I may not work on the podcast much in the near future; I might stop entirely. This short episode includes some updates about how the podcast has been going and how my polarization-related work and books has been going.
Episode links:
Category: podcast
A talk with psychologist and magician Anthony Barnhart focused on how magicians misdirect attention and manipulate an audience. Other topics include: the role blinking can play in misdirections; acts that claim to use psychology and behavior-manipulation to achieve magic-like effects (e.g., Derren Brown’s act); neuro-linguistic programming (NLP); a magic show Tony was impressed by recently and why he was impressed, and more.
Transcript is below.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources related to or mentioned in this talk:
- Anthony’s website
- Sleights of Mind: book that Barnhart helped with
- Barnhart’s presents on “tactical blinking” in magicians
- Article on Wiseman’s analysis of magician blinks
- About Gustav Kuhn, who also works in psychology and magic
- New Yorker piece on Derren Brown
TRANSCRIPT
(Note that transcripts are not perfect and may contain errors.)
Zach: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people better – and also understanding ourselves beter. You can learn more about it, and sign up for a premium ad-free subscription, at www.PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
In this episode I talk with psychologist and magician Tony Barnhart. Our main focus in this talk is how magicians misdirect attention and manipulate their audience, with a focus on some behavioral aspects of misdirection that Tony has studied. Other topics include: Neuro-linguistic Programming (known as NLP), psychics, Derren Brown and similar acts that claim to use psychology and behavior-reading to achieve amazing feats; a magic show Tony was impressed by and why he was impressed, and more.
If you want some resources related to the stuff we talk about, you can find that at the entry for this episode on my site PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
And just a heads up that you can find transcripts for almost all my episodes on that site, too.
A little bit more about Tony, which I’ve taken from his website anthonybarnhart.com :
He’s an Associate Professor of Psychological Science at Carthage College, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He’s also a part-time professional magician with over 30 years of performing experience. His research trajectory changed in 2010 with the publication of the book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions, in which he was featured as a consultant and teacher on the science of stage magic.
The scientific interest that the book garnered motivated Tony to shift his focus toward the interface of science and magic. Magicians are informal cognitive scientists with their own hypotheses about the mind. Tony’s work on the science of magic has been featured in Science News For Students as well as in national and international television appearances and documentaries. Most recently, his work was featured in an episode of The Nature of Things, Canada’s long-running science program.
Okay here’s the talk with Tony Barnhart:
Zachary Elwood: Okay, here’s the talk with Tony Barnhart.
Hi Tony, thanks for joining me.
Anthony Barnhart: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to chat.
Zach: Yeah, I appreciate it. Maybe we could start with… I know this is probably a big question, but maybe a quick summary of what drives your interest in the intersection of magic and science. How do you find yourself working in that area?
Anthony: Sure. Yeah, before I was a psychologist, I was a professional magician. I started performing when I was seven, I was doing paid gigs by my tween years and paid for college doing magic shows. So, I always had that interest. And I think magic is what drew me towards psychology in the first place. Magicians are kind of informal cognitive scientists. They have to have hypotheses about how the mind works in order to come up with ways to deceive the mind. And so there are lots of magicians who are sort of psychological hobbyists who try to read the literature and keep up with some research. I was a psychology major as an undergraduate from the very start, but I thought I wanted to be a clinician as most undergraduate psychology majors do. In fact, the best thing that ever happened to me was not getting into grad school for clinical psych my first year out of undergraduate. It made me sort of rethink my priorities a little bit. And I thought back to the work that I had done with the cognitive psychologist who worked at my undergraduate institution. I’d worked in his lab for years, he’d been the first person to sort of foster my thinking about the psychological basis of magic, I gave some of my first talks on the topic while I was an undergraduate. Thinking back on those experiences reminded me just how rich they were and how much I enjoyed thinking about magic in this way. I ended up applying to graduate school in cognitive psychology, which is an experimental type of psychology. It’s not clinical at all. I know nothing about helping people, but I can design a mean experiment. Cognitive psychologists study the building blocks of thought. So, language and memory and attention and perception, all that jazz.
So I went to graduate school to be a language researcher. Even though I’d done this thinking about magic as an undergraduate, I didn’t at that time see a basis for making magic my shtick as an experimental psychologist. But while I was in graduate school doing work on language, I started seeing other psychologists and neuroscientists publishing research that either used magic as a tool in the laboratory for studying attention and perception, or that examined hypotheses from the world of magic that had not been empirically tested to see whether they could contribute to a more formal understanding of the mind. And I thought, “There’s really nothing special about me to study language, right? I don’t have a leg up on anybody, I can read the literature just like anybody else and come up with some hypotheses, but I have all of this training as a magician that I could immediately put to use to give myself a leg up in this new burgeoning research program on the science of magic. And so I started looking at who the movers and shakers were in this new field and I realized that a couple of them were just down the road from me at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. I was a graduate student at Arizona State. This was Steve Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, who were neuroscientists by training. They were not magicians, but they’d started to take an interest in magic and had published one big review piece about magic.
And so I reached out to them and told them who I was and what I was up to, and we struck up a long-term collaboration. At that point, they were noodling the idea of writing a popular science book on the neuroscience of magic so I became their magic consultant. I was their magic teacher, I built an act for them to audition for the Magic Castle, and I had some pieces… I contributed some ideas for the book. And the interest that that book garnered from not just the public, but from the scientific community, showed me that there’s meat on the bone here. There’s real work that can be done. There can be an entire career built upon the seed of an idea of studying the methods of magicians. I guess that’s the long story of how I got to where I’m at now. As a psychologist now, about a third of what I do in the laboratory is still the sort of language research, and now two-thirds of my output is in the domain of the science of magic.
Zach: Yeah. It seems like, obviously, attention and misdirection are a big part of magic. Can you talk a little bit about what are some of the ways that magicians misdirect people’s attention or draw their attention to other things? And am I right in saying that that’s a big part of magic?
Anthony: Absolutely. I think that was the foot in the door for psychologists to begin looking at magic. What were some of the techniques that magicians were using to choreograph their audience’s attention so that they can be more readily deceived? There is scads of thinking on this in the magic community, but one of the points that falls out of all this discussion is that misdirection isn’t just distraction. If you know that your attention has been distracted and then you see something that you didn’t expect, well, there’s no magic there because you know you just weren’t attending at the right time or the right place. So, misdirection is really about direction. It’s about directing the audience’s attention to something that feels relevant and feels important. You have to give them something meaningful to attend to while you’re engaging in your shenanigans elsewhere as a magician. Magicians have this huge toolbox of cues that they can use to control an audience’s attention. Probably the greatest tool in their arsenal is social attention cues and social gaze cues. Magicians know that the audience is likely to be attending where they’re looking. So the magicians make sure that their gaze is directed toward exactly what they want their audience to be attending to. We as humans have this strong urge to gaze-follow, and it’s been suggested that this is really one of the things that evolution endowed us with. We got these big whites of our eyes. There are no other species of monkeys that have big whites of their eyes, and monkeys and chimpanzees do not gaze-follow the same way that even newborn babies tend to. It’s remarkable. That’s the strongest tool in the magician’s arsenal.
So if I’m doing a dumb little trick like making a coin vanish by only pretending to transfer it from one hand to the other, well, my gaze, my eyes should follow where the audience presumes that coin to be or where I want the audience to presume that coin to be. If I do that sleight of hand and then I direct my gaze toward the dirty hand, the trick falls apart immediately. And it’s not just gaze, right? There are other social cues that are readily used by magicians.
Zach: Yeah, real quick. I was wondering if have there been any studies, informal or otherwise, where they show a magic trick but take away the magician’s head and it doesn’t work as well-
Anthony: Yes. Yep, there’s been a lot of that. One of the oldest tricks in the book is called the vanishing ball illusion. In that trick, the magician throws a little ball in the air a couple of times and on the third throw, the ball vanishes in midair. Well, the magician has just retained the ball in his hand. He feigned throwing the ball in the air. But the audience has this strong experience that the ball has vanished in midair that they saw the ball leave the magician’s hand and it vanished in midair. Well, there’s been a lot of research trying to figure out what causes this illusion. And some of the earliest work used the technique that you’re articulating. They took away the social gaze cues from the performer to see if people were still susceptible to the illusion. And they still were susceptible to the illusion, just not quite as much.
Zach: Right, there’s multiple factors. Yeah.
Anthony: Yep. That’s one of the complexities of doing this research. Magic tricks and the experience of magic tricks never have just one cause. Magicians are piling deceptive techniques, one on top of the other, to increase their odds of deception. So there’s been a lot of work on that weird little trick.
Zach: Yeah, and you were going to go on. What are some other major ways of distraction— or misdirection, I should say? Obviously, verbal is one. I’m sure there’s many others, as you said.
Anthony: Those social cues include body tension. The hand that’s holding the coin should be more tense than the hand that’s presumably not holding a coin. Audiences are sensitive to subtle variability in tension and their attention is even captured by unexpected tension— tension that doesn’t make sense. And body posture, right? Our posture tells other people what we are attending to or what we find to be important in the environment around us. The thing you mentioned, of course, language. Language is a powerful tool of misdirection. The narrative structures of magic effectively tell the audience what’s relevant and what’s irrelevant. If I want to be sure that the audience’s attention is localized to a certain spot at a certain time, I tell them to look there. Right? If I spread out the deck, I say, “Look, your card isn’t in the deck!” Right? People follow those directions really well and that allows me to get away with all manner of shenanigans elsewhere.
But perhaps more interestingly for you, humor is a powerful tool of misdirection that a lot of magic theorists have talked about. Magicians have this intuition that the moment an audience understands the punchline of a joke, they’re briefly blinded to the world around them. This has not been tested in the laboratory. There are no published works looking at humor as a tool of misdirection or helping us understand why humor might be an effective tool of misdirection. There are a couple of dominant hypotheses out there waiting to be tested.
Zach: It’s like a brief overwhelm, that kind of thing?
Anthony: Yeah. One group of researchers thinks it’s all about the emotional content of humor, that there’s something about the mirthfulness of humor that leads to a general relaxation of attention. I think there’s something much more interesting going on. I think humor taxes your short-term memory or your working memory if you will. Working memory is where you’re holding content you’re currently processing or making sense of or trying to organize. And think about how a joke might impact your working memory. Jokes have a setup. They have a punchline. The setup creates an expectation, the punchline doesn’t match that expectation. So the only way to make sense of a punchline is to travel back in time and reinterpret that setup in light of this new constraint. That’s a working memory task. You have to manipulate the language that you’re holding in your working memory to try to resolve the ambiguity in this new way. And so my hypothesis is that this process of organizing and rearranging working memory requires attention, attention focused inward toward these memory processes. And attention is sort of a limited resource. So in order to focus more attention inward, that has to come from somewhere. So I think it’s usurping attentional resources from the world so that you can focus them inward. We’re working on a series of experiments testing that hypothesis right now.
Zach: It would help explain why humor is so often used by stage magicians. I would imagine there’s some element, too, of humor just making magicians more likable so you are less likely to want to prove them wrong.
Anthony: Absolutely. Yeah, I think the first minutes of a magician’s show are really important because the magician has to establish some kind of rapport with that audience, especially if they’re going to be engaging in a lot of these social misdirection tools. Who are you more likely to gaze follow, your friend or some stranger on the street? Your friend. So a magician wants to establish this rapport so that all of these tools will become more powerful so that they can more effectively control their audience’s attention.
Zach: Yeah, it seems like even for the more serious dark magicians, there’s still a subtle element of humor and they’re like, “I know I seem really mysterious and dark, but there’s still elements of rapport building.” Yeah, I thought about that a bit. Like the Criss Angels or David Blanks, there’s still this element of humor in the mix there or self-awareness of like, “This is a funny act I’m putting on,” kind of thing.
Anthony: That’s right. And the places where you don’t need that rapport would be big stage illusions that really aren’t contingent on manipulating the visual attention of the audience.
Zach: Right. That can be very different than close-up magic.
Anthony: Yeah, it’s like the mechanism or the box does the work there. You don’t need to distract. You don’t need any of that. And so if you are a performer who wants to play it serious and maybe not work so much on this rapport building, you’re going to succeed in grand illusions.
Zach: One thing I’ve wondered is… I think it might’ve been in your work I was reading recently, or maybe something else where you read about people looking the unexpected way or the unintended way during a magic act and seeing a little bit more than they should have and seeing how it was done. But I’m curious, it seems like that seldom happens for good magicians. And I’m wondering, does it happen more than I think and maybe we just don’t hear about it because most people aren’t seeing those things? Or are good magicians just so skilled that very few people look the wrong way?
Anthony: Yeah, I think it’s the latter. I think skilled magicians have thought enough about the narrative structure of their performance that the entire audience is locked into it. There’s a lot of psychological research on how audiences control their attention when watching films. If you monitor people’s eye movements while they watch a really great movie, everybody’s looking at exactly the same spots at exactly the same times because they’re using the narrative to predict where the action is going to occur, where they need to be looking to extract meaningful content in the moment. And so a good magician is doing the same thing as a film director, trying to choreograph the actions so that audiences are making predictions about what’s relevant and irrelevant and guiding their attention accordingly. Yeah.
So if audience members are engaged with the narrative, then they should all be looking at roughly the same spots. Even, in fact, blinking at the same time.
Zach: Right. I want to talk more about that because I know you’ve done some work on that. I was going to keep going unless you wanted to add more there.
Anthony: Sure. In those instances where a person has seen something or has looked at the wrong spot at the right time or whatever, that’s probably an instance where their attention has lapsed, where they have failed to track the narrative for a moment. They got distracted by their own thoughts or something like that and so then they weren’t influenced by the techniques of the magicians to be misdirected.
Zach: Yeah, I can see your point. It’s like a good director and a good magician and probably other performers have to have a really good sense of how their things appear to the audience. That’s what makes them good, is understanding and predicting how people will react to it.
Anthony: Yeah, that’s right.
Zach: I saw you’d researched how magicians might use other modes like, say, verbal language to aid in misdirection, like, say, physical misdirection. At least that’s what I was understanding. Could you explain a little bit more about how that works?
Anthony: Yeah. When discussing misdirection, magicians will often use the term offbeat. For example, if you tell a joke and you want to get away with some piece of sleight of hand, you’ll align that sleight of hand with the punchline of the joke. They’ll call that moment the offbeat. It’s a moment when the audience’s attention seems to be reduced or focused inward or whatever. While I was still a graduate student, I started taking a deeper look at what magicians really mean by offbeats. They describe lots of different ways to create offbeats, and I wondered if these different techniques are all calling upon the same psychological mechanisms or if they’re different techniques that we’re using the same name for. So, yeah, a joke was one of the things that magicians will do. A climax in the magic can serve as an offbeat. If you reveal that something has vanished from somewhere, in that moment, the audience is relatively blinded to things around them and you can use that moment, the revelation, to get away with sleight of hand that sets you up for the next phase of the trick. Those seem to be related, right? Those seem to be about this working memory stuff. When you see that something has vanished, what do you do? Well, you probably try to work backwards to figure out where it went. You probably try to access things that are in your working memory to reconstruct what the magician could have done to get to this place.
But there was one other technique that magicians called an offbeat that seemed different to me. They will create a rhythm, either through music or through speech, and they will align their deceptive action on the literal offbeat of the rhythm. So if you think about downbeats and upbeats in music, they would align their sleight of hand with the upbeat. There are a handful of magic tricks that seem to exploit this phenomenon and I, for my doctoral dissertation, decided to explore the mechanisms behind that flavor of offbeat. Psychology at that time was familiar with what’s known as attentional entrainment, that when there’s a rhythmic event in the environment, our attention aligns itself with that rhythm so that you have heightened sensitivity at moments when important things are happening and you can kind of rest in between. It was a known phenomenon.
But what magicians seemed to be doing that was unknown to psychology was they were using auditory stimuli to influence visual awareness. This was happening across sensory systems. They were using music to impact visual awareness. And that really had not been studied when I started doing my dissertation work.
So in my dissertation work, I decided to distill this down to the simplest case of trying to detect a subtle visual event like the appearance of a dot on a computer screen while people listen to a very simple rhythmic tone which is played at a consistent clip. And some participants had to monitor the tones for an oddball, like a tone that didn’t match all the others, just so we knew that they were paying attention to them. And we manipulated the onset of this dot relative to the rhythm that they were being exposed to. Sometimes the dot could appear on the beat, sometimes it could appear shifted off of the beat. And we found that people’s accuracy and reaction time to report this dot were impacted by its alignment with the rhythm. If the dot happened off the beat, they were slower and less accurate to detect it than if it appeared on the beat. This was the first time to demonstrate that the mere presence of an auditory rhythm could impact visual awareness. And we showed that the effect happened even if people didn’t have to focus on the tones at all. If they were just present, the mere presence of this rhythm impacted participants’ visual awareness. This is really an example of how you can take an idea from magic and pull all the magic out of it to test its validity in psychology.
Zach: So in concrete examples, magicians might be doing something rhythmically language-wise or maybe rhythmically physically, and that kind of entrains the audience’s attention. And then when they do things in between those times, they’re more likely to have people miss it. Right?
Anthony: There was an anecdotal account that I heard while I was working on this. I could never track it down to any particular individual, but there was this story that I heard repeatedly of a stage illusionist who was complaining that his audience kept catching him activating this mechanism with his foot while he was performing. They would see it. They kept catching him. And somebody asked him, “There’s music playing while you’re doing this?” He’s like, “Yeah.”
“Are you moving with the music?” And he said, “Yeah.”
“Are you hitting the button on the beat?” He said, “Yeah!”
So they encouraged him to press the button, hit the trap off the beat, and people no longer caught him doing the dirty work.
Zach: Well, that’s a perfect example. But you said it was anecdotal, you couldn’t track down the details.
Anthony: I could not find a source for that.
Zach: It’s a good representation of the concept.
Anthony: Yeah. There are some visual magic tricks that do really seem to exploit this phenomenon that wouldn’t play very well in a podcast, I think. [laughs]
Zach: I can imagine. This is related to when you mentioned magicians blinking and getting people to basically entrain the blinking so they’ll blink at the best moments to miss things. That’s related to that.
Anthony: Yeah. This is one of those places where people who claim expertise in lie detection or body language get it wrong. Lots of people claim that heightened blink rates are a cue to lying. But that’s not the way it works. In fact, you tend to blink less in moments when you’re engaging in deceptive action because deception is cognitively complex. You have to maintain the truth and the lie and make sure the lie is consistent in order to be a good deceiver. And so all the attention that goes to maintaining that reduces your blink rate. After a lie is over or after a deception, you see this rebound in blink rates where there’s a bunch of blinking after it’s over. It turns out audiences that are watching a magic show use the blinking of the performer to gauge when there is nothing important happening. So, their blinks tend to synchronize with the blinks of a performer. Richard Weissman over in the UK did an experiment using a magic trick performed by Teller of Penn & Teller and looked at the blink behavior of participants watching this video, and the participants in the video tended to be blinking their eyes in the moments when Teller was engaged in deceptive action because the narrative and perhaps his own blink rates were telling the audience, “This is a moment to relax, there’s nothing important happening right here. “And if you look at blinking behavior of people who are watching a speaker who’s telling a story, their blinks synchronize with that speaker. There’s quite a bit of work on this now. They’re using the the speaker’s blinking as a proxy metric of when they can relax or when there’s not meaningful information to be captured.
Zach: It relates to what we started talking about about how the human beings eyes are so communicative and seem like they’re set up that way. Right? We have a lot of white space and it’s almost like we can communicate anxiety. You can imagine back in the day when early humans were scared. Seeing someone’s eyes widened about something communicates a lot. So I can see that as related where it’s like when someone’s eyes are not blinking, it makes us a little bit more anxious and more aware. It kind of relates to cats. They say cats, too. Cats communicate relaxation and friendliness by doing long slow blinks at each other, which is kind of related, which is something I use. When I want to befriend a cat, me and other people do long slow blinks to basically set the cats at ease, which I think works for mammals in general maybe. Because we can accidentally communicate our anxiety to people by having wider unblinking eyes. But yeah, it just makes me think of all that and how the blinking makes us think, “Oh, there’s nothing much going on here or something.” They’re relaxed blinking.
Anthony: I don’t know if it’s true but I feel like I’ve heard that Anthony Hopkins made sure that he he never blinked while he was on screen playing Hannibal Lecter because was so off-putting.
Zach: It was. Yeah. But now that you mentioned that, yeah, when I think of him, I just think of him staring with wide open eyes and unblinking strangely. Yeah, that’s a good example. I don’t know if you had any more to say about that but I was going to ask you about the work you’ve done about how magicians might self-deceive themselves when it comes to blinking and missing things.
Anthony: Uh-huh. You’d like me to talk about that now?
Zach: Sure. Yeah.
Anthony: Sure. A few years ago, we set out on this really strange project: Looking at blinking behaviors in performing magicians. The reason that we explored this is that it seemed like it could be a very clear-cut instance of self-deception. There were anecdotal accounts of magicians, who when rehearsing their sleight of hand in front of a mirror, would blink their eyes the moment they carried out a piece of sleight of hand, thereby editing any evidence of that deception out of their consciousness. They were removing any evidence that they were no good at the sleight of hand. It seemed like it could be a very clear-cut instance of self-deception. And looking at the literature on self-deception, we became keenly aware that the evidence for self-deception sucks. That there are very few clear examples of a person both knowing the truth and pushing that truth outside of their conscious awareness. By definition, self-deception requires knowledge of the truth that lives in the unconscious mind and that isn’t available to consciousness. And so we thought about this anecdote and we thought, “Can we produce this phenomenon in the lab? Can we produce self-deceptive blinking? And can we push it around with some other manipulations?”
So we recruited a handful of magicians with varying levels of experience and expertise and we gave them one week to learn this complicated series of sleight of hand moves with coins. We gave them one week to learn this thing. Some of the pieces of sleight of hand were common pieces of sleight of hand that probably all the magicians had had experience with, some of them were weird things that we kind of created for the experiment that they would have no familiarity with. And then we brought them into the lab and we had them perform this routine four times. Twice in front of a mirror so it emulated a rehearsal setting– they had full visual feedback– and twice just in front of a camera, so emulating more of a performance environment with none of that visual feedback. Then we moved to the the really labor-intensive process of coding frame by frame in all of these videos, whether the magician’s eyes were open or closed, and whether that frame happened in the bounds of a piece of sleight of hand or outside of those boundaries. We expected that these magicians would be more apt to blink while they were carrying out sleight of hand than when not and we expected that that blinking behavior would increase when they were in a rehearsal setting when they had this visual feedback. That should be the situation that produces this behavior, compared to the performance setting where they have none of that visual feedback.
Well, we found that indeed these magician participants were more apt to blink while they were engaged in deceptive action than when not. But that tendency was heightened in the performance setting compared to rehearsal setting. So, to the extent that magicians are blinking when they’re carrying out deceptive action, it’s not in service of self-deception because they’re doing it in moments when they aren’t capturing visual information from the world around them. It was exactly opposite to our predictions. This made us think about this work from Richard Weissman that showed that audience members blinking tends to align with moments of deceptive action and teller’s act. And there’s research literature showing that audience members entrain their blinking to that of a speaker. And we hypothesize— this is after-the-fact hypothesizing, we cannot verify this— but we think that perhaps these non-conscious blinking behaviors by the magicians are really meant to communicate relaxation to the audience to encourage the audience members to blink at these moments when the magicians are engaging in deceptive action.
Zach: That would presumably be not even something consciously the performers are doing, it’s just something instinctual they’re doing.
Anthony: Yeah. Yes, humans are unaware of when they’re blinking and they’re mostly unaware of what their eyes are pointed at at any moment in time. Yeah, so this would all be non-conscious. And none of the magicians who participated had awareness that it was an experiment about blinking. [laughs]
Zach: Right, they weren’t even thinking about that or wouldn’t describe it in that way. That’s interesting. Yeah.
Anthony: Yeah, we also did find that this blinking behavior increases when the participants are engaged in complicated unfamiliar sleight of hand compared to the really familiar easy stuff. That was a prediction that came from the self-deception hypothesis. So that was borne out but still, that tendency was heightened in performance compared to rehearsal. It’s very strange.
Zach: Huh, interesting. To switch topics, when it comes to magicians reading the behavior of audience members in service of their tricks, for example in mentalist-type acts, I’m not sure how often that actually happens versus having the appearance of reading audience members’ behavior, but just certain things come to mind in that realm.
Anthony: Yeah, that has become a really popular cover story for mentalists. That they’re using body language and social cues to read minds effectively. Any time a magician claims they’re reading a spectator’s body language, they definitely aren’t. [chuckles] While there are certainly some consistent relationships between behavior and mental processes, there are lots of individual differences that make these cues almost useless. So, magicians cannot rely very heavily on any of these pieces of body language. It’s just become a sexy cover story for traditional mentalism and traditional magic.
Zach: Yeah. I was just reading that New York article about Derren Brown from a few years ago where he talked about how in the modern world where everybody is obviously more skeptical about real magic, it becomes a more sexier interesting thing to talk about how we might be manipulating people’s minds and easier to understand or theoretically more plausible ways that make you think, “Hey, maybe this could be possible,” as opposed to just rejecting magic entirely.
Anthony: Yeah. Yep, it has a little bit of plausibility that makes it just really sticky as an idea. Derren Brown was really the dude who popularized this style of magic, and also, a friend of mine from Phoenix named Kent Knepper was among the first to use these deeply psychological cover stories for rather traditional magic. And so I have a love-hate relationship with this style of magic, right? [laughs] It can be beautiful, it can be compelling, audiences love it, but it is antithetical to the ethical code that I have to live up to. Using those cover stories- those believable cover stories- for traditional magic spreads misinformation about what is and isn’t possible with psychology. And so a lot of these mentalists and magicians take issue with people who claim to have legitimate psychic abilities. Even Derren Brown has spent a lot of time debunking pseudo-psychics, showing that they’re charlatans who are using magic tricks to fleece the masses
Zach: But he’s doing a similar thing.
Anthony: He’s doing a similar thing with these psychological cover stories, maybe even the same thing. He’s encouraging false beliefs about the world around us through these kinds of performances. What’s perhaps even worse is that even if you include a disclaimer, the disclaimer has no impact on the takeaway that people get from the show. There has now been science on this. My colleague, Gustav Kuhn from Plymouth University in the UK, has done a series of experiments where he’s presented people with a mentalism act that looked like psychic behavior or psychic phenomenon, and he included a series of different disclaimers. Like, a disclaimer that says, “This is a magician who is simulating psychic ability,” or introducing them as a legitimate psychic. Afterwards, if he surveys people’s beliefs about what they’ve seen, people believe that they’ve witnessed psychic ability, regardless of whether there was a disclaimer or not. So Derren Brown, for years, has opened his TV shows with this disclaimer that’s a little bit ambiguous. It’s like, “I’m using magic and body language and linguistics and all this stuff. I’m not a psychic.” But to the extent that that disclaimer is meant to control the beliefs and the takeaway message of the audience, it’s not doing it. So, I’ve got deep ethical concerns about misrepresenting magic as something more.
Zach: Yeah, I can see it from different angles where it’s like, “Hey, what Derren Brown does is pretty cool,” but I can see your point too. Because I’ve done episodes and written about these behavior bullshit people who… I did a past episode on this specific guy, Jack Brown, but there’s plenty of these people who do basically the same thing. But they’re actually deceiving themselves in a lot of cases. Jack Brown really thinks he can read people exactly and tell you, like, “I saw this slight gesture in the Bill Gates interview and I think it means all these over-the-top things,” which to me— And I’ve written about how harmful this is, this kind of stuff. People believe these things and they go out and it basically just allows them to use their biases and service of whatever they want to use them for—
Anthony: That’s right.
Zach: “I think I can read this person because I saw them do this slight thing, and so I believe that they have the motivations I think they have because I…” You know, it’s just all this confirmation bias. Giving people these dangerous stupid ideas, basically. So I can definitely see your concern.
Anthony: My colleague, Ray Hyman, who really did some of the earliest science of magic work back in the ’80s, when he was an undergraduate, took up palm reading because he could meet girls with it. It seemed like a really effective way to meet girls. He went into it just thinking it’s just fun, and then he started convincing himself that there’s something to it. The feedback he would get from these people whose palms he would read at parties blew him away. And he told one of his psychology professors about it while he was an undergraduate and they said, “Hey, try this. Next time you’re reading a palm, tell them the opposite of what you think the palm is saying.” And he did it, and it worked just as well. We’re so susceptible to that kind of confirmation bias, finding evidence that supports our beliefs and ignoring evidence that disconfirms our beliefs.
Zach: Yeah, speaking of the self-deception aspects, I’m actually going to be interviewing an astrology author— which I didn’t expect to do, because I was like, “Well, I don’t believe in it. So if you’re willing to have a really tough conversation…” So that’ll be an interesting one because I get to ask some questions about, like, “Why do you believe these things?” But anyway…
Anthony: Well, I can’t wait to hear it.
Zach: That’ll be an interesting one. I didn’t think he’d say yes. But yeah, I do think it’s interesting how we can fool ourselves with these things. Because I used to actually work for a neurolinguistic programming seminar guy, somebody who was in the Anthony Robbins circle, and I only took the job because I was like, “This will be very interesting.” It was back in the financial crisis of 2008 so I was like, “Okay, I’ll do this for a little while.” But it was very interesting because part of his backstory was basically like, “People kept telling me how good I was at these amazing psychological and mental feats. I was skeptical at first, but eventually, I believed.” He told me once, “I just put you into a trance there, didn’t I?” And I was like, “No, I don’t think so.”
Anthony: [laughs] Ouch.
Zach: But he really did believe that he had these powers to put people in trances. He would say things like, “I can raise the temperature of the room just by saying certain words.” He thought he had this control over people. But it’s just interesting how people… I don’t think it happens in the magic space because people are obviously more aware.
Anthony: It absolutely does.
Zach: Oh, really?
Anthony: Subsets of the magic community really glommed on to NLP when it became big. They read Bandler and Grinder and they have tried to apply these things to their performances. In fact, a name I’ve dropped already, Kent Knepper out of Phoenix, was one of the first to do this. And I don’t believe that Kenton believes that NLP is doing it, but he’s not totally open with other magicians about this skepticism. I don’t actually know what Kenton believes.
Zach: People keep things close to the vest for various reasons.
Anthony: He put out a series of originally, I believe, audio tapes called Wonder Words that were magic inspired by NLP and that attempted to harness the power of NLP. It’s out there, and lots of magicians to this day claim that they are using NLP to enhance their deceptions.
Zach: And I will say I think there are a few good ideas in NLP because NLP is just a bundle of a bunch of random… Some of the ideas are better than others, some of the ideas have validity. And if it wasn’t a little bit of validity, nobody would listen to it. It’s just like a bundle of tricks, some of them are completely nonsense, and some of them are like, “Okay, well, that makes some sense.”
Anthony: A magician’s need to heighten his or her deceptions really opens the door to superstition. Right? Magicians have these things they call subtleties, just little things that they pile on top of each other to enhance a deception. Like with the coin thing, right? The tension thing was a subtlety, and gaze would be a subtlety, and all these things would be subtleties. But magicians don’t have the capacity to test whether one of those subtleties has an impact. They’re not doing a reductive experiment to independently examine the impact of each one of these subtleties. That’s a recipe for us engaging in behaviors that we think have some impact when they really don’t. It’s a recipe for superstitious behavior, and I think there’s probably a lot of that within the magic community, and a lot of that with this NLP stuff.
Zach: And I imagine in general, for any competitive-performance-based thing, there’s benefits to making yourself think you have more power than you do. There’s definitely incentives to overstate your own mystique or power in your own mind just so that you feel more confident and such. So I can see how there’s a dangerous edge there where if you get too far into the self-deception, it becomes a liability. But maybe a little dose of that can be good for you.
Anthony: Magicians talk about magician’s guilt; the knowledge that you’re engaging in deceptive action can lead to some tells and some weird behaviors– the guilty behaviors. So, confidence is a way to get beyond those. Right? If you’re just confident that it’s all going to work, you’re not going to use any of those tells.
Zach: Interesting. Yeah, I haven’t heard about that. That’s an interesting one. Yeah, guilt and worry are not good things for performing.
Anthony: That’s right.
Zach: Yeah. When you watch magic shows, do you generally have a sense of what’s going on? Are there any shows you’ve seen recently where you’re like, “I have no idea how they did that?” And if so, what were those shows?
Anthony: I mean, there are only a handful of methods in magic that just get reapplied in unique ways to create new effects. Once you’ve got training in these things, you can see through a lot of stuff. But I’ve really changed my perspective on magic in the last decade, and I’m really highly motivated to see magic and perform magic that’s narrative-driven, that’s telling a story, that’s about building a relationship with the audience. I’m less concerned with the actual tricks that are happening, and more in how they’re happening, how they’re being presented. And so because I apply that lens to magic now, I get fooled all the time. Because I am really keyed into the narrative and really keyed into the storyline, and so I’m pretty easily misdirected because of it.
Zach: Makes it more fun.
Anthony: It makes it more fun. A few years ago, there was an Off-Broadway show called In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio, and they filmed a documentary version of this that’s available on Hulu called In & Of Itself, and I really believe that it changed the game on what magic can be. It’s not presented as a magic show. I don’t think it’s ever pitched as a magic show, but it is. It’s a series of six or something magic effects. It was directed by Frank Oz, a one-man show with this Derek DelGaudio, and I think it changed the game for magic because it was one of the first magic shows that elicited a full range of emotions. It wasn’t just a comedy show. I cried at times watching it, I laughed, I experienced awe, and it built a relationship between this one performer and a large audience. I believe that the audience members left that show with a weird sense of community for having experienced this thing together. There are some things in that show that fool my pants off, but it’s really beautiful and people should seek it out. And I think it sort of renewed magicians’ interest in having a throughline of action in their shows, actually building a character, actually having a theme for a show, having deeper ideas for their magic… I think it’s changed things. That’s the kind of magic that I’m now really, really interested in.
Zach: No, that sounds cool. I’m definitely going to check that out.
Anthony: But I will say I also have ethical concerns with that show. There is one piece in the show where he gets a spectator from the audience— I don’t want to spoil this because it’s really beautiful and really ethically dubious.
Zach: Spoiler alert for anybody watching, maybe.
Anthony: I think I won’t give spoilers.
Zach: Okay.
Anthony: Obviously, the person that’s coming up from the audience doesn’t know what they’re consenting to. They don’t know what’s going to happen when they get up on stage. And while they’re up there, he creates this deeply unique emotional experience for this person on stage that they did not expect to have and that’s really just for them that the audience doesn’t really get to witness, but they see this person break down because of this emotional response to this magic that they’ve experienced. And I think, as a researcher, I have to get informed consent from people. They have to know what they’re consenting to before they participate in one of my experiments. They have to know what they’re going to be asked to do, what’s expected of them, what they can expect to feel during this event. And I understand theater doesn’t require the same kind of consent process, but I think it makes me feel icky to have this person put in this really precarious emotional position in front of an audience of 500 people without consent, without them knowing that this is going to happen.
Zach: Yeah, it’s like when comedians insult you. A comedian made me feel awkward and bad the other night and I was like, “Hey, why do they always do that?” It kind of reminded me of that. Well, this has been great. I did want to ask you real quick. I know we’re coming up on time, but did you want to talk for a couple of minutes about why you’re interested in analyzing handwritten language?
Anthony: Oh! Yeah, that was what I went to grad school to do in the first place. That was part of the language work that I did in grad school and it was inspired by this big asymmetry in the research literature. Everything we know about reading is based on research using typewritten words. Like the simplest case of reading, nobody had done anything exploring how the processes of reading might change when the input is messy and ambiguous and incomplete and in a style of handwriting you’ve not ever seen before. How are people able to look at handwritten words from someone whose handwriting they’ve never seen before and find the signal within the noise to know what those words are? That’s what inspired this. And in the spoken language research area, those researchers would never consider using an artificial voice for their stimuli. Their stimuli are always naturally produced human speech. So why in the reading domain, are we not also looking at naturally produced human stimuli? That’s where that came from. Of course, when people hear that I do handwriting research, they assume I’m studying graphology– reading people’s personalities through the style of their handwriting, which, of course, is nonsense. But because people assume this about me so much…
Zach: Because it’s connected to the magic kind of.
Anthony: It kind of is. Yeah.
Zach: That’s how people see it, or something. Yeah.
Anthony: A student and I have just completed a new meta-analysis of graphology because there hasn’t been one since 1992 and yet people are still making hiring decisions using input from… [crosstalk] Not in the United States very much. Still in Europe, a lot in Asia. And so just for funsies, our student and I did a meta-analysis that we’re going to try to get published pretty soon.
Zach: Oh, that’s interesting.
Anthony: Spoiler alert, there’s still no solid evidence the graphology works. [laughs]
Zach: I’m shocked. Yeah, I can see why you’re interested in the handwritten words. It’s like there’s some archetypes of symbols that we have that allow us to easily recognize things. Is that what makes it interesting to you? Because we have these internal rough, amorphous ideas of—
Anthony: Yeah. Yes, they’re fuzzy. These templates are very fuzzy to allow for a lot of variability.
Zach: Same with spoken language, we have chunks of amorphous templates or something. Yeah.
Anthony: I’ve got a hypothesis that I want to come up with a good way to test in regards to handwriting that I think is very cute. [chuckles] If you’re looking at pictures of celebrities and identifying the celebrities, you’re faster to identify a celebrity when given a caricature of that celebrity than when given a real picture of that celebrity. Why? Because the distinctive features of that celebrity are exaggerated in a caricature, so it’s easy to recognize them. And so I’ve often wondered, there are some flourishes in our handwriting. Right? The tails on Ys, they get this big flourish. There’s some pieces of handwriting that get exaggerated. And I wonder if that exaggeration is actually for the reader if we are magnifying those distinctive features of the words to make it easier on the reader. I haven’t tested it, I’d love to, but it feels oddly related to all this other stuff that I’m up to.
Zach: Has anyone studied why doctors’ handwriting is so bad? [Tony laughs] If it is so bad, I know I hear that a lot but…
Anthony: Not that I know of, but I suspect it’s a speed-accuracy trade-off. Right? [laughs]
Zach: I don’t know if it’s true, but you often hear that cliché.
Anthony: Yeah, that’s right.
Zach: All right. Well, this has been great, Tony. I appreciate it. It was very interesting, and thanks for taking the time.
Anthony: Thanks, this was a lot of fun.
Media bias specialist Vanessa Otero, founder of Ad Fontes Media, talks to me (Zach Elwood) about my books aimed at reducing toxic political polarization in America. Topics discussed include: common objections to and skepticism about this work (for example, views that those working on depolarization are “helping the bad guys”; why overcoming objections is so important; how conflict makes people behave in ways that amplify the toxicity of the conflict (often without knowing it); our distorted views of each other; how our contempt can help create the very things we’re upset about; and more.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
TRANSCRIPT
(Note that the transcript may contain errors.)
Zachary Elwood: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at improving understanding of human behavior; you can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
As you may know, I work on reducing toxic political polarization. I’ve been working full time on this problem for the past 9 months or so, and part-time on it for years before that. I recently released a book aimed at a liberal audience about the problem of polarization; it was titled How Contempt Destroys Democracy, with the subtitle An American Liberal’s Guide to Toxic Polarization. A Kirkus Reviews review said that it makes quote “compelling arguments, based on astute observations and backed by solid research” end quote.
As you probably know, there are a lot of objections to this work; a lot of skepticism about this work. I and others doing this work are regularly insulted by both conservatives and liberals; I regularly see pessimistic and paranoid messages where people think I and others in this space are secretly working for the quote “other side,” or that I or others have a secret liberal or a conservative agenda. More commonly, people just call us stupid and naive.
Many of the objections and skepticisms are based on misunderstandings of various sorts; misunderstandings about what the “other side” really wants and what they’re like; misunderstandings about what the goals of reducing toxic polarization really are; and more.
In my book I have a section toward the beginning that talks about common objections. I’ll read a little bit from that section:
Objection #1: The word “polarization” implies a both-sides problem but liberals don’t contribute to this problem in a significant way. Our problem is simply that the “other side” has become so wrong and dangerous.
Objection #2: It’s morally correct to be polarized when you’re fighting bad, dangerous people (for example, like Trump).
Objection #3: Trying to reduce people’s animosity at Trump and Trump voters helps Trumpism. We need our animosity to defeat them.
Objection #4: If you’re trying to reduce polarization, you’re wrongly and naively valuing civility and unity more than morality and justice.
These objections are phrased in liberal-leaning language but there are similar objections from the right; they use different language and terms but the underlying objection is the same: the core underlying objection is “they’re bad and we’re good, so it’s naive to ask us to reduce our animosity toward them”
And I do understand these objections; Before I got into this work, I would’ve had a lot of the same kinds of objections. Trump is just so bad, my thinking would’ve go, so we need to shame these people and make them see the light of day. Or I might have thought that people seeking to reduce animosity did have some secret, underhanded agenda. These are stressful times, so I do get the objections and why rational people have them.
It’s my hope people who are skeptical about this work are willing to listen to resources like this, or similar ones, like my book. No matter your political views, we can probably agree that America is in a tough spot right now, with our divides: it’s a situation that I think requires more people to carefully consider our situation: how we got here, and how we might get out.
If you like this episode, I hope you share it with others who may have some of the objections we address. One of the big themes in my polarization books is that it’s very important that we spread the word throughout society and help overcome all these various objections to this work that reside in so many people’s minds. Sharing this talk is one easy way you can help with that.
This is a talk I had with Vanessa Otero, for her audience. Vanessa is the founder of Ad Fontes Media, which is a media bias analysis company. You can learn more about it at AdFontesMedia.com; that’s AD FONTES media. You may have seen her media bias charts making the rounds; she’s gotten a lot of respect for that work. If you’re curious about that work, I interviewed her for my podcast a few months ago; we talked about her interest in reducing polarization and how she saw her media bias analysis as relating to that goal.
I think Vanessa asks some very good questions and structures the talk very well. It’s the best talk I think I’ve given on this topic — which is why I put it on the home page of my polarization website: american-anger.com.
Also want to say: if you’re listening to this via audio, this talk was done via a video call, so if you want to see that, you can find it on the People Who Read People youtube channel.
Okay here’s the talk I had with Vanessa Otero…
Vanessa Otero: Welcome, and thank you everyone for joining. I’m really excited to have Zachary Elwood here with me today. Zachary is a really thoughtful and wise writer about the issue of polarization. Those of you who saw our email to register for this, which is all of you, have seen the images of his books, Defusing American Anger, and his most recent one, How Contempt Destroys Democracy. The reason I was so drawn to Zachary’s books is because there’s so many overlaps between what we do at Ad Fontes Media and the way that Zachary approaches the concept of polarization. I’m going to jump right into the good stuff.
I want to talk about objections. Objections to even framing the issues that we face in our country politically as an issue of polarization. Because I’ve run into this so much with promoting our work at Ad Fontes. One of the reasons we put out the media bias chart is so folks can see how different other sides’ media is for the purposes of understanding others’ media consumption and for purposes of understanding why we’re so polarized. The thing I always get as a response is, “Well, it’s not that we’re polarized. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the other side is just wrong. And if they would just simply be right and agree with me, we wouldn’t be so polarized.” I know you get that a lot yourself. What do you say to folks who frame that objection that way?
Zachary Elwood: Yeah. First, I just wanted to throw in, thanks so much for having me on. It’s a big honor and I’m always humbled when people want to talk to me about it, because I haven’t been in this space that long and I mainly see my efforts as trying to draw attention to other people’s ideas and research and stuff in a more accessible and easy to understand way. It always means a lot when people think I did a good job. So, thanks for that. Yeah, the objections. There’s quite a few objections but I think the core objection boils down to that, you know, “The other side is just bad.” Right? And there’s various forms of that, that that can take on the right and the left. It can be phrased in different ways. But I think the core thing it misses is what Daniel Stone called our undue hate. It’s our exaggerated ideas and worst-case interpretations of what drives the other side or our political opponents. It’s the worst-case interpretations of so many things they do, and often it’s just not seeing that what drives them largely is the fear of the more extreme people on our side and these kinds of things.
So I think it boils down to the exaggerated fear and contempt and animosity that we have for each other, and seeing that we can vehemently strongly disagree with each other without bringing in all of this overstated contempt and fear and such. And when those things enter the equation, they drive the conflict cycle and end up creating the very things that we’re scared of and upset by. Right? And that’s what I focus on a lot, is the way that those negative emotions about each other aren’t just about emotions, that those things actually skew people’s beliefs and help create the more extreme and divisive and hardened and non-negotiable stances that people have because a lot of that stuff is driven by fear, and anger, and animosity, and such.
Vanessa: I find that when I invite folks to create a greater understanding of folks on the other side, that’s viewed as sometimes a non-starter. I posted a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn, there was a– I don’t even remember what big political event it was, but… Oh, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies. You know, big news story, everybody’s covering it. And I invited folks to take 30 minutes or an hour, if they could stand it, to watch the cable news from the side they disagree with most for the purposes of understanding that other people’s media consumption is really different. And I got a lot of visceral, “No! I’m not going to do that.” And it seemed to come from a couple of things. One, fear that I was trying to encourage them to adopt the other side’s views. There was a lot of resistance to that. So when you talk about having a lot of contempt for the other side and just being so resistant to that, I think that’s one aspect of it. But two, people didn’t realize I was asking them not to change their opinions. I was asking them merely to understand what other people are viewing. I was not saying please abandon all your beliefs and believe somebody else’s beliefs, but people thought that I was asking them that. So, get into that kind of contempt. Please, do.
Zach: Yeah, I think that’s a key part of this thing because we have a hard time distinguishing between a call to understand and empathize with other people and agree with those people, right? Like so often in my books, I’m making cases for how you can understand someone else’s view and see the better versions of it. And I think so often we easily conflate that as like I’m defending that view or I have that view. But for so many things we could go through, I feel like I understand by and large what drives a lot of the narratives on both sides of the political aisle. It doesn’t mean I agree with any particular stance necessarily, it just means I think there’s an important thing there about trying our best to understand those better points, as opposed to so often our instinct when we’re in conflict is to assume the worst about everything that happens, right? Any rhetoric or any behavior conflict makes us jump to the worst interpretations. I think we need more people to try to understand the better reasons, you know, what they call the steelman kind of things. I think a lot of times those things are pretty banal and easy to understand if we try. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah. Why is it important to understand other people’s, like you said, steelman, as opposed to strawman? Talk about– for those who might not be familiar– what’s a steelman kind of argument?
Zach: Yeah, the steelman and the strawman thing. The steelman refers to thinking about the better, strongest versions of our opponent’s arguments versus the strawman is the weakest versions, or in practice, it’s just the most pessimistic versions of what the other side thinks. But I think for people who say why is that important— like if I’m still going to end up disagreeing with them, why is it important? And I think it’s important for the reasons just stated because if we see the deranging nature of toxic conflict and how it drives people to more extreme and more divisive behaviors, it creates support for more divisive and more extreme and non-negotiable leaders and ideas. If we can see that, then we can see the value of trying to engage— for our own sake and even for our own political goals sake— for trying to engage in more respectful and more honest and true ways, as opposed to the more pessimistic and worst case possible imagining ways of engaging. And that’s another thing I emphasize in my book. Because I try to make an argument to politically passionate people for why they should want to embrace these ideas, which I think is hugely important for getting— as many of us are politically passionate people— for getting people to embrace these ideas, even for their own sake, and not just for the sake of being nice or something. Right?
Vanessa: Right, let’s dive into that. That relates to one of the questions that we have. The last part of the question is, “Liberals need to agree that the conservative side is right. It’s a conservative invitation, it challenges that the next revolution will be bloodless if the liberals allow it. That’s paraphrased from something that Kevin Roberts, the leader of Heritage Foundation, said on an interview in reference to Project 2025. Do liberals need to agree that the conservative side is right? Is that what you’re calling for?
Zach: No, not at all. No, that’s not what I or anyone else in this space is calling for.
Vanessa: Or conversely, that conservatives need to agree that liberals are right.
Zach: No. See, that is a common misunderstanding. Yeah. But I think it’s related to the idea… I guess it’s related to the misunderstanding of what this work is about. There’s so many misunderstandings about this work. For example, an organization— Starts With Us— that I work with, we often see the criticism, “Oh, you’re working with the other side. You’re with the bad guys.” We get that from people on the Left and the right, which I think is kind of the fundamental nature of what conflict does to us. And in any conflict, people trying to resolve the conflict are seen as the enemy or traitors or what have you. I would say it’s just a fundamental misunderstanding because, like I said, we’re trying to get people not to avoid disagreement. You know, there’s going to be strong disagreement, even strong moral judgment, or even anger. There’s nothing wrong with anger. But it’s being willing to examine what really drives your political opponents. It doesn’t mean you can’t judge specific leaders or specific people on the other side that you see as divisive, as extreme, whatever it may be. But it’s trying to understand what drives the support for those people. If you think the people on the other side are supporting more extreme people, it’s being curious about what are the underlying dynamics of the conflict. Obviously, these things are really hard to talk about in an off-the-cuff way, but that’s the things that I and other people try to get across in our work is seeing the underlying pieces of the conflict and how that bubbles up to more extreme people, statements, behaviors, and what have you. And if you can see how that dynamic works, then you’d be interested in tamping down the unnecessary and unreasonable amounts of contempt and fear in these kinds of things. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah, you talk really specifically about contempt, and you talk early in your book about how contempt and anger are different things. You didn’t say contempt and anger. You can be angry and you can disagree about a position really strongly and want to convince somebody about why you disagree and why you’re correct, you know? But contempt and how contempt destroys democracy is that it’s about contempt being a thing that undermines you trying to achieve your aims. There’s so many places we can go with this, but let’s move to a concept that you spend a good amount of time on in your book. You’ve alluded to it a little bit already, but outgroup homogeneity. What is it?
Zach: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking of when you asked that question. Because it’s like I’m angry a lot. Many people are angry about specific things a lot, right? I might be angry at things Trump has done or angry at various things, but I think it’s very important to distinguish between our feelings, our views of specific people– say it’s Trump, Biden, whoever– and our views of our fellow citizens who are willing to support those people or those ideas or whatever. Because even though I’m very open that I think Trump is a bad and even dangerous leader, but I can still understand what drives rational and good people to support him. That is a key distinction. But your point about the outgroup homogeneity thing… The outgroup homogeneity effect is in research when they show that in conflict or in a situation where there’s an in-group and an outgroup, we have the tendency to view the outgroup as basically being all the same. Which means, in practice, we often view them as being like their worst members. Right? And you can find examples like this all over social media very easily. You open up Twitter, you’ll see it. It’s like all Republicans are racist and fascist and authoritarian, all Liberals want to kill babies after birth or whatever the extreme Antifa communists, groomers, what have you. So there’s just this tendency to see the other side in simplistic ways while at the same time seeing our own group as very complex and human and often much more divided than the other group which seems like a monolith. Right?
Which makes the other side even more scary because we see everything they do is connecting to other things and it’s this huge, scary group. Right?
Vanessa: You bring up some quotes in your book from both Democrats and Republicans saying, “Aargh, if we could…” Democrats saying, “Oh, if we could only get our stuff together like the Republicans where they just agree with each other and they’re all in lockstep…” and then basically Republicans saying the exact same thing about Democrats.
Zach: Right. Yeah, that’s an interesting phenomenon too. When I first encountered that, I was surprised because this Republican pundit told me behind the scenes off the record. She’s like, “The Democrats are just so aligned. The liberals are so aligned. I just wish we could be like them.” When I shared that with liberal people, they’re like, “What is she talking about? It’s obviously the reverse.” But that’s what the homogeneity effect and similar group dynamics do to us. They make the other side seem this completely aligned monolith who’s all trying to accomplish the same thing. But to get back to your point, I think it’s important to distinguish our anger at certain people or ideas we think are wrong or harmful from our understanding of why people are willing to support those ideas. And those can be quite different. For example, some people vote for Trump just because. They may not even like him. They may even think he’s quite bad, but they see it as a lesser of two evil things and they’re scared of what they see as extreme or dangerous behaviors on the Left. And so the group of Trump voters or the group of Biden voters are not monolithic, there’s all different spectrum of different concerns and reasons. Sometimes it’s just one issue. Some people are just one-issue voters and they’re like, “I’m just voting because I believe X on this very important issue.” Right?
So I think it’s important to see that nuance about groups in general, about our own group, about another group, and I think that helps explain the distinction between anger and contempt too because contempt really plays a role when it is applied to an entire large swath of people. That’s when it really becomes dangerous. It’s one thing to have anger or contempt for a few specific people or something, but it really becomes toxic when it spreads to whole entire groups. And then it impacts how politicians and pundits and journalists or whoever talk about these things and they create more between-group animosity in the way they talk and so on and so on.
Vanessa: The folks that are on this webinar are familiar with Ad Fontes Media and should have quite a bit of familiarity with distinguishing levels of things. On our very chart itself, it skews Left and Right— strong Left and right hyper-partisan, left and right most extreme. It’s not just one side is all one thing and one side is all another thing. But we do that a lot with the outgroup homogeneity effect. And it’s really exacerbated in our entrenched two-party political system as polarization has grown. Because as you mentioned, our distribution of the kind of beliefs people hold in the United States is… Sorry, I’m conscious of my hands and the blurriness here. It’s bimodal, you know? Like Left and Right, there’s a lot of folks that will— in that middle, if you think about the chart, that line between strong Left and hyper-partisan Left, and strong Right and hyper-partisan Right, there are a lot of folks that hold those views. And then in the middle, I don’t think it’s another mode or I don’t think it’s another spike, but I think there’s a big group here. It’s not all the way down. It’s not like there’s zero people that are in the middle. Only there’s a ton of people right in the middle, but I think if you added up all these people right here, it would be a fairly large mound in the middle. But most people are not dead in the middle on a lot of issues because there isn’t necessarily a flat middle on issues, you know? With guns or abortion, tending to land as a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right is common as is landing strongly to the Left and strongly to the Right. So if you’re landing closer to one side than the other, because we’re so polarized, if you’re on the right, you’re closer to Trump. If you’re on the Left, you’re closer to Biden. You don’t have a middle choice in the United States. Your vote is one or the other essentially.
It’s really rough for people who feel like they have nuanced views and then they get categorized in that outgroup homogeneity effect. If they just lean a little left or lean a little right, and if they lean a little right and they’re called… Or even if they’re strong Right and are called racist, fascist, destroyers of democracy, or Antifa communist groomers, then that’s clearly incorrect. They can’t believe the other side because they know that to not be true of themselves.
Zach: And it drives them farther into that path of polarization. On both sides, it is understandably angering to be told what you believe based on things that you don’t think are applicable to be told, “You are X, Y, Z.” It can just be very deranging in ways that I think we’re only in the beginning stage of understanding how deranging these various insults that are thrown around can be. I think we’ll look back one day and have a better understanding of just how much… And there’s plenty of research showing how insults… There’s one study from back in the ’60s maybe that was like, you know, insulting people has a boomerang effect of making you double down on the things you’re being insulted for and these kinds of things. There’s just all this human psychology at work that drives us deeper into channels.
Vanessa: Talk about that vicious cycle of more contempt causing the very problem that you are fighting against.
Zach: Yeah, that was a big thing I wanted to focus on for the book because I think it helps make a scalable argument to people, no matter their political views of why they should care about these things. Many people have written about the cycle of conflict, how it’s… Well, one person– can’t remember his name offhand– but he wrote about the mutual radicalization process of conflict. Both sides become increasingly fearful of each other and the actions that one group may make in defensive ways to what they see as defensive ways to the other side is perceived as the provocations and aggressions to the other side and vice versa. So things just keep going in this vicious cycle. And I think the thing that’s important there is our emotions, our fear, and our anger can distort our beliefs. For example, no matter what you believe about election distrust or election denial, I think everybody would agree that toxic polarization leads to more and more people distrusting elections. And no matter if you think one side is worse than the other or what have you, it’s a natural progression to find reasons to say that election is unfair. That’s an outcome of high suspicion, high anger, et cetera, et cetera. Again, even if we think specific people have done bad things on that front, the underlying dynamic is there and the emotions are there. That’s just an example of how our emotions can really derange our thinking on all sorts of things; on issues, on stances on specific events, stances on issues. There’s so many factors there, but I think one factor is when we see the bad guys as believing something. Nobody wants to be like the bad guys, so we kind of subconsciously can find our stances shifting in an opposite direction. It’s like, “Well, if Trump voters believe this, then I don’t want to be like them and I want to make a stand against that. So, maybe my beliefs will shift a little bit more to the Left and vice versa on the other side.” There’s all these various psychological reasons why we can find ourselves drifting to the edges on stances.
That’s why I think it’s important to notice that the more contemptuously we engage with each other, we’re contributing to that dynamic. And it’s entirely possible– like I emphasize in my book to politically passionate people– it’s entirely possible to embrace these ideas while pursuing whatever political goals you want. And I would say embracing these ideas actually helps you because it means you’re trying to speak in more persuasive ways that speak to a broader range of people. You’re not alienating people. So I think it’s very important to see that these are not… I think a lot of people’s instinct about this work is that political passion or political activism is mutually exclusive with depolarization ideas. And I think that’s just completely wrong. To me, those two things are aligned and depolarization ideas help political persuasion and political activism. But I think our instincts when in conflict lead us to see that as completely opposed, right? Because we feel like, “Well, we have to make our contempt known. That’s how we’ll beat the bad guys.” Right? But in my mind and in many people’s mind, that’s actually what creates the very pushback you’re working against because nobody wants to be told they’re pieces of shit, basically. It helps build the cycle of conflict.
Vanessa: Yeah. We dance around the subject a little bit around language, around calling people certain names, but it’s a really key component about persuasion and contempt. I view it as a hierarchy of… There’s a hierarchy of verbal persuasion. Ideally, you’d use lots of facts to… If you’re going to make an argument, you’d use as many facts as possible to make that argument and your conclusion that you’re supporting really strong. The fewer facts you use and the more conclusions you use, the more easily it’s categorized as opinion. But on our very chart, there’s a couple of sections. There’s the opinion section, and above that is an analysis section, and above that is fact reporting sections. The difference between that fact reporting analysis and opinion is truly the density of facts to conclusions. But then there’s this line, and below that, we call it our problematic section but it contains a lot of things. There’s a lot of reasons that things are not merely opinion, they’re problematic. But the biggest thing is dehumanization, insults, and vilifying language. And I really want to dive into those distinctions because what we mean by dehumanizing language is language that specifically calls out somebody for being not human. Like they’re animals, they’re monsters, they’re less than human, they’re aliens. They’re not even people. Insults is a little bit more straightforward. Vilifying. Words that have vil, like V-I-L is a root word, they’re evil or they’re villains. Those particular words are really strong and they’re on the lower end of the persuasion hierarchy. But people use them for a couple of reasons.
One, it’s easier. It’s just easier to name-call than to make a really factually supported argument, especially in 240 characters. And people get a lot of pats on the back and engagement and thumbs up from their side for calling people ‘the orange Satan’ or something. I literally got that in an email when I was promoting this webinar. Yeah, talk about contempt, how that plays a role.
Zach: Yeah, totally. There’s so many of these things, as I write out in the books. There’s so many of these things that just have this self-reinforcing aspect. And it’s like the more polarized a society becomes, the more incentives there are to be polarizing. The more polarized a society becomes, the more power is granted to more polarizing people in polarizing language. And I think that’s part of seeing the need to tone down the contempt, too, is because the system is such that it rewards more polarizing behavior. But yeah, I think there’s so many… I actually had a good interview on my podcast with Karina Korostelina who wrote a book about the role of insults in international or national conflicts and such. And that was a good talk. One of her points or one of the things that stood out to me about that talk was I’m a big believer that the internet and social media is a big amplifier of these things because when you think about the internet, the internet is a place where it’s easy to store and retrieve all sorts of insults. There’s insults everywhere. It’s easy to make insults, it’s easy to have our insults viewed, right? So you can think of the internet as basically an insult creation and amplification place. And all the insults from the past don’t fade from my memory, they’re all there for us to dredge up at a moment’s notice. I’m a big believer in that.
When it comes to the dehumanizing language, I think often there’s these shades of it too. There’s some less direct things. For example, I was thinking today about the whole real American’s language on the Right. That’s an indirectly dehumanizing thing because you’re basically saying, “Well, you’re not real Americans. You’re almost like not real people because you don’t believe what we believe.” That’s just one example. I could pull others. You see lots of things on the Left and the Right. But I think there’s all these shades of things that are, you know? I think we often think of dehumanizing literally like saying you’re not a human or you’re a cockroach or whatever, but there’s all these shades of things that are insulting up to dehumanizing and I think that all plays a role. Including, I would say— I actually wanted to write a piece about this where there’s… Another way we can be dehumanizing or at least insulting is treating others’ narratives in the worst possible way, as if saying the reason you vote for Trump is for the worst possible reasons. That is a, if not dehumanizing, is a very insulting and demeaning thing depending on how it’s phrased. But just to say when we disrespect each other’s narratives and treat their narratives as basically entirely malicious or entirely founded on horrible things, that can have a very insulting and understandably anger-producing reaction.
Vanessa: Yeah. An example you talk about in your book is saying the reason Trump voters vote for Trump is because they’re racist. And you gave a counterexample of like, “Here’s examples of other reasons folks would vote for Trump.” Can you talk about that example?
Zach: Yeah. Well, one key way to see that it’s not just about racism, if anyone needs to hear that, is those kinds of narratives don’t help explain why racial minority support for Trump has increased substantially between 2016 and 2020. And if anybody wants to look into that, I wrote about it in my book, of course, but Musa al-Gharbi has a great paper called “Race and the Race for the White House” which really kind of breaks down some of those most pessimistic narratives on that front or most pessimistic interpretations of research and those kinds of things. But maybe you had mentioned a specific example, I’m not sure.
Vanessa: Yeah. You talked about, you know, it doesn’t account for somebody who just may be a low engagement or a low-information voter, maybe a younger voter who hasn’t really given a lot of thought about the history of racism in our country or whatever.
Zach: Right. Yeah. I think the nature of conflict makes many people reach for these really elaborate, as I see them, explanations that delve into the past to help explain why racism or segregation or whatever it may be played a role in forming the bad ideas of Republicans. Or on the Left, some Conservatives will paint these elaborate pictures about the dark Marxist underpinnings of far Left thought and such. The thing is we’re such good storytellers. Humans are just such good storytellers. We can easily create these very convincing and persuasive arguments about the long history of the badness of our opponents, right? And they’re creeping inclinations or malicious motives and tie it into past things. But at the end of the day, the nature of polarization and conflict is you could easily place someone down in the middle of that polarized situation who knew nothing about any of that past stuff, and they would be like, “Oh, well, I see arguments for why this makes more sense or I’m more afraid of these things over here,” and they would start to go on one polarized track or another, right? It doesn’t require a lot of these elaborate— which I find are often just our ways in practice of trying to build excuses for why the other side is so bad. We’re drawn to those narratives because it makes us feel like we understand their badness. But I think oftentimes we’re just fooling ourselves because it is tempting for us to feel like we understand this huge complex thing and we understand the bad guys. But I think we’re just drawn to very simplistic narratives that make us feel good and make us feel superior in our contempt and such.
Vanessa: Yeah, that’s excellent. I feel bad that I’m letting all these questions build up and people have a lot of questions. Thank you for your engagement. We’re only going to take the questions through the Q&A, we’re not going to… So if you’ve got your hand raised, please type in your question in the Q&A. We have a couple of related questions so I’ll read the first one that addresses this.
How do I talk with someone who holds me and my views in contempt?
Zach: Yeah, that’s obviously a tough one because I think at some level you have to question whether that’s even worth it if someone’s engaging with you in that way. But then sometimes you have to, right? You feel like you have to in some situations. I have a few thoughts on that in the book at the very end, but I think one of the things that stands out to me is especially if your conversation is being viewed by other people, say it’s on social media or say it’s in a public context where say you’re a politician interacting with someone who you feel is contemptuous towards you. I think it’s very important to keep in mind the other people that are listening and observing that because the dynamic that often happens is people get stuck in this mutual insult back and forth, which if we’re talking about publicly viewed things, it just has the impact of driving away the people and further polarizing the people that are watching because they’re just going to filter for the insulting things that they find in that interaction that offend them and their group.
So I think it’s very important to keep in mind how can I talk in a persuasive way, not necessarily to this person who’s disrespecting me or treating me with the intent, but how can I speak in ways that are persuasive to people that may be listening that may actually care to be reached or care to have a more nuanced view or have their minds shifted. And I think otherwise, if it’s a private conversation, you’d probably just be best to walk away. But I think about that in terms of all of these online and public interactions that happen where someone’s saying, “They’re treating me with contempt, I’m going to return fire with fire.” And I just think that’s often just falling into the trap of the hate-bait kind of trap where we just get caught. And then the animosity becomes the focus as opposed to talking about the actual issues. I will say also I’ve interacted, you know, I’ve done my fair share of going into very polarized places like really angry pro-Trump groups, for example, where I had some pretty nuanced conversations just by refusing to return fire with fire and being vulnerable too and being like, “Hey, you made a good point there for X, Y, Z, but here’s why I think what I think.” I’ve even had people apologize where they were like, “Sorry, I came off so mean at first, but I’ve been having a tough time in my life.” That kind of stuff happens, especially online where online we’re often talking to people who we don’t know what they’re going through and their online interactions bring out the worst in people and so on and so on. It’s a very tough thing to do, obviously, but I think taking the patient or the more neutral approach and vulnerable approach often is the stronger… It’s a harder thing, but I think it takes strength and I think it pays off a lot of times.
Vanessa: I have the exact same experience. Refusing to insult, refusing to go to that level, and even refusing to respond to the anger, it’s tough. Especially when you identify a disagreement. And we’re sort of primed to when somebody responds to us on social media, you’re like, “What are they saying against me?” And you sort of view it as an attack or something you have to rebut, but it’s not always. Sometimes it’s a legitimate point if you can slow down and listen to it and refuse it. It’s harder when somebody starts out with an insult or some anger or some contempt towards you. But it really does diffuse it when you say, “Okay, yeah, I hear that you…” Repeat back their concern and explain it using your own words, non-insulting words. And it really tones down the rhetoric. I had a great exchange… I do this all the time on social media and I know you do it all the time on social media. I see it. The tough part is you don’t get as many pats on the back from people who agree with you than you do if you’re doubling down on the insults. That gets a lot more engagement. Social media just wires us to be like, “Ooh, if I say this thing and a bunch of people like it, that means it’s right.” I kind of like to go into the echo chamber threads where people are like, “Yeah, high five. I agree with you.” And I’m like, “Actually, this is harmful.”
Zach: I used to get so many more shares when I would put out really good zingers of people, but I don’t really do that anymore.
Vanessa: Well, yeah. I wanted you to share about that. How did you… You weren’t always the high-minded, above-insults personality on social media that you are today. Tell us about pre-2016.
Zach: Yeah, don’t go through my old tweets, please. You’ll find some doozies. But yeah, I talk about that in the books about my path of when Trump got elected, I was insulting Trump voters and putting all these righteous screeds online. Then I started getting curious about conflict dynamics and started thinking maybe I’m part of the problem. And then that got me curious about well, what are the angry narratives that people on both sides have and how did they form and how did polarization increase over the last few decades? So yeah, that was kind of my journey into it. I even had instances of insulting and driving away people I knew that I was close to and these kinds of things.
Vanessa: Yeah. Let’s pick away at some of these questions. We’ve got so many great ones. Thank you all. Yeah, do you think that extreme polarization causes less politically engaged citizens, more or less in the middle to further separate themselves from the process?
Zach: It’s complex, I think. I think it results in some people tuning out because they’re exhausted. Some people have called it an exhausted mindset of being exhausted with the fighting and the animosity, especially for people that can’t identify as much with a Left or Right label, which I think there’s a lot of people with the increasing polarization can make people tune out and just not care, which I think is also for politically passionate people. That’s another reason you should not like high contempt and toxic polarization because it does make a lot of people tune out and makes them less susceptible to listen to your stances on things you care about. But I’d also say, obviously at the same time, it creates a lot of people who are hyper-tuned in. Right? And I agreed with Ezra Klein’s synopsis at the end of his book where we pay way too much attention to things we can’t control like national politics where it’s almost like creating a magnifying glass of everyone’s attention and focusing on these things that they can’t change and can’t really affect and that they’re really angry about also. I think that helps explain a lot of the impotent rage a lot of people feel on such things. I liked his recommendation of focusing on more local issues, things you can actually change, things you’re passionate about.
And also just questioning. I feel like a lot of us, especially obviously the more online people spend a lot of time just venting online. How many hours are people spending on those things? I feel like a lot of people think that that’s actually accomplishing something but I think we should question, “Is that accomplishing something, or is a lot of that stuff just building the contempt and animosity and helping create some of the dynamics that we’re upset by?” So I think it’s helpful to question how we spend our time and consider if I am passionate and if I am angry about things, can I devote my time and effort to something that’s more constructive and useful in my community or something like that? Things that I can actually feel good about and feel good that I’m actually doing something concrete.
Vanessa: Yeah, like civic engagement, especially on the local politics level. Or even engaging with people one-to-one. I have a few questions about one of the topics, which is, you allude to a difference between online conversations and in-person conversations. And I think approaching those requires different sets. There’s different circumstances that attend each one of them and different approaches that can work. We spend so much of our time at Ad Fontes with our analysts left, right, and center in pods with each other writing articles. Each of them will spend two hours at a time with people from their political opposites discussing political things. And they can do so without contempt, not just because of training and practice and an internal commitment to it, which are really important.
Zach: Not just because they’re getting paid.
Vanessa: Yeah, exactly. Whenever we put out a call for analysts, we get a lot of applications. It’s truly fun. We do feel like we’re doing something. I was really frustrated before I had this company trying to have a conversation online with people on Facebook. I’m like, I’m in this one conversation, it is so much work to get somebody to tamp down the level and get them to agree on some facts, and then have a persuasive argument. Meanwhile, millions of memes are just floating around and I’m like, “What difference am I making?” It was very frustrating. And so when you feel like you are actually doing something about it, it relieves a lot of that angst, first of all. And I think a lot of the relief of the angst is likelier to come in these offline conversations, these in-person conversations. So it gets to one of these common questions that you can have in person, which is: How do you have a discussion with somebody where you don’t agree on basic facts?
Zach: Yeah, that’s obviously tough. And first, I just want to throw out I’m a huge fan of your work and also other people like Isaac Saul’s Tangle News. I think you and Isaac and other people have been examples of people trying to do something concrete to tackle these issues so I just want to say I think that’s great. I think part of the solution is just getting more people to do these various projects and endeavors of various sorts to tackle it.
Yeah, not agreeing on basic facts is obviously really hard, which is in some sense a big part of our divergent narratives in the first place, like polarization results in us not agreeing on a lot of basic facts because our narratives are so divergent. Obviously, there’s only so much you can do in those spots, but I do think getting back to the idea that even if you can’t agree on some basic facts, can you try to understand how they’ve come to those views? And even if you can’t convince them on specific facts, if you’re trying to persuade them trying to have a nuanced argument, can you at least help them see— if you can understand their view, maybe you can help them see what your concerns are. I think a big part of that is even just understanding the basic underlying things that they’re concerned about, whether it’s… And often they may have real things, not just fake things that those concerns are based on. Usually, for the most part, people’s concerns are not entirely built on false things, even though we often see them as we’ll focus on like, “Well, they must be idiots. They believe X, Y, Z, that is false.” But a lot of times they have other things that are real in those areas that their concerns are built on. So I think focusing as much as you can on the things that you can agree with or can understand about their concerns, and not so much on if you can’t convince them on X, Y, Z specific facts or something. Yeah.
Vanessa: Yeah. I can think of a couple of examples on the Left and the Right that maybe have different factual underpinnings and understand things. Let me give you an example. People on the Right raising concerns about immigration, like too many immigrants coming across the Southern border and crimes committed by those immigrants. I’ll find that folks on the Left will tend to dismiss those concerns, even though there are some factual underpinnings. The disagreement on the extent of the problem often has a lot to do with the media sources you consume and how much you think it is a problem. MSNBC versus Fox News will present different statistics to users that might be true, but will– to MSNBC viewers– it just might not seem like that big of a problem. Whereas to Fox viewers, it seems like a much of a big problem. And to get to an ultimate like, “All right, you and I, we decided to talk about this issue of immigration and we agree exactly this many immigrants came over and this many crimes or whatever,” it’s really hard to get to. A flip side example is Democrats talking about women being in danger and their lives being in danger because of a lack of access to abortions, and telling stories of women who had medical emergencies or died because of them. That’s the same thing where folks on the Right might dismiss that like, “Ah, it doesn’t really happen that much.” Because again, the same kind of factual underpinnings of the rate at which it happens or whatever, it’s sort of hard to like, “All right, we’re going to go sit down, we’re going to go do a bunch of research together from factual sources and find out the exact number.” Finding the underlying concern there and acknowledging somebody else has a valid concern. Don’t just dismiss because you don’t think it happens that much on one side or the other. Dismissing those facts can be as big of a problem as not agreeing on the facts.
Zach: Yeah. No, I think that’s a hugely important point. And actually, that’s probably the thing I would emphasize more in my book if I was going to go back. The fact that it’s just so easy for humans to build entirely different narratives of harm, like who’s doing harm, right? For example, the immigration crime thing. Right? Clearly, some illegal immigrants do commit crime or even murder. Right? That can be scary. That can build a logical defensible narrative in the same way that to make an analogy, the Left is angry about shootings and killings by police, even as Conservatives might think in context, that’s not as big a deal as you’re making it out to be. So just to say, we can build all sorts of narratives depending… Because harm is harm, right? If we perceive harm, even if it’s a little bit of harm, we can say this is too much harm. The idea of what harm is normal and expected is entirely subjective depending on, oftentimes, where our attention is drawn and sometimes even where our allegiances are and what we pay attention to, et cetera. I just think it’s very important to see that perceptions of harm can be very subjective. And like you’re saying, it’s very good to– for people that want to tone down the contempt– it’s acknowledging like, yes, it’s possible for Liberals to see the perspective that even a few too many crimes or murders is too much if we believe that those people shouldn’t have been in the country in the first place. That’s how they frame it. And each side has their narratives of why harm is excessive or why it’s okay in context. I think that’s very important to see. And it’s getting to that central idea, which I quoted from Kevin Dorst who’s done some good work in examining the rational ways that we can reach polarized perspectives. I think we have a tendency to be like, “Look at how stupid these people’s perspectives are.” But if we care about reducing contempt, it’s worth examining the very rational ways that we can pick and choose information to build these narratives. And those narratives, even if we disagree with them, we can see the shreds of rationality in there.
Vanessa: I am going to take one voice question. So, Joy Thomas, if you want to get ready. You’ve been patiently waiting with your hand up, but I just want to be cognizant if there’s any issues like getting your question into the chat. I know we’re not always going to get that question, but I’m going to allow you to talk here in a second if you’re there. Joy, you want to go ahead and say your question? [silence] I might’ve left her on mute for too long. [chuckles] All right, you’d have to unmute, Joy. [silence] All right.
Zach: I think she’s unmuted.
Vanessa: Oh, there you are. Joy? [silence] We can’t hear you. All right. Sorry, I tried. All right. Anne also had her hand up, so I’m going to… Anne, you put in the chat that you’re a part of Braver Angels, a great organization. Zach and I are both familiar with it. You want to share?
Anne: Yes, I just want to give a plug to Braver Angels. I want to start off by saying I never go on social media. Just for the reasons that you all have said, I can’t find anything that makes me feel good there. I prefer a face-to-face discussion. We have a small group– I’m from Longmont, Colorado– we have a small group of eight people. One of the rules is that the group has to be balanced, so there are four Reds and four Blues who come. And we give time, we give dedicated time to each person to express their beliefs about whatever topic we’ve chosen. Actually, our topic in a couple of weeks is Project 2025. So, everybody’s encouraged to read it, find something in there that touches them, and just bring it forward. Not to defend it, not to put it down, just to bring it forward. And then each of us has a chance to comment on that. After we make a comment, then that’s limited to– I think I’m going to do four minutes– then there’ll be two minutes of questions from everybody else. So it’s safe, there are guardrails on the conversation, and I find it very helpful.
Zach: I think getting involved in Braver Angels or checking out what Starts With Us is doing, or even to pitch my own stuff, buying and promoting my books if you like my books, I think there’s all these different ways but I think checking out Braver Angels, I love what they do. I was going to throw all that stuff in there for people who wanted to know more about what concrete things they could do.
Vanessa: Yeah, that’s excellent, Anne. Yeah, let’s talk about things we can actually do. I’m going to turn to that. One of the big takeaways I’ve gotten from doing this kind of work and engaging with folks is that the kind of work that we’re doing is not widespread. And it’s hard to scale the conversations where there’s these rules of engagement. You know, not everybody is an analyst for Ad Fontes Media and has these really respectful conversations. A lot of times it’s like you’re going out in the wild, especially with these online conversations, you can feel like you’re getting beat up and you’re the only person that’s trying to talk in a sane way. So yes, let me give the big plug for your books. They’re excellent— How Contempt Destroys Democracy and Defusing American Anger on Zach Elwood’s website. You can Google it. They’re really easy to find, good reads, and they specifically have a lot of links to other books and academic work in this field. What else do you want to add to close this out?
Zach: Yeah. I think to me, there’s often a debate about whether making systemic changes are the most important things to reduce toxic polarization or cultural change, you know, convincing more people of the importance of this. And I focused on convincing the cultural change aspect because I think we just need more and more people talking about it and more and more demand for it if we’re going to change something bigger. Because I just think sometimes the systemic change talk avoids the fact that we are so polarized that probably making systemic changes would be really hard. So I think we just need more demand amongst the population for these things, which is kind of what I focus on. And I think we need, not to say we just need my book, but I think we need more resources that are persuasive to convince people of the importance of this work. That’s what I focused on with my book. I’m trying to make something that’s short but persuasive and that people can share with other people. Whether it’s my book or other resources, I just think we need more people to spread the word and to have those tough conversations, and even to say, “I know that you’re politically passionate, but here’s why I think you should care about these ideas and not see them as something opposed to your ideas.” But yeah, I think just spreading the word is important. And hopefully, if we did spark some curiosity about these ideas for people that were previously skeptical, I just hope that they’ll look into it a little bit more and answer some of the objections. Yeah.
Vanessa: I think the crux of this work is really summed up in a Martin Luther Jr. King quote that somebody dropped in the chat about how hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. That’s exactly the point here. So, thank you so much for joining. The hour flew by. I really love talking about this with you. Thank you for your work, thank you for joining us today, and thank you everyone online. We’ll see you next time.
Zach: Thanks, Vanessa.
This is a reshare of a talk I had in January 2022 with Liz Stokoe, who studies conversation analysis (CA) and who’s the author of the book “Talk: The Science of Conversation.” Stokoe studies how language choices can impact us and change our behavior, often without us being aware of that. Topics include: the more surprising and interesting things Stokoe has found in her work; the popularity of the very wrong “most communication is non-verbal” concept; the practical use of CA work in persuading people to do things; why Stokoe analyzes scripts from comedy shows (like Friends) in her work; perceptions that men and women talk differently; ideas about building rapport.
Episode links:
For more information about this episode and a transcript, see the original episode.
A talk with psychologist Leonard Saxe, who is known for, amongst other things, his research into lie detectors (also known as polygraphs). Topics discussed include: why polygraphs and other forms of deception detection are unreliable; the use of polygraphs as a tool to extract information and confessions; the Richard Ames case, which involved a high-level CIA employee spying for the Soviet Union and beating a polygraph when questioned; a story where someone’s life was ruined due to cops trusting polygraph evidence far too much; and more.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video of talk)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Resources related to this talk:
This episode examines a video from 2020 that seemed to show a black person being harassed by a racist white woman. The video was shared by the celebrity gossip personality Perez Hilton, and was then picked up by several low-quality news sites, like RawStory.com and DailyDot.com. But the video was staged; it was done as a joke, for reasons unknown. This episode examines the reasons why I confidently believed the video was staged after watching it for only a few seconds.
Episode links:
Resources related to this episode:
This episode is a piece of mine about how an awareness of life’s strangeness might impact us, both positively and negatively, and how that might relate to existential psychology concepts. Topics include: how an awareness of life’s strangeness might be seen to be a core existential stressor (like the fear of death, or fear of isolation); how this might relate to religious/spiritual experience; how this might relate to traumatic experience and PTSD; how being aware of life’s strangeness might make one more likely to embrace nonsensical, low-evidence beliefs of various sorts; how this might relate to mental illness (including psychosis and delusion).
Episode links:
Related resources:
A talk with Robin Dibble, an experienced Albuquerque-area restaurant professional who’s worked in every aspect of the business, from waiting tables, to cooking, to managing restaurants and night clubs. Topics include: psychological strategies servers use to get more tips; how menu design can affect what people order; reading customer satisfaction as a restaurant manager; the factors in deciding to cut someone off from drinking; lighting and acoustics considerations when designing a comfortable space.
This is a reshare of a 2019 talk. For more details about this episode, see the original post.
Episode links:
I talk to former members of the House of Representatives Luke Messer (Republican) and Elizabeth Esty (Democrat). We talk about: political polarization; their experiences being in congress during such a highly polarized period of time; their ideas for reducing toxic polarization, and more.
Episode links:
A talk with Russell Hurlburt, who’s researched inner experience for more than five decades. He is the author of 6 books and many articles on the topic of mental experience. Transcript is below.
Topics discussed include: The challenges of describing and measuring inner experience; his contributions to improving how we measure and talk about inner experience; the ambiguities in the classification of “aphantasia” (reporting no visual qualities in one’s thought processes); the ambiguities in the “inner monologue” concept; thought on whether dreams are visual or not; and more.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video of talk)
- Spotify
- Apple Podcasts
Related resources:
- Hurlburt’s site
- Hurlburt’s book Investigating Pristine Inner Experience
- Book Hurlburt worked on with a skeptic of describing inner experience
- A talk about my own so-called aphantasia
- New Yorker article about our different styles/descriptions of thought
TRANSCRIPT
Zachary Elwood: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding people better; you can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com and you can sign up for a premium subscription there that gets you ad-free episodes and lets you learn about and collaborate on upcoming episodes.
On this episode I talk to Russell Hurlburt about inner experience, including mental visualization, aphantasia, and inner monologue and narration. Russ has studied inner experiences for more than five decades. To quote from the bio on his professor page at University of Nevada: “In the 1970s, he was the first to use beepers in psychological research and was the creator of the ‘thought sampling’ method. Dr. Hurlburt considers the understanding of inner experience to be a fundamental task of psychology, and has written six books and many articles exploring how best to investigate experience.”
As you may have noticed, there have been a lot of people lately talking about inner experiences, whether that’s aphantasia — which is people saying that their thinking has no visual qualities — or about inner narration, or the lack of inner narration. For this podcast, I’d previously aired an interview I’d done about my own so-called aphantasia, and I thought it’d be interesting to follow that up with a more in-depth one with someone who’s researched that. If you’ve seen aphantasia and inner narration mentioned recently and wondered “What’s going on with that?” or wondered how your own internal experiences would or should be categorized, i think you’ll find this a very interesting talk. We dig into some of the nuances and ambiguities in these areas. And I’ll put some of the resources and books we mention in this talk on the entry for this episode on my site at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
If you’re listening to the audio version of this talk, that audio comes from a video talk I had with Russ. You can find that video on my People Who Read People youtube channel.
Okay, here’s the talk with Russ Hurlburt. Hi, Russ. Thanks for joining me.
Russell Hurlburt: My pleasure.
Zach: Maybe we could start with how you got interested in researching inner experience. I realize that’s probably a big question, but maybe you could summarize your beginning interest in it and what you thought was fairly unexamined in that area.
Russell: Well, that is a big question and it’s basically my entire career, or before that, depending on how you define career. I was an engineer before I was a trumpet player, and then I was a trumpet player before I was a psychologist, and the interest in all of those things goes back to probably before I was an engineer, so several lifetimes ago. But I’ve always thought that other people were the most interesting things on the planet, and I’ve always thought that people’s inner lives were the most interesting part of people. And so the object, I’ve always been interested in that. And in the course of my previous lifetimes, I’ve tried to figure that stuff out and decided that I didn’t know and that psychologists didn’t know and it seemed like nobody knew, and so I set about trying to figure out, well, how would you try to answer that question? And so 50 years ago- a few months ago, actually, 50 years and a few months ago- I figured out that the way to do this was to give somebody a beeper and ask them to report what was going on in their inner experience at the moment of a beep. And 50 years ago, the world was a different place as it is now, and the way that seemed to answer that question then and now, too, for that matter- except for everybody almost except me- would be to have given people a pad of questionnaires that just triggered when the beep went off, what is now called EMA or ESM or something like that. I was the first one to do that. I invented the beeper in 1973 and used it in 1974 and onwards, starting out with something that would nowadays be called ESM or EMA.
Zach: And what’s that stand for?
Russell: ESM is Experience Sampling Method, and EMA is Ecological Momentary Assessment. They’re both more or less the same thing that basically involves giving a random beep or some kind of an external beep to people and asking them to fill out some kind of questionnaire- usually a questionnaire- EMA sometimes uses some biological measurements like heart rate or whatever. There’s a lot of different ways that people use that. But when it comes down to inner experience, most people are doing questionnaires triggered by beeps, which is how I started 50 years ago. But by 48 years ago, I had decided that I wasn’t learning anything that I thought was very interesting so I gave up giving questionnaires and launched into what I now call the Descriptive Experience Sampling method or DES. But it’s a simple method designed to answer a very simple question. Like, a simple question is what’s in your inner experience? What’s your inner experience like when you’re being Zach? I’m not particularly interested in what you’re like being Zach when I’m giving you some kind of an experiment to run, I’m interested in the Zach as Zach goes to the grocery store and interviews people and drives his car and does whatever it is that Zach does. That’s when Zach is interesting. He’s not so interesting when he’s responding to a probe in some kind of a psychological experiment because that’s as much about the experiment as it is about Zach.
Zach: Right, because the observing and the experiment change people and such.
Russell: Right. So my goal would be- my goal still is- to get at what Zach is like when he’s not being interrogated. And so I give you a beeper, you wear the beeper in your everyday life doing whatever it is that you generally do, and every random time at some random times, the thing beeps and your task is to pay attention to what was in your inner experience just before the beep occurred. I call that the moment of the beep but what I really mean is something like the last undisturbed moment just before the beep, which is not really undisturbed, but as best we can to get the last undisturbed moment. Sometimes I call it a microsecond before the beep. It’s not a microsecond and it’s not before.
Zach: You’re trying to capture those unselfmonitored moments.
Russell: That’s exactly right. So, what I want you to do is to capture your self-monitored moment while it’s still in short-term memory, whatever that is, while you still have as direct access to it as you can get. And let’s talk about that.
Zach: Yeah, if you had to recommend one book of yours, is there a favorite one that you recommend for people to understand your thoughts in these areas? Or another resource if it’s not a book.
Russell: I would say a book of mine… If I had to pick one book, it would probably be my 2011 book, which is called… I don’t remember what it’s called, “Exploring Inner Experience”, I think. Cambridge University Press, 2011, whatever that book is called. Oh, it’s called “Moments of Truth”. That’s the book.
Zach: Gotcha.
Russell: But there are two other books that people might be interested in. One is a debate, basically, with a philosopher, Eric Schwitzgebel. That’s my 2007 book. That’s the one that’s called “Describing Inner Experience?” Schwitzgebel is a skeptic about introspective kinds of things and so we have a book-length debate about that. And then my most recent book is sort of like that, except one step more modern, I guess. It’s a debate, in a way with, a literary scholar about inner experience.
Zach: That sounds interesting. Yeah, I wanted to read the Schwitzgebel one. That looked really interesting because you go through examining snippets of people or a specific person’s descriptions of their inner thought and going back and forth with his skepticism and your thoughts on it. Yeah, that looked really interesting.
Russell: That’s exactly what that book is about.
Zach: So, maybe…
Russell: But I guess I should also say I have been creating a website for the last three or four years that I’ll send you the link to it and you can make that available to your folks. But basically, the interviews that I do… So if you were going to be a subject in my research, you’d wear the beeper for a day and we would get together and talk about the half a dozen beeps that you got on that particular day. And you wouldn’t be very good at it because it’s a skill that you have to master like any other skill. And so we would say, “Well, we need to do this again.” And so tomorrow or next week or whenever it’s convenient, we do it again. And then we do it again and then we do it again. And on a second or third day, you’d start to get pretty good at it. And on the fourth, fifth, or sixth day, typically, we would be limiting our discussion pretty much to talking about your inner experience at the moment of these beeps and we’d have ruled out the stuff that isn’t really inner experience, and we’d have ruled out the stuff that isn’t before the beep and isn’t.
And so I have been of recent years, I guess, recording those and putting them entirely on the web with quite carefully drawn transcripts with annotations about what’s happening. So if people are really interested in what we’re talking about here, they can go to that website and spend 100 hours listening to me ask the Zachs of the world what’s going on in their inner experience and read the transcripts and read some discussions about the questions that they might have. Basically, I prepare the transcripts carefully, and then I answer questions that I think people might have or make comments that I think people might have who would be seriously interested in what it takes to find out about Zach’s inner experience.
Zach: I would imagine with all the recent interest in aphantasia and mental imagery and people talking about inner monologues, have you seen an uptick in people reaching out to you in the last few years about those kinds of things? Because it really seems like some of that stuff has gone kind of viral in terms of people writing about it on social media and their experiences and whether they have aphantasia or not, these kinds of things. Have you seen a lot more interest in the last few years?
Russell: Yes. I would say the interest has gone up fairly dramatically in the last seven or ten years or something.
Zach: So, what are your – maybe pivoting to the aphantasia area, what would be your summation of that? Because I’ll say from my perspective, I would classify myself as someone with aphantasia. I don’t identify with reporting mental imagery and these kinds of things. I actually did a previous podcast where someone interviewed me for their podcast on those things asking me questions about that. But at the same time, I see a lot of ambiguity there. I’m very uncertain about… I do get a sense that there are differences that exist because it’s kind of hard for me to understand how somebody could report having something very visual, but I also see a lot of ambiguity in the sense that I’ve talked to a lot of people that are like, “I don’t know if – I’m not sure if I would qualify these things as visual or not or how visual they are,” and a lot of it seems to come down to- for at least some spectrum of the differences- seems to come down to the difficulties of reporting inner experiences. But I’m curious to ask you, do you have a high-level view of how you see that landscape?
Russell: Well, yes. I’ve got lots of views on that subject. The first one I would say is that the skepticism that you’re reporting there is good. I think you ought to be skeptical about that. But the second I would say is that what you should be saying when you’re expressing that skepticism is, “Well, what we need is a good method, and we should spend some time thinking about what the method is.” I’ve spent 50 years thinking about the method, and Descriptive Experience Sampling- DES, what I do- is the best that I can do. That doesn’t mean it’s the ultimate method, it means it’s the best that I’ve been able to find in 50 years of pretty careful looking. And I would say most people don’t look very carefully, and so the methods that they use are not very good. And the methods that they use are sort of like what you’ve described, which is sort of like armchair introspection and trying to decide what my inner experience is like. And I would say that’s a very difficult thing to do. So, that’s the first part of my answer to your question.
Zach: And really quick, I’ll throw in there one interesting example of how hard these things are to describe. When I asked one person about this, they initially said, “Oh, yeah, I would describe it as visual.” And then when I inquired more about it, when I threw in some of the ambiguity of what people said about the ambiguity in those areas, he said something like, “Well, now I’m not clear. Is it mental imagery or am I thinking about mental imagery?” That’s just an example of how difficult it can be, especially for the people that aren’t on the extreme end of saying… There’s some people that are very confident, like, “I see things extremely visually,” but there’s this large swath of people, it seems to me, that are like, “How do I exactly describe those things?” But go on.
Russell: That’s a good interjection. I’m on your side as far as that goes. Because people don’t use the same terminology about their own inner experience as they use about the external world. They don’t know that. People are very ignorant about how they use their own words. And I would say people are pretty ignorant- many people, maybe most people, but many people are quite ignorant about their own inner experience. And so there are a lot of people who are like you who said, if I remember calling correctly, you said something like, “Well, I don’t have very much of this imagery stuff.” And some people, when they say that, are right, and other people, when they say that, are wrong. It can go either way. I have sampled a lot of people who say, “I never have visual imagery,” and yet at some random beeps, they’ve got quite a bit of visual imagery. And vice versa. Other people who say, “I’ve got great visual imagery all the time,” but when we get it to beep, it turns out that they don’t have it. And part of it is the reason that you identified, is that they think of themselves as visual until you really start to ask, “Well, what do you mean by visual again?” And then when you pin them down on that, well, it turns out visual doesn’t have anything to do with something that you would see. And that’s worse, I would say. It’s worse with the inner speech deal because inner speech sort of has a wider uncertainty of definition than maybe even in visual imagery. But all of them are terrible. People are very unspecific about what they mean.
[crosstalk]
Zach: Oh, go ahead.
Russell: The clearest example for that that I would give is about the word thinking, where you ask people what thinking means and they will tell you, “Well, thinking is some kind of a cognitive thing where I’m trying to decide this kind of a thing.” And then you beep them and they say, “I was thinking about something.” And when it turns out that what thinking means then, when they’re describing their own inner experience, for one person it would mean I’m seeing a visual image. And for another person thinking it’s going to be, I’m talking to myself in inner speech. And for another person, the word thinking, as in I’m thinking, means I have an emotional experience. And for another person, the word thinking means I feel a tingle in my back or something like that. The point that I’m trying to make here is that the word thinking, when applied in the external world, has a Webster kind of definition.
But the word thinking, when applied to me, has a private personal definition, which probably I acquired at age two or three or something like that when I heard my mother or whoever say thinking. And what that meant was, well, there’s something going on in her that I can’t see. So I apply that to me, what’s going on with me with what I can’t see. And so when I apply that word to myself, it means whatever is sort of frequent for me. I call that thinking. So that’s the reason why- or one of the reasons, one of many reasons- why I’m skeptical about questionnaires. Because questionnaires ask questions that use public definitions, and public definitions and private definitions are not the same. And I’m skeptical of armchair introspection because, like you gave in your example where you were giving an easy interview or slight interview with a guy who changed his mind about what was visual, if you really want to know what’s going on in somebody else’s experience, you have to be careful in that interviewing method.
Zach: Yeah, I really liked your… I was reading some of your work and describing the- I think you called it the unsymbolized thinking, I think that was what it was called, where it’s like sometimes if you inquire- like you do inquiring at the moment- sometimes if you really inquire what you’re currently thinking, it’s just a rough non-cognitive thing of like, is this thing going to happen? But it’s not verbal or anything, it’s just like imagining if something’s going to happen. It doesn’t require any verbal or even… But sometimes we’ll put those into words, you know? We’ll put a narrative to it. So we’ll apply the… Yeah, it’s just really hard to pin down exactly what’s going on there. But going back to the aphantasia thing, it’s like you see these kind of confident descriptions sometimes about that. Journalists, for example, or writers will write about like, “Oh, 3% of people have aphantasia or these kinds of things,” whereas to me in just talking to people, I found that that seems really like a strange, overly confident or just wrong way to describe it. Because when I’ve dealt into this with random people, including doing Twitter surveys of people who follow me, it’s like there seems a lot more range of ambiguity, and trying to pinpoint who’s interviewing is highly visual versus not seems really hard to do. But I’m curious if you have a personal take from everything you’ve researched and read. How do you group the general population into highly visual versus non-visual if you do?
Russell: I think since Galton, since Sir Francis Galton, who was sort of the first guy to explore widely the visual nature and he discovered the members of the academy that had reported and he believed them- and I think there’s reason to believe them- widely different frequencies of visual imagery. So I think it’s true. I think it is true that people have widely different frequencies of visual imagery. That’s number one. Number two is I don’t think people are very good reporters about that. As I said a little bit ago, people I think are substantially mistaken about that. So, anybody who tells you they know what the percentage of people is, you could ask them, “Are you doing a method that’s as least as good as Hurlburt’s?” And if they say no, then you should say, “Well, then there’s no reason why I should believe you.” And I’m not saying my method is the best method, I’m saying you got to do something that’s better than just asking somebody.
Zach: Something methodological. Yeah, something with some method to it. Yeah.
Russell: Right. And it can’t be a questionnaire, and it can’t be just a casual interview. You have to have worked out some kind of a method. So, what is aphantasia? I think it’s a more a popular term than it is a… You know? It’s sort of like a [Tennesseer] or something like that. You know, some people play tennis, some people don’t play tennis. There’s a guy who doesn’t play tennis, we’ll give him a name. We’ll call him a Tennessee kind of a thing. You know?
Zach: Yeah, I’m glad to hear you say that because it’s what I’ve gathered. I see so many people using these labels for themselves. And it kind of strikes me. It seems like people in general are so label-happy when it comes to these kinds of ambiguous mental… Whether it’s, you know, it could be autism or any number of things where it’s like, yes, there are some differences, but we’re also too quick to lump ourselves into these categories without really knowing where the boundaries are. I see a lot of people confidently saying like, “Oh, I have aphantasia,” or, “I do or don’t have an inner monologue,” and I just think that that seems to me to be like… It’s almost like an interest of I want to quantify myself, or I want to confidently have some sort of label for these strange inner experience things to kind of make sense of a confusing inner thing. Because I think there’s something almost interesting but also almost stressful in a way to have these large differences with other people, you know, these fundamental differences or at least perceived differences. So it’s almost like we want to be like, “Oh, I’m in this group and other people are in this group.” I don’t know if you have noticed that too, almost like a label-happiness for these kinds of experiences or conditions.
Russell: In broad strokes, I would agree with what you said. I haven’t applied myself to trying to understand why that is that. But that is pretty self-evident, I think. From my point of view, it’s sort of an interesting thing. Because I think inner experience is about the most interesting question that there is. And I think a lot of people agree with that. Maybe even most people agree with that. And I think it’s remarkable how methodologically sloppy people are, including maybe especially psychology or philosophy or whatever, people are not methodologically sophisticated in answering that question. You would think, if you knew what the most interesting question is, that you would work at trying to answer it. But most people, it would appear, would prefer to give an answer than to have the right answer. That’s what people call aphantasia or whatever.
Zach: Yeah. Just in general, surveys in general often strike me just as so bad for whatever it is. It’s like there’s just so much ambiguous language that will mean different things to different people. I’m constantly examining surveys including political psychological surveys, that could mean many different things to many different people. And then you get into inner experience areas where it’s even more ambiguous so the difficulty is hundreds of times harder or something.
Russell: I agree.
Zach: So when it comes to inner monologue, that’s another area where when I’ve tried to inquire about my own thinking, there just seems to be so much ambiguity in the sense that sometimes I am thinking in ways that could be called monologue-like. Sometimes there’s repeating, you know, like a sentence that repeats in my head or is much more verbal than at other times, and other times it’s more like the unsymbolized kind of thinking that you describe where… And sometimes it’s hard to tell what it is, right? It’s like, did I… When I’m thinking about what I just thought, sometimes it’s like… I think a way to see the ambiguity is sometimes what stood out to me was sometimes I will have a fully formed thought that I want to communicate, but it’s quite hard for me to put that into words because I’ll have to work for a while at how do I phrase that? Or I’ll be missing a word. Right? But the thought is there in my head in some way, it’s just clearly not verbal because the fact that you have to work at describing this amorphous thought that you have is hard to get out. That’s what stood out to me in terms of like, yeah, sometimes my inner thought is like I’m writing something. But other times, it’s just amorphous kind of concepts and I have to think about getting those out. But would you agree that that seems to be the case for most people? And so people lumping themselves into like, “I have an inner monologue,” or, “I don’t have inner monologues,” I would imagine that’s a faulty binary framing for most people who have a wide range of experiences if that makes sense.
Russell: That’s a complicated set of questions in there, but let me see whether I can make sense out of it. So, you described a rather wide range of experiential things. Sometimes I got a full sentence, sometimes I’ve got just sort of a hint of something, sometimes there’s a sentence with some holes in it, and sometimes there’s whatever. There were a lot of ‘sometimes’ in there. One question would be, “Well, how much of that should you call inner monologue or inner speech or something?” And the answer to that varies widely. So I think many people who say, “Well, I got under a hundred percent inner speech,” what they mean, if they were halfway careful about that, would mean that all those things that you talked about, I’m going to call those inner speech. And if you’re going to talk about that, then I got a hundred percent about that.
But they don’t usually say that. They usually say, “I just got a hundred percent inner speech.” But if you nail them down, so, okay, I don’t know. Let’s be interested in inner speech. I’m happy to be interested in inner speech, but let’s know what we’re talking about. So, does speech have to involve words? Well, if you say yes, but then inner speech has to involve words. Well, that narrows it down because there’s quite a bit of what you described in the range of your stuff, which is sort of like leaning into something that doesn’t have any words to it. And so then if it has to involve words, does it have to involve a voice if we’re going to call it inner speech? External speech has to involve some kind of an experience of a voice or speaking or something. Well? And it gets to be hard because in the inner world, you can have words without a voice and you can have a voice without words, and you can have a complete sentence and you can have a partial sentence and you can have a hint of a sentence, all those things. And how much of it do you call inner speech? Well, there’s a lot of variability in there.
But I personally think if you’re going to call something speech, it has to have words involved. It at least has to have that. And if it doesn’t have words in it, then you probably shouldn’t call it speech. I think that would be true in the external world, you know? If you heard [knocks on desk], you wouldn’t say, “Oh, my desk was speaking to me.” You would say I heard a knock on my desk or something like that.
Zach: I heard some sensations of some sort. Yeah.
Russell: Yeah, yeah. And if you heard speech or somebody was singing, la, la, la, la, la or whatever, you wouldn’t say, “Well, Russ was speaking.” No, you’d say he was singing or something. So there’s got to be words involved, I think, if you’re going to call it inner speech. But when you do that, and then you get sort of careful about discerning whether there are words present, then the frequency drops dramatically down from a hundred down to 25 or so.
Zach: There’s also this ambiguity around, like people will say, “I hear my inner voice in my voice, basically.” I’ve thought about that too, where I feel like there’s so much ambiguity around that. Because sometimes if I inquire, like, “Oh, I had some sentence or verbal-like thoughts. Is that in a specific voice?” And then there’s almost this element of like, “Well, yeah, I guess it’s in my… It’s the sound of my voice,” but in another way, it’s very amorphous and maybe I’m just fooling myself into thinking like, well, that’s just like the voice I know or think I know. So if I had to put a name to what the sound of that voice is, it’s my voice. And I think there’s a lot of ways to fool yourself but I’ve seen, in that area, people saying, like, “Yes, I hear this voice and it’s in my voice,” and I’m like, “Is it really in your voice? Or are you just…” You know? Sort of like you’ve described it. It’s like we can fool ourselves and see things that aren’t there for those things and assume it would be in our voice and these kinds of things.
Russell: People make all those kinds of assumptions and it gets in the way of their actually paying attention to what’s actually going on in their experience. I call those presuppositions. People have presuppositions about the way things are, and people would prefer to, to corroborate their own presuppositions rather than to find out what the truth actually is. That’s the way most people are, actually, but it doesn’t get you actually at what’s the interesting question. So when I say the interesting question is, “Well, what’s Zach’s inner experience really like?” Some people would say, “Well, you don’t really want to know what Zach’s experience is really like, you want to know what Zach would tell you his experience is really like.” And I would say, “I don’t really care much about what Zach would tell me about his inner experience, I would like to know about his real inner experience. Because he’s going to tell me… What he tells me would be a mix of what his experience is, plus how he wants to present himself, plus what he wants to think about me, plus what he told somebody else and he’s trying to be consistent with that, and any other self-presentation biases that he might have that get mixed up into that.” And all of that stuff makes a mess, which by comparison to what is actually going on in Zach’s experience at the moment was some beep. Well, that would be interesting.
Zach: I could say… I just think, like a lot of human experience, there’s so much chaos and uncertainty and multiple threads going on. People have written about boiling down this really complex and convoluted thing into this single, simple narrative. And I just feel I can sense that in my own thinking. It’s like there can be a tendency to try to put it in some sort of order, but often it just seems like it’s all over the place and it’s really hard to pin down. Like those experiments they did on people with split brains where they would make up explanations for the things that they did, even though they would be doing something or seeing something but wouldn’t know why and would confabulate. It kind of reminds me, too, of the blind spot in your eye where the optic nerve goes in and your vision just kind of smooths it over. It’s like there’s so much of this hiding of all the chaos that goes on under the surface, I feel like, when it comes to our inner reports of what our experience is like. Yeah, sometimes I can just really feel the chaos of like, I don’t really know. There’s all sorts of weird random dead ends and multiple layers going on at the same time, sometimes that…
Russell: What I would say about that is, I think there is chaos. I would prefer to call it multiprocessing, but chaos is as good a word as either one of those is fine with me. The question is-
Zach: Chaotic multiple processing.
Russell: Yeah. The question is whether what you said is a sort of a general characteristic of Zach, or whether it is a, at some particular moment, characteristic of Zach. And so it could be that at some particular moment, Zach is experiencing this chaos that’s all these things going on, or it could be that at some particular moment, Zach has determined, his body has determined, his bag of bones or whatever that is- bones and neurons and synapses and whatever- has determined that for this particular moment, he’s interested in the goldness of the picture that’s in the back of my head. And of all the chaos that he could be interested in, he has zeroed in on that. And at that particular moment, there’s no chaos. I’m zeroed in on that gold. But it’s very difficult for Zach or anybody else to recall that at a particular moment, he was interested in gold because- actually, that’s sort of the overall thing- he was trying to figure out what question is next or what thought about Hurlburt or whatever that was. And the gold, which actually drew him at that particular moment, would be forgotten like a dream on waking, you know? A second later, that’d be gone. But that is, I think, what makes up Zach’s actual inner life. Maybe. Maybe he clearly makes this the figure of his perception or whatever you want to call that, a figure of his consciousness, whatever it was before the footlights of his consciousness. There aren’t any good terms for that. But something becomes centralized, focused, thematized, whatever you want to say about that, for Zach at a particular moment. And then something else at another particular moment, and then something else at a particular moment. Those are the kinds of things that I’m interested in.
Zach: Yeah, it made me think of the trance-like state when you’re focused on something like you’re driving and your mind’s seemingly blank, but who knows what it was really doing. It’s hard to say what it was doing. It’s kind of dreamlike or trance-like or something. And maybe that’s a good. I was going to ask you this thing I’ve wondered about dreams, which I think seems kind of related. And I don’t know how many opinions you have on dreams, but one thing I’ve thought about dreams is that I don’t think, at least for me, I don’t think they’re visual. I think they basically are concepts and ideas that go straight into memory. And they get stored in a similar way because they’re in our memory and so they can have elements of… They can be hard to distinguish from the memories of visual things we’ve seen. But I think, for me, when I remember dreams, it’s often like it’s not like there’s a set image. It’s more like I know things happen. It’s much more conceptual and idea-related. That, to me, seems related to the mental imaging thing because I feel like it helps explain why they’re so ephemeral too in our memory because they don’t have all the solidity of I actually saw something and had all these extra details. It’s just the bare wisps of ideation and concepts coming together. I don’t know how you feel about that, whether dreams or everyone’s dreams are actually visual, if you have any thoughts on that.
Russell: I would say, first, I’m not a dream researcher, so I’m not in a position to say I’m an expert on that subject. Second, I would bet against almost everything that you said in your last question. If I were a betting man, I would guess that most of what you said is not true. I think most people have dreams. Most people that dream probably do dream (or many people, let’s not say most, but let’s say many people, and by many, I mean a lot) dream and it’s entirely visual or a big part of it is visual. I would bet most of the ranch at pretty good odds on that statement being true. It’s the same thing as I would say, there are many people who in their everyday waking life, which I think I do know something about, do have visual imagery. And it makes every bit of sense to say, “I saw whatever that was, but it wasn’t really there. It was in my imagination. So I would say I innerly saw that.” And there are some people who innerly see and convince me- I’m as skeptical as they come, or probably more skeptical than almost anybody you know, or a lot of people. I’m a very skeptical guy. So when somebody says I’m seeing something, I want to know what they’re talking about. And I’m convinced that many people, when they say I’m having an image, they mean I’m innerly seeing something. Other people who will say I’m having an image, they mean something conceptual, like you were describing. But I would say most people who talk about having an image are having some kind of visual experience.
But I don’t want to get us down into counting the number of people who are doing that kind of thing. But from the standpoint of what the phenomenon is, I would say I am 99.9999% sure that some people innerly see things with every bit as clarity and maybe more clarity than external seeing. And it’s just as visual an experience as an external seeing would be, in the sense that there’s colors and there’s forms and there’s motion sometimes, and sometimes it’s clear and sometimes it’s not.
Zach: Have there been studies on brain imaging to see if when people are doing that, do things show up in visual areas? Has there been that kind of stuff? Do you know?
Russell: There has been that kind of stuff. And most of that kind of stuff would corroborate that there is visual. The visual cortex lights up when people are reporting having visual. Those studies are not as good as I would like them to be, but then very few studies are as good as I would like them to be. But because they’re mostly about self-reported, people at this time are saying I’m having a visual image. I think there’s reason to be skeptical about that until you’ve got somebody pretty well-trained and knows what we’re talking about when we mean that. And those studies don’t generally have anywhere near adequate training.
I’ve done one set of studies, one small study or set of studies or whatever, where I’ve put people into the scanner and using the descriptive sampling method I’m talking about, just let them do whatever it is that they’re trying to do or would be happy to do in the scanner. And sometimes there’s visual imagery and sometimes there’s inner speaking and whatever. I think we’ve had enough. Scanner studies require a lot of reps and it’s hard to do this. We’re putting people in the scanner for like 10 hours, it’s a little tough to do that at scale. But I think we’ve done enough. We’ve done enough where I’m pretty convinced that there’s reason to believe that when I tell you that I’ve got a subject and that person’s got visual imagery and it really is seeing, you should believe me. That’s what I think. And you can say, “Well, you know, Russ could be crazy,” which he might be, but I think I have a track record that you shouldn’t just dismiss. Let’s put it that way.
Zach: Have they done a study… Have they noticed, when it comes to lighting up the visual cortex for inner thought things, have they noticed big differences in people in the aphantasia? Kind of like these people report seeing mental imagery and their brains light up in that way and these people don’t report it. Has there been anything like that?
Russell: I’m not particularly an expert in that, but I would pretty be pretty confident answering that question yes.
Zach: Oh, really? Okay. Yeah, I know there hasn’t been actual… From what I was reading, there hasn’t been that much research on the whole aphantasia thing. So it sounds like maybe nobody’s really done that.
Russell: And that could be, too. I don’t claim to be an expert there.
Zach: Gotcha. Gotcha.
Russell: The reason that I’m not particularly interested in that literature is that the…
Zach: They don’t describe… They may be bad describers, is what you’re saying.
Russell: There you go.
Zach: Yeah. Even if they say it, they may not be accurate describers of what’s going on inside. Yeah.
Russell: Right.
Zach: Right. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, even just the most basic psychological things are so hard to study, so this just seems much harder to study. Well, yeah.
Russell: Let me… I’ve thought about saying this for a while so I’m going to say it now. Let me tell you why armchair introspection is difficult. And by armchair introspection, I mean, well, I’m going to ask myself what’s going on in my inner experience? One of the reasons that that’s difficult is that if you ask yourself, “Well, what’s going on in my inner experience right now?” Well, what’s going on in your inner experience right now is you’re asking yourself the question, “What’s going on in my inner experience right now?” But you think that’s not important. I want to rule that out because, obviously, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in my experience that goes beyond that. But the problem is you’re ruling out everything that’s there. What’s there when you’re in the armchair introspection mode is the question, the intention of asking yourself what’s going on in my inner experience. That’s what’s in my inner experience. And then you rule it out and you can’t find anything else that’s left. And then you say all kinds of crap after that because you have ruled out what’s actually there. So what you need, I think, is some kind of an external signal to get you to engage in that armchair introspection task without the armchair, which is what the beeper is about. Some people derisively say, “Well, Hurlburt says he’s got a magic beeper,” or whatever. Well, that’s not true. What I say is I have an external signal that has a well-defined characteristic. It’s a beep, and the beep is either not here or it’s there. It has a sudden rise time and it comes at a time that’s not under your control, so you don’t have to ask yourself… And that’s a big deal when it comes to introspection. People will say, critics will say, “Well, you know, you hear the beep and then you’ve got to decide to introspect.” Well, yes, that’s true. But this is a skill that you can amass over a while so that you can do that skill pretty quickly. So the question is, “Well, can you do it quickly enough?”
William James says introspection is like turning up the gas to see what the darkness looks like or something like that. Well, that’s hard to do, but it was harder for James than it is for us because James had to turn up the gas where we have the virtue or the advantage of being able to create a beep in a way that was out of his ability. So, I can’t give you a beep and turn up the light to see what the darkness looks like. But I can, I think, give you a beep that allows you to see what kind of nocturnal animals are there before they get a chance to scurry away into the holes or wherever. And so I’m not getting a complete picture of what the darkness looks like, but I’m getting a picture of the darkness that’s better than armchair introspection work, because armchair introspection is, you know, I got to decide to do this and think about that.
Zach: Yeah, you’re trying to sneak up on it and catch it in the act. Yeah. So, getting back to the dream question because I personally am just very interested in dreams, when you said that you were confident that dreams were visual, there’s also the point that I think was brought up in that book you had with Schwitzgebel,; the point that people reported in the 1950s dreaming in black and white and then they reported dreaming in color. That’s not to say I think I’m not confident at all… I don’t have any confident beliefs that dreams are visual or originate in visual or don’t originate visual, but I’m curious you seem pretty confident in the visual origin of them. And I was just kind of curious what was behind that confidence.
Russell: Why should I be confident about that?
Zach: Mhm. If you are confident. Yeah.
Russell: Setting aside that I’m not going to talk about dreams because I don’t know much about dreams, but I talk about experience in general and I think people can be confident about visual experience in general. And if they can talk about it in general, they should be able to talk about it in their dreams as well, it seems to me, which is… So, why would I be confident about it in their waking life? Well, the example that you gave, I had a participant- a couple, actually- of older folks, they were 75 or 80-ish people. And one woman that I have in mind right now said, “I have quite a lot of visual imagery,” and she did. A beep occurred when she had visual imagery. She told me, “At one beep, I was seeing my flower garden. I wasn’t in my flower garden, but I was imagining my flower garden and I could see the yellows of the daffodils and the red of the roses laid out just like they were in my experience.” And then I had another picture and she said, “I see my piano. And on my piano is a photograph of my son in the army, and he’s in his uniform in front of the flag. And I see this whole scene in color and detail. The picture is looking in this direction and it’s like it really is in the real world.” And so she’s giving me a description that makes sense.
Then on the third day, she says, “You know, I don’t think I’ve been honest with you. I’ve been trying to be honest with you, but I don’t think I have. Because what I am now seeing in my experience is that my visual imagery is in black and white when it occurs. And then when I tell you about it, I colorize it. And I don’t feel myself colorizing. For example, if I were to really have been careful on that second day when I told you I saw my son in front of the flag, I think” she says, “that at the moment of the beep, that vision was in black and white. And there was no red, white, and blue on the flag. There was black and gray and white on the flag. But then when you asked me about it and I reflected back on it and could put all my attention to that, well, then I produced it in color.” And so what I think happens in that kind of thing is that a person, when they get older, loses some of their computational power or whatever that is. I don’t have a theory about computational power. But you’re going to simplify your life. And one important way to simplify your life is to deal with black and white imagery rather than color imagery. If you’re a computer person, you know that a black and white image has a lot fewer pixels to it. A lot fewer bits to it- same number of pixels- a lot fewer bits to it than a color image. Because you’ve got to provide the color information as well as all the rest of the information.
And so the processing on a computer, a computer can process black and white imagery a whole lot faster than it can process color imagery. So what I think happens for older people when they go through life and they’re seeing this image in their mind and seeing that and seeing whatever, and they’re extracting out of that the information that they need, it’s not probably the color information. But when they stop and think about it or stop and focus on some particular aspect, well, then the color information becomes somewhat more salient again and they put it in there. So, that kind of experience with me makes it seem to me, well, here’s a woman who hadn’t… That’s a pretty high-powered theory that she’s spinning. There’s no reason why she would have had that in mind. She didn’t have the theory. What I told her was the theory. She told me, “I was lying to you.” You know? “I was trying to be honest with you, but I think I was lying to you.” Why would she say that if she didn’t really have visual experience that was in some ways black and white and in some other ways in color?
Zach: Yeah. I guess the skeptic would say if she’s thinking of those, if she has the concept of that image of her son’s picture or whatever it is, it’s like that’s sparking all the neurons associated with that. So then later, from all the construction of all the things that spark all those things she’s saying, she’s adding detail like the faultiness of memory and such.
Russell: I agree. I totally agree with that. That’s why the method that I say, the Descriptive Experience Sampling method, has to be iterative. I don’t think we’ve used that word here, but iterative means we got to do this over and over again. Because there’s no way to answer the question that you just asked about an instance which has already occurred. But there is a way to say- and I could say to this woman that we’re talking about here- well, isn’t that interesting? Maybe going forward when the beep happens and the only shot that you’ve got is right then and right then, when the beep happens and you got a visual imagery, well, pay attention to whether it’s in black and white or color. That’s sort of interesting. You’re never going to get a better shot at that, including asking a philosopher about that. Because the skeptics aren’t going forwards, they’re going backwards. They’re given an explanation like you just gave, which is fine, a perfectly good explanation, but it’s not an adequate explanation because the only time the explanation actually counts is at the next beep and the one after that.
Zach: A quick note here. Obviously, I can only speak about my own experiences here, but I will say that even though I think it’d be easy for me to think of my dreams as visual in nature, I think that perception mainly comes from the tendency to assume that things we find in our memory have their origins in visual experiences. But I tend to question that assumption. For example, I seldom have a sense of having seen a dream scene from a specific angle. It’s often more just concepts and ideas that make up a scene. Even when I sometimes have a sense of something being visual, it’s hard for me to say confidently that it was really a visual experience and not, to quote the acquaintance that I spoke with, more like thinking about visualizations. This all reminds me of a strong ketamine trip I had once where I was conscious of having all sorts of conceptual scenes running through my mind. For example, the sense that I was experiencing all sorts of battles and conflicts in the early days of human history, but nothing I experienced was actually visual. But as Russ would probably agree, it’s difficult enough to study waking conscious life. It’s much more difficult to study dreams, which we only consciously remember after they’re over. And of course, it’s possible that because I don’t have mental imagery or don’t see myself as having mental imagery, maybe my dreams are much less visual than other people’s are. Okay. Back to the talk.
If I was going to read the book that you wrote with Schwitzgebel, is that still a good explanation of your ideas in that book? Because I know it was put out a while ago, do you still recommend it as a way to understand your views?
Russell: I haven’t read that book. That book is 15 years old now. I think the answer to that is in general, yes. There are probably some details that I would squirm at about what I said then and what I would probably say now. It’s different now. But I think in broad strokes, the answer to that would be yes.
Zach: Cool. Yeah, I wanted to read that. Yeah, I plan on reading that. Is there anything you wanted to throw in that you think we didn’t touch on that you’d like to mention that you think people would find interesting in this area before we end?
Russell: I would say anybody who’s interested ought to go to my website and poke around and watch it happen. Watch Descriptive Experience Sampling happen.
Zach: And what’s the website?
Russell: I don’t know. I’ll have to send it to you. If you Google me… Let me see what I can-
Zach: Is it live currently?
Russell: Yeah. So if you Google me, you would find my website. And my website is called hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu.
Zach: Oh, gotcha. Okay. Yeah, I’ll put a link to it.
Russell: And on the left-hand side of that website is a link that’s called complete DES interviews with annotated transcripts. If you clicked on that link, that would take you to 100 hours worth of interviews with aphantasia people and face blind people and journalists.
Zach: And it’s hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu. Was that it?
Russell: Yes. Yeah.
Zach: Okay, that’s great.
Russell: I’ll email it to you and make sure you get it right.
Zach: Yeah. But for people listening, I just want to make sure they checked it out. Okay. Thanks a lot, Russ. This was great and I think people will find this very interesting.
Russell: You’re welcome. My pleasure.
Zach: That was a talk with Russell Hurlburt, the author of several books on inner experience. You can get some links to resources that we mentioned in this talk at the entry for this talk on my site, peoplewhoreadpeople.com. Thanks for listening.
Music by Small Skies.
I’ve been resharing some episodes from early in the podcast that were interesting but that didn’t get that many listens. I’ve had a couple longtime podcast listeners tell me this was one of their favorites. A transcript is below.
This is a talk with Brendan Bartholomew, who’s a professional bus driver in San Francisco. We talk about the role understanding and predicting human behavior can play when driving a city bus. Topics discussed include: the importance of thinking ahead about potential pedestrian/traffic dangers; how bus drivers know who’s waiting for a bus and who’s not; thoughts on handling unruly and/or mentally ill passengers; how modern rideshare and scooter traffic have changed things for bus drivers.
For more info, see the original post.
Episode links:
TRANSCRIPT
Zach:
This is the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding human behavior and psychology. You can learn more about it at PeopleWhoReadPeople.com
This episode will be one from the vault. I’ve been resharing some episodes from early in the podcast that I thought were interesting but that didn’t get that many listens. This one will be a talk with Brendan Bartholomew, who drives a bus in San Francisco. We talk about his skills at reading drivers and road situations in general. I’ve had a couple podcast listeners tell me that this was one of their favorites.
Before playing the episode, I also wanted to announce that my new book on American political polarization is now out in paperback and ebook. The book’s title is How Contempt Destroys Democracy and this one is aimed at a politically liberal audience. If you’ve appreciated my polarization work, you might like to check that out; I obviously would appreciate any reviews on Amazon or elsewhere, and any mentions to people you know online or wherever else.
Okay, here’s the talk with Brendan Bartholomew.
Zachary Elwood: Today’s interview was recorded on March 13th, 2020. I interviewed Brendan Bartholomew, who’s a city bus driver in San Francisco. We talk about how understanding human behavior can play a role when you’re a bus driver. One disclaimer before we start, Brendan speaks only for himself. He doesn’t speak for the organization he works for.
Hey, Brendan, thanks for coming on.
Brendan Bartholomew: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be doing this.
Zach: Yeah, I appreciate your time. I should say I first learned about Brendan when I was searching online for stories about people driving buses and I found an article he wrote for CityLab. Brendan, you like to write other things too, right?
Brendan: Yeah, I was a freelance journalist first for the San Mateo Daily Journal. I did that for about a year. And then that kind of transitioned into me spending about four years as a freelance journalist for the San Francisco Examiner, and it’s something I’m very passionate about. I love doing it and I just wish I had time for it now. [laughs]
Zach: I saw in your article about driving buses, you said – this was a quote – “A big part of the training process is teaching future bus drivers to develop a sixth sense about things, to predict dangerous moves by pedestrians and motorists before they happen, so we can avoid collisions without braking hard.” Can you talk a little bit about… Would they give you specific tips on predicting dangerous moves by pedestrians and motorists?
Brendan: You can probably tell from reading my article that I am actually very much in love with that training program. The people in the training department are amazing human beings. They’re some of the funniest, most intelligent, most creative people you could ever hope to meet. And every single one of them has done the job. Every single one of them is a veteran bus driver themselves. And so in terms of tips and tricks, a lot of it has to do with these veteran operators sharing with us their own experiences, you know?
Zach: Scary stories, kind of stuff.
Brendan: Not even just stories. But yeah, there’s certainly a lot of those. But also a lot of… Like, you know, you’re driving the training coach down the road and your trainer is hovering somewhere behind your right shoulder pointing out things that you should be noticing. You’re going down the road and the trainer will be like, “Okay, see that kid over there on that street corner?” You have to be thinking, “What if…” His mom is holding his hand right now, but you have to be thinking, “What if he abruptly breaks away from his mother and comes running into the street?” You know? One of the guys who’s in charge of the training department actually tells a story about a time when he was driving a bus. He was coming abreast of a convenience store and he found himself getting on the brake pedal before he even knew why he was doing it. And it turned out that somehow, some part of his mind- because of how good he was about scanning the environment and making these assessments- some part of his mind realized a kid was about to run into the path of his bus before it even happened. I think if I’m remembering the story correctly, this was a kid who had just stolen something from the convenience store. And so his whole point to us trainees is, for us, it’s not enough that you noticed this kid running out of the convenience store after he’s stolen something, we want you to know that he’s inside there shoplifting before he’s even done it. And of course, that’s not reasonable. But that’s how he illustrates the gravity and the importance and the level of awareness and vigilance that they want to see in their operators.
Zach: There’s so many jobs that have that hidden kind of sixth sense that you can’t really communicate to people just from experience. Yeah.
Brendan: Speaking of the line training that I mentioned – that process during those last two weeks of training where you’re driving the bus actually in revenue service- that was another experience that really stuck out to me. There were moments where I’d be pulling the bus over into a bus stop because there’s somebody standing at the bus stop, and my line trainer would say, “Oh, no, no, she doesn’t want us.” And I’d be like, “How did you know that?” You do develop a certain sixth sense about that. It has to do partly with body language. But I’ve also noticed, with the prevalence of rideshare services, that’s actually a problem for us. There’s a lot of people out there that think it’s perfectly fine to stand at a bus stop and summon Uber or Lyft to come pick them up in the bus stop, which causes us no end of problems because then you can’t get the bus into the bus stop. But oftentimes, you can tell who’s at the bus stop waiting for Uber and Lyft and who’s actually waiting for a bus.
Zach: Right, because they’re just not paying attention. They’re looking at their phone kind of thing.
Brendan: I think part of it has to do with there is a certain stratification in terms of wealth and class in San Francisco. So the people waiting for Uber and Lyft, oftentimes, you can tell by the fact that they’re young and they look well dressed and upwardly mobile that it’s like, “Oh, yeah, okay, those kids are from the tech industry and they’re waiting for Uber or Lyft.” [laughs]
Zach: Let’s talk a little bit more about telling who’s waiting for a stop or not. Do you feel like it’s mainly just about body language? Like either they’re paying attention or they’re not, and then it’s about some class type?
Brendan: Yeah, at the opposite end of the class scale, there are certainly a lot of unhoused individuals in San Francisco. And many of them will habitually sit inside a bus shelter because they have no place to be and so you can oftentimes make a prediction based on whether or not they look like they might be homeless. As you’re approaching a bus stop, the person that’s waiting for the bus to stop, you might notice their head will trick up or they’ll turn and look towards the bus, you know? There are little nuances of body language.
Zach: What about when you’re pulling up to a bus stop and there’s a lot of people around like a crowded stop? I would think it would be hard at crowded stops to know when to pull away because, theoretically, people are coming towards the bus. Do you start to get a sense of, “Oh, this person’s rushing towards the bus, I have to wait,” or, “This person is walking towards the bus, but they’re not hurrying.”
Brendan: Yeah, there have been times where I’ll be mid block, like nowhere near the bus stop itself, and I’ll see somebody in the middle of the block hurrying up or running. And I’m thinking, “Okay, that person is trying to get to the bus stop before the bus does.” And I’ll toot my horn real quick, get their attention, and let them know that I’m aware of their presence so at that point they can relax because they know I’m going to wait for them when I get to the bus stop. The biggest hazard there is they want both wheels of the bus to be within 12 inches of the curb so that people with disabilities don’t trip and fall as they’re trying to get from the curb up into the bus. So for safety sake, you’ve got to get the bus close to the curb. But when there’s a big crowd of people standing at the curb, you really have to pay a lot of attention to whether or not some people in that crowd are going to spill off of the curb and into the space that the bus is in the process of occupying. So, part of that is reading the crowd. But at the same time, you have to respect the fact that your ability to read the crowd is not infallible. You know, honking the horn a little bit to kind of give people… Not an obnoxious honking of the horn, but a brief tap of the horn to let people know, “Hey, there’s a bus coming and maybe you all shouldn’t be standing with your feet hanging over the curb.” You know?
Zach: Yeah, people are pretty unpredictable.
Brendan: Yeah, very much so.
Zach: Do you feel like driving a bus has changed other things in your life like, for example, how you drive a car or how you interact with people or how you read people?
Brendan: Oh, yeah, all of the above. It’s kind of funny. Like in terms of how I interact with people, you know, you’re setting limits for people all day, and oftentimes you have people on the bus who might be dangerous. They might be acting wrong on the bus. So you really start to exercise this muscle of being able to politely confront a person who’s doing wrong in a way that maybe is not going to escalate the situation. And that does kind of translate over into your non-working life. There are times where you might encounter some situation on the street or whatever. Maybe somebody’s cat calling a woman or being racist in public or whatever, and I just find myself kind of being in their way and saying, “Hey, you know what you’re doing right now is really inappropriate.” That kind of thing.
Zach: Gently defusing it.
Brendan: Not necessarily gently, but it’s like-
Zach: Firmly.
Brendan: Yeah. So, there’s that. And then what was the other part of the question? Oh, in terms of how I drive my car. Yeah, I have a very good friend who owns a dog walking business. And on my days off, I love to meet up with her and actually drive her doggy van around with her while she’s picking up dogs and dropping off dogs. And the way she tells it, she’s like, “Muni has ruined you.” Because her little doggie van, it’s this tiny little thing. It’s no wider or longer than a passenger car, but I make these wide turns with it like I think it’s a bus. And oftentimes she’ll be like, “Okay, you’re overlapping with the oncoming traffic lane.” And I refuse to speed and I refuse to go through a yellow light. Because Muni trains us really good on, you know, if you see what they call a stale green light- like, if you’re approaching a green light and you didn’t see that light turn green- you have to be prepared for the fact that it might be about to turn yellow. And we don’t want you running a yellow light. So I’m now the slowest driver in the world, which is still-
Zach: Very safe. Yeah, very safe. That’s good. Good habits to have, for sure.
Brendan: Indeed.
Zach: I read a story on Reddit. There was a Reddit thread about driving buses and somebody had a funny story about I think it was their dad drove a bus. And sometimes when he was driving his car, he would absentmindedly stop at the bus stops. You know? [chuckles]
Brendan: Well, I’ve almost done that. It’s like there are times when I’m in my personal vehicle and I see people standing at bus stops, it’s like you kind of have to stop yourself.
Zach: Yeah, it makes sense.
Brendan: Another thing, actually, there are times in my personal life where you just almost organically happen to run into somebody who’s in crisis, or for whatever reason, stranded somewhere. And you’ll say like, “Well, of course, I’ll give you a ride. That’s what I do.”
Zach: Right. It kind of makes you into much more of a friendly driver when maybe you shouldn’t be that friendly.
Brendan: Yeah. And, of course, the other thing is as a motorist doing this job, it’s really made me very, very conscious of the fact that a cyclist or a pedestrian or somebody on one of those little rented e-bike scooter things could appear where I don’t expect them to be. It’s almost out of nowhere. And so it’s like just driving my personal car around, I’m much more likely to make eye contact with pedestrians and cyclists so they know that I know that they’re. I’m much more likely to yield the right of way to them, even if they’re acting wrong and violating my right of way or whatever.
Zach: Speaking of confronting people and setting limits and other non-bus circumstances, I was curious when they trained you, did they train you on de-escalation kind of scenarios? Or was that mainly something that you learned driving the bus?
Brendan: Both, I’d say. I mentioned in that article I wrote that there’s some training about cultural differences and inclusiveness and what not. As far as de-escalation training, that’s something that SFMTA is in the process of rolling out right now. I believe some of my coworkers have been through that already. And it’s kind of important because they don’t want us carrying weapons. I mean, we’re prohibited. Not even pepper spray. And if you get violently attacked, they’re going to look at the video. And it’s one thing to defend yourself while you’re being violently attacked in the driver’s seat. But if they see you get up out of that driver’s seat and chase the assailant down the street, at that point, they’re going to have a problem with you because they’re going to say, “Hey, your attacker was retreating. At that point, the situation should have been over. Why did you chase that guy down the street?” You know? Basically, the agency is very big on de-escalation.
Zach: Well, I’m surprised they wouldn’t even want you to carry pepper spray. That’d just seem like they would want you to have something like that. But I guess I can see why they wouldn’t want that.
Brendan: Yeah. I mean, it could be a real nightmare and open up quite a can of worms if you ever had an SFMTA employee using pepper spray on somebody for the wrong reasons, you know?
Zach: Right. Yeah, and then the person might have a heart attack or who knows, or they have something and then they’re at fault. Yeah. When you had mentioned scooters a second ago, that made me think I hadn’t really thought about scooters. Those being all over the streets, has that really impacted and made you more nervous on the streets because there’s so many people flying around scooters?
Brendan: Oh, yeah, very much. Those electronic scooters are definitely a problem. A lot of them, people ride them in bike lanes, and people using those devices don’t really pay attention to any of the rules of the road. So it’s very common to have a scooter user suddenly swerve across the path of a bus. There’s this concept of the Idaho Stop, which is the idea that if you’re riding a bicycle, it’s not reasonable to force you to stop for every red light and every stop sign, because then you’ll lose all of your momentum and since your bicycle is not dangerous to other people in the way that a car is. It’s called the Idaho Stop because I believe that was probably one of the first places where it was legalized for a cyclist to go through a stop sign or a red light when it’s safe to do so. The thing about these people with these little electronic sharing economy scooter things is that the existence of an Idaho Stop as a concept has contributed to users of these devices believing that they don’t have to stop for any red light or any stop sign ever. So it’s like when you think in terms of reading people, on the one hand, you might think, “Oh, it’s good to be able to read the body language or the intent of that scooter user and make a prediction about whether or not they’re going to run through that red light.” But the reality is you have to be prepared for every single one of them to do that, no matter what.
Zach: Right. Yeah, because you definitely don’t want to guess wrong.
Brendan: Yeah.
Zach: How often do you have people that start trouble on the bus or scare people on the bus? Is that a fairly frequent thing?
Brendan: It varies depending on which route you’re driving. You know, some routes go through rougher neighborhoods than others. My feeling is the sooner you intervene, the better. It’s interesting you talk about scaring people because there’s a lot of people who get on the bus who will say things that are really scary and that sound quite scary. And if I stopped the bus and tell him something along the lines of, “Hey, listen, I really need you to stop saying those things. I can’t move this bus if you’re saying things that sound threatening,” oftentimes, some people will calm down. And in many cases, mental illness plays a role in this. I’ve noticed San Francisco has a tremendous amount of people that do not have shelter and are out there living with mental illness while also living on the streets, and some of them can be going through a bad spot or a bad patch. I don’t know how to put it, but some of them can be having a crisis or having a bad day and it’ll cause them to say things that sound really scary, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with mentally ill people. But oftentimes, that’s as far as it goes. It’s just, “Oh, this person is saying stuff that sounds really terrifying, but they have no intention of hurting anybody.” You know? I have a lot of friends on Facebook who are very transparent about their own experience of living with mental illness, and hearing from them has been tremendously helpful for me and guided me a lot in terms of my approach to my mentally ill passengers. At some point, one or more friends have clued me into the fact that a person who’s having what looks like a psychotic episode, if you’re a layperson who doesn’t understand what all of this means, you might think, “Oh, that person is having a psychotic episode. They’re completely irrational and dangerous. There’s nothing you can say to them.” But in terms of having friends with mental illness who have talked to me about this a lot on Facebook, what I’ve learned is that a person might be on my bus saying really lewd whatever, throwing out a bunch of four-letter words, yelling and whatever. And if I go back and talk to them and say, “Hey, I need you to stop saying these things that are threatening or obscene and stop yelling,” sometimes they’ll calm down. They’re not as out of touch with reality as we who are not mentally ill might think they are. They’ll notice, if you’re speaking to them in a way that is respectful. And for a lot of them, they are so marginalized that it has become unusual for them to have somebody with a home and a job address them in a way that is compassionate. Yeah.
Zach: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I like to ask people when I do rideshare things or taxis, I like to ask them like, “What’s your craziest, wildest experience?” And somebody recently told me their experience of picking somebody up and the passenger started talking about, “Oh, I killed my cat. I did this. I did this,” and I realized he didn’t really know a lot of people with mental illness have these obsessions around death. It doesn’t mean that they actually killed their cat, they probably didn’t. But they like to talk about death and killing and stuff. I think a lot of people just don’t know that so it makes them… You know, people are obviously much more scared than they should be when people say scary things because they don’t realize a lot of times it just goes with the territory of some psychosis and obsession stuff.
Brendan: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah, you must really get good at dealing with people with mental illness.
Brendan: Yeah. And then of course, there’s also a lot of people that are homeless in San Francisco that were not mentally ill when they became homeless. And living on the streets exacerbated things and maybe caused them to either develop mental illness or get into a worse place mentally.
Zach: Let’s talk about traffic patterns. Do you have any examples that come to mind of how you’ve gotten better at reading how cars are moving or having to adjust to how cars are moving and that kind of stuff?
Brendan: Yeah. Definitely a car will have a body language to it. And I don’t know if I can really articulate it. I’m not sure how to put it into words, but cars definitely have body language depending on what the person driving the car is planning to do. An Uber or Lyft sticker in the car’s window oftentimes is a big clue that they might be about to slow down in the middle of the traffic lane and block your bus because they’re waiting for a passenger. Or they might block a bike lane and thus force cyclists to swerve around them into the traffic lane. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve noticed, there are people in San Francisco who think they can run red lights with impunity. And oftentimes, I can tell when somebody’s going to run a red light long before they do it. Obviously, the speed at which the car is moving is a big indicator. But it’s like sometimes you can just tell, even if they’re not necessarily speeding. And I don’t know how to explain how you can tell, but it happens.
Zach: Right, some sort of unconscious things you’re picking up.
Brendan: Yeah. Another thing that occurs to me that I wanted to mention is sometimes I feel like there’s a certain ‘feng shui’ to the way streets and roads are designed that in some almost intangible way, set people up for failure. For example, when I drive the 10 Townsend and or the 12 Folsom bus, both of those buses when they’re going towards downtown, they travel on a street called Pacific. On the Pacific, you’re in the North Beach Chinatown neighborhood. And Pacific crosses of Kearney Street, which is this major thoroughfare that goes up towards Broadway. And on Pacific when you’re crossing Kearney, it is almost inevitable that some pedestrians at the far side of that intersection are going to attempt to cross against the light and walk into the path of your bus. It happens so often at that intersection. I would love to see somebody with a lot more education than I possess really study that and figure out what is it about that intersection that is setting pedestrians up for this situation. And it’s usually they’re walking uphill. Usually they’re in groups with their friends and they’re laughing and joking and they don’t look at the cross traffic at all. It predictably happens at that intersection.
Zach: Right. It’s like you look at some… There’s definitely places that have more accidents and others and it’s like you could… I know sometimes they do study what is it exactly about this that’s not obvious that’s causing people to get in an accident?
Brendan: Yeah.
Zach: Interesting area of study. You had mentioned the body language of cars, and I was actually talking to another bus driver who I almost interviewed and he was talking about how he could tell patterns with the type of cars. Like, expensive cars behaved in a certain way. And I think he was saying the more expensive high-end cars would behave more aggressively and rudely to the bus, versus less expensive cars following the rules more. I don’t know if you notice anything like that.
Brendan: Well, yes and no. Because I feel like when you think about something like that, you have to really be on guard against your own confirmation bias. Meaning if you resent this guy because he has a $120,000 BMW and he violates your right of way, that’s going to stick out in your mind and you’re going to remember it more than the person in the Toyota Camry who behaved exactly the same way. But of course, as you might know, there are actually studies out there and think pieces about them on the internet about the idea that BMW drivers do actually habitually drive worse than owners of other cars.
Zach: Haven’t heard that.
Brendan: Yeah, BMW and Prius drivers are kind of notorious. [laughs]
Zach: Interesting. I was getting a ride from a Lyft/Uber driver and he was saying how he thought that Toyota drivers, for some reason, were the worst drivers on the road. And it was funny when he said that. Literally like a second after he said that, a car went zooming by us on the shoulder and sure enough, it was a Toyota. [crosstalk] It was strange that he happened to tell us that and we saw it firsthand. Do you have any opinion on Toyota drivers?
Brendan: No, not at all. Prius drivers have acquired a reputation for themselves, I think, because early on when hybrids were kind of new, there was this phenomenon of hybrid owners would be staring at their dashboard because they’re hypermiling and they’re watching that little gauge that shows exactly how many miles per gallon they’re getting. So Prius drivers kind of became notorious for going slower than the flow of traffic. And people that gravitate towards Priuses tend to be people that are not interested in driving because it’s not a fun driver’s car. So I think Prius drivers acquired a reputation. But no, I don’t have any kind of opinion about Toyota owners in particular.
Zach: Got you. Okay. Maybe it’s a Portland thing, if it is a thing at all.
Brendan: If you’re in the car enthusiast community, there are always car enthusiasts who have opinions, you know? Like, “Oh, Nissan guys are like this,” or, “Ford owners are like that.” But I think that’s just a lot of silliness really.
Zach: Right, it’s like sports teams kind of stuff. Can you think of any other things that come to mind as far as predicting car patterns or traffic patterns?
Brendan: Well, part of operating a bus safely is you have to occupy space in such a way that it makes it impossible for motorists to do dangerous things or discourages them from doing so. For example, when you’re making a right turn in a bus, there’s this phenomenon of the squeeze play, where if you’re turning wide enough that there’s enough room for a cyclist or a motorist to squeeze in between you and the curb while you’re making that right turn, somebody will try it. And, of course, what they don’t realize is that as you’re making the right turn, the space between the bus and the curb is getting narrower and narrower. So when somebody pulls that squeeze play, it’s entirely possible that the bus is going to make contact with them. So the way we’re trained is make that right turn not so wide. You know, lock up the space so that you’re aware of what the back wheel is doing and make sure you look in your right mirror enough times that you’re not making it… I mean, I’m kind of repeating myself here. But, yeah. Another example would be if you’re driving on a street with really narrow lanes that has a lot of parked cars sticking out on the right hand side because maybe the area for parked cars is narrower than it should be, you want to keep the right side of your bus away from those parked cars. It’s especially an issue in San Francisco because our housing crisis is so insane that we have a lot of people who live in RVs and vans now so there are a lot of major thoroughfares with tons of RVs and vans that stick out kind of far from the curb. And so what you want to do is keep the right side of your bus away from those parked vehicles. That means you have to encroach on the lane to the left of the lane that you’re driving in. And one of my trainers very recently told me, “You know what? Don’t just drive with your left-hand tire on that line that divides the lanes because…” Well, I actually brought it up with my trainer. Because if I’m driving with my tire on the stripe that divides the lanes, what happens is motorists will squeeze past me in that lane that’s to my left. And that’s dangerous. So what this trainer told me was go ahead and split those two lanes so you’re occupying 50% of that lane to your left and 50% of that right lane. Because at that point, you’ve taken away the ability of a motorist to split the lane with you and so it’s a lot safer because they’re not going to sideswipe you if they can’t squeeze past you on your left.
Zach: Do you feel like when you actually start getting pretty skilled at something like this, and for a lot of things in general, it’s like you can have that curve of getting so skilled that you get too relaxed and paying attention as much and you go into autopilot. I imagine that’s got to be a risk for skilled bus drivers.
Brendan: Yeah, very much so. I used to have this regular passenger, a woman by the name of Nikki, who had a lot of experience driving buses in Las Vegas and also had a lot of experience as a big rig truck operator. And she used to get on the 19 Polk all the time. She would talk to me about things and she told me that her observation was that two years in is when you really see operators begin to have accidents that are kind of surprising. Because at that point, you know enough and you’re confident enough that you may be a little bit dangerous. [chuckles]
Zach: Right, that must be such a pattern in so many jobs. You start to know enough to get relaxed and then that’s when you’re really dangerous.
Brendan: Yeah, quite possibly. But at the same time, it’s best to not be… I feel like there’s a healthy amount of terror that you should have at all times. The analogy that I think of a lot is I’ve been told that people who fly helicopters have to always be prepared for disaster at all times. There’s this thing called auto-rotation that would allow a helicopter pilot to not have a catastrophic crash even when they lost the engine, because the rotors are still spinning. So you can use this auto-rotation technique to put the helicopter down in a way that’s not a crash when you’ve lost your engine. But the problem is you got to always have a place where the helicopter can be put down if that happens. So what I’ve been told is that helicopter pilots are always constantly scanning the terrain during every second that they’re in the air, always making sure that they are aware of where’s that flat surface that’s wide enough and unobstructed enough that I could put the helicopter down right now if I had to. And I feel like there’s a certain parallel to driving a bus. It’s like you always have to be thinking about what can go wrong right now. What is the disaster that is about to happen if I’m not vigilant? You know?
Zach: Continually scanning the horizon or the road.
Brendan: Yeah, very much so.
Zach: For a couple of summers, I worked for a plumbing company. I drove one of their bigger trucks and I still have nightmares about (bad dreams, anyway) about driving the truck of it flipping over or me hitting something randomly on the road. Did you have any of those fears going in that you had to get over?
Brendan: Oh, yeah. I mentioned that in the article I wrote. Basically, because I’d never driven a large vehicle before I entered Munis’ training program, I certainly found them kind of intimidating. During that first week when you’re doing the obstacle course in the training program, you look in that outside mirror, and there is a flat mirror but there’s also a convex mirror. The convex mirror shows more of what’s out there but it makes everything look small. And so you look in that convex mirror and it’s really kind of scary. Because you can see the sides of the bus and the right rear tire or both rear tires, depending on which mirror, but the thing is you’re looking in there and it’s kind of shocking how far away that back tire is from where you’re sitting. And it really drives home the fact that this is a really large vehicle covered with blind spots, and it’s potentially a very dangerous machine if you operate it wrong. And the first time I ever noticed that, it was legitimately terrifying. But what I eventually began to realize was that those mirrors were my best friends because they allow you to project your consciousness outwards and towards the sides and back of the bus. So in some way, it makes the bus feel smaller because you know what’s going on back there.
Zach: That’s an interesting choice of words, project your consciousness. Because it must be like with driving, you start to feel like actually this is your body. So giving you that awareness of the different parts of the bus, over time, you instinctually start to understand that this bus is kind of yourself in a way. The sense of it.
Brendan: Yeah, I don’t know if I really… It’s weird because it’s like I’ll watch somebody driving one of our buses or just look at one of my co-workers going by and it’s kind of a surreal experience. Because when I’m outside the bus, I’m looking at it and it’s like that thing is larger than some studio apartments in San Francisco. And it’s crazy that I get to drive that thing! You know?
Zach: Yeah, it’s intimidating. One big problem I see with people’s driving abilities in general, not buses, is that so many people don’t know how big their vehicles are. And I’m wondering is that something they really focus on when you do the training? Because that would seem to me to be one of people’s biggest weaknesses.
Brendan: Yeah, that obstacle course during the first week, a lot of it is all about, “Can you get around these orange cones without running them over?” Because are you able to internalize an understanding of, you know, the bus is eight and a half feet wide- I think it’s 10 and a half feet tall and 40 feet long- and are you able to understand that on some kind of deep level? Alot of it is reference points. It’s like you have to use your mirrors to know what the sides of the bus are doing and what the back wheel is doing, especially as you’re going around turns. But there’s also a lot of understanding what reference points you might need to use outside the bus. You know, what part of the bus needs to be lined up with this fixed object in order for me to start turning, so that I’m not turning too soon so I don’t hit the fixed object as I’m trying to steer around it.
Zach: Right, that would be like looking at the windshield and knowing a certain place is the side of your bus kind of thing.
Brendan: Yeah, exactly.
Zach: Anything else stand out as far as really interesting times? Do you have equivalents of when you said your acquaintance seeing somebody running out of the store ahead? Do you have any things that stand out like that where you’re like, “Oh, that was really cool that I knew that.”
Brendan: Oh, yeah, definitely. But I think long and hard about my failures also. And this comes back to reading people. I had this experience a few months ago, where this woman got on the bus and she was just talking wrong. She was saying things that were bad and wrong. It was a crowded bus and it’s like there’s this mental calculus that I did where I’m thinking, “Okay, I could make a big show of the fact that I’m in charge of this environment and I have the authority to deny service to somebody. I could stop the bus right now and tell her she has to get off. Or I could stop the bus right now and tell her she has to behave herself if she wants to ride on the bus.” But my experience has been that oftentimes these situations resolve themselves on their own. And oftentimes, based on where we were, it seemed like maybe probably that person was just going to ride for a couple of blocks and get off. So I did not intervene. And I think about this event a lot because what wound up happening is she actually put her hands on another passenger in a way that was really disturbing and it was hugely dramatic. And at that point, I had to stop the bus and call the people on the radio that give me orders and tell them, “Hey, get some police over here.” She actually exited the bus because there were many passengers around her that intervened in the situation. But that was a tremendous learning experience for me because it was like, basically, I should have trusted my gut and I should have intervened sooner. You know? It’s like if I’d just set the tone a little bit sooner and said, “Hey, you know, you can’t really be saying these threatening crazy things because I can’t operate the bus whilst something like that is happening on board the bus,” I have to wonder if I’d done that much earlier in the situation, maybe she would have never put her hands on that woman, and therefore, that woman would have had a much better experience. You know?
Zach: Must be all sorts of ways to second guess yourself, though. Because who’s to say, if you did it a different way, something worse could have happened or something. But I’m sure you’re always learning about better ways to process.
Brendan: Yeah. Muni, and in their training program, they’re really clear about telling us, “Hey, you’re not the police.” I actually have a co-worker, this guy named [***]. He’s a bodybuilder. And I know from talking to him that he has, you know, he could handle himself in a fight. But he once shared with us his technique when somebody is acting wrong on the bus. His way of approaching it is they’ll stop the bus, and he’ll speak to them in a very calm tone of voice and he’ll say to them, “Look, I can’t tell you what to do. I can’t tell you to get off this bus. But I can’t move this bus as long as you’re on it.” His philosophy on that is basically that at that point, he’s giving them their power. He’s not even ordering them to do anything. He’s telling them… He’s allowing them to make the decision. And because they’re keeping some of their power, it’s a less dangerous situation.
Zach: That makes sense because for people going through mental stuff, the feeling that they’re out of control probably plays a role. So to put the control on them is probably helpful for them avoiding getting angry.
Brendan: Yeah. And my sense was that he wasn’t even necessarily talking about people with mental illness.
Zach: Just anyone.
Brendan: Yeah, sometimes people just are toxic and violent in their speech and demeanor. You know?
A talk with David Foster, who writes about polarization and media at knowthesystem.org and is the author of “Moderates of the World Unite!: Reworking the Political Media Complex.” Topics discussed include: the optimal approach for reducing toxic political polarization (cultural change vs systemic changes); defining the word ‘moderate’ and examining some of the negative connotations it has; the difficulty of making any changes in a polarized, high-animosity environment; why some conservatives dislike the idea of making systemic changes; the ideas in David’s book for improving the media environment and political discourse. A transcript is below.
Episode links:
Resources related to or mentioned in our talk:
- Cynical Chris Rufo tweet and another one
- A book by Damon Centola about cultural change and how it happens
TRANSCRIPT
Zachary Elwood:
Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about psychology and behavior. You can learn more about it PeopleWhoReadPeople.com.
Sometimes this podcast focuses on America’s political polarization problem, as I think it’s our most serious problem and also a problem that, by its nature, prevents people from caring about solving the problem. I focus on it because I think not nearly enough people do.
On today’s episode I talk to David Foster, who writes about polarization and the media landscape on his site knowthesystem.org and who recently released a book aimed at reducing toxic polarization titled Moderates of the World Unite!: Reworking the Political Media Complex.
David and I talk about polarization and media, and we focus on the question: what’s the most optimal strategy for trying to reduce toxic polarization? Is it better to focus on making systemic changes, like passing legislation aimed at improving the media environment or other policies? Or is it better to focus on changing the culture; changing the way everyday people think and treat each other?
David has focused more on the systemic aspects, specifically with regards to the media environment. In my work I’ve focused on more cultural change. So this talk might be interesting to you apart from polarization because the focus is on: how do we change culture for the better? What are the levers we have to pull?
And for anyone interested in polarization I think this is a very important question that doesn’t get asked enough. Trying to figure out the best ways to spend our time is an important issue; we want to get the most bang for our buck, or for our effort. So it’s David and I’s hope this is of value for people in the bridge-building and depolarization space.
And just a note that this is a video talk and the video version is on my People Who Read People youtube channel. So if you’re listening on audio and it sounds less edited than usual, that’s why. I’ve been trying to do more video talks.
Okay, here’s the talk with David Foster, author of “Moderates of the World, Unite!”.
Zach: Let’s start out with, how did you get into this work? What drives your passion in this area? If you want to summarize that, I know that’s a big question.
David Foster: Yeah. Yeah, that is a big question. I mean, the motivation is probably pretty similar to yours and everyone who works in the whole problem of polarization and depolarization. I want to see this country have a more pragmatic problem-solving attitude towards everything. And polarization is making our government, especially the Congress, kind of dysfunctional and unable to do much of anything, as we are currently seeing in the Congress even in the past few weeks. That’s what’s driving me. I guess you could call it idealistic, but I’m really interested in… I think it’s a super important problem and it kind of gets in the way of solving other problems. Yeah, that’s what’s driving me. As you know, my career has been in online course development- eLearning- and my educational background even goes back into studying theory and cognitive science and computer science. I know a lot about learning systems, like technology-based learning systems, and I think maybe that gave me ideas about ways to approach the problem that not everyone would think of. And I rose to a pretty high level, I guess you could say, in that whole sector but decided five years ago that I want to work on this problem because it’s so urgent.
Zach: Is part of your frustration maybe like mine, where you feel a bit of frustration because people aren’t paying enough attention to these things as they should?
David: Yeah. Yeah, huge frustration. And it’s super daunting. You and I have talked a lot and I think we both feel it, you know? I remember a guy who was kind of a mentor who was coaching me, and he described it once, “Well, you know, David, what you’re doing is sort of like standing on the yellow line in between two lanes of traffic speeding in different directions. That’s kind of where the moderates and the people who want to work on polarization are.”
Zach: You need like a thin yellow line flag or something.
David: Yeah, definitely. [laughs] Definitely.
Zach: Maybe we can work on that branding. That might be good.
David: Yeah, that’s a branding opportunity for sure.
Zach: Yeah. Maybe that’s a good segue to talk about, you know, you and I have talked about the two different high-level categories of how to approach this kind of work. You focused on the more systemic changes, like changes to media or policy, and I have focused more on grassroots convincing people of the need for it. Yeah, and I want us to be real frank here because I have my own doubts about whether I’m spending… We can all second guess if we’re spending our time on the right things, but maybe you could talk a little bit about why you have focused on the systemic changes as opposed to the more kind of grassroots mass mainstream convincing efforts.
David: Right. Right. Yeah, it’s a really good question and quite a dilemma. I have to caveat first by saying that I do see a lot of value in grassroots efforts and I admire the work that people are doing. And it can only be a net positive, you know? Even if it doesn’t change the world, every little bit helps. Also, the other caveat is we need multiple approaches. None of us knows which is going to have the most impact and so we should welcome all approaches as I do, and I’m sure you do as well. The analogy– or try out this analogy, I’m curious what you think– My belief is that there’s some value towards focusing on the system-level things in terms of efficiency and productivity and impact. An analogy that I would use is, when inflation is heating up, one approach would be to try to convince all the companies in the country to not raise prices, you know? Or the Fed can raise interest rates and it spreads through the whole system and it’s more efficient and scalable and all those good things. So the analogy in the face of escalating polarization, one approach is to try to convince individuals to work on their own contributions to polarization. And you’ll get some people to do it, for sure, and it helps. But my take on it is that why not, instead, go at the cause of it in the media environments and what’s really causing it? Because it’s my belief that the escalating polarization we’ve had in the last 20 years is not due to a change in human nature. That’s kind of the reverse direction of the causality, in my opinion, that when you’re trying to fix individuals, that’s trying to fix the effects. Whereas, in my opinion, the cause is primarily due to the change in the public media environment.
Zach: Right, environment. Yeah.
David: But not public media, just the media environment.
Zach: Right. Right. Yeah, and I’d say I’m with you in the sense that I don’t have any firm opinions. Actually, talking to you about this in the past made me update my book because I felt like I was downplaying systemic change too much. It’s not that I’m like… I think systemic changes are very good and very important. And like you say, I think we need everybody working on it. Because I think the way I think of what I’m doing or what other organizations who focus on convincing people of the need, I see it as some of those people we convince that it’s a big problem will help create the systemic changes and there needs to be some sort of pressure to work on those things. But yeah, like you say, it’s like I have doubts about what am I or what are any of these organizations really doing. Because if you change a few people’s minds, how much is it doing? But then you can also have those doubts about the systemic change aspect, where it’s like, “How can we really get this gridlocked Congress to pass a systemic change?” So to your point, I see them as [working a concert]. You have to convince enough people to even try it, too, whatever you’re going to try to do systemically. Yeah.
David: Right. Right. Yeah, it’s a chicken and egg problem, for sure. I think one of the things that the grassroots efforts aren’t doing enough of, you know, I agree that if enough people are sort of working on depolarizing themselves and learning how to be more civil and so forth, that could generate some pressure. But it’s not really getting them thinking about the media environment and about what’s… And so if no one’s really thinking about, well, what could Congress even do, that’s not going to put any pressure on Congress. Or at least that’s my concern.
Zach: Yeah. And to your point, I can imagine somebody could easily take… A Republican or a Democrat Congressperson could easily take an idea out of your book and make a bill around it or something, right? Theoretically, that could pretty easily get bipartisan support and could pass and you can make a big impact. So I see your argument that the effort of getting something through to draw attention or to change the immediate environment is theoretically a much bigger payoff for the effort, right? Because I have that sense, too, when say even a few thousand people read my book, for example, it’s like yeah, what does that really do? I think most of that effort is actually wasted but it’s kind of my hope that a few of those people will do something else. Like, a few of those people will be influential. That’s kind of my idea. That’s how I think of it. It’s like, maybe one of those people, for example, could be a congressperson who takes one of your ideas and makes it into a bill.
David: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Zach: That’s kind of how I view the interconnection there, you know? It’s all good stuff and I’m not convinced my approach is the most efficient either.
*** A quick note here. I wanted to say that I think I was underselling cultural change work a little bit here. I don’t work on cultural change stuff only in the hopes that it gets people to work on more systemic changes. That’s underselling what I see is the power and goals there. I think it’s actually easier to change culture than we sometimes think. Sometimes all it can take is a few relatively influential people pushing back on certain behaviors to affect other people’s behaviors, to affect a lot of people’s behaviors. I think many of us have overly pessimistic and fatalistic views about the difficulty of changing culture. I think getting a decent percentage of people to think differently about politics and how we engage with other people can actually make a big difference, especially if some of those people have influential voices and are brave enough to speak up and push back on the incentives and the toxic polarization. I just wanted to clarify that a little bit as I felt I was doing a disservice to the cultural change work.
Okay, back to the talk. ***
David: Well, I’m probably jumping ahead and talking about specific ideas, but you said something about it would be easy enough for a legislator to take one of the ideas in my book and turn it into a bill. I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. Like it’d be that easy.
Zach: Oh, not that easy? It’s possible, though. Right?
David: But it’s possible. Yeah. And unless people are sort of suggesting it, it won’t happen at all. We can get into this if you want but part of the problem is especially on the [unintelligible 00:16:15] who just doesn’t want a lot of people on the Right, who just don’t want the government to do anything. You can make your arguments about how, “Wait, this is fair to both sides what we’re doing here,” but yeah, there will be resistance.
Zach: Yeah, to that point. That was actually… It’s kind of obvious in hindsight, but that didn’t really strike me until pretty recently a few months ago, where I saw a conservative person on Twitter respond to an idea of a government-led depolarization effort. Like you said, they were very much against the idea for the usual conservative reasons of like, “We don’t want government solving this, government’s just going to make it worse.” I hadn’t really realized that but in hindsight, it’s like, yeah, of course, they’d be against a government solution. That’s not to say all conservatives or Republicans would be against that, because clearly Republicans have some government programs they like so if you could convince enough of them, then maybe it will go over well. But yeah, that was an interesting angle too that I hadn’t really seen until recently.
David: Yeah. No, definitely, that’s one of many obstacles and barriers. Yeah. Or headwinds. I don’t know what the right word is. [chuckles]
Zach: Yeah, I think the difficult thing with the gridlock and always thinking in the worst case framing is even if you arrived at something that in better times both sides would agree to mostly, how it often goes is one side will be like, “I think they’re getting a slight advantage,” so they are against it. That’s kind of how a lot of these things end up going, which speaks to just the problem of polarization in general. Yeah.
David: Yeah. But, you know, this is another one of these things where a large portion, I think, a large portion of the country is pretty tired and disgusted with the extreme partisanship and the gridlock. You could even maybe say that a lot of Trump’s base is motivated by the antipathy towards Congress and how they just aren’t paying attention to what they care about or what their needs are. And then there’s the exhausted majority kind of stuff, you know? So I think there’s a hunger for it, but it needs to get more focused. That’s one of the things I hope my book might be, in a small way, helpful in trying to do.
Zach: I do think there’s– even in Congress, I think even if there’s pressure to not talk about it, I think even many of those people want solutions. Right? Because I think many of them, even if they stay quiet for fear of hurting their side or whatever, I think many of them are sick of it.
David: Oh, for sure. Yeah. Oh, like there’s the Problem Solvers Caucus, which that’s kind of their mission; is to sort of bust through all that. But it hasn’t been easy. And no labels, you know? It’s been excoriated by Democrats. Because it’s a spoiler, it’s going to get Trump into office, and so forth. But in spite of all that, I think they have some base of support that wants to look for a different way.
Zach: That’s good to have. It’s like a trial balloon to see how much support those kind of third-party candidates would get. Do you want to talk about the… Let’s talk about your book, if you want to talk about, what were you most proud of when it comes to the proposals in there or what was the most unique ideas? Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
David: Yeah, no, definitely. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?
Zach: If you’re willing.
David: Absolutely. Well, I haven’t even said much about the book. So, just to kind of high-level it just to start, the book has two parts to it. One is, it’s kind of an analysis of the way that for-profit media just in the last two to three decades has influenced and caused really rapidly accelerating polarization in the country. Then the second half is, I attempt to provide a vision of several national-level initiatives at a scale that tries to match the size of the problem as a way to potentially turn things around. I can talk a little bit about some of the ideas, but the key theme, I guess, would be that it’s trying to change the national speech environment. And I think it’s going to require, not for every one of the proposals, but for a lot of them, some legislative action to make them happen. That will bring out the free speech or First Amendment absolutist saying, you know, you can’t do that. But a key is that none of the proposals are about any type of censorship or trying to control the content. All of the proposals have to be nonpartisan and have the right governance structures in them and so on.
And the goal is not to change the content of speech anywhere, but the speech environment. You know, the world has changed pretty dramatically in the last two decades. The speech environment, it’s nothing like anything the founders could have ever envisioned. And what we’ve seen is social media is destroying the economic model for journalism and it’s just become this terrible race for profitability, both the social media companies and the news media companies. If you heard the expression ‘cheap speech’ which was coined a few years ago, it’s kind of an acknowledgment that in the old days, there wasn’t very many ways to get speech out there; there was a few networks and so on. And in the new environments, with lots of different TV channels and of course with social media and blogs, we’re just drowned in speech. The founders could have never anticipated that. I believe that the Fourth Estate is supposed to facilitate democratic discourse and I think what we’re looking at is a massive market failure. That’s why I think who else but the government can come in and try to fix the speech environment. The speech environment, not speech. [laughs]
Zach: Right, the environment. Yeah. [crosstalk] Yeah, go ahead.
David: Let me stop there.
Zach: This is something I think about sometimes, I’m curious if you’ve thought a bit about it. I sometimes think about the immense demand for content that all these companies have and how that’s a factor in destabilizing us. It’s like in order to fill these airwaves, these many vacuum of airwaves, people need content. And what are we going to make for content? We’re going to make stuff that presses people’s emotional buttons, right? The demand to create all this to make money, basically, and fill this huge amount of bandwidth we have of content, they create all this stuff that polarizes us and divides us unintentionally, often. But I just see it as this machine for destabilizing us. There’s just so many narratives floating around, so many divisive polarizing narratives, and just so much content. Yeah.
David: Yeah, right. Well, I think in this new era, we should start regarding the really limited amount of attention that individuals have as a precious societal resource that we should stop wasting on sensationalism and polarizing rhetoric and stuff like that. It’s a really precious resource that we should be trying harder to make the best use of for everyone.
Zach: Right. Just think about the millions of hours that people spend on these meaningless shows and watching videos on TikTok. Anyway, I’m digressing and ranting a little bit, but it’s just… I mean, I do that a good amount myself, but… Maybe we can talk about one of your ideas that you’re most proud of. I think you had mentioned something about the– I can’t remember the exact name, but something involving silo. [00:27:06]
David: Yeah, yeah. That’s one I like to… That might be the one I’m proud of at some level, at least. I think it’s kind of creative. Yeah, that one is… In the modern media environment, we have these echo chambers, as they’re called. They may be sometimes overstated, but when you’re in an echo chamber, you only hear the version of reality on that political side. And what you do hear about the other side is mostly a straw man. It’s like—
Zach: Worst-case arguments.
David: Yeah, worst-case arguments. And when you’re in echo chambers, it also contends to push everyone to have more extreme views. Anyway… So the idea for this proposal is to pass a new law that requires all media outlets of all types– and this has never been easy for me to explain real quickly but I’ll do my best– requires all of them to allow a new technical scheme that injects on-the-spot counter-speech into every broadcast or article or whatever. The way that would be done is to register what I call a designated opposition person for each of those news outlets or– I don’t know how granular it would get. And there’d be on all screens, whether it’s a TV screen, computer screen for social media or for news websites, at the end of each associated with each content piece, there would be this recognizable button which I call OPPO, O P P O for opposition. No one’s ever encouraged or required to click on it, but anytime they do, they can get what an opposition person would have to say about that particular content. So can you see how it busts open the echo chamber in a way by inserting… Now, you might think that, okay, that opposition person is just going to spew propaganda and take apart everything that the speaker or writer has to say. Actually, I don’t think it would work that way. Because you know you’re in a unfriendly audience and it’s your job to appeal to them.
Zach: Yeah. You don’t want to drive them away. [crosstalk]
David: You don’t want to drive them away. Yeah. Right. So I don’t know, is that a good explanation? [chuckles]
Zach: Yeah. I think people would have a lot of questions about how the specifics of— [crosstalk]
David: Absolutely. Buy the book and you’ll find out. [laughs]
Zach: Okay. But that idea, it kind of gets to the heart of how I view these things. Because to me, it’s like this divergence of narratives, right? These narratives are growing apart.
David: Oh, yeah.
Zach: So it’s like anything you can do to get people to start considering the better aspects of the other narrative will draw the narratives a little bit closer together. Right?
David: Yes. Yes.
Zach: And that’s how I think about a lot of the stuff I write about. If you engage with the better arguments on the other side, it draws the narratives together. Yeah, to your… I was going to bring up, too, a good example of the whole bubble phenomenon recently was when the Supreme Court was, you know, everybody knew the Supreme Court was going to weigh in on the Colorado ruling to remove Trump from the ballot. That was a good example where in the liberal-leaning sphere, I saw these people act as if it was a certainty that that was a good ruling Colorado made and the only reason the Supreme Court would vote against it would be Conservative bias or pro-Trump bias. Versus I read Tangle News– which I just interviewed Isaac Saul who started Tangle News recently– and I had a much better idea that, oh, from reading that and reading the arguments, I was almost certain that the Supreme Court was going to rule against it and why and what the good reasons were. But the thing I saw in the Liberal-leaning sphere, including people I knew, they spoke as if you had that opinion that that was going to happen or if you thought that those were good arguments, that you were pro-Trump or you had Conservative bias. I think that was just a good example where everyone was shocked, like, “What do you mean that was a unanimous Supreme Court ruling? I was expecting it to be split amongst the usual.” That was just a good example where if your example for your solution for that would be on CNN, there would have been somebody explaining the better arguments and even why Liberals and Democrats should want that because if they went the other way, it could be used against a Democrat president. These kinds of better arguments which I just don’t think many people are exposed to for many of these issues on either side. Yeah.
David: Yeah, we’ve talked about this before. We both believe that most political thinking is in the form of narratives. A term I use a lot in my book for it is ‘talking points’, which are the manifestations in public discourse that sort of create and activate and reinforce narratives—
Zach: —in the pieces of the narrative. Yeah. [crosstalk]
David: Yes. Right. Right. Right.
Zach: Gotcha.
David: I also– I don’t know if this is the ideal place to stick this in but since you brought up the liberal bubble, I just wanted to plug your book. I think it’s so great your approach or your taking of just focusing on one side, for this book anyway.
Zach: Oh, the latest one. Yeah.
David: Yeah, your new one. Right.
Zach: Yeah, to a liberal anti-Trump audience. Yeah.
David: Right. Because there’s so many liberals and progressives who think, “Oh, it’s just that side’s problem,” and they don’t see the way they’re contributing to the polarization themselves. And the way that liberal sanctimony just really pisses people on the Right off to such a deep, deep degree.
Zach: The righteousness.
David: And righteousness. Yeah. Not that there’s not some of that going the other way too, but it’s not totally symmetric in my opinion.
Zach: Yeah, I do often think about the… I mean, there’s all sorts of asymmetries, which I think is an unexamined part of examining American polarization or any conflict as these group asymmetry. It’s like the fact that liberal-leaning people dominate the mainstream media and the Hollywood and academic world, it’s like that is an asymmetry that has effects on how the conflict plays out. And I don’t think those kinds of asymmetries are talked about enough, but…
David: Right.
Zach: Do you want to… Is there anything we haven’t gotten to that’s important that you want to touch on?
David: Well…
Zach: Oh, I was going to ask you about your book title. The word ‘moderates’ can be kind of off-putting to some people because some people are like, “I have views that some people would consider extreme.” I don’t want to be a moderate, you know, but there’s different approaches of explaining or defining what a moderate is. So, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you view that word.
David: Sure. Well, the definition that I use is… There’s a lot of different interpretations. And some of the interpretations of what a moderate is aren’t too complimentary. They’re people who are wishy-washy, indecisive, low information… And that’s true for some people, for sure. So the definition I used in my book, and it’s not a standard definition, but it’s people who despise both the hard Right and hard Left; who are resistant to sort of one-sided grand-sweeping narratives that come from either side.
Zach: When you say despise, you don’t have to hate them as people, just dislike their ideas and approach. Right?
David: Yeah. Well, yes, except for I have a special place in hell in my book for propagandists who intentionally manipulate the system. Most of what’s going on in the system is just economic forces. And I don’t blame journalists or social media companies or anyone, generally, the one bad actors or one category of bad actors are those propagandists.
Zach: You got your nine levels of polarization hell.
David: [chuckles] Exactly. But to your larger point, no, I never despise the people who are in a lot of cases pawns of a lot of this. But, yeah.
Zach: Although I will say the thing that strikes me is some of these people who I think are some of the most, in my mind, honestly kind of gross and despicable people– I’m not going to name any names right now, I talk about them elsewhere– but some of these people are to me like it’s really hard to separate their propaganda from the true belief. Because some of these people, to me, are like their minds have been deranged by conflict. They really do think that they’re in an us versus them battle. And I guess that gets into where they’re willing to the-ends-justify-the-means kind of approaches where they’re like, “Yeah, we’re willing to bend the truth or even even lie because the ends are so justified and…” Not to excuse it, but it’s like some of these people I think have been deranged by conflict. Which I think is the bad thing about conflict and extreme polarization, is that it deranges more and more people to be that way. Right?
David: Sure. Definitely. Yeah. And if I thought the planet was going to be destroyed if I didn’t win, I might be willing to lie too. So your point is well taken. But I will name one name just as a counter-example.
Zach: I’m willing to name some names, you know? I just didn’t want to derail it. But…
David: Oh, well, I’ll just name one. Although I won’t go so far as to say that I know what his true beliefs are. But Christopher Rufo, do you remember that ignominious tweet that he did about three years ago about how he was programming the world to understand the words ‘critical race theory’ in a specific way?
Zach: Yeah, it’s basically like lifting up the curtain and saying, “Here’s my approach to ruining this word and making it toxic in a manipulative deceptive way.” Right?
David: Yeah. He didn’t even… There was no hint of apology, or any sort of self, or any kind of justification. It painted a picture that he regards conservatives as rubes, you know? That the general public, on the Conservative side, is so manipulable and that I can program their thinking and they won’t be any other wiser. I just find that so reprehensible.
Zach: It’s a strange thing, too, because disagree or not, there’s plenty of ways to denigrate those CRT ideas or whatever ideas in the Left, there’s plenty of… You don’t have to do that to demean someone else’s ideas, there’s plenty of legitimate ways that you can disagree. So, yeah. But yeah, to your point, it’s like… I’m pretty sure I mentioned his book. Oh, yeah, I’m pretty sure I mentioned his book about the Marxist ideology on the Left in my recent book as an example of like– I might have taken it out because it’s more for a liberal audience now, but an example of how both sides in conflict will reach for these really elaborate extra pessimistic narratives that go back in history and help build up this narrative of the immense badness and scariness of the other side. And then there is some truth to it, right? Far-left ideas do appear in these dangerous scenarios and there’s been all sorts of bad things and the horrors of communism and stuff in some of these countries. But it’s like to build this narrative, which is what the Left does about how everything on the Right is linking back to this racism and this elaborate narrative, right? Not to say it’s the same, we all have our views about who’s doing it more than the others and who’s doing it worse, but there’s just this tendency to build these elaborate narratives, which is what I see Rufo and these other people doing. And whether he believes it or not, to your point, it’s like he could be doing it purposely as a means to just destroy the brand. Not that he really needs it, because there’s plenty of other people doing it, too. But he could be doing it and painting that picture purposefully, or he could really believe that’s the scariness that he spews on the Left. And it can be hard to say but to your point, yeah, his tweet about kind of saying here’s my strategy for painting these things really negatively kind of shows you where his mind’s at.
David: Yeah. Well, I could say more about it because, you know, I do have a section of my book that kind of drills in– kind of like you did in your first book– drills into specific topics and sort of explores the talking points on each side and how quickly they fall apart if you just look at them briefly. But I talk a bit about Rufo and critical race theory. He has this briefing book that that he puts together for use by, I don’t know, in schools or parents or what have you. And you just look at it and it’s like straw man, straw man, straw man, straw man, one after the other. It’s so transparent. And this thing about– I think we’re going off here a little bit– that Marxism or that critical race theory is Marxist. Who cares? Why should I care about that? [laughs] Marxism is a scare word and it’s just…
Zach: Yeah, there’s all sorts of… It’s quite easy. That’s the thing, getting back to the narrative idea, it’s like the importance of stories. It’s so easy to build… I think that’s a really key fundamental aspect of understanding polarization, too, it’s just so easy to build stories. We can build stories out of nothing, basically. So it’s like, you give us two or three data points so we can build this story around it tying all this stuff together, you know, the story about the threat you’re facing or how bad your enemies are, right? It’s just so easy for us to—
David: Oh, it’s easy to do. Yeah. I mentioned in my book, Daniel Kahneman talks about what he calls the illusion of knowledge. The principle is that we just latch on to these stories, and the world isn’t really as explainable as it seems to be. And in fact, the less you know, the more certain you can feel that your story is a reflection of reality.
Zach: Yeah, I just want to throw in. I’ve been reading this philosopher Kevin Dorst’s work, he’s got a Substack and he talks about basically rational polarization and how we can have both these sides, on any issue, can have these rational narratives and they were reached rationally, and be completely divergent. And it’s all about how you sample information in a complex system because you can’t absorb all the information, you just pick and choose. It’s not to say everybody’s, you know, clearly there’s a lot of irrationality but he’s talking about for a lot of these issues that we argue over, there’s various rational narratives you could put together, but then you add on top the toxic polarization which makes us veer towards the irrational for some of these things. But do you think he’s talking— He’s talking about a pretty important key part of it, where it’s the fundamental ways that we can rationally diverge on a lot of these complex issues.
David: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s one thing that I, deep in my soul, look around and think, “Where’s the intellectual humility?” I’d love to teach people about how little they know and how much they shouldn’t rely on what they think they know. But that’s a tough one. I got a lot of that out of studying cognitive science and the way that people make inferences and the values that are hidden underneath a lot of it, and so on and so forth. There’s been a lot of great researchers and scholars who’ve written about it, but…
Zach: We need a PBS show or some kind of public service show every day reminding people that they’re idiots, you know? [David laughs] It’s like—
David: “You Are so Dumb” could be the name of it. [laughs]
Zach: It’s like, “I’m an idiot, we’re all idiots, so let’s just walk through how badly we get stuff wrong. That’d actually be a pretty good show.
David: Yeah, I’d watch it.
Zach: Somebody’s probably done something like that. Do you want to talk about anything you feel that we really missed that is important about your work that you want to throw in?
David: Yeah, thank you for asking. Kind of to pull in stuff when we were talking at the very beginning. So, this bust open the silos national initiative that I described earlier, that’s one of seven that I have in the book. The theme is finding ways to help people learn about politics and about political argumentation. But not through anything formal, just in daily life through ways that don’t require any effort or willpower or study. That’s a theme through several of my proposals. But like I said, some of them would definitely require legislative action, which is pretty tough. I just wanted to talk a little bit about… I don’t think we can go straight to any of these proposals. And the route that I have in mind– and it’s partly why I named the book the way I did, you know?
Zach: “Moderates of the World, Unite!”
David: Yes, yes.
Zach: Thought I’d mention it again.
David: Thank you. There could be pros and cons to that title. But a serious part of it is that I think for any of this to happen, it’s going to require a critical mass of engaged moderates to stand up and start demanding change of Congress. And so where my focus is going to be next is to work on ways to create educational materials that even include describing these proposals to people so that they can start to get a vision, not only that, “Oh, there’s ways we could improve it,” but also to get a better sense that, “Gosh, how did we get into this? This is not how the Fourth Estate is supposed to work in theory, even.” And so my hope is that through creating educational materials for college level and even for public spaces, I can play some small role in starting to help develop that critical mass of engaged moderates, you know, that will lead to greater amounts of advocacy. And kind of as a compliment the grassroots depolarization efforts that you and others are working on.
Zach: And eventually you can create a moderate militia to kick off the moderate revolution.
David: [laughs] Go ahead, make fun of me.
Zach: No, you said your book title was supposed to be a little little funny, right?
David: It is. Yeah.
Zach: Moderates revolting.
David: Yeah, workers of the world unite.
Zach: Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to clarify, I wasn’t mocking it. But did you also want to mention, because I really liked your idea about the responses to specifically polarizing tweets or other posts. Did you want to mention that idea really briefly here? In case anyone watching it might, theoretically, someone watching it might want to contact you about the idea or something.
David: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That’s one issue I’ve started prototyping, and it’s one of the one of the seven proposals in the book. I’m calling it right now at least ‘the schoolmarm’. The vision is to have a large, nonpartisan organization that… The focus, just a backup a little, is on polarizing rhetoric on social media, of which there’s a lot. [laughs] Of course. Not so much about factual falsehoods, and of course not like the illegal stuff which the platform’s themselves are responsible for taking care of and taking down. But the platforms have no incentive to do anything about polarized rhetoric on their platforms and certainly no business interest in doing so. But an external organization could go in and selectively go in and find polarizing posts. And when it does, attaching a little bit of educational material right next to those posts. Of course, it’s not going to get everyone. But if you get enough of them that people start seeing this once in a while even, it’ll raise consciousness and people, when they see polarizing rhetoric, they’ll sort of slow down a little bit and maybe some users will try to temper what they say online a little better. And it’ll just kind of reduce the status of dunking and… So, that’s the schoolmarm.
Zach: Yeah, like that. Getting back to the idea that there is a real demand out there for reducing these team-based ways of thinking and high contempt ways of engaging, I do think you’d see people respond to that. That was one of the… I kind of took a similar small-scale approach with my Twitter, that was basically what I was doing. I was just responding and doing a little bit of that. But I do think there’s a hunger there for it, and I think a lot of times people just don’t even know what that path looks like so they’re looking for, like, “Oh, that’s how this works!” Like, that’s how we do it. I think a lot of people want that, but they just don’t even know how do we get better. You know, what does better discourse look like? Or what do we have to push against exactly? I think that would be… I’m a fan of that. Even just people listening who want to do that on their own, I think that’s like encouraging people to be like, “Hey, go examine why this person’s speech is unreasonable and polarizing,” and not an insulting way, but a persuasive way, to say like, “Hey, can you see how this leads to the toxicity and such?”
David: Right, right. Well, and just to pile on that, Christopher Bail at Duke who’s studied this a lot has measured that the more extreme people on social media are the ones that post by far the most and get promoted the most. And moderates just… They don’t even speak up, you know? It’s too intimidating, they’re going to get… You know? And so people don’t even see moderates. Well, not none, but there’s not that much in the political realm. There’s not that much moderate speech right now. And if there were ways to encourage them to feel comfortable to speak and just bring the temperature down on social media.
Zach: Right. That’s the thing. Yeah, it really does work. I mean, I’ve seen just in my personal life on Facebook with a few friends, it’s like somebody shares something kind of unreasonable and everyone’s like, “Yeah!” And then you make a point about poking a hole in the logic gently, and everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. It’s a good point.” [crosstalk] It’s like it doesn’t actually take that much. But to your point, it’s like so few people feel like getting into those caustic interactions and it’s just not… It takes effort, it takes time, it takes a headache, you risk offending people you know, etc, etc. So there’s always reasons but…
David: Yeah, right. Right.
Zach: Okay. Yeah, this has been great, David. I appreciate it. And yeah, best of luck getting the book out there.
David: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me on your show.
Zach: Sure. Thanks. That was a talk with David Foster. You can learn more about him at his site knowthesystem.org. I’ll include links to some of the things we talked about, including his book at the entry for this episode on my site, peoplewhoreadpeople.com. And you can learn more about my soon-to-be-released new book on polarization at american-anger.com. Thanks for listening. Music by Small Skies.