About the Author
Michael Brownstein is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College and Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Implicit Mind.
Alex Madva is Professor of Philosophy, Director of the California Center for Ethics and Policy, and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Consortium at Cal Poly Pomona. He is a coeditor of An Introduction to Implicit Bias and The Movement for Black Lives.
Daniel Kelly is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust (MIT Press).
Opening Questions for All Three (Group Discussion)
1. Three authors, different institutions, and one book – how did the collaboration begin? Was it sparked by a single conversation or something you’d been circling for a while?
Alex and Michael had been working together for a few years already, but in the spring of 2012, the three of us sat together at a dinner during the very first philosophy conference on implicit bias at the University of Sheffield. We were on parallel intellectual journeys. All of us started off focused on understanding the mind and how it works, which led us to think about big-picture injustices in terms of the biases and prejudices inside the human head. Meanwhile, leading feminist and antiracist philosophers were arguing that this emphasis on individual bias was misplaced, a distraction from the underlying structural factors making the world unfair. We were moved by these criticisms but thought they went too far. The three of us agreed that we had to bring systems and structures into the picture without pushing individual minds out of it. The right way to think about this stuff isn’t either/or but rather both/and. We started out by writing a couple academic papers, one about the “individual action” vs. “systemic change” debate in climate politics, and another about antiracist moral education. After that, we thought that it could be interesting to write something more in depth, showing how that debate plays out all over the place, in conversations not just about climate change and racism, but about housing policy, diabetes, gun control, online misinformation, and so on. Since so many of these conversations take place both in public and in scholarly work on philosophy and the social sciences, we figured the book could have public appeal. And we liked the idea of writing something accessible and fun.
As we dug into the project, figuring out the details for both of those ambitions—exploring all the different domains where this debate plays out, and writing something accessible and fun—proved to be challenging! But it was also rewarding, and we’re happy with the final product.
2. Your publisher, The MIT Press, is known for combining intellectual depth with public impact. What does it mean to each of you to publish this kind of book in this moment, under that banner?
As far as “this moment” goes, we certainly wish things were better. But one of the things we focus on in the book is backlash to progressive social change and how to hold onto the willpower to keep pushing in the face of setbacks. So although we wrote the book during the Biden administration—when a string of individual states voted to enshrine protections for reproductive justice in their constitutions and the federal government passed the most important climate legislation ever—it’s actually looking remarkably prescient in terms of navigating a moment when democracy and social progress are under threat.
Each of us has been harboring ambitions to do work that reaches beyond our tiny niche of philosophers. But each of us has also been wary of doing work that feels motivated by the desire for attention rather than to share ideas we think are genuinely important. Many scholars who write with public impact in mind fret about hitting the mark between these two desires. This was definitely one of the central, ongoing challenges for us in writing the book: balancing intellectual depth with storytelling, lighthearted prose, etc.
One lesson we learned is that the tension is not so much between intellectual depth and storytelling. By and large, it seems like depth promotes storytelling, at least in many cases. The challenge, instead, at least for us, had to do with deciding how much detail to include, and also with figuring out when to present an idea versus when to argue for it.
For anyone interested, we’ve written an appendix to the book that dives deeper into the details and scholarly debates behind key ideas in the book. The appendix is available as a free download on the book website, https://www.somebody-book.com.
We’re grateful to The MIT Press for embracing our commitment to reach a broader audience without sacrificing scholarly rigor, and for their patience, support, and guidance as we learned along the way. The final product is better for the feedback they offered.
3. This book draws heavily from contemporary philosophy, psychology, and social science. Can you walk us through the research process behind it? How did you ensure it remained both rigorous and accessible?
There was never a question of the book being rigorous. Each of us is constantly discovering new research, especially because all three of us straddle disciplines and read promiscuously. We have shared files with literally thousands of papers in them. Our group chat is a mess of “look at this new one!”
One of our biggest challenges was constraining the impulse to say something about everything everywhere all at once. Finding a narrative arc that would give all that material a beginning, middle, and ending, and that we could summarize in a sentence or two—now that was difficult. Brainstorming together was easy. Cutting beloved sentences and anecdotes was really, really hard.
Our process was mostly to work in rounds. One of us would read a bunch of papers on a topic, take a ton of notes, and brainstorm rough ideas for what we might want to say. Another would then take those 25,000 words or whatever it was and look for stories, historical precedents, or characters that might illustrate the key ideas, and then take a stab at translating the rambling notes into prose. Then the third person would start editing the prose, especially with an eye toward connecting the ideas between chapters and making it work as a unified piece of writing. Then we’d go around and around making edits, changing the edits, rejecting the edits, and proposing new edits. We did that approximately one bajillion times.
We also held two “book scrub” workshops, where we gathered a fantastic set of scholars and friends to read draft manuscripts and give us feedback. We’re eternally grateful to everyone who participated in these events, as well as all the audiences that heard us present parts and versions of the project.
4. Were there moments of disagreement – on framing, tone, or emphasis – that led to deeper clarity or learning between you?
Never a single disagreement! Just kidding . . ..
Writing this book was difficult, we’re not going to lie. We’d collaborated before on academic papers, but writing a book is a much larger project. And then setting aside the standard conventions of journal essays and academic tone, writing a book for a public audience that delivers a message while providing a good reading experience– that’s a whole different beast. It turns out that arguing about taste with three co-authors—does a sentence “sound” right? Is a joke funny?—is a little like building a house using three different sets of blueprints. Except nobody can see each other’s blueprints or describe them to one another.
The book took longer than any of us imagined at the start, but ultimately that’s fine, even if getting there may have taken a few years off each of our lives.
5. The tone is approachable and even humorous at times, which is rare for books dealing with topics like racism and climate crisis. Was that a shared decision from the start?
Thanks! It was certainly a shared aspiration. Pulling it off, assuming we managed to, was definitely a lot of work. It’s easy to agree to try to funny in the abstract, but much harder to agree on the merits of each joke, or whether a meme from 2022 would still mean anything to anyone in 2025, etc. For every joke that made it into the book, probably ten more got cut along the way.
Questions for Each Author
Michael Brownstein
1. Your research on implicit bias and unconscious mental habits has deeply influenced conversations about behavior. How did your understanding of those internal forces shape the way this book talks about change?
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’d say that one way they influenced the book was by thinking of biases and habits not as “internal forces” alone, but rather as aspects of both our personalities and our shared, social context. While I might have biases that you don’t, biases are also present in families, communities, neighborhoods, cultures, and nations. Similarly, habits are made, sustained, and broken both because of choices individuals make but also because of choices other people make. For example, people are much more likely to quit smoking if their spouse quits, and smoking rates overall have declined in the USA as norms and expectations around it have changed. (The economist Robert Frank makes a great point about this, which is in our book: the biggest danger of second-hand smoke isn’t that someone else’s cigarette might harm your lungs; it’s that people smoking in public creates more smokers, by making smoking seem normal and natural.)
One of the ideas we explore in the book is how “my choices are your situation.” We can be effective agents of change even when we make what otherwise might seem like merely personal choices, like quitting smoking, taking up bicycle commuting, or attending a protest. When we do these things, we normalize them for others, shaping the incentives and culture that they make their so-called personal decisions within.
Alex Madva
- You’ve worked extensively at the intersection of philosophy and public policy. What strategies from Somebody Should Do Something do you think are most useful for people working in education, government, or community leadership?
My approach to some of the key topics in the book is shaped by my own experiences running all sorts of implicit bias trainings and DEI workshops for different audiences, wanting desperately to engage and empower people to really fight bias rather than just “check a box” to say they attended the event and forget about it. One of the biggest hurdles I face in these settings is getting people to think of themselves as actual agents of change, rather than just people at the mercy of others’ rules.
I’ve seen the same thing in my students. I used to have a paper topic in my intro class that was about some bad stuff happening in another culture. I got really tired of students just saying “what they’re doing in that other culture is wrong!” So I said in the paper topic that you can’t just talk about how wrong it is, and you can’t just talk about “what should be done” about it. If you think it’s so wrong, you have to talk about what you might do about it. And basically, this paper topic broke students’ brains. They would write about sending in the troops or a diplomatic group but simply couldn’t find a role for themselves in fighting for that change. Around the same time, I also got introduced to Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Both of them decry what we now call the “information deficit” model of education, seeing students as empty receptacles that get passively filled up with the information we share with them. They emphasize students’ agency instead, even pointing out that students have much to teach (and by the same token, reminding teachers that they have much to learn).
So lots of the central strategies we play up in Somebody Should Do Something are oriented towards trying to get people to think of themselves as difference makers, as capable of seeing what’s wrong in their social systems and acting to change them. And reminding people that they shouldn’t just measure the effects of their actions in some narrow, simplistic way, like whether their vote tips an election. They also have to think about their individual actions as shaping those around them (“my choices are your situation,” as Michael writes above) and as shaping themselves. The choice I make today shapes the person I become tomorrow. So the question is not just “will my recycling this soda can save the earth?” but “am I the kind of person who’s going to fight for an unpolluted planet, and what kind of actions would that person take—starting right now?”
But ultimately that’s not really a question we should just be asking ourselves in isolation. I think one of the most important strategies we play up in the book is intergroup cooperation, getting people from different walks of life to collaborate around shared goals. Fostering conditions for meaningful intergroup cooperation is one of the most important things that educators, community leaders, and policymakers can pursue. (One silly thing I daydream about is creating a campus-wide group trivia event, where you have participation from all the different campus groups. But instead of having the Campus Democrats play on one team against the Campus Republicans, you mix and match all the club members so that each team is made up of members from different groups. That’s just one kind of example of the sort of thing we might humbly experiment with across our social institutions.)
Daniel Kelly
1. In your view, what are some of the most common ways well-meaning people unknowingly contribute to systems they wish to change – and how can they begin to shift that?
I think a fairly common mistake people make is underestimating how deeply humans are intertwined with each other, and thus underestimating how much potential to exert social influence they actually have. A lot of my own research looks at these issues through an evolutionary lens. That perspective itself has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades. What’s emerging is an account of humans that puts our cultural and social abilities right at the center of what makes us distinctive and what makes our minds so special. We learn from each other; we imitate each other; we enforce norms on each other; we blame and praise and gossip about each other; we keep meticulous track of our own and each other’s reputations and statuses; we rely on each other. Social influence is the air we breathe. Our minds were molded by evolution to handle social influence, and our natural facility with it is literally the reason why we are here as a species. Importantly, we are both consumers of social influence – we react to other people on a constant basis – but we are also producers of social influence ourselves. It’s always a two-way street.
It’s easy to miss the significance of this. We are living in an extremely individualistic society (in many ways – see our appendix for more details!) Real forces separate and atomize us, and it’s easy to absorb imagery and messaging that makes us feel even more isolated than we actually are. This also can make us feel ineffectual, unable or unwilling to even try to influence anyone else or do anything that makes a difference beyond ourselves. It becomes so easy to sink into feelings of powerlessness, and do nothing.
But the image coming from the cognitive and evolutionary sciences shows this pessimistic view to be wrong. As we elaborate on, especially in the sixth and seventh chapters of the book, the new scientific image of human nature as cultural to the core and rooted in social relationships speaks directly to our potential to create and guide social change. We need each other, and the social influence of each other, to survive; it is literally unavoidable. We are always absorbing it, but we are also always emitting it. Both the social influence itself, along with the character and sophistication of the minds that enable us to soak up, exude, and direct it, can too easily go unnoticed or unappreciated. But seen properly, we are all, each of us, already agents of social change. Getting clearer on this points the way to being better, more effective ones.
Group or Open-Ended Questions
1. Each of you holds leadership roles in philosophy departments and centers that focus on ethics, public policy, and social science. How do you see this book contributing to conversations in academic settings – classrooms, syllabi, or institutional initiatives?
We’re hoping that the book itself has something to offer for a wide range of people, from fellow researchers to vaguely curious readers browsing at a bookstore, from activists in the trenches to students of all sorts. We also hope the book fits well on different syllabi, since we wrote it to be accessible to undergraduates and maybe even go-getter high school students. The chapters are fairly stand alone, too, so instructors can pick and choose if they don’t want to assign the entire book. We also think it could work well on the syllabus of graduate courses, since we have also, as they say, brought receipts. Our extensive endnotes give more detail about the research behind the claims we make in the main text, and point the interested reader to primary work where they can follow up on any specific lines of thought or take a closer look at the evidence. Finally, on our book website that we mentioned earlier—https://www.somebody-book.com—we’ve posted an extensive appendix that picks at some of the conceptual nits and works through some of the more fine-grained distinctions between different versions of ideas (individualism, structuralism, human nature, etc.) that loom large in the book.
2. Many educators struggle to teach topics like bias, climate justice, or inequality in ways that empower rather than overwhelm students. How can Somebody Should Do Something support that effort?
We aimed for the book to have an overall hopeful vibe, even as it took up its heavy subject matter. Wrapping one’s mind around these kinds of “everything problems” can be overwhelming at first. But developing a clear-eyed view of the lay of the land is a crucial first step. If you want to change the world, you’ve got to know which levers to pull. So a big part of what the book is doing is pulling together a set of concepts to help people “see” social structures, and to see how social change runs through those. But another set of concepts we pull together are about individual people and their actions, and our relationship to the many social structures we inhabit. Each of us wields more social influence than we realize, and making that visible was another big aim of the book. No one person can solve all these big problems by themselves, and different people will be called to act on different ones, depending on their position and priorities. If people can think clearly about the social roles they already occupy, and roles and positions they can aspire to, they will be able to better see the levers they can pull. We wanted to help individuals appreciate the opportunities they have to change structures, to better see the ways they can most effectively work for social change, and to give them a sense of what to expect from their efforts. So one of the central things we try to do in the book is share stories about individual people who also might have felt overwhelmed and responded by getting engaged and making a difference.
Of course, they never made that difference all on their own! So we also emphasized the power in joining forces with others, the way people create new communities and new structures. And we hope that the book is useful for everyone who wants to figure out how they can get the most bang for their taking-action buck, amplifying the influence they have and directing it at the issues they care about most.
3. Was there anything that didn’t make it into the book – a story, concept, or case study – that you still think about?
Only all the time. One of our main targets for the book is the tendency to engage in “either/or thinking” and in particular thinking that social change is either about individuals or about structures. The book is one big illustration and defense of the “both/and thinking” alternative. But one of the lingering questions is why people can so easily succumb to seeing a forced choice where there is none, and then why people come down on one side or the other, either saying “individuals shape the world” or “the world shapes individuals.” We had one whole chapter speculating about the sorts of cognitive biases and social narratives that might make either/or thinking seem intuitive and attractive. And we expect that a lot of people are going to read this book and, if they agree with us, they might also wonder what explains the impulse to either/or thinking. For example, one thing we got impressed by was how gendered a lot of the language around social change can sound. One anecdote stands out in particular. In one draft, we wrote, “Consider how Greta Thunberg responded to the misogynist troll Andrew Tate. As Bill McKibben explained, Tate “reached out to Thunberg to boast about his large collection of automobiles. ‘I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,’ he tweeted, asking for her e-mail address. To the delight of, so far, 3.9 million people, the Swedish climate activist wrote back, ‘Yes, please do enlighten me. Email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.’””
We also wondered if this gendered language might be related to a certain kind of fantasy of imagining that if we can just make big enough changes, then they will last forever—and we won’t have to keep fighting for them. It’s not uncommon to see this kind of thinking in political philosophy. For example, in Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, John Rawls says that in his vision of a just society, unlike utilitarianism:
“The first requirement, given the fact of pluralism, is to fix, once and for all, the basic rights and liberties, and to assign them a special priority. Doing this takes these guarantees off the political agenda of political parties; it puts them beyond the calculus of social interests, thus securing clearly and firmly the terms of social cooperation on a footing of mutual respect.”
It sure would be nice if we fix everyone’s “basic rights and liberties” “once and for all” and just take them off the political agenda. But this is a fantasy, and a pernicious one. Our current President is literally trying to end birthright citizenship (a constitutionally protected right) through executive orders all by himself, and de-naturalize people who have already become citizens. The “deep” basic fundamental stuff is always up for grabs. We will always have to keep fighting for it.
One reason we cut this chapter, however, was that our speculations about the cognitive and social factors driving either/or thinking were, well, really speculative. We think these are super important topics for future research, but they’re fundamentally the kinds of things to be studied through history and social science and not settled from the philosophers’ three-seated armchair.
But another reason we cut this chapter is because we were able to fold some of the key ideas into tighter narratives in other places. Our case study on the Prohibition movement is a good example. It was a dedicated social movement that worked for decades and decades to accomplish what can seem to us in 2025 like the unthinkably deep structural change of passing an amendment to the US Constitution. But Prohibition failed for a whole bunch of fascinating reasons and created unintended consequences that led to its repeal through another amendment a few short years later. That example does the job pretty well, we think, of dispelling the fantasy that we can achieve lasting change “once and for all” and then take basic rights and liberties off the political agenda.
When you put it that way, this can sound like a huge bummer. But the point is just as true of regress as it is of progress. During dark moments when hard-fought rights are eroded, it can seem like these setbacks will be permanent. But even regressive social changes will only last if people keep fighting for them. If people instead fight to undo them, there’s plenty of room to hope they’ll succeed.
4. Looking ahead, do the authors see this book as a standalone project – or the start of something larger, such as a course, curriculum, or broader public initiative?
In the short term, we hope to have some pedagogical materials ready by 2026 to supplement the book itself. We plan to make them freely available to interested instructors on the book website.
We would be excited for the book to receive the kind of uptake that would make a broader public initiative based on our ideas possible. We don’t know what exactly that would look like, but would relish the opportunity to find out. For example, one idea would be a shared internet resource to help people learn how they can be YIMBYs, that is, opportunities in their local communities for them to say “yes” to social changes (rather than being a NIMBY who says “I support your social aims but not in my backyard”).
Whether all three of us will join forces on another big research project remains to be seen. We’ve all got lots of other irons in other fires. Many of those exciting projects are concerned with the same broad types of issues, and done in collaboration with a sprawl of other great researchers.
Kelly is working on another book specifically about social norms (what they are, where they come from, how our minds grasp them, and how we might change them), and another larger project on nature of the self, the multitudes we all contain, and the ethics of code-switching.
Alex is planning to develop a course at Cal Poly Pomona called The Philosophy of Social Change where students pick an activist cause and learn to fight for it. He’s going to shamelessly steal ideas from here: https://www.engagedphilosophy.com/
Michael is dedicating most of his time to helping the City University of New York continue to serve the city’s students well. It’s a vexing challenge at this moment, when state budgets are precarious and universities are operating in fear of the federal government.
5. And finally, if each of you could leave readers with one lasting idea from the book – just a sentence or thought – what would it be?
Thomas J. Davis published an early review of our book in Library Journal that we really liked, not just because it was positive but because we felt he really “got” the book. He said the book as being for “anyone interested in escaping the demoralizing effects of pessimism, in favor of defining their own role in fighting for social change.”
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