing all sorts of challenges,
whether it's the rise of far
right or people feeling disenfranchized.
Where would you see your politics
addressing these existential issues?
I guess for for liberal democracies?
Yeah, I think I mean,
I think particularly the kind of work on,
the identitarian approaches, the, the,
the provoking acts.
I'm about to give the Shapiro lecture
on government and opposition.
And so that's very high in my head.
I'm going to give some spoilers on that.
But but yeah, basically that question
almost our positioning always of things
in adversarial formats of government
in opposition in itself,
immediately puts
six people up into two group scenarios.
And we know, from many, many studies
that very often more effective
policymaking
takes place in quite a functional,
quite a sort of law, politics environment.
And what we haven't always known
are what other mechanisms
that explain why that works.
One of the key issues,
I think democracy is faces is trust.
And I'm wondering,
can you read politics to tell us
about trust in political systems?
Have political parties,
political leaders, around the world?
Is this an area?
Yeah.
I mean, again, I mean, one of the, the,
the studies that we did
a couple of years ago
was looking at trust in information,
and the way that we process trusted and,
and non trusted information in the brain,
whether that makes us feel more positive
or more negative about the information
that we're achieving.
And again, we were looking very much at
how identity, fits into those processes.
So I think in that very, similar vein,
again, you're talking about small sample
studies.
You're just beginning to maybe shine
a light on some of the mechanisms.
But what you're also seeing
is across the studies of social
and effective neuroscience
and of cognitive neuroscience,
you're seeing multiple studies
across all these wonderful labs.
There's talk about a many, many more.
And as you get more and more of them,
you have more meta analyzes possible.
And then these small studies
aren't just small studies on their own,
but you're beginning to get, wonderful,
banks of information that highlight
which parts of the brain
seem to be associated
with particular activities.
And the more we see
these as a source of metastases
and then the more useful it becomes.
So yeah,
I think everything that you're doing
is just a little drop towards it,
but I often think of it as a bit more,
like maybe being a chemist,
you know, if you, if you drop one,
or two drops of solution into something
and it doesn't work,
you're not necessarily
going to throw the whole experiment out.
It might be 93,
or it might be if you did one and a half
and I think that that's
some of what you have to look at.
You're looking at around very,
very much a moving target.
You know, our understanding of the brain
is developing every day, our understanding
of the analytical models and,
and simply the software to use to analyze
the brain is changing
and updating all the time
as people learn about it.
So it may be very well
that you did a perfectly,
appropriate and well managed study
from the five, ten years ago.
But then really now the results wouldn't
stand up because our understandings of to.
So yeah, also have to accept that
and acknowledge that one thing
that's changed over the last 30 years
or so is social media
and the use of social media particularly,
and monitoring
and expressing political views.
How do you see the relationship
between what people say online,
what people do online,
the whole notion of echo chambers,
that people are basically ending up
talking to
people that they largely agree with,
rather than people
that they might have disagreement.
How is social
media changed the way in which,
neuro, sense
of the the political world
around us, develops?
Yeah. I mean, there's
a lot of great studies on that in our lab.
And Claire
Llewellyn is really a social media expert.
Of course, it's a really challenging
environment to work in just now,
Twitter ex was,
an amazing resource for academics
and the limitations on on that.
I've changed a lot of, of the ability
to do longitudinal studies,
which I think are particularly interesting
in that,
field.
But, one thing I think that remains and,
and I really do hope we get,
we get back that ability
to use that range of, of,
social media sources is
I think it's very interesting to observe,
spontaneous conversation from people
rather than sort of top down questions
that we might offer in surveys
and, and know
there is fabulous research done on the way
in which things
that carry like moral outrage, move,
at a different, rate around,
the world.
So, I, I think we have to look at it
in a number of ways.
I think there are some challenges,
to the notion of the echo chamber.
In the sense that, you know,
if you remember, when we all just
used to buy our one newspaper,
we were very much in our equity.
We only read, you know,
if you were a Guardian reader,
you were definitely not a telegraph reader
and never the twain.
So in fact, you probably do get exposed
to more things.
And again,
there's been quite a lot of studies
on that Christian faculty
here, does a lot of work on,
the social media and, ecosystem as well.
But, we may be a bit more exposed, a bit
more than we think in that ecosystem.
Could you tell us a little bit
about the work that you've done?
The, the sort of neuro politics
of the politics of identity,
for want of a better phrase?
Yeah.
So, that really, so, for example,
the story that I told you about the PSI
football experiment
is, is one of the parts of these stories.
And I guess the starting
point for that is really,
an understanding that
whether or not and there are
that are disputed positions on this.
So whether or not we basically, are born
social on the spot,
alien man's political animal,
or whether we become
social people
like Catalina for tapas to talk about,
how we become social
through our early nurturing.
But one way or another, as human beings,
we don't survive
without others,
and certainly not in our, our early lives.
So I think, one of the things that I find
most compelling when you come back
to the study of identity from a neuro
political perspective, is I came to it
because I found that there were
it was a bit like ships
that pass in the night
when you talked about European identity,
the beside the those
who thought it was highly rational
and it was in the cost benefit,
and I
would identify with you or I wouldn't
and there were others
who thought it was a much more emotional,
sentimental attachment and actually,
what I think you get out of the kind of
political approach
is that it's very rational to be social
and that these, these, shape one another.
And when you start to understand that
that's really
that is a real shifting point.
So it's not either rational cost benefit
analysis or affective emotional social.
How we rationalize is affected
by our emotional, physiological
and the context and environment around us
shape our physiological
and our emotional responses.
And that affects our ability
to make rational decisions
and to to perform executive function.
So I find actually that understanding
of the feedback
and the interaction between the two
is probably the biggest contribution that.
Have you had much interest
from political parties, think tanks,
what you might call the sort of mechanisms
of of the political system
in the in the work you do.
I could see why why
they might be interested in it.
Yeah.
I mean, we've talked to various people,
not sure so much political parties.
All I can see why
they might be interested.
We have worked a lot
with, different institutions.
So, for example, part of the,
the European Commission's
Joint Research Council, did a study
on understanding our political nature
and how that might help them
to inform their policymakers.
And, they
had, people from a variety of different,
different disciplines.
I was part of the
neuroscience group there.
Stefano Palminteri led that,
and my psychiatrist was part of it.
Lou Safra runs, and really,
again, a really nice example of people
putting together
these different understandings
from different disciplines
and bringing to the question
of how might an EU policymaker
actually make better policy
if they understood some of this?
And that was a really interesting project
to be part of.
We're here at the Edinburgh
Futures Institute.
What sort of future do you envisage,
given your expertise
and the wonderful work
that you've told us about?
Yeah, I mean, it's hard,
you know, when times when resources
are constrained and generally and, and
and times are hard, we know that
that can make it, difficult for people to,
look for a road to look up optimistically.
My hope, my sincere hope is that our,
our focus comes on how we can do
better, how we can,
use the knowledge that we have
about the way that brain,
mind and body interact with one
another to understand
better how the policies
that we make impact on people,
and how that in turn affects
how they behave as political citizens.
And I think sometimes
we lose that connection.
So often you'll hear people walking around
just nice, and all
this is broken and that is broken
and that that brings a lot of despair.
But it also often brings
with it, a lot of sense of impotence,
lack of
efficacy and an inability to fix things.
And, my hope
for future research
is that we actually start right there.
How do we make
people feel more efficacious?
More like their contribution in the system
can make a difference.
Make it so that, when,
a system needs fixing,
they feel like
they might have a voice in the fixing,
and that they are, the policies
that affect them.
They're not just passive
recipients of these policies, but
that they actually have a role to play.
Well, thank you very much for
for taking the time to tell us
about your own fascinating work.
The work of the newer Politics Research
Lab at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
Oh, thanks very much for having me.