343 - Misguided - Matthew Facciani

You can go to kittedkit.edu.shop and use the code Smart50, SMART50 at checkout, and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show. [Music] Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast Episode 343. [Music] The classic example is like someone who is very convinced they are unbiased, but that thought process of really stridently thinking you're unbiased, ironically makes you more biased because you're not open to the idea that you could be wrong. So you're just following this very narrow track in your mind that allows you to believe various falsehoods even though you think you're not. [Music] That was the voice of Matthew Fatiani, who is a doctor of sociology, a sociologist, and an interdisciplinary social scientist, which means he researches neuroscience, psychology, and sociology, and then mishes them all together to help make sense of the world. His focus these days, his specialty, is media literacy, which means he studies misinformation and polarization, and how nefarious actors manipulate all of us on purpose to get us to think, feel, and do things they would like us to think, feel, and do. He studies all of that and then comes up with ways to better combat all of that, and teaches it to people in the form of media literacy. He has a podcast called Misguided, and he just released a new book titled Misguided, which is all about misinformation, where it starts, how it spreads, and what to do about it. And that title, it's important here. Misguided. Because as Fatiani explains, the research is clear, the evidence is overwhelming that people who fall for fake news, people who share misinformation, who believe it, people who just believe things that do other people seem clearly false, these people are not stupid, they're not crazy. For the most part, they have been misguided. And as Fatiani's research reveals, and his book explains, there are a lot of nefarious actors out there, organizations and individuals, political institutions, corporate entities, and so on, that count on this. They understand how people actually work, and they use that understanding to purposefully generate misinformation. And these nefarious actors, they produce such misinformation a lot. That way, you get exposed to it repeatedly, all in an attempt to misguide you toward the assumptions, conclusions, and behaviors they would like you to assume, conclude, and engage it. We will talk about all of that in just a moment. We'll get into things like superordinate identities and affect control theory. What we can do about all of this is the train headed for the cliff, or can we actually create an environment where there's a whole lot less misinformation, or just anoculate ourselves against it. All these things are coming up soon. But first, I wanted to take a second to define just what is misinformation, scientifically speaking. According to the American Psychological Association, misinformation is quite simply false or inaccurate information, while disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead. As Fahceani explains in his book, misguided, misinformation includes both intentionally and unintentionally false information. It's put out there on purpose, or it just so happens to be not true. So if you have a belief based on such inaccurate information, that would be considered a misperception. And as he puts it, if someone were to say believe that walking backward cures the common cold, that would be a misperception. That's a belief that is not supported by the evidence. That's someone who for some reason is misinformed, which is not the same as being uninformed. An uninformed person wouldn't have any beliefs about how to cure the common cold at all. They're just absent of beliefs in this regard. In this framework, misinformation is therefore a big umbrella term under which there are many kinds of misinformation. So, for instance, disinformation in this framework would be intentionally false or misleading information. That means the person or people who spread disinformation want the people who are exposed to the misinformation they spread to believe it. And they want them to believe it because they have some goal in mind toward which the belief in things the spreaders know are false serves some purpose. Propaganda in this framework is a form of disinformation. Usually propaganda is used to change attitudes via changing beliefs via misinformation. So, if you want to shift public opinion from negative to positive or positive to negative, you can do so by identifying an area in which people may be uninformed. Then you can misinformed them. And then once they are misinformed, they will, on their own, generate positive or negative emotional reactions to the issue for which their false beliefs now provide them with an inaccurate model about some concept or event or institution or person or political party or so on. For instance, someone who does not live in a major metropolitan area who has never visited one, they might be uninformed about the rate of crime in major cities. The truth might be that crime rates have been going down for a long time and are currently at a 50-year low. But they don't know that. So, an aferious actor might spread disinformation about high crime rates in major cities for the sake of misinforming the uninformed. And now the misinformed will generate negative attitudes about the safety and overall civic health of cities they've never visited in person. You can then manipulate people's deeper beliefs, attitudes and behaviors by suggesting actions, laws, and blame that those attitudes will now support. And that's not just some hypothetical, this is how it work. No, this has been done a lot. There is a long history of propaganda throughout all of civilization, especially during sort of the radio into television era where it became much easier to spread that sort of thing and get a lot more bang for your book. Propaganda, it's a thing that happens, still happens right now. It's happening today. It's happening wherever there is a device where you can look at things that tell you how things might be working around you. It's a real thing. And there's a wide array of this sort of stuff. There's another kind of misinformation that's rarely mentioned in the literature they call it "mid-information." And that's when no one really knows exactly what the truth is yet. Either concerning a science fact or a historical incident or some sort of evolving situation. As Fachiani points out, this was the case during the Middle Ages before the development of germ theory. Back then, most medical experts believed miasma or bad air was the true cause of the bibonic play. What they didn't know was that it was actually being spread through direct contact with individuals. So in this case, it wasn't what they didn't know that got them in trouble so much as what they felt they knew for sure. Because they took actions to avoid bad air all the time. But they did not take measures to avoid direct contact. So this has been with us forever. Misinformation in some form or another is part of the human experience. It's been part of our information exchange for a long, long time. It's just now the information economy is much more complex and misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and so on. It's much easier to spread and share at scale. And if that bothers you, you are not alone. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 70% of people pulled across 19 countries said the spread of false information online is a quote, "major threat." When polling people just inside the United States, 84% of people said they believed misinformation was a quote, "very big problem today." But here's the thing, the fallout, an impact of misinformation, it's not inevitable. We actually understand scientifically how all of this works and we understand it quite well. We have been researching this for a long while and we know how to fight against it. And that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. That is what we're going to discuss with sociologist Matthew Fachiani right after this commercial break. (soft music) (soft music) The School of Thought, I love this place, I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non-profit organization. They provide free creative commons, critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide and their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called Kitted Thinking Tools, K-I-T-T-E-D Thinking Tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want and there's tons of them. And the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well-curated high quality, each one about double the size of a playing card, Matt Chilo 400 GSM stock prompt cards, and a nice, magnetically latching box that you can use to facilitate workshops. Level up brainstorming and creative thinking sessions, optimize user and customer experience and design, elevate strategic planning and decision making, mitigate risks and liabilities and much, much more. And each kit can, if you want to use it this way, interact with this crazy cool app. Each card has a corresponding digital version with examples and templates and videos and step-by-step instructions and more. You even get PowerPoint and keynote templates. There's so many ways you could use this. Here's some ideas. If you're a venture capital investor, you could get the investor's critical thinking kit and use it to stress, test and evaluate different startups for series A funding. If you're a user experience designer, you can get the user design kit to put together a workshop with internal stakeholders for a software product. Or if you're an HR professional, you could mix and match these kits to create a complete professional development learning program tailored specifically for your team over the course of the next two years. So if you're the kind of person who is fascinated with critical thinking and motivated reasoning and intellectual humility and biases, fallacies and heuristics, those sort of person who listens to podcasts like you are not so smart, you're probably the kind of person who would love these decks. If you're curious, you can get a special 50% off offer. That's right, half off offer right here. You can get half off of one of these kits by heading to kitted.shop. K-I-T-T-E-D dot shop and using the code Smart50 at checkout. That's Smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the school thought. So you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of us out at kitted.shop or just click the link in the show notes. (upbeat music) And now we return to our program. My name is David McGranny. This is the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. And our guest in this episode is sociologist Matthew Fachiani. And who is that? Matthew, we'll tell you. - So I am a social scientist who studies why people believe the things that they do. I've been working at the University of Notre Dame for the last few years in their computer science department where we've been studying how to teach media and digital literacy in a way that's scalable and engaging. You wrote a book about all of this. And I think the title is imported. Misfigyated is a good term that I will use and I will cite you and I use it because what I often see in discourse about all of this is to assume that the people who are behaving in ways that you disagree with or they believe things you disagree with, that they're stupid or that they are robes or that they have been tricked because they're stupid in roots. And the framing of they've been misguided is a different frame when you get down into the scalpel first. So let me ask that as a question. Are people who fall for misinformation Matt, the expert on this topic? Are people who fall for misinformation stupid? - No, I think of a yes, no answer. I would say no. Because there's so many intelligent people that fall for misinformation, it kind of goes against that idea. And my whole point is that we're all vulnerable to this process because we're social creatures remotivated by these, these social motivations to belong in our groups and to have community. And I start out the book and often use this example outside my book, but the idea of like flat earthers and how there was this really great documentary behind the curve that came out a few years ago. There really dives into this very beautifully. They talk about the community and the social aspects of people who believe the earth is flat and how it was used conferences and friendships that develop and this community around that. And I think that's so critical understand the community component because it provides us with so much self-esteem and makes us feel supported within ourselves. So I think when we think about like why someone might believe something false, even something as extreme as the earth being flat, that belief by itself may not have a big impact or any impact on their day-to-day life. So whether the earth is hexagon or square or spherical, it's really not changing the day-to-day life. But what definitely impacts the day-to-day life is if they lose all their friends and people they care about and their community. So from that perspective, it's actually pretty rational to uphold this belief and say, I'm gonna continue believing what my friends and close connections believe because I wanna maintain that community and these people care about me, I care about them and this belief is part of a larger set of beliefs that kind of holds us together and we can connect with each other. So to me, it is very rational from a psychological perspective to maintain a variety of beliefs, some of which may be false. And that speaks to my larger point about the book, Ms. Guided, Ms. Guided is something that happens to all of us. It's a process of being guided by social forces that provide us with self-esteem and meaning and reductions of uncertainty. So we have this strong motivation to protect our identities and our groups that provide us with this meaning and self-esteem. So a lot of times it can be very positive. We're guided towards being a good parent because we care about our children. Like that's an identity process or we wanna do well on our sports team because we care about the sports team that we belong to. But when we belong to a political team, for example, sometimes that support of that political identity and that support of the political team might mean rejecting certain facts that make the political team look bad. And that's where we run into these issues with people having this motivation to protect that identity so strongly that they will reject information and believe falsehoods sometimes. So that's kind of like the larger issue of identities and then it gets more complicated as you dive into like the context to which these identity forces are most impactful. - We're getting into that this thing, but I just, I love how surprising this can seem to be uninitiated because you're doing it all day, every day and we've been doing it all day, every day for the entirety of human civilization. - Right, yeah. And yet this can still seem quite surprising. - Yeah, I felt similarly. I mean, I study this stuff every day. So like I know other people who don't maybe don't think about it as much and it could be a lot more novel. But I think it's even broader and deeper than that because whenever you're learning about these social biases that okay, we have this motivation to protect important identities and we have this motivation to protect identities and meanings that bond us with our communities. What the broader message is that we're actually motivated by these forces that we're not always aware of or thinking about. human beings like to believe that we're very rational and logical and we're making decisions completely by logic and reason and we're just in control driving how we believe things and how we come to different conclusions. But the reality is much more complex and that we have a lot less control than we might think. And we might be very biased by our environments and the social and psychological forces behind that. So I think some of that requires awareness and this broader intellectual humility that yes we can be biased and yes there are forces that we might not even know about. And appreciating that makes us less biased. So it's kind of interesting whenever someone is trying to say like no, you know, I know the classic example is like someone who is very convinced they are unbiased, but that thought process of really stridently thinking you're unbiased ironically makes you more biased because you're not open to the idea that you could be wrong. What comes up a lot in these discussions I find is the information deficit models what comes up because it just seems like if you just saw the things I saw if you just been exposed to even especially in academia, if you just expose the information that I've been exposed to and just acknowledge that I am an expert on this topic. And so therefore take a look at this information that I have provided for you. Then you'll look at that and go, oh okay, I was wrong about that. And it seems to me there's an element of this group is trusting one source of information. This group is trusting a different source of information. As a question, what would you suppose is the difference between a person who believes the earth is round and person who believes there's this flat when it comes to who they're trusting? Yeah, I mean, what's altering that different trust spaces? Trust is such a critical component and it's also another very social, another social type of thing here because it's comprised of how you feel about the person and how competent you are. You think they are. So, it's interesting to think about trust in the form of experts because so much of how we determine if someone's trustworthy or not is not just like a very technical aspect of how competent they are at certain problem solving. It's not like we're just viewing all their test scores or something and saying, okay, this person's competent or not. A huge chunk of trust is warmth. Is how do you believe that this person has your best interests in mind? And that component is a huge predictor of whether or not we trust someone. So if you don't know any scientists personally or any physicians personally, then you might have less interactions with them and it might be more, you might be more easy to believe that they're not having your best interests in mind and they might be corrupted somehow. So as far as the flat earth thing, it's like, okay, imagine you have this contrarian, free thinker, influencer that you like to follow who is always in your phone and in your hand every day talking to you directly, sometimes responding to your comments and you have this connection with them. It might be a prayer or a social connection, but it's still a social connection with this person. Do you believe that they have your best interests in mind? They're constantly affirming identities and questions that you have. So you trust them and they might think that their earth is flat or they're presenting that view to you and maybe they're showing some of their work in a technical looking way. And you trust that because of the social connection you have with them and you can compare that to this faceless abstract scientific institution that releases a statement on their website and says, you know, the earth is round. Well like from a psychological perspective, which one of those pieces of information are you more likely to trust? The person that you have this ongoing social contract with or this faceless abstract, non-human entity of just this like big science group that, you know, you're supposed to distrust. And I think that really speaks to how we form trust and then what that looks like in practice and how a lot of these institutions have been super slow to adapt to the current media landscape and have been so cautious to have dialogue with people that now we're seeing the negative effects of that where we need people like going on podcasts and having dialogue with people on social media from these institutions, whether it's academic institutions or medical institutions, science institutions, because people want to see that level of sociality, that social relationship. And if you don't have that, then you're already being reduced so much in the components that determine if you're trustworthy. And it creates a vacuum for someone else to come and be like, hey, that person's not even talking to you. Or when they do talk to you, it's a very patronizing like top down type of process. So instead, trust me and I will talk to you and I'll give you access and, you know, answer all your questions directly. So you were seeing that asymmetry between these institutions that didn't value science outreach enough and all of these influencers who are all about outreach and connecting with their communities, how that asymmetry and trust conform from that perspective. And you talk about this in the book like there's a question of how much of this has always been the case and how much of this is new, especially when it comes to the polarization. And you go from, there's a maniac in the street yelling crazy things in your small village. And you know that person and everybody knows who that is. And then you switch us to every maniac that has access to the internet, you know, yelling. And it alters like the signal to noise ratio and what goes the top. And then you've got newspapers and radio, television, and internet. And then you single one of those changes, the information economy and the attention economy and the, and then what gets incentivized and what everybody's consciously or unconsciously able to be testing all of that and going with what works, especially how you make a living off of it. Cable news started having, you know, pun to tree that was just angry is the effect that in my from my perspective, it's like accuracy was never what was connecting to the person was that they were angry at the same things you were angry about. Exactly. And that's the issue that's at stake. That's what's actually the motivation, even when you're arguing with your family member, like what you want them to do is come over to your side so it's no longer an us versus them situation. And the actual topic is almost irrelevant. You just want you on my side. Right. So that you're motivated by the same things I'm motivated by and you're angry at the same things I'm angry about. And then the landscape just adapt to do it. So that's what you do up front is portray your anger and portray your us versus themness and everything sorts. That seems newer or at least the how quickly the economy can adapt to that is faster. And now I think I'm on the right track there, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think the psychological biases that we've been talking about have been around since humans have been around. But what is different now is the speed and the scalability of enacting those biases. I mean, social media makes it instant. Whereas before you'd have to have like a group of people actually meet them in person and have conversations. And it gets really messy. And I think that's kind of another interesting distinction of before whenever you would try to bring up politics or something. Like you might, if you were embedded within your local community and you were like going to community events and interacting with lots of different people, there was. You knew you had to have future encounters with these people. So you had to treat them with respect and mutual respect and understand that they're full humans with their complex ideas just like you. But with the age of the internet and social media, you can self-select people who think almost exactly like you and affirm your identities and your ideologies and make the world much cleaner. And like these are all the good guys on my side who agree with me 100%. And everyone else who's disagreeing with me is on the bad side. And it just makes it so simple and so quick. And algorithms amplify that and keep showing you stuff that you like and you interact with. And AI makes that even more personalized. Like we're just like stream aligning these psychological biases to make them more impactful. So it's not so much that like social media itself is creating polarization. It's just making these existing social psychological biases much easier to be introduced to us and then amplified and reinforced as we interact with them. I think this is one of the things that is most difficult for like a, especially in the United States culture, but just Western culture in general. You want to think that people are being misled and they're being tricked. And the battle is like to fight the agents who are brainwashing people. And there's a little less emphasis on a person is actively choosing to engage or disengage with certain sources and information. And the idea that there will be any responsibility involved is a prickly thing to introduce to the conversation for a lot of people. Who do your thoughts are on that? - Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting-- Yeah, I think both-- this is something that like both sides of the political spectrum will say. It's like the other side is it's brainwashed, they're NPCs or whatever. And I think that's an interesting idea of itself. Because what does that say about how you view other people? Like, you do view other people as just these easy to lead and mislead people, but you're not part of that. So it's like you're very much othering this group of people that it's like you're assuming they have completely different psychological processes than you do. And that's just not true. Like we're all human beings. We all have these social psychological biases. Again, that's like my main point is we all have these. And we're all vulnerable to it. And it's important to understand what context and what situations make these biases more impactful. So yeah, I think it's an easy way to just ascribe a simple explanation to something, especially if we don't like the outcome. It kind of goes into just world hypothesis stuff and thinking about neat, simple solutions of, well, my dad, I want to believe my dad is good. And what he's believing is something I consider not good. So there must be this external thing that's that's driving that. And instead of like underdiving into the complex interplay of environment, social influence, and how we all of these biases. I'm just really getting things in a way. But I find that to be one of the things I'm most neat to your response to is this othering that you're describing. Because there's just so much research into what people will actively avoid certain types of information. You do that enough. And when it was just newspapers or books, there's one that's some sort of impact there. But as you're describing it constant from the almost-- if you especially if you wake up and you begin doom scrolling within 30 seconds of entering conscious reality again, you're doing a lot of work to stay inside your bubble. And a lot of people are helping you do that more and more. And almost making it as easy as ordering room service. But it's-- the effort you have to put into doing the thing that you're going to do, they're making it so easy to get from here to there. OK. I can talk about that forever. And I'll learn a lot of time talking about that. Because I find that particularly fascinating right now. I didn't see that. That's a word that is in the common parlance, but an actual social scientist, a cognitive researcher, has a much more robust understanding of the term identity. So let's just start there. From the scientific perspective, what are we talking about when we talk about identity? Yeah, great question. So from a civil science perspective, how we can go-- other people have different definitions of identity. So that's a whole other conversation of the nuance there. But broadly speaking, from a social psychological perspective, an identity is defined as a set of meanings that allow us to identify with a role or a social group or a unique characteristic that defines as a unique person. So the set of meanings is really how we're thinking about it. So what does that mean? And how do we define those meanings? And how do we measure them? We can ask people. We can try to track how they interact with different things. But really thinking about identities as meanings and values that we want to adhere to. And why that matters is because once we know that there's these important identities and then associated with these important values and meanings, we then know that people have this motivation to protect those identities by acting in ways that are consistent with those meanings and values. And when people act in ways that are consistent with these meanings and values, it provides them a source of self-esteem. So there's this constant motivation to maintain consistencies between the behaviors that we do, the information that we process, and the meanings and the values associated with those important identities, because they provide us with this feedback loop of self-esteem. So for example, let's say you're a student, and you care about being a good student, that's an important identity for you. There's roles associated with that identity, such as studying and going to class. And whenever you're studying and going to class, and then you're getting good grades, that provides you a self-esteem boost because you care about that. And it allows you to verify that identity in your mind in a way that keeps giving you this positive feedback loop. So you want to keep studying, getting good grades, being a good student, and so on and so forth. So that's the positive aspects of identities. And not only do we have this feedback loop with self-esteem, identities also allow us to connect with other people who share characteristics with us so we can form bonds and provide all the social support and communities. So there's all these positives that go along with identities, like this constant verification of the meanings and the values of these identities make us feel good. So we're constantly motivated to do that. But as we've been describing, whenever we have this motivation to protect those identities and act in ways that are consistent with those meanings, sometimes it means rejecting facts and rejecting reality in a way that's adhering to these falsehoods because what matters more is protecting those identities, protecting that source of self-esteem, and protecting the communities associated with those identities we belong to. And that's where we see issues of vulnerability to misinformation. We like to think of our identity as something that just is. This is where I either was born with this identity or I chose it from the panoply of options. The fact that I was influenced to consider this identity important to me is something we'll get prickly about because it feels like I have no agency involved. Agencies are a key word there. And I think that's one of the challenges with having these types of conversations is we have to acknowledge that we have less agency than we might think. And that's an uncomfortable truth to try to present with people, you know, talking about like a meta-discussion of identity. Yeah. Because identity feels like it's synonymous with agency, but it's not. Right. Yeah, it's a psychological process. Like we're measuring psychological bias in the form of social influence through identities. And when we have these identities, they do happen sometimes randomly, you know? Like college is a good example because you're meeting lots of different people and you're growing up and becoming who you are. And that could-- your identities can be formed by just who you interact with, who you have class with. Like if you're just walking through campus and this kid comes up to you and is like, hey, you want to join my club and let's say it's a religious club. And he seems really nice. And then you become religious ultimately because of that interaction or maybe you become non-religious if it's like an atheist club. So it's like, you might not even think that that was the thing that pushed you. But what do you think of like the preponderance of your social interactions? We're motivated again to be these social creatures and have social support from people we care about. And that can be due to who we connect with. And that can be a very random process that we don't always like to think about. Which is in itself, we could have been born into a culture that was more OK with that. Yeah, it's good. Let us so quickly. Yeah, just one of our favorite things. And we can have many, many identities, as you talk about in the book. You can be a parent and a teacher and a musician and ex-military and American and from Iowa and a fan of this. And you like this. And I go to this conference and this convention and like this TV show, all these things are multiple aspects, multiple identities that can become-- depending on the context, depending on the other people that share it, we'll have more impact on your cognition and behavior because it sort of rises in the importance of that context that that identity is front and center. Tell me a little bit until everybody in the world a little bit about the difference between identity salience and identity prominence. Yeah, so identity prominence is referring to how personally important the identity is to you. And identity salience is more about if it's top of mind or not. So if something is salient, you're thinking about it. If something is prominent, it's more of a deeper personal association with that identity. And both of those influence our behavior because if we're reminded about an identity we have-- so it's more salient-- we're also more likely to want to support that identity and act in ways consistent with that identity. But if it's an important thing. identity, a prominent identity, we're also motivated to support it. And these are constantly changing what's top of mind for us is a constant process of like if you remind someone about their identity, then they may be more likely to think about it and then have a motivation to protect it. So one of the studies that I mentioned that kind of dives into this is this political identity study where if you have people write about their political identities, they become more biased. And that's because they're thinking about it more. And they're like, oh yeah, you know, I'm a conservative or liberal. And now that I'm thinking about this, I'm going to respond to even having stronger political attitudes than the group of people in the study that you don't ask to think about your political identity. So it's becoming more salient in their mind. It's more top of mind. And it was already important to them for many of that. So so both of those concepts explain how motivated we are to protect these identities when we're consciously thinking about them or unconsciously thinking about them if it's a deeper, broader personal importance like with prominence. You did research into this affect control thing when people heard a story. So share a little bit if you could about the research you did into the affect control theory. Yeah. So affect control theory talks more about how we feel towards cultural ideas and how we think about different components of language. So you mentioned language. So you might find this is interesting because what we're actually doing is evaluating each word on three dimensions of meaning like evaluation, potency, and activity. So evaluation, good bad potency, strong week, and activity like really active or more passive and slow. And there's been a lot of research on showing that these three dimensions of meaning really break down a lot of concepts just with those three factors. Yeah. So this is like part of my dissertation work. So it's been a few years since I've really dove into this. But I remember it being such a cool way to try to quantify how we navigate our social and cultural worlds. Because whenever we experience the world in a way that contrasts from what we expect, it creates this like sense of unreality in this kind of like uh-oh response. And we're motivated to try to fix that in some way. So for example, I think this is an example I provided my book. We break one way to study this is through like really short statements. And one statement is I think like mother hurts child. So you break down each of those components even more specifically like mother we think more positively for as a culture. So this word and this concept we think okay mother good hurt is a bad thing. So a bad action, a strong action, and then child we think good. So it creates this cultural inconsistency in this psychological inconsistency for us to read that sentence of like mother hurts child. We think uh-oh like something we then are like motivated to reframe one part of that sentence. So maybe the mother we think is a bad person we say like oh this is actually like more of a monster not a mother or hurt maybe we're saying oh maybe hurts is just they're disciplining them they're not actually hurting them. So like we're trying to reframe this constantly in our mind to try to make sense of of the world. And I think that's an interesting way to think about how we like process identities and biases on a very granular detailed level. It's like even at the level of each word we're trying to make sense of it and we are rejecting these inconsistencies whenever we see them even at a very lower level. So to connect at the politics which is like the easy political identity to fit in here. If we're a Republican we're a Democrat and we read a story about like Democrat hurts person. If we're a Democrat we read that we're like oh well we're less likely to think that's true. But if we're a Republican we read that same sentence or more likely to think that's true because the Republicans are evaluating the word Democrat very differently than Democrats are. So you can really like quantify at a very simple mathematical level how how much conflict people are going to perceive these statements based on their own identities. And that's what I was trying to study in my dissertation is really breaking down these political attitudes at this like synactical level of okay Democrats and Republicans are going to evaluate each other differently. And that also means that they're going to evaluate the likelihood of events differently based on how they are evaluating different words. So like Democrats and Republicans I think in my dissertation I did use the example Democrat hurts person Republican hurts person. So Democrats and Republicans evaluated the words hurt and person pretty similarly but they evaluated Democrat and Republican very differently. And you can do this like mathematical equation of seeing how much conflict there is between the words in that particular sequence. So a Democrat reading the sentence Democrat hurts person creates a lot of conflict or what's called in the literature deflection because you're saying good word is doing bad thing and that's this big conflict in your mind whereas Republicans it creates a lot less deflection and less conflict in their mind because that is more similar to their expectations based on their identities. And so we can kind of like mathematically operationalize how much psychological conflict are people experiencing when they read these short sentences and then you can expand that to like a broader way of how they view their worlds where all right so right from the beginning we're seeing that this person is going to consider this social situation much more or less likely depending on the identities that they have. And that likelihood is really what of driving at is like how likely do you think this event is and that likelihood is dependent on how you evaluate each component of the social situation. So again if you're viewing the actor in this situation good or bad you're going to view the subsequent behaviors of that actor differently. So it's kind of speaking to this broader identity bias but it's really diving into the details of like okay here are the nuts and bolts of where it starts and you can see these like building blocks of identity bias based on how people just evaluate certain words and certain actors they experience you know in their environments. Something you brought up I think it was amazing who had brought this up. I have noticed this and it's a strange thing and I'm wondering if you have any insights into this or just any curiosity about it. It seems to be in my lifetime and I could be wrong about this and maybe this has happened all throughout history. I just happened to be in a pocket of it where it's happening now. Being in American culture being a Democrat or being a Republican has become this superordinate identity. And you can say left versus right but it seems like this becomes salient this becomes the thing. Mega identity as you've describing it. This feels at least in my lifetime it feels stronger than ever but I'm wondering if you have any insights as to how did that come about? How did why is that now our superordinate identity across all sorts of context? Yeah I think there's a variety of reasons for this. One thing has just been how you could talk of the macro level of how political discussion from political leaders has changed as become much more adversarial in just the past few decades. You can see this top down effect of people becoming much more aggressive towards their opponents considering their opponents as the enemy more versus just someone they disagree with. We saw that in the 90s with Newt King Rich and stuff like that where the language used was just very different. And so that's like at the macro level but then there's also the personal level and the environment we are in now is very different than it used to be. So we talked about social media. Social media is just amplifying this existing process. So we already have these social biases, these social identities and these networks that amplify these identities. But now you can find your own cable channel that supports your political identity. Whereas before there wasn't like a personal cable channel that it was more of a broad channel that applies to everyone. So now it can be personalized with one identity of the other. But not just cable identities like it was in the 90s and early 2000s. Now we're seeing social media. You can have your very personalized social media information that will support your identity and tell you the other identity is bad. So it's this amplification process. And that's really the major vulnerability. that I see with these identity processes. It's not so much that we have these identities that bias us. Like, yes, we should be mindful these identity biases, where it really becomes a problem is the spaces where it's reinforced to be the super-ordinary identity, like you speak of, or this mega identity. And what contexts and situations allow for that to happen. So any sort of amplification process is going to make us more vulnerable to these identity processes. And that could be surrounding ourselves with people who think just like us and are constantly reinforcing our identities and our beliefs and our meanings associated with those identities. So again, that could be like a cable news show you watch it and it's constantly affirming that. But then it's not just cable news. It's your social networks. It's your social media. And it's constantly amplifying these existing forces to create such a strong polarization that connects other identities together. And that can be because when we are navigating our world, we want to associate with people who are like us and share our characteristics. And when politics is such a driving force of who we are, we want to be around people who think similarly to us. But this can be an issue when we are so motivated to be around people that we share characteristics with, that we stop associating with people who think differently than us or have different backgrounds. And this relates to this idea and this research topic that I talk in a book of this social psychological concept of social identity complexity. And that's a really interesting way to think about identities. So it's not just that we have this identities that exist in vacuums, but our identities operate in a context of intersecting with other identities. And how does that influence us? So if we have, let's say, our political and religious identity, how much overlap do those two identities have? If they have complete overlap-- this is an extreme example. Let's say we have four really important identities in our lives, which is just an extreme example. Let's say our political identity, our religious identity, our volunteer identity, and our friend identity. So this is who we are. So let's pretend that our religious and political identity completely overlap. All the meanings are 100% agreement. And we volunteer at our place of worship. So we are there. We care about volume of volunteer. It's also connected to this. And all of our friends are also at this place of worship and also share our political beliefs. Then in this example, 100% of how we derive our social self-esteem is based on this very narrow lens of meanings that are all within this four identities that completely overlap and completely amplify and increase the prominence of these identities. So it's not just that these are personally important to us, but they share meanings with other personally important identities that then enhances the overall importance of those meanings. So 100% of how we view ourself is through these few meanings associated with these identities. So any information that challenges those identities challenges 100% of where we derive our self-esteem from. So it's a super strong personal attack that makes us motivated to reject it because it feels very, very uncomfortable, very, very negative. You can think of the converse of that where we have a much broader set of identities that do not overlap very much. So we can still have a political and religious identity. But let's say they're not over connected all that much. Our church doesn't even really talk about politics all that much. And let's say we volunteer, but we volunteer at like a pet shelter, something completely outside our church. And we have friends that maybe a few go to our church, but we have a lot of friends who don't go to our church. So our friend identity is much broader. Now our meanings associated with our identities are spread across a wide range of social support systems. So whenever we encounter information that challenges our political identity, it's only a small subset of where we're deriving self-esteem from. And we're much better able to absorb it and process it more objectively because it's not completely attacking our entire sense of self, but only a small component of it. And that's how we're more resilient towards misinformation if we're experiencing information that is false, that challenges these identities. That's awesome. I'm going to make a new slide for my next thing I'm going to present to talk about this. They'll take a long time to get here on your own, but once you see it, it's like, oh, yeah. You kind of have to build it up, yeah. But once you get it, then you can just see it. I literally try to see what I visualized this. You can write it down on a map. And some people have talked about how that could help reduce polarization by actually visualizing your identities on a piece of paper. But you can see how this all connects because we have our identities and our identity maps and how much overlap they have spatially. And then you can see the network effects of all those identities amplifying them. And then if you really get really crazy and granular, you can think about that affect control theory and how we view social situations based on our evaluations of specific words and actions and how that is all interacting with each other and potentially amplifying our susceptibility to misinformation and bias. So it's like, it gets really complicated, but that in that complexity, you can really start to understand the broad effects of how we're vulnerable to these social biases and what we can do about it. - Yeah. And I'm imagining all throughout our history, different types of ways of being civilized, you know, villages, communities, empires, how that alters the way your identities get a chance to be overlap just because of the practicality of the situation and the geographical limitations. And you don't have a media source, you don't even have literacy yet. So it goes like you, it's my politics and my religion and my friends and my volunteers, it's all smushed up. And it makes sense that when you meet, you suddenly, when this group suddenly meets the Romans, you know, like, oh wow, there's not a whole lot of overlap here. - Exactly. So it's wild to think about how much we can like visualize these processes happening. And it makes a lot of sense of how strong and quickly that othering can be when it's not just, okay, it's one identity, it's this confluence of all these identities that amplify each other. And that's really where that polarization stems from. - This is good stuff. Okay, I do want to get one last thing in. And sure. Which is, and this is a question that would take two hours for you to answer. So I understand that. In these discussions, no matter who you're talking to, if you're talking to somebody who seems like an expert, the question is, okay, what would we do about this? Because it seems like we're like the trains headed for the cliff. What options are available according to the research we've done that seems actually has a, can have some positive impact on all of those. It's just that inevitable outcome of what happens when societies get complex, or do we have options here? And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. - Yeah, so it is a big question. And yeah, it will take several hours to really dive into it. But to try to summarize it, what I've been referring to is like the particular vulnerability of our susceptible misinformation. So when are we most susceptible to misinformation from a social science perspective? My point is that happens under context where our identity biases are amplified and reinforced. So in order to reduce that vulnerability, we need to reduce that reinforcement and amplification process. And that's kind of like a good starting point of like, okay, well, now we actually are defining stuff. So it's like, okay, so where are these vulnerabilities take place? One is social media isn't easy one, 'cause you can kind of visualize it. And I think we have an idea of what that looks like. Whenever we're in these hyper echo chambers on social media, it provides a way to amplify and reinforce these identities. So trying to break out of that is be one way, like trying to not doom scroll and constantly obsess over whatever your particular political ideology is, trying to break out of that. And I think people are aware of this. Like the whole idea of touch grass. Like that's a common thing. Like people know like, yes, sometimes it's good to log off and meet people in the real world. And it sounds so simple and obvious, but it's true. Like literally just getting outside social media, outside whatever these screens or how we're receiving these online information. It's important to take a break and not allow yourself to become radicalized through this reinforcement process that will take advantage and exploit these identity processes that we've been describing. So actually like, meeting lots of different people. Again, it seems so obvious and simple, but I think it's a really important component to improve our resilience to misinformation. We need to expand our diversity of identities and what that could look like is simply volunteering at different places, getting a new hobby, meeting different people, joining a sports league. So again, it seems silly, but there's so much power and literally like joining a local sports league and meeting people from all different backgrounds. So that's why I really enjoy sports because one, it's like good physical exercise and good for your mental health, but also it's good for your social health. Like just meeting lots of different people and being active and thinking about how there's a variety of people out here from different perspectives that you might otherwise not have a chance to meet. So personally, we can, on an individual level, we can try to expand our identity maps and do different things, meet different people and not have our identities so wrapped up in a narrow set of meetings. So we can individually we can do that. Now the issue is like, what does that look like on a societal level? And we don't always have opportunities to do that. So in the United States, we don't have a lot of what's called third spaces where we have our home, we have our work, but there's not really a lot of good community spaces where we can meet lots of different people. So that's kind of the tricky part is like, how do we like fund initiatives for more people to do this? That requires like a whole structural kind of bigger picture thing, but there are opportunities still for people to join sports leagues or volunteer with different things, meet people at their local libraries and stuff. So like there are like publicly available things like that. So that's one part I think is like diversifying ourselves, diversifying our identities, diversifying our networks. And then there's the education component, which is what I've been working on the last few years. It's like not only do we have to be aware of our social biases and work on that, but that should be merged with this idea of becoming as media literate as we can. Like how do we learn how to navigate or media and information landscape as best we can? And that speaks to some of the work that I've been doing at Notre Dame, developing these short media literacy games that teaches people different aspects of verifying the credibility of sources, for example, what's called lateral reading often, where instead of looking within an article and trying to fact check it within the confines of the article, you're going laterally in open new tabs and seeing who the author is, what their biases might be, what outlet are they writing for, and what journalistic practices does that particular media out that have? So like learning those skills is also really important. And in the age of AI, I think that connects to digital literacy, learning the limitations of artificial intelligence and these large language models, these chatbots. So like there's that whole education component too, but the education component I would argue can only go so far. You have to have that social understanding as well, and that awareness of your own social biases, because that allows you to combine the best of both of those techniques, where it's like, OK, now I know how to fact check, and I'm aware of my social biases. So I'm not just fact checking stuff that's inconvenient or convenient for me. So that's on the individual level, is like trying to understand how we can learn about our biases, learn how to fact check better, and how to navigate the internet. So that's individually, but then I can also go into like the Meso and macro as well. So I think that's also important. So I dive into this into my book about the Meso level of basically communities and what that looks like. So we've talked about trust and how trust is a social process of how we trust someone when we think they're competent and we think they have our best interests in mind. So that might require forming relationships with someone. So what I would like to see happen is more of these scientific and medical institutions that have lost some trust actually go out in their communities and form relationships again with their local communities or on social media, like actually invest in this and have people speaking about what is the importance of a university? What are they actually doing? What research are they doing that makes a difference in your life? And that reduces this psychological distance between people who are not familiar with universities and the universities themselves. So I often think like I'm within academia. I know a lot of scientists and physicians. So for me, it's a lot easier for me to trust them because I know them personally. But if you don't personally know these people, then that creates a barrier and it creates an opportunity for someone else to be like, hey, don't trust those people. You don't even know them. Trust me instead. And I think if more opportunities existed for partnerships between local community leaders and their hospitals and universities and really invest in those partnerships at a local level and then scale that throughout the United States, like that's like my big picture. If I could wave a magic wand, I would have these hospitals and universities have resources to invest in those community outreach programs. And then of course, there's like big, big picture of thinking about social media and what they can do a better job on. And that gets really tricky because it requires regulation. But I mean, some simple things are just like having these companies share their data more and have more transparency. And that's something, unfortunately, that we've kind of drifted away from. Because ideally, we'd have independent researchers studying these platforms and having access to their data so we can actually really know what these algorithms are doing and how they're affecting us. So that's a big component of it as well. It should be complicated. If you had a simple answer, I'd be like, man. [LAUGHTER] But yeah, that is the simple as I can try to be. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast for links to everything we talked about. Head to YouAreNotSoSmart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McRaney. I have been your host in those show notes. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks, details for davidmachrainy.com. And I'll have all of that in the show notes as well. Right there in your podcast player. For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible Spotify, or YouAreNotSoSmart.com. You can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and BlueSky and everything else that's like that @DavidMcRaney, @symbolDavidMcRaney. Follow the show @NotSmartBlog. We're also on the Facebook/YouAreNotSoSmart. And if you'd like to support this one person operation, no editors, no staff, just me. Go to patreon.com/YouAreNotSoSmart. Pitching in it any amount gets you the show ad-free, but the hire amounts. That'll get you posters and t-shirts and sign books and other stuff. The opening music that is clash by Karev and Pallis. And if you really, really, really want to support this show, the best way to do that, just tell people about it. Either a rate and comment on all these platforms, or just tell somebody directly, hey, you should check out this show. Point them to an episode that really meant something that really connected with you. And check back in in about two weeks for a fresh, new episode. [MUSIC PLAYING]