Here at Open Cul­ture, we can’t resist the RSA Ani­mate video series, cre­at­ed by the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures, and Com­merce. Its twitchy but super­nat­u­ral­ly pre­cise hand has illus­trat­ed talks by Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robin­son, Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich, Slavoj Žižek, Steven Pinker, and Dan Ariely. This newest RSA Ani­mate pro­duc­tion may pro­vide you an intro­duc­tion not just to a ris­ing thinker, but to a new con­cept. “Writer on the art of liv­ing” Roman Krz­nar­ic, accom­pa­nied by the quick draw­ing of Andrew Park, wants to tell you about some­thing called “out­ro­spec­tion.” Con­sid­er it less an entire­ly new prac­tice than a fresh way of think­ing about how to devel­op an old human capac­i­ty: empa­thy. He finds empa­thy not a “nice, soft, fluffy social con­cept,” but some­thing pow­er­ful and poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous, a fuel for rev­o­lu­tions of all kinds.

For an exam­ple of empa­thy that looks to him pro­to-out­ro­spec­tive, Krz­nar­ic cites George Orwell, author of 1984 and Ani­mal Farm. His plunge into the world of urban pover­ty — the deep­est kind of first-hand research — to write Down and Out in Paris and Lon­don, com­ing to know, befriend, and work along­side the down-and-out them­selves, makes him “one of the great empath­ic adven­tur­ers of the 20th cen­tu­ry.” This line of thought con­nects Orwell’s active social curios­i­ty to empa­thy as a poten­tial­ly col­lec­tive force; we even hear a call for new, empa­thy-ori­ent­ed social insti­tu­tions like a “human library” with actu­al peo­ple avail­able for illu­mi­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tions. Empa­thy, to Krz­nar­ic’s mind, will only become more impor­tant in the 21st cen­tu­ry, and those of us who can mas­ter out­ro­spec­tion, the skill of “dis­cov­er­ing who we are by step­ping out­side our­selves and explor­ing the lives of oth­er peo­ple and cul­tures,” will fare best there. If after the video you still find your­self con­fused about how best to engage in out­ro­spec­tion, don’t wor­ry: Krz­nar­ic writes an entire blog on the sub­ject.

via Sci­ence Dump

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

If it is the bulk of the world’s cheat­ing, steal­ing, and decep­tion you seek, says Duke pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy and behav­ioral eco­nom­ics Dan Ariely, look not to the heinous acts of indi­vid­ual vil­lains; look to the count­less dis­hon­est acts com­mit­ted dai­ly by the rest of human­i­ty. “The mag­ni­tude of dis­hon­esty we see in soci­ety is by good peo­ple who think they’re being good but are in fact cheat­ing just a lit­tle bit,” so we learn in the lec­ture above (find the com­plete lec­ture here). Ariely speaks these words, but they also appear writ­ten onscreen by a pen-wield­ing hand that rapid­ly sum­ma­rizes and (lit­er­al­ly) illus­trates Ariely’s points as he makes them. This unusu­al style of ani­ma­tion appears in a whole series of videos from the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures and Com­merce called RSA Ani­mate. These have, the RSA claims, “rev­o­lu­tionised the field of knowl­edge visu­al­i­sa­tion whilst spread­ing the most impor­tant ideas of our time.” Rev­o­lu­tion­ary or not, The Truth About Dis­hon­esty makes, in under twelve min­utes, the kind of obser­va­tions that let you see real­i­ty just a lit­tle more clear­ly.

“Human beings basi­cal­ly try to do two things at the same time,” Ariely says and the hand writes. “On one hand, we want to be able to look in the mir­ror and feel good about our­selves. On the oth­er hand, we want to ben­e­fit from dis­hon­esty.” This dilem­ma would seem to allow no com­pro­mise — you’re either hon­est or you’re dis­hon­est, right? — but Ariely finds that most of us instinc­tive­ly strive for the gray area between: “Thanks to our flex­i­ble cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy and our abil­i­ty to ratio­nal­ize our actions, we could do both.” We then hear and see how, if the prop­er ratio­nal­iza­tion hap­pens and the instances of cheat­ing remain minor and dis­tanced from their effects, every­body acts with a mix­ture of hon­esty and dis­hon­esty. (But some­times the “what the hell effect” — the lec­ture’s finest coinage — kicks in, where peo­ple tem­porar­i­ly stop con­sid­er­ing them­selves good and pro­ceed to act freely.) Ariely brings up the exam­ple, ripped from the head­lines, of bankers and hedge fund man­agers who, dis­tanced by vast cor­po­rate struc­tures and elab­o­rate math­e­mat­ics from those whom their actions con­cret­ly affect. The hand draws a car­i­ca­ture of Oscar Wilde, then writes the most appro­pri­ate quote beside it: “Moral­i­ty, like art, means draw­ing a line some­place.”

via Brain Pick­ings

More RSA Talks:

Rena­ta Sale­cl: The Para­dox of Choice

Sir Ken Robin­son: A Cre­ative Edu­ca­tion

Good Cap­i­tal­ist Kar­ma: Zizek Ani­mat­ed

Smile or Die: The Per­ils of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy

Steven Pinker: How Innu­en­do Makes Things Work

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.