This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
On any given day, you can find plenty of examples of people doing bad things.
Domestic violence is on the rise as victims.
Earlier this morning, an 82 year old man beaten and robbed inside a lower east side bodega, which could lead to such things as them draining your bank account.
This hour, two people have been arrested, accused of human trafficking teenagers here in central Florida.
It makes sense that our attention is drawn to these sorts of people.
From an evolutionary perspective, being alert to those who might cause us harm can help to keep us safe.
Calling out these people also helps to reinforce the rules of our society.
But is it possible that we've become too focused on the wrongdoers amongst us?
What if our focus on the bad makes it harder to see the many good people in our midst?
And what happens when these biases play out not just at an individual level, but are built into the structures of communities and nations?
In policy making circles, you are regarded as highly intelligent and realistic.
If you say, listen, everybody is selfish, we have to treat the citizen, the taxpayer, the employee, and so on as if he or she was entirely selfish, because otherwise, maybe we're a chump, or maybe we'll be taken advantage of.
And so on.
Over the past few weeks, we've looked at how we gauge other people's intentions, why we underestimate our own likability in interpersonal settings, and how we often fail to understand our own motivations.
Today, we continue our mind reading 2.0 series with a 2020 episode about how we profoundly underestimate the goodness in human nature and how this era is woven into the fabric of our societies.
What we lose when we assume people are bad this week on hidden brain.
Both in times of crisis and in normal times, public policy is focused on keeping bad people from doing bad things.
Behavioral economist Sam Bowles thinks this is a mistake.