Did you read Little House on the Prairie when you were a child? I didn't, but I know it's a common American rite of passage. My guest in this new episode, Dr. Dolly Chugh, got entirely immersed in the story with her two young daughters - so much so that they took a vacation to the places depicted in the story, and her daughters danced around in prairie dresses.

 

Dr. Chugh didn't realized until afterward that there was something missing from both Little House on the Prairie and from her family's exploration of the Midwest: settlers didn't arrive to find unoccupied land ready for farming; the government actively removed Native Americans from the land so it could be occupied by 'settlers.' Dr. Chugh studies issues related to race as a professor, and yet she completely missed this aspect of our country's history.

 

In her new book, A More Just Future, Dr. Chugh asks why so-called Good People act in ways that are counter to their beliefs because we don't have all the information we need, or we prioritize some information over others. In our conversation we discussed this research, and what we can all do to take actions that are aligned with our values - even when we're new to working on social justice issues.

 

Affiliate link to A more just future: Reckoning with our past and driving social change by Dr. Dolly Chugh: https://amzn.to/3D8adV7 (https://amzn.to/3D8adV7)


 
Shownotes:

(09:13) 3 ways that we tend to perceive ourselves.

(12:02) People who are trying to avoid a loss are more likely to make less ethical choices than people trying to make a game.


(14:35) Kahneman and Tversky's work that says how you frame something can have meaningful consequences, even if the thing you're framing is exactly the same.


(15:06) So that’s all the research of Framing says, and the gain versus loss piece of it says that you can have identical situations. But what the research, Molly Curran and I have shown us that if you frame it as a loss, people are more likely to cheat.


(28:51) James Loewen has done some, some deep analyses of textbooks where he's, you know, God bless him spent two years he took like the 20 most popular history textbooks used in American high schools.