Here are the steps of how this happens, as I see it, though not every one of these steps occurs in every single case:

(1) Many people feel dissatisfied with the state of their society and its impact on their lives, and blame the groups that have long remained in power. (Sometimes these groups that have long been in power deserve blame for the bad state of affairs; other times, the bad state of affairs is due to circumstances largely outside of their control.) Blaming these groups that have long remained in power often also involves distrust in existing institutions.

(2) A new potential leader emerges who is perceived not to be a member of the groups that have historically been in power (or if they come from the original groups of power, then this potential leader typically claims outsider status, presenting themselves as a reformer who is different than the other insiders). Typically, this potential leader is viewed as being more “one of the people” than the prior groups in power.

(3) This leader is charismatic and, though potentially polarizing, many people find this person captivating and persuasive. Oftentimes, this leader is also high on traits commonly associated with grandiose narcissism (e.g., a belief in their own superiority and specialness, a need for admiration, arrogance, manipulative tendencies, a “with me or against me” mentality, and reduced empathy).

(4) This leader promotes a grand vision of what the country could become (or could be restored to again) under their leadership, which gets many people excited.

(5) The leader typically appears to be powerful and courageous, and willing to stand up against (and correct the errors and abuses of) the previous people in power who have held the country back.

(6) In addition to blaming society’s problems on the prior group in power, the leader also uses one or more other groups as scapegoats, and blames many of society’s problems on that group as well (typically a distrusted local minority group, immigrants, or some other country that the population sees as a potential threat). However, the scapegoat group(s) are either not actually a cause of any of the problems in that society, or are only a minor cause (with most of the problems being caused by other factors).

(7) The leader also exaggerates, lies to, and manipulates the people, claiming simple (but inaccurate) narratives about what’s gone wrong that make their solutions seem likely to be effective, and that paint themselves as the heroes and the prior groups in power (as well as the scapegoats) as villains.

(8) Through their charisma, exciting vision for the future, and promises to fix the problems in society by correcting the errors of the previous groups in power and by cracking down on the proposed scapegoats, the leader gets strong public support. The leader then gets into a position of executive power by one of a variety of means (e.g., being elected, being appointed, deal-making, coercion, or a coup).

(9) The leader then attempts to neutralize the power of formerly powerful groups that were in power (e.g., through violence, arrests, seizing their wealth, and/or disparaging them and damaging their reputations).

(10) The leader additionally harms the scapegoated group(s) (e.g., through arrests, preventing immigration, forced migration, tariffs, military action, and/or violence). Sometimes, though not always, the leader also cracks down on leading intellectuals and groups of intellectuals, attempting to weaken their influence or prevent them from being listened to.

(11) The leader amasses power and wealth for themselves while in charge, while also attempting to reduce the checks and balances on their power (e.g., by weakening or consolidating other parts of government, or by exerting control over media and journalism). Additionally, the leader typically engages in information control and propaganda in an attempt to get the population to view all of their actions as positive. The more effective their information control and propaganda are, the more they can get away with making terrible decisions on behalf of society and enriching themselves at the expense of the people.

(12) The leader’s actions sometimes produce no benefit at all for the bulk of the populace, and sometimes produce a short-term benefit to the populace, but ultimately, the leader’s actions come at a meaningful (and sometimes disastrous) long-term cost, leaving society worse off long-term than it was before that person rose to power.

And, with that, as has happened again and again in many societies throughout the world, populations end up trying to improve their country’s problems by electing an exciting new leader, but instead end up being lied to and manipulated, leaving the well-being of the people of their country worse off than it would have been. This is a worldwide phenomenon. It happened with Hitler in Germany, Kim Il-Sung in North Korea, Mao Zedong in China, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and Putin in Russia. And it will likely keep happening. A first step towards helping stop this pattern is if voters become more aware of it.

To be clear, populism isn’t bad, per se. The unmet needs and desires of ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded are very important. And widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo usually does mean that something needs to change. The real issue is that grandiose manipulators leverage populist sentiment to install themselves in power, leaving their people worse off in the long term.

It’s also important to observe that this pattern isn’t one of the right or the left – it’s a pattern that arises on both sides of the political spectrum.

This piece was first written on August 31, 2025, and first appeared on my website on October 23, 2025.

Much to my surprise, liking rock and classical music predicts the same things about your personality: having greater “openness to experience” (a personality trait from the Big Five framework) and being more intellectual.

Makes sense for classical, but who would have guessed that’s true of rock?

Another surprise to me was that enjoying dance/electronic music, country music, and jazz music predicted similar traits: being more group-oriented (e.g., gravitating toward group rather than 1-1 interactions), being more extroverted, and being more spontaneous.

But each of these 3 groups also stood out uniquely. Enjoying country was associated with being more emotional, enjoying dance/electronic was associated with higher openness to experience, and enjoying jazz was associated with being less attention-seeking than the other two groups.

Enjoyment of both pop music and hip-hop was associated with being more emotional, but pop music enjoyers were more group-oriented, whereas hip-hop music enjoyers were more spontaneous.

All the correlations discussed here are between r=0.3 and r=0.45 in size, so they are moderately large. It would be neat to see whether this generalizes to non-U.S. samples.

You can explore all of these music genre correlations, plus over a million more correlations about humans, for free using PersonalityMap: https://personalitymap.io

This piece was first written on May 23, 2025, and first appeared on my website on May 29, 2025.

(1) Two groups have a small (but meaningful) difference in their average value of some trait, with heavily overlapping distributions.

(2) Some people (“Dichotomizers” or “Oversimplifiers”) observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small average difference into a (sometimes very harmful) oversimplification: “A’s are like this, B’s are like that.” They also fairly often make it seem like this difference is large (or applies to almost everyone in the group), important, and fundamental (e.g., inherent and unchangeable).

(3) Other people (“Difference Deniers”), often acting with good intentions, criticize this oversimplification, which they correctly perceive as harmful. But instead of saying some combination of:

• “the difference in averages is small”
• “the distributions are heavily overlapping”
• “judging an individual based on a small difference in group averages is a poor way to make predictions, as well as unjust”
• “we shouldn’t judge people for differing on that trait” (if it’s not a trait one should be judged on)
• “if we want to remove the difference in averages, we should consider implementing policy XYZ”

they say “the difference in averages does not exist.” After denying the difference and seeing those they respect deny it, some of them become convinced anyone who believes in the existence of this (actually existing) small average difference is nefarious (and lump such people in with those who harmfully oversimplify people into “A’s are like this, B’s are like that.”) Others among them know the average difference exists but pretend not to because they want to fit into the group that adamantly denies the difference, or because they feel guilty about believing it (even though they are right about it existing).

(4) Oversimiplifiers from (2), who remain totally convinced an average difference exists (and are correct about its existence but exaggerate its magnitude), assume that the Difference Deniers from (3) must be either stupid (for not realizing there is a difference), or untrustworthy liars (for denying what they must see is true), or cruel lunatics (for getting enraged at people for believing in “the truth”).

Queue endless fights between the Dichotomizers and the Difference Deniers, both of which are misrepresenting the actual reality of the situation and demonizing each other.

The problem with turning small averages into “A’s are like this, B’s are like that” is that it is an inaccurate oversimplification and often unfair to A’s or B’s or both.

The problem with denying the existence of average differences that, while small, really do exist is that you end up believing falsehoods, or you end up lying, or both, and you may end up unfairly misjudging people who are (without malice) reporting on real average differences.

To avoid the weaknesses of both the Dichotomizers and the Difference Deniers, I think the best way to handle these cases is to:

1) Avoid pre-judging people based on their membership in broad groups – learn about people as individuals before coming to judgments about them.

2) Avoid language like “A’s are like this, B’s are like that” so that you aren’t a Dichotomizer.

3) Avoid denying that an average difference exists when it really does exist, so that way, you aren’t a Difference Denier.

4) When relevant, remind people that small average differences are not a good basis for judging individuals (epistemically and morally), and point out that the distributions between the two groups are heavily overlapping (when they are) to combat people using differences in the average as a justification for stereotyping.

5) Point to (when relevant, helpful, and accurate) policies that may help close the gap between the two groups (keeping in mind that some gaps in averages are fine if the trait in question is merely a difference and not something “good” or “bad”)

6) Point out (when the difference in question is not something people should be judged for) that this attribute should not be a basis for judging people, i.e., that having different values of that trait is completely okay.

Another approach that can be taken when the group differences in the average are small but meaningful is well described by Guy Srinivasan in the comments on an earlier draft of this post: “Can we agree to make decisions as if there were no average difference, since usually all such decisions would turn out the same, and usually when they wouldn’t it’s perpetuating systemic problems to make the decision differently?”

Of course, as with any binary categories, some people will only be partial Difference Deniers or Dichotomizers – people are absurdly complex, and this model I present here is purposely simplified in order to help communicate this dynamic clearly.

Okay, but are there cases where the Dichotomizers or Difference Deniers are actually just right?

Absolutely, there are some.

When a group difference is SO huge that the distributions are nearly non-overlapping, then it’s reasonable to say, “A’s are like this, and B’s are like that.” For instance, it makes sense to say that “blue whales are big, mice are small.” In such cases, the Dichotomizers aren’t really oversimplifying. But when we’re talking about human groups, this kind of situation is very rare.

And in situations when the difference in averages between groups is so small as to be essentially insignificant for all purposes, the Difference Deniers aren’t actually denying reality. For instance, if it turns out that right-handed people are 0.001% better at school than left-handed people, that difference is so small as to not be meaningfully different from zero for all purposes, and so saying there is “no difference” is an extremely reasonable thing to do. There are, in fact, many attributes along which human groups differ so little that “no difference” is an accurate way to describe it (even though the difference is not literally zero to the 10th decimal point).

Click here for a high resolution version of this image.

As you can see in the diagram, there were well over 60 Abrahamic religious splits, each of which changed one form of religion into another. Since I made the diagram quickly and used Wikipedia as the source for a lot of it, I’m sure it contains plenty of mistakes and typos and still leaves lots of splits and denominations out (my apologies for any egregious errors!)

I learned some things from making the diagram that I think most people don’t realize:

(1) We tend to view the religions of today as a linear progression from religions of old (perhaps with some modification in ideology along the way), but in fact, a more accurate model is that religion has minor schisms over and over and over again but most of those offshoots die out. It’s like a branching tree where most branches have been removed, so what we end up seeing is a tree with only a few branches that each seem to have had a smooth progression from the root. We see a few winners and assume those were the only ones in the race. We do see a bunch of twigs at the end of the branches, though (which represent the newest offshoots – presumably, some of these will die out as most of the offshoots did in the past).

(2) Where one should draw the line at something being an entirely new religion now seems a lot more arbitrary to me than it used to. The most clear-cut cases are when an entirely new religious text is added which gains widespread popularity (e.g., Christianity branching off from Judaism), but with new religious groups offshooting regularly, there are a lot of minor branches that are now separated from each other by so many prior splits that they seem so distinct as to essentially be different religions despite happening to use the same religious text.

It’s also interesting to consider that almost every one of these groups believed or believes its religious doctrines and practices to be more accurate or good than all the other groups. Religious truth has never been something we humans have been able to agree on!

This piece was first written on August 3, 2017, and first appeared on my website on June 16, 2025.

(1) Human groups have pretty much always done unspeakably horrible things to other groups (e.g., think mass murder and numerous forms of oppression). And fairly often, while it is happening, this evil seems to be condoned, supported, or only passively opposed by a large and fairly culturally representative group, rather than by just a few very bad people.

Are we humans evil?

(2) On the other hand, the vast majority of people feel sympathetic when they see people suffering (even realistic depictions of suffering in movies), and are willing to help people they don’t know at some inconvenience to themselves in the right circumstances. For instance, if an elderly stranger passes out in an office building elevator when only one other person is there, most likely that other person would try to help, even if it caused them to be late to work. In other words, the vast majority of people are at least moderately pro-social, have some compassion for strangers, and will at least sometimes inconvenience themselves to help others when they don’t expect to gain anything out of it.

Are we humans good?

Originally I attempted to explain these phenomena using the idea of “mimicry” that people just copy what others do, so if people are harming others, people will copy and do it too, but I no longer think that really gets at the core of the issue (though I do think mimicry plays a certain role, as you’ll see).

Below is my attempt to reach a simplified explanation for the seeming contradiction between (1) and (2). This theory is by no means novel. If there is anything novel about it, it’s in the particular way of combining the various pieces, or trying to fill out certain details.

So what’s going on with our species?

We humans seem to automatically divide others into “moral groups.” In our minds, each of these moral groups has an implicit “moral weight.” A group’s moral weight determines:

• whether you think the fates of members of that group are important (high moral weight) or irrelevant (low moral weight)
• whether you see it as good to help a member of that group (high moral weight) or acceptable to harm a member of that group (low moral weight)

If harming a certain group (call it “group X”) is considered both acceptable AND happens to be useful, convenient, or a way to reduce perceived danger, then murder or subjugation of group X may ensue with little guilt. In other words, if one group assigns group X a low moral weight, and there is some additional reason why harming group X seems useful, then that harm may well occur.

The simplest example of this is the way we kill insects regularly without a second thought. But the distinction of being assigned very low moral weight is not just reserved for insects. We humans unfortunately sometimes do it to other human groups.

Some small percentage of people in our society view killing insects as morally unacceptable. Similarly, in societies where the majority generally assigns essentially no moral weight to group X and plans to massacre or oppress group X, there will usually be a minority of conscientious objectors who protest it. According to this model, this occurs because (for various reasons) this minority assigns a different moral weight to group X than the majority.

Here are some examples of common groups people might assign different moral weights to:

• “family member”
• “friend”
• “child (my own)”
• “child (not my own)”
• “person I am interacting with right now”
• “neighbor”
• “citizen of my country”
• “person I’ve met before but don’t really know”
• “person of my religion”
• “criminal”
• “white person”
• “black person”
• “murderer”
• “celebrity”
• “French person”
• “friend of a friend”
• “co-worker”
• “foreigner from somewhere unfamiliar”
• “human being”
• “cow”

People can fall into different groups, each group having varying moral weights, making it more complex than an in-group/out-group binary. If someone falls into multiple groups, then the moral weight assigned to that person is some complex combination of the moral weights of the different groups they belong to. In some cases, it seems to be the maximal moral weight of any group they belong to (e.g., a parent would usually be treated as being in the parent group regardless of what other groups they fall into), but sometimes we focus on the lowest moral weights (e.g., a work colleague who was also a murderer may end up getting a moral weight closer to that of a murderer than of any other work colleague).

I’ve identified six factors that seem to be predictive of how much moral weight a person assigns to a given group. Moral weight seems to be higher for:

1. Relation: groups that share a person’s genetics (e.g., “parent”). This has an obvious evolutionary explanation as a gene propagation mechanism. Many people feel we have the strongest moral obligations to our family members.

2. Enjoyment: groups that we enjoy interacting with (e.g., “friends” or “puppies”). For instance, people are more comfortable screwing over a person they dislike than a person they like.

3. Familiarity: groups we are highly familiar with or spend a lot of time with (e.g., “work colleagues”). Almost everyone would save a long time acquaintance over a stranger they’ve just met if forced to make a choice.

4. Similarity: groups we perceive as similar to ourselves or that we group ourselves with (e.g. “people of our own country” or “people of our own religion”). People feel a heightened duty to protect others from their country, religion, etc.

5. Safety: groups we are not afraid of or view as non-threatening (e.g., this would exclude “sharks” and “violent criminals”). People often feel justified in harming someone in “self-defense.”

6. Innocence: groups we feel are innocent rather than capable of being sinful or responsible for their actions (e.g., “children”). There is something that people find particularly repugnant about harming children, or anyone helpless.

As mentioned before, a classic example of a group who the majority view as having near-zero moral weight is “insect.” Insects (1) hardly share any genetics in common with us, (2) we don’t like interacting with them, (3) we don’t generally spend much time with them (at least, not on purpose), (4) we don’t perceive them as similar to ourselves, and (5) we often view them as a threat. The only thing they have going for them is that we may or may not view them as innocent, but I suspect a lot of people view them as guilty because sometimes they seem to be intentionally bothering us.

Chickens do slightly better than insects on these criteria. Those who interact with them tend to enjoy it a lot more than interacting with insects, and they seem more similar to us than insects, but mostly we treat them as having low moral weight as well (which helps explain why it’s so common to eat them).

To give a few more examples:

• Cats (in the U.S., anyway) do much better on the criteria 2-6 than chickens, so we assign them much higher moral weight than chickens.
• People of our own country do much better on criteria 2-4 than people of other countries.
• Family members usually do much better on criteria 1-5 than people of our own country.
• Violent criminals typically don’t do well on criteria 1-6, and, empirically, people often seem willing to strip rights away from this group, and in some cases, have them executed.

Circling back to our original question with this model in mind, how do we rectify the seeming contradiction that:

(1) most people are pro-social

(2) human groups do unspeakably horrible things to other groups

According to this model, the answer is simple. When one group assigns almost no moral weight to another group, they are willing to do horrible things to do that group. To them, it is simply not morally problematic, because that’s what moral weight MEANS. However, when that group has a reasonable amount of moral weight assigned (e.g. “person who works in my office building”), they are happy to be helpful and generally act pro-socially. A small percentage of people are truly sociopathy, and assign low moral weight to everyone. But the far more common thing is to assign high moral weight to some groups, and low moral weight to others (influenced by factors 1-6 above).

So, instead of: “are we humans fundamentally good, or not?”, the question becomes: “who are we good to?”

Now, this doesn’t mean that a group WANTS to destroy all groups they assign a low moral weight to. You may assign low moral weight to insects, but that doesn’t mean you spend your weekends trying to find insects to harm. All that low moral weight means is that you are WILLING to do harm if it happens to be advantageous. If an incentive to destroy or control the group is added (e.g., the group is viewed as threatening or useful), then the mass murder or mass oppression may begin.

If this simple theory is reasonably accurate, then it suggests that most of the greatest evils of humanity are not the evils of individual bad actors, but the evil of assigning little moral weight to other groups, combined with the view that it would be “useful” to harm that low moral weight group.

When these groups are across borders, we get war and mass murder. When these groups are ethnic, it can lead to genocide. When these groups are across gender, it can lead to the mass oppression of women or the murder of female babies. When these groups are across species, we get large scale mistreatment of animals in factory farms.

But where do these assignments of moral weight come from? Here are some possible factors:

(i) Mimicry: to a significant extent, we copy the moral weights that we are implicitly taught by the people around us, especially when we’re growing up. So if, as a child, we see that our family members don’t assign any moral weight to group X, we learn not to assign a moral weight to group X as well. This is, I think, where mimicry does come into play.

(ii) Bad actors: sometimes, individual bad actors that are influential in a group, call it group “A,” convince others in group A to assign less moral weight to another group X. This may be for their own selfish reasons, or because they themselves assign a low moral weight to X and want others to as well. The bad actor may cause group A to assign a less moral weight to X by appealing to factor (D), the idea that group X is very different than group A, such as by highlighting differences between A and X or causing group X to stand out even more. Another option is for the bad actor to try to leverage (E), the idea that group X is harmful or dangerous. They may also do this by taking advantage of factor (F), the idea that group X is not innocent, for example, by blaming something that happened a long time ago on that group, even if it poses no threat today.

(iii) Danger: stability and safety in our society seem to influence the assignment of moral weights. It seems that, on average, the less we can trust those around us, and the more we have to fear danger, the more narrowly we define which groups have a high moral weight, and the more we rely on factors A-F to decide who matters. For instance, if you are trying to survive during wartime and barely have enough to eat, you may be more likely to only assign a substantial moral weight to your closest family members, whereas as danger lessens, you may start increasing the moral weight that you assign to neighbors.

(iv) Genetics: It’s also possible that genetic differences exist as well in how we assign moral weights to others, since there is at least some genetic variation in quite a number of traits. For instance, it could be that some people are just born more compassion than others, and are therefore more prone to assign higher moral weights to more groups than others are, all else being equal.

There have been a number of attempts to cause people to more broadly assign higher moral weight, such as in certain Buddhist traditions, the Effective Altruism movement, and, perhaps, the Hippie movement. One common theme of such movements is an unusually large amount of vegetarianism and veganism since, as the expanding “moral circle” (as its sometimes called) begs the question of whether other species should be included.

Creating widespread change in the assignment of moral weight seems as valuable as it is challenging, it strikes me as an extremely valuable project. If the simplified model suggested above is at least modestly accurate, then, causing a more broad and uniform assignment of moral weight could go a long way toward preventing future evils that we humans tend to inflict on each other. What’s more, when we assign reasonably high moral weight to a group we do more than prevent harm: we tend to actively help it, even where personal benefit is unlikely.