I was interviewed on Mahima Samraik‘s podcast Breaking The Facts about my struggles with anxiety and mental issues as a young man, which led to me dropping out of college in the middle of my second year of college. We talk about what that experience was like; recommendations for people dealing with similar problems; and the obstacles that can get in the way of getting help.
Episode links:
A talk with psychologist Richard Bentall, author of the well known book “Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature,” which is an examination of the psychological causes of the symptoms associated with psychosis, schizophrenia, mania, and other mental issues. Richard Bentall is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Sheffield.
A transcript of this talk is below. Topics we talk about include: the experiences and mental struggles that can lead to symptoms associated with psychosis and other mental illness; how theories of mental illness have changed over time; pushback and criticism of psychology-focused explanations of mental illness; aspects of madness that most of us experience at some point; the role of feelings of isolation in madness; the difference between beliefs and delusions; and my own mental struggles as a young man.
Episode links:
Resources discussed in this episode or related to the topic:
TRANSCRIPT
Zach Elwood: Hello and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com.
On this episode I interview the psychologist Richard Bentall about mental illness, psychosis, and so-called schizophrenia. Bentall is probably most well known for his 2004 book Madness Explained, which is a fantastic book that I highly recommend. It won the British Psychological Society Book Award, and is widely regarded as a groundbreaking work in the world of psychology. When it comes to psychology, for me personally, it’s up there as one of the most important books ever written, alongside Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy.
In that book, and in his work in general, Bentall attempts to show how various symptoms of so-called madness are understandable human responses to various forms of stress and anxiety and trauma. In other words, he focuses on the psychological causes of madness, the factors related to the workings of our minds, as opposed to potential biological causes.
In this episode, we talk about how theories about the causes of mental illness have changed over time; we talk about pushback and criticisms to psychology-focused theories of madness; we talk about how it is that mental stresses can result in madness; and we talk about how we might distinguish strange but fairly common beliefs from delusions.
Along the way, I also talk about my own mental struggles as a young man; If you’re interested to hear more about that, I recommend a previous episode where I talked to Nathan Filer about psychosis and schizophrenia. And if you’re interested in mental health topics in general, you might also like a talk I had with Scott Stossel about understanding and dealing with anxiety. I also have a talk about existential psychology and therapy with the psychologist Kirk Schneider.
A little more about Richard Bentall: he’s a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Sheffield. In 1989 he received the British Psychological Society’s May Davidson Award for his contribution to the field of Clinical Psychology. He’s written several books, including “Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good?”, and one titled “Think You’re Crazy? Think Again: A Resource Book for Cognitive Therapy for Psychosis.” A 2021 Guardian article about Bentall was titled “Richard Bentall: the man who lost his brother – then revolutionized psychology”, and it’s a good read if you’d like to quickly learn more about his work and life story.
Okay, here’s the talk with Richard Bentall.
Hi Richard, thanks for coming on.
Richard Bentall: Hi. It’s good to be here.
Zach: So, maybe we can start with the idea that symptoms of so-called madness; the idea that those symptoms can be explained by psychological processes is seen by some people as controversial. And I know that when you first started writing about these kinds of ideas which I think was back in the ’80s you started some of this work, those ideas were more controversial than they are now. Maybe you could give an overview of how the mental health field as a whole has their views of such ideas has changed over time and some of those ideas have become more accepted.
Richard Bentall: Yeah. Okay. That’s actually quite a big topic but I’ll try and deal with the highlights, really.
Zach: Yeah, that’s a big one.
Richard Bentall: So throughout most of the history of psychiatry, research into mental illness is focused on diagnostic categories. So, people have been divided into different groups of patients according to whether they have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a major depression, or whatever. And that seems superficially quite a sensible thing to do, it’s an idea which goes back at least to the work of Kraepelin in the latter half of the 19th century. So for most research studies, for example, people are divided. You find that there’s a target group of patients who have particular diagnosis, say schizophrenia, versus healthy people who don’t have a diagnosis, and also sometimes a control psychiatric diagnosis. So you might have three groups; you might have schizophrenia patients, depressed patients and controls, and the hope is to find out something about schizophrenia. Of course that’s built on the assumption that the people who have the diagnosis of schizophrenia all have something in common, which makes them different than people in the comparison groups.
And quite early on in my career, it came to me. It wasn’t a particularly original idea, I don’t think. I can think of other people who said things to me which made me think along these lines but it came to me that schizophrenia in particular wasn’t a coherent entity where that assumption could be upheld. In fact when you looked at people who had diagnosis of schizophrenia, they had a wide range of different types of symptoms. And therefore it wasn’t really all that surprising that almost every variable known to influence human behavior at some time or other had been held out as a potential causal factor in schizophrenia, but for none of them it did it seem that the evidence was particularly consistent. That’s exactly what you get if you compared people who according to diagnoses, which were actually masking a great deal of heterogeneity within the diagnosis. So I wondered what you could do about that and the thought came to me that maybe if we couldn’t decide on what the core features of schizophrenia were, we could certainly agree on who, for example, had auditory hallucinations and who had paranoid beliefs. So I started to do research in the mid 1980s which was targeting people just based on those particular symptoms. Initially I started looking at people who were experiencing hearing voices. I was a bit influenced by my PhD which I’d actually done before my clinical training, and which was nothing to do with schizophrenia but it was actually about various aspects of child development, but was very influenced by the ideas of a Russian psychologist called Vygotsky who was interested in the way that children learn to think in words, a process which culminates in what you call inner speech– we all have this inner dialogue in our head. And it occurred to me that, whoa, whatever’s going on in auditory hallucinations is got to be something which is related to that process. And that led me fairly quickly to the idea that when people hear voices, what they’re actually hearing is their own inner speech or inner voice which they are somehow failing to recognize as belonging to themselves.
So while I was still in clinical training, I carried out my first study of hallucinations to test that hypothesis and actually I generated a result which has been replicated many times since. I think it’s probably my most replicated study, although the way I carried it out back in the day involved some very crude technology compared to the techniques which we have available today. But anyway, from there I went on to think about, well, what could lead people to have paranoid beliefs and so on? And that whole kind of approach became this idea of trying to develop a separate understanding for each of the different symptoms. And the idea is that once you’ve explained each of the symptoms, there’s no schizophrenia left to explain. Once you explain why people hear voices, why they have delusions, why they have what we call thought disorder which is actually a sort of speech disorder, why they have the so-called negative symptoms which is the ones which are associated with loss of motivation and loss of feeling… Once you explained those with separate theories for each of them, there’s no schizophrenia left to account for. And you’re right, it was a fairly controversial idea early in the day. People, I think, varied in terms of the way they responded to it. A lot of the psychiatrists I actually worked with at the time, because I was involved in face-to-face clinical work at the time, I think they thought I was kind of nice but useless– like somebody who had wacky ideas but they didn’t see me as certainly not harmful to put it like that. Whereas some people in the psychiatric establishment, senior people who got very annoyed about the suggestion that schizophrenia wasn’t a coherent entity and they got quite hostile, I would say at times. But as time rolled on more and more psychologists and physicians started to focus on symptoms. I wasn’t the only person I’m sure who kicked off this movement, other people at roughly the same time had also begun to look at individual symptoms. And we’re now in a position where research on symptoms is very well established. It’s a huge industry, in fact. In fact I find it almost impossible to keep up with it.
There’s a lot of research on particularly hearing voices, hallucinations, and there’s a lot of research on paranoid delusions, less research on some of the other symptoms, but it’s still there. So it has become quite widely accepted. And when I first started in that area, my methods were psychological ones because I was a psychologist obviously. But the borderlines between psychology and biology have dissolved in those three decades largely, mainly due to the invention of advanced neuro imaging techniques particularly MRI. Which means that psychologists can now carry out psychological tests on people and at the same time see what’s happening in the brain while people deal with those tests. So you can see using a technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging which I’m sure you’ve heard of. You can see which parts of the brain are active when a patient tries to solve a particular type of problem, for example, and then you can compare the brain activity in patients to other people. But again, you can do that kind of research focusing specifically on symptoms. And so I don’t think it’s controversial anymore to do research on symptoms. It’s still to some extent controversial, the idea that schizophrenia isn’t over meaningful a concept in the way it’s been traditionally used. But even that has become much less controversial in the sense that there are prominent people in main stream psychiatry who would argue that certainly the diagnostic system is not fit for purpose and that the concept of schizophrenia in particular is problematic. And that’s led in the last 10 years to a number of efforts to try and think of ways of developing better ways of classifying patients.
So, just an important point to add here and then I’ll stop for your next question. The important point to add is that there are some people who don’t like the idea of classifying patients at all. They think that somehow it’s dehumanizing, objectifying, and that each patient is unique. Of course it’s true that in many ways each patient is unique, but in order to make progress scientifically and also in order to have some pragmatic ways of estimating for example how many people are likely to need psychiatric treatment at any particular time in history, which is an important issue for public health people, or in order to find out for example which drugs are going to be most effective for which people, you do need to have some way of putting patients into groups to find groups which are meaningful.
So I think where we are now is that people accept there’s a very widespread acceptance that, for example, the Diagnostic and Statistical manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the only positive thing to be said about it is that it’s pragmatic and easy to use, but nobody really believes that the categories in the DSM correspond to how nature is.
And there’s quite a lot of search going on for alternatives. There’s some big research programs trying to develop alternative ways of thinking about those of classifying psychiatric conditions.
Zach: So it seems like some of the initial pushback in the– a few decades ago anyway some of that pushback about thinking about the psychological aspects of psychosis and schizophrenia might be seen to be due to some of the more irresponsible psychological theories that happened before that, like the idea of the schizophrenic mother. So I’m curious, do you see that as at least accounting for some of the reason why people didn’t want to delve into some of the psychological aspects of it?
Richard Bentall: Yeah, so it certainly, I think that’s true that if you look at some of the theories you should propose in the 1960s, which tended to put, I think where blame is actually, right. In fact, they tend to locate the blame for the problems of young adults on squarely on parents who were sometimes described in ways which make them almost seem like monsters, the refrigerator mother, for example. So when psychiatry took a biological turn in the 1980s, one of the reasons for that industry was that people thought that somehow that biological theories were less stigmatizing. Actually, they thought that somehow, that if you said that somebody who had schizophrenia had a brain disease, you were saying it was neither their fault nor the fault of anybody in their family.
And a lot of what was at the time called mental health literacy campaigns were based around that idea. And people used phrases like it’s a disease like any other or sometimes you’d hear people say, in fact, you see clinicians saying to patients, you’ve got something a bit like diabetes. It’s a chemical imbalance, I’m afraid like a diabetic person, you’re going to have to take your drugs for the rest of your life. But that’s what’s happened. And actually the situation around that is actually quite complex and nuanced. So what’s emerged is that a lot of evidence emerged that family relationships do affect the development of mental illness in offspring in children who later go on in adulthood to develop psychosis. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that now, and I’m always very careful, however, about how I talk about it, because in my entire clinical career, and I should just say as a caveat that I’ve not been doing face to face clinical work for about 10 years, but I did quite a lot over the years. In my entire career, I don’t think I ever met the parents of a psychotic patient who was a monster.
Actually, they seemed to be very distressed people whose hearts were broken very often by seeing their sons and daughters undergo these profound difficulties, which were, that you could see the grief sometimes in parents, as they could see. Every parent wants their children to have a bright, wonderful, happy future. And to have that stolen, as it seems, by this whatever it was, nobody really understood it. Schizophrenia, it was breaking their hearts. Sometimes it was leading them to do things which actually made things worse. So, this is where we come to the idea of expressed emotion. So, here’s quite a lot of research which shows it’s probably one of the most well demonstrated things in psychiatry. The way that a parent reacts to a child’s emerging mental illness can affect the course of that illness as it goes on.
Particularly if the parent is hypercritical or over controlling, then that tends to mean that the mental illness will persist and will be much less likely to resolve. The thing about that though, is that if you think about those two characteristics of the parents being critical and over controlling, I mean, which parent, in all honesty can say they’ve never done that. I’ve got two kids and two step kids, and I know that I’ve failed to meet my own standards of parenthood on quite a few occasions to be fair to myself, when driven to distraction by teenage behavior. So everybody does those things to some extent. And the other thing about them is that, of course, people sometimes do them more when they see their children in trouble. If you see a child who’s constantly somehow making bad decisions or it looks like they’re making bad decisions, the temptations become highly critical.
Or if you feel guilty about the fact that they’re developing psychological problems and you think, “Oh my God, what have I done to cause this?” Then of course you’ll be over controlling and overprotective. So parental behavior does have an influence on the emerging mental health symptoms of children. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But often it’s not always because parents do bad things. Sometimes they do bad things for sure, but it’s always for that reason. Sometimes it’s parents trying to do their level best in a way which is actually making things worse.
Zach: These things are just so complex. And I think, there’s often this tendency to look for these simple narratives of good and bad, but it’s like narcissism too. We all have narcissism, we’re all narcissistic in a sense, and we sometimes, even the best of us can behave in narcissistic ways in certain situations, and these certain complex things unfold. And I think that’s what to remember about, that becomes a destigmatizing thing about this, thinking about the psychological aspects, it’s like these are such complex processes and systems and people’s minds can go down rabbit holes. I think of my own experiences where it involved smoking a lot of marijuana when I was in college and leading to me having my mental issues and dropping out of college. And that’s just one factor. And I think when people tend to look for these simplistic narratives about things.
Richard Bentall: Yeah. So I mean, what the research tells us is all these different things interact. So marijuana’s the kind of interesting one. Lots of social circumstances which push young people to take marijuana, and actually most young people try it to some degree, but for some people we know, I think we’re pretty certain high degree of certainty but it’s very bad for them. It produces psychotic reactions. But there are all sorts of social circumstances which will tend to make somebody more likely to take marijuana. And if they do take marijuana, to take it frequently and to use for self me medication. And those might include biological factors, of course, it could be that there’s some genetic, I don’t know, any research you suggest it, but it wouldn’t surprise me that some people are got more for whatever reasons, might have a genetic tendency to put themselves in that situation, if I can put it like that. We don’t know but it wouldn’t strike me as weird if it turned out that that was the case.
Zach: A small note here, if you’re someone who hasn’t heard about the link between marijuana and mental issues and thinks that might be an exaggerated connection, I’d invite you to read up on that connection. There’s a lot of research and writing on it. For what it’s worth, I actually still smoke marijuana occasionally, so I’m definitely not anti-marijuana. But for me personally, I believe it was an amplifying factor in my mental breakdown as a young man in the same way that it seems to be a contributing factor in many case studies you can read. I think I was predisposed to some bad outcomes due to me already being a very anxious young person who had previously suffered panic attacks in high school and such. And in my case, I think it was less about trying to self-medicate than it was about me wanting to feel cool and fit in despite being very unhappy and anxious.
And also, I think some young people can be quite fragile because they haven’t developed a strong sense of self and models of the world to think about marijuana as that it can really amplify our visceral sensation of things in the same way that marijuana can make listening to music or watching a movie more viscerally exciting and captivating. It can also lend a visceral realness to our random trains of thought, including our dark and disturbing and depressing trains of thought. So I just want to clarify that point about marijuana a little bit. As I’ve often seen people express skepticism about marijuana’s role in mental illness, there’s a lot to talk about there.
Okay. Back to the talk.
Zach: So for me, the idea that there are psychological causes for madness is pretty easy to understand, because I went through some pretty painful mental experiences when I was young in college. It involved me feeling like I was on the verge of madness. I dropped out of college mid-year due to no longer being able to function. So I can relate to much of the things you write about in Madness Explained in a pretty visceral way, because it’s easy for me to remember how easy it is to become distanced from reality, especially when one is socially isolated and suffering. But I think for a lot of people that’s hard to understand just due to most of us taking our so-called normal minds for granted. So when we’re feeling good and feeling like so-called normal people, we have all sorts of healthy narratives going on in the background, like “I’m an independent agent interacting with other independent entities, and I’m able to enjoy these interactions I have with these other people. I have various goals that I can work towards that will increase my happiness.” These kinds of things.
And I think we tend to take for granted those kinds of really complex forms of narratives and modeling and modeling of self and modeling of other people. And as someone who went through basically what seems to me like, it was almost like a stripping away of all those social narratives and so-called normal narratives, and just being left with this real existential terror and shock at the weirdness of life. So I can see the things you write about in your book; I can relate to them and see how there are all these layers of meaning and narratives that make someone normal to other people and seeing those layers of meaning and narratives as just tremendously complex. And I’m curious if you see one of the challenges we face in trying to understand psychosis and madness is just that there are these things that we take for granted about normal life that are much more complex than they seem to be.
Richard Bentall: Yeah. So, I mean, I can’t remember who said it, but somebody said the thing about Freud was that he recognized that nearly everybody’s mad and they’re more aware of another; that’s a bastardization of Freud, I guess. But my point is that actually I think you make a very important point, which is that normal mental life is pretty weird and we underestimate its weirdness a lot of the time. And that comes out in all sorts of different ways. So one of the things for which it comes out with is that people who are going through a psychotic episode, they often feel very alone. They feel alone because they think they’re completely different than everybody else. And they think that nobody else will understand how they’re feeling, and they find it very difficult to express how they’re feeling or what they’re experiencing.
And that’s a terrifying situation to be in. You feel that your own mind is slipping away, but you are alone. Nobody can possibly help you because nobody can understand. But actually, if we look at epidemiological evidence, one of the things we find is that first of all, that these experiences are much more common than people used to think. So for example, it’s been estimated that, I mean, it’s crudely that roughly about 10% of the population at some point in their lives experiences hearing voices in somewhere some way or another. And actually there are quite a few people who had that experience who are living perfectly normal lives perfectly successful lives in the population without receiving or seeking psychiatric health. That was a great insight of Dutch psychiatrists, Marius Romme and I’m sure you’ve heard of. But Romme even went as far as to the MEA formed a club for a society for people hear voices, which was initially called resonance in Holland, and which supported the international hearing voices movement which has been a great force for good, I think, and maybe I can relate an anecdote, which I actually mentioned in my book about that movement because Marius invited me to give a talk to a conference of people who hear voices.
And this is back in the 1990s, and this seemed to be like a pretty strange thing to be doing because I was used to talking to mental health professionals, but not talking to a conference for people who hear voices. So I was a bit anxious about how it was going to go. And as just before I walked into the lecture theater, Marius said to me probably one of the most important things which anybody’s ever said to me, which was he said, “Richard, I really like your research on hallucinations, but the trouble is you do want to cure people who hear voices, don’t you? I want to liberate them. I think they’re like homosexuals in the 1950s. They need liberating, not curing.” And that’s a very powerful thought, I think. But going back to the weirdness of ordinary life issue, it’s certainly true that a lot more people hear voices than most people imagine.
But it’s also true that there are lots of, if we look at beliefs, for example, strange beliefs that there are a lot of people have straight beliefs as well. Now that sometimes it’s quite difficult to tell the difference between what’s a delusional belief and which is how a psychiatrist would define this abnormal belief that the person with psychosis might have. It’s difficult to tell the difference between what’s a delusional belief and what’s a non delusional belief, particularly in an era when there’s, for example, a lot of conspiracy theories going around on the internet. So this has become, that particular question is a preoccupation of mine. And I’ve began to do research specifically comparing the beliefs of the so-called delusional beliefs of psychiatric patients with, for example, very strongly held political beliefs or religious beliefs. One problem in that area, in terms of the way that other people approached it in the past is that people just take mundane beliefs for granted. So, for example, there’s a whole program of research on delusions about the phenomenology of delusions. Phenomenology is basically the experience of having these types of beliefs. Yeah. And phenomenologically inspired researchers spend a lot of time interrogating small numbers of patients about their experiences related to say their paranoid beliefs. And the bottom line is that what they usually end up saying is, behind these beliefs, there is some altered sense of self in the world. So it said, for example, that people who that paranoia is often preceded by a period, which in German is described as [foreign speech], which is this sort of sense that there is something in the offing, something’s about to happen, there’s something not quite right. And that precedes the onset of the paranoid delusion. But actually, if you look at narratives of people who’ve had religious conversion experiences, you find very much the same thing. But that’s been ignored by researchers because they’ve just taken mundane beliefs for granted. Actually a lot of stuff which goes on in the so-called healthy minds, it’s pretty weird.
Zach: Yeah. And the thing I was trying to get at, which I might not have explained, well, it’s something I often think about when I was trying to make sense of my own mental struggles as a young man, the thing I return to often is the idea that there’s just so much bandwidth and complex modeling processing power that’s required to be a so-called normal person. You have to have these models of other people. You have to have this model of your own self. You have to have this model for how yourself is perceived by the others around you. You have to keep all the social rules that dictate what is acceptable normal behavior in mind when you interact with others. And it just seems to me like such a large amount of bandwidth and processing.
And then when you’re in the world of other people if you start to feel bad, you start to feel anxious, depressed, you can start to have all these balls that we usually juggle interacting with other people or thinking about ourselves as social creatures. It becomes harder to keep all those balls in the air. And so you have this cascading effect where our narratives about ourself and our place in the world become more strange and less functional, less realistic, and we can start to have these weird ideas just based on this cascading effect of us not being able to keep all these ideas of others and self in mind at the same time. And I’m curious if is that something, as someone who’s an amateur, I don’t really have a sense of if that makes sense or if people have talked about that in the mental health literature.
Richard Bentall: Yeah. So there’s quite a big American particularly psychological literature on intentional limitations and their role in psychosis. It’s certainly true that people who suffer from psychotic disorders do have reduced attention span. In fact, Kraepelin recognized that in the 1890s. So in his accounts, his descriptions of people with what he called dementia praecox, what was later renamed as schizophrenia. And it’s certainly true that in ordinary everyday life, we have to juggle all these things as you’ve described. So I’m trying to think of somebody who’s formulated it in quite the same way as you have and I’m not quite sort of, nothing’s coming to mind immediately, but what you’ve described doesn’t sound to me particularly implausible actually as an account that if you imagine that if your capacity or working memory capacity, your intentional capacity is impaired, then ordinary everyday situations are going to be much more problematic and stressful.
And I suppose one of the things related to that is that a lot of the social psychological processes which underlie everyday social life are normally automatic. So a good example would be what developmental psychologists misleadingly call theory of mind. Theory of mind is the ability to understand or be able to guess what other people are thinking. It’s called theory of mind because a better term will be mentalizing, actually, because it’s an ability, it’s called theory of mind because the concept was first brought to attention by celebrated paper by David Premack about chimpanzees actually won’t, the title of paper was, does a chimpanzee have a theory of Mind? So we know that certain people find mentalizing or understanding other people’s mental states much more difficult than others, notably people with autistic disorders. And indeed there are some people who argue that that is the central problem in autism, although that’s disputed about whether that is the case. And it’s certainly true, and I’ve done studies myself going back a while now, it showed that when people are acutely ill, that their theory of mind skills, their ability to think about other people’s mental states are impaired. So there is certainly some evidence which fits with our idea, which is, if our processing capacity is handicapped in some way, then it’s going to make social situations much more tricky and actually more frightening.
Zach: The thing that strikes me there is when I was going through my mental struggles, I had this very visceral feeling. When I felt like I was losing my mind, I felt like I was a million miles away from basically other people. I felt like I was almost on like metaphorically another planet and it was losing these, it strikes me that losing these narratives about if we feel that we’re so isolated in our own minds and we, we basically are going into our own minds then we lose these narratives about it even being important to pay attention to the things that other people think are important. So I’m reminded of you open madness explain with your work with the mentally ill women at the mental hospital who you were trying to walk them through these attention paying exercises. But it’s like if they don’t even have the narrative that such things are important, they’re not going to. Their lack of paying attention.
Richard Bentall: What you’re referring to is my first ever work with people with psychosis when I was still a student and was, what can I say? I’m quite embarrassed about it, really in some ways compared to,
Zach: But you were young.
Richard Bentall: Certainly in terms of my understanding of psychosis at the time was very minimal, but so was everybody else’s, I think. Yeah. Now we just had this idea we could actually teach people to improve their attentional skills by getting them to, actually, the ideas came from, it’s linked to this in the speech idea. The idea was that if you get people to talk to themselves while they’re doing whatever they’re doing but to literally instruct themselves, it will focus our attention. We got a change in people’s performance on simple IQ type tests but I’m sure that improvement lasted for about five minutes.
Zach: Yeah. I think it gets back to that idea of the kinds of tests, it’s like the early testing of mentally ill people, having them try to recite things. It’s like, well, if their narratives are not in their world that they’re living in, such things do not matter at all. Whereas we’re in the world of living with other people, and so we care what others think where they’re just not in that frame of reference of the normal test. Just there’s only so much you can learn if their narratives are not matching ours.
Richard Bentall: So I guess one thing which is just reacting to what you’re saying is that actually that this ties in with something which I’m preoccupied with at the moment. I was mentioning earlier on that I’m interested in what makes a belief a delusion as opposed to, for example, if you take something like QAnon, like expressive theory which is associated with the MAGA movement in the United States. I mean, on the surface it seems just as crazy. So I can use that termas anything which you’ll see in the psychiatric hospital. I mean, some of these people believe that there is some vast conspiracy led by the Democrats to sexually abused children worldwide and even drain hormones for their bodies. So I’d say it’s pretty crazy. And yet it’s not usually considered to be a delusion.
One of the things which makes delusions different than other types of beliefs is that they’re generally not shared. So delusion there’s only only one person who believes in delusion, a particular patient. Whereas things like QAnon, they’re shared by lots of different people. And that points to something which is quite important about belief formation in general life, which is most of us get our beliefs in interaction with other people. So belief formation is a social process. You discuss what you think with other people, you negotiate a shared understanding of what’s really going on and beliefs get passed from one person to another. There’s some people like that process to the process of viral infection, but none of that seems to be happening in the case of delusions. And I’ve come to think that in a way psychologists have missed the point a bit about delusions because what we’ve done is we’ve spent the last 20 or 30 years trying to look at reasoning in people with, say, paranoid beliefs.
And there’s not a huge amount of literature which seems to show, well, if you test people on this psychological task, they seem to be reasoning a little bit different than everybody else. It’s usually nothing particularly dramatic. And I think I might be missing the point, it’s more to do with the way that police are constructed in collaboration with other people, which is seems to be the problem in delusions. And that to me would say that even though I think that say QAnon is a pretty crazy theory, I wouldn’t really say it’s a delusional theory in a way, the fact that it’s shared, it’s a narrative developed by lots of people interacting with each other is makes it precisely not a delusional belief. Doesn’t mean it’s a correct belief, by the way.
Zach: Yeah. I think the I mean, and then as society’s become more polarized and more angry, it becomes easier to have these high animosity, strange beliefs that are paranoid about the other side doing things. That those things become more common. So I definitely, I believe you’re working on a book now about those topics and I can see the map over for all of it. And one thing that strikes me too, I mean, one of the takeaways from my own mental struggles was being very skeptical when I thought that I’m now very skeptical when I think I have some sort of truth that other people don’t have which is one of the things that was one of the things that led me down a dark path was thinking like, oh and some of it had aspects of positive things too or feeling positive where I thought I was reaching some form of enlightenment, I was reading books about Buddhist schools of thought and so at the same time as I was becoming distanced in a socially painful way, I was also having these periods of feeling like I was a genius and things like that.
So I think it maps over to some of the experiences so-called normal people can have, where we feel that we’ve reached these realizations about narratives that explain the world or explain our place in it and it’s good to be skeptical of those things because reality is largely defined by our interactions with other people so-called reality. So there can be negative sides to delving off into these other worlds, whether it’s like QAnon or what other unusual or unlikely worldviews. Would you agree that a big part of mental illness and mental struggles maybe in general is when we go off in our own heads a bit and reach these narratives that are not agreed on by other people? Would you largely say that’s it?
Richard Bentall: Yeah, no, that’s in a sense my point really, I suppose that’s normally the narratives, we have to use your terminology, they’re constrained by our social relations. They’re checked by other people formally or informally. Your friend says, “Nah, I don’t think that’s what’s going on.” Or they say”Have you thought about this? That might be.” So on. Those kind of things. And in a coalition, you develop your beliefs in a coalition. But if you’re isolated, if you’re frightened of other people, which of course will increase your isolation, then you can’t form as coalitions. So the whatever’s going on in your head is unconstrained. It isn’t limited, it isn’t moderated by anybody else. We all have, I think, pretty crazy ideas which go through our heads. I know I do, every so often, but what most of us can do is either it gets dismissed for us by somebody else who we discuss it with, or we dismiss it ourselves because we go, no, I think that’s a crazy idea.
I’ll give you an example. I use this example when I’m talking to students. It always creates a bit of amusement, an almost everyday occurrence if you are a academic researcher which is a good model of paranoia. So if you’re researcher, what happens is you write a scientific paper and it takes you ages to do it. You finesse it as well as you can. You stick it in the poor submission portal as it is these days. We used to post them back in the old days. But you put it in the submission portal of whatever journal you are hoping will accept it. And usually you will start out by aiming high, you’ll find some journal, we’ll think of some journal which has got a really high, what we call citation impact, which is otherwise it’s read by a lot of people but they’re difficult to get into because they’ve got a vast number of people sending papers done.
So I send it there, and then you wait and you wait and you wait and weeks go by. And then finally you get this email back and the email says something like, “Dear Professor Bentall, thank you for submitting your paper on paranoia in UK academic staff to the journal of very excellent psychopathology research. At this journal, we have considered your submission very carefully and asked free expert reviewers to review it. The reviewers all identify strengths in your work.” And you’re reading this thing and you’re going, no, come on, come on. What’s the bottom line? And then you get after a while. So sometimes it goes, “But unfortunately, some important weaknesses were also identified, which are,” And then they go, “We can only accept 5% of papers, which is submitted to our journal. So unfortunately we must decline your submission.”
And what’s the first thing which happens to an academic in that situation? Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in feeling pretty paranoid. So what happens is, very often you go kind like, “Who else is working in this area? Who are those three referees? Let me look what they’ve read. Oh, those bastards.” And you get very angry. You could easily develop a paranoid worldview that all the other scientists are against it and so on. And so actually some people do develop that paranoid worldview, but most of us, what happens is we get very upset and then we go and have a cup of tea in Britain, a cup of tea, I don’t know what it would be in North America, probably coffee. But you go and you sit back and you relax a bit and you think, that journal is a pretty hard journal to get into.
Also, what the referees said wasn’t completely wrong. There were some things I could do to improve the research or maybe the way I reported it and so on. And you slowly taught yourself round to thinking, now this is just what happens. It’s just one of those things I need to see if I can learn from the referees reports to improve the paper, but I’ll send it to another journal and get in somewhere. So you talk yourself out of your paranoid episode. And whenever I talk about this to, use that example with either students or in academic conferences, there’s always smiles around the room because everybody recognizes that feeling, the feeling of paranoia when you have a paper rejected. The problem with, I think people are very isolated or with that cognition is compromised for whatever reason, maybe because they’re emotionally distressed and their working memories is limited or whatever, but it’s much more difficult to talk yourself out of a strange belief like that. So, whereas your average university professor can go, hold it, I’m being a bit paranoid. No, I’d be a bit more realistic about this. I need to calm down. I have my cup of tea. Maybe it’s simply the case that a lot of people with psychosis can’t do that.
Zach: Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re working on right now with your book?
Richard Bentall: I’m still involved in clinical trials and the one thing we haven’t talked about is the role of trauma in psychosis. So one of the things which has emerged in the last 10, 15 years, I think, is that very often people with psychosis have some significant social trauma in the past. Going back to what I said about parents, of course it’s very important to recognize it’s not always the parents who are responsible for those traumas, but it appears that we’ve now got quite a lot of evidence that that traumatic factors are one of the causal factors in what type of causal factor in psychosis, for sure. So I’m involved in clinical trials to develop treatments which are targeting particularly trauma related mechanisms. But apart from that, yeah, no, I’m writing a book. It’s been going on. I’m not going to say how long I’ve been writing it for because it’s too embarrassing.
But a long time ago I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really understand what a delusion was. I’d been doing research on delusions for 20 years. I thought I’d discovered some vaguely useful things, but I thought that the whole area was a bit stuck. That we’re doing, seeing a lot of studies come out where people are doing the same old thing more or less or another with slight variations. And it suddenly struck me that part of the problem was we didn’t really know what a belief is. Which seems a bit strange because beliefs are central concept in all of the social sciences. Arguably you could say that it’s a focus on belief, which is what distinguishes the social from the natural sciences. Sociologists talk about beliefs, anthropologists talk about beliefs, historians talk about beliefs. Psychologists talk about beliefs, but there’s no coherent understanding of what beliefs are.
And it seemed to me that if we could have a better understanding of how beliefs are generated and what they are involved in general, that would inform our understanding delusions. So I’ve been involved in this task of, I basically managed to get a contract quite from a very well known public, well from Penguin, where I said I don’t know what a delusion is, but if you give me a contract, I’ll write a book. And by the time I finished writing the book, I’ll know. And amazingly they did because they were very happy with previous books I published and I had no idea how difficult that task would turn out to be. So I’m currently writing quite a, I’m just polishing off a lot of sections and about political beliefs, for example, and it turns out there’s a lot we can learn about belief systems in general by looking at political beliefs.
And those have some applications to thinking about the beliefs of psychiatric patients. The problem with it’s endlessly fascinating so I found myself today trying to improve a section I’d already written about the left right spectrum where fascist ideology fitted into it and I could end up.
Zach: Going deep.
Richard Bentall: Could end up going down a day. That’s a rabbit hole which I could have disappeared in for three weeks so I won’t. I written a huge long section about Ezra Pound, the American modernist poet who, I don’t know if you’ve heard about the story of Ezra Pound but.
Zach: Not sure.
Richard Bentall: Ezra Pound, put it briefly Ezra Pound modernist poet, fascist and psychotic question mark, because he was somebody who had quite appalling political views really. He was a sport of fascism. He was viral anti semite. He was an American citizen who did radio broadcast on behalf of the Italian government during the Second World War. And at the end of the second World War was arrested by the FBI and indicted for treason, potentially faced the death penalty, at which point it was decided that he was psychotic and he spent the next 12 years in the psychiatric hospital. Looking into the life of Ezra Pound, it really is difficult to, it’s a fantastic story about how difficult it’s to tell what is just an awful political belief or what is a delusion. Just say, I’m finding it’s enormously enjoyable, but I’m spending far much, it’s taking far too long.
Zach: Quick question, if you do have time for them. One thing I’ve been curious about is in mental illness, do you write about at all the idea that sometimes when someone’s not feeling well, they can have a hard time telling a belief from a passing thought? And so like a passing thought can in the way that we shrug it off and say, that was a weird passing thought we had. They might dwell on it and start to think that was it.
Richard Bentall: Yeah. So that is one of the things I haven’t actually written anything about that in the book yet, but I will be covering that. But some interesting ideas from psychotherapists around that, actually, I don’t know if you’ve heard of acceptance and commitment theory?
Zach: No.
Richard Bentall: Therapy, sorry. It’s sort of brand of CBT. I mean, therapists are always trying to invent new brands of therapy which I’m not sure is always a good thing. But anyway, but there’s some interesting ideas in ACT particularly ACT therapists put a lot of emphasis on the idea that people find it very difficult to distinguish their thoughts from themselves. So you have, all of us got these thoughts going through our heads of feelings and so on, and we can become so preoccupied with them that we think they’re reality basically.
And so what ACT therapists try and do is do, one of the things they do is they try and help people to see, to distance from her thoughts with the idea that once they’ve done that, then they can actually pursue aspects of a life which are actually more important and more valuable to them. So, an ACT therapist use a lot of metaphors. So, and I did do a little bit of ACT therapy before I stopped seeing patients. It was a very new psychotherapy then but I found it quite powerful actually. So one of the metaphors will be to ask, say to the patient, well imagine your mind is a chess board and there’s black squares and white squares. But unlike a traditional chess board, it goes on forever. It stretches forever in each direction.
And there are black pieces and white pieces trying to clubber each other. The bad thoughts and the good thoughts trying to clubber each other. Unfortunately if although the white thoughts, the white pieces can win for a while, they’ll always be some more black pieces. And then the therapist says, so where do you think you are in this picture? And I can remember a patient saying to me, well, oh, I think I’m a little gray piece somewhere in the middle. And the answer is no, you’re not. You’re the chess board. The board. And that’s the point that the thoughts are not you you’re just the space where they happen.
Zach: You wrote about this related to your, something you mentioned in madness explaining which was the studies that showed that people that were more intolerant or that the strange actions of their mind bothered them more, were more likely to have issues. Getting used to the idea that our mind can do strange things and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And that’s even normal.
Richard Bentall: Yeah. So, there’s a whole psychological literature on what’s called metacognitive beliefs, which is your beliefs about your beliefs. And if you have a set of standards for your own mind, if I can put it that way, which your own mind can’t meet, then you’re going to become highly distressed. You’re going to think you’re weird, that you’re different than everybody else and your mind is completely out of control but if you accept that your mind just makes mistakes, does weird things every so often, then that pathway doesn’t have to be followed if it speaks to me.
Zach Elwood: That was the psychologist Richard Bentall, author of Madness Explained and many other respected books on psychology. If you want to know more about him, you can check out the entry for this episode on my site behavior-podcast.com. I’ll put some links to his work there, and some other resources related to things we talked about.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. If you like this podcast, please do me a favor and recommend it to your friends and family. Helping me gain listeners is the best way you can encourage me to work more on this podcast.
And just a reminder that I have several previous episodes that deal with mental illness and mental health.
Thanks for listening.
A talk with Larry Hart (Twitter: @coachlarryhart), a football coach at the University of Houston, and the author of the book The Recruit’s Playbook.
Topics discussed include: common behavioral patterns (tells) in American football that are used to get an edge on opponents and teams; reading signals that opponent coaches give to players; the importance of reviewing game tape; some red flags in the recruiting process; the mental stresses of being a professional athlete; and more.
Episode links:
Resources discussed in this episode or related to the topic:
A talk with cultural psychologist Steven Heine (twitter: @StevenHeine4) about how we react to our sense of meaning being threatened. What happens when our mental framework of how the world works doesn’t hold up and things seem chaotic? What happens when our sense of what’s meaningful in our lives is threatened? A transcript is included below.
Topics discussed include:
Episode links:
Resources discussed in this episode or related to the topic:
TRANSCRIPT
Zach Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and family; the more listens and reviews it gets, the more I’ll be encouraged to work on it.
I think we’d all likely agree that meaning is very important to us humans. We want to feel like we live in a stable world where certain things are associated with certain other things; we like conceptual stability; things being chaotic and unpredictable can be threatening. We also like to feel like our lives have meaning, however we define that; we like to feel like we’re engaged in things that matter.
On this episode I talk to Steven Heine about how humans react to our sense of meaning being threatened. What happens when our mental frameworks of how the world works don’t hold up and things seem chaotic? What happens when our sense of what’s meaningful in our lives is threatened?
Steven and his colleagues have proposed a theory they call the “meaning maintenance model”. A 2006 paper by Steven and his colleagues, Travis Proulx and Kathleen Vohs, was titled The meaning maintenance model: on the coherence of social motivations. I’ll quote from the abstract of that paper:
The meaning maintenance model proposes that people have a need for meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people’s sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termed fluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are different from the domain in which the threat occurred. Evidence for fluid compensation can be observed following a variety of psychological threats, including most especially threats to the self, such as self-esteem threats, feelings of uncertainty, interpersonal rejection, and mortality salience. People respond to these diverse threats in highly similar ways, which suggests that a range of psychological motivations are expressions of a singular impulse to generate and maintain a sense of meaning.
Here’s some information about Steven Heine from his professor page on the University of British Columbia website:
He is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at the University of British Columbia. His research has challenged key psychological assumptions in self-esteem, meaning, and the ways that people understand genetic constructs. He is the author of many journal articles and books in the fields of social and cultural psychology including Cultural Psychology, the top-selling textbook in the field. In 2016, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Steven is also currently working on a book with the working title, ‘Navigating the absurd: The science of existentialism’, to be published by the publisher Basic Books.’
In this episode, Steven and I talk about threats to meaning and how we handle that; we talk about political polarization and how that might be related to threats to meaning; we talk about existential crises, like the so-called mid-life crisis and adolescent angst; we talk about examples of threats to meaning from our own lives; we talk about the anxiety that having a lot of freedom and choice can paradoxically have for us; and we talk about the theoretically positive aspects of having one’s worldviews and meaning thrown off kilter, as can happen when things cause us to update our perceptions of the world, or, for example, with psychedelics.
Okay here’s the talk with Steven Heine.
Zach: Hi, Steven. Thanks for coming on.
Steven: Hi, Zach. Thanks a lot for having me on.
Zach: So, in your Meaning Maintenance paper from 2006, you start out by talking about a 1949 study that involved switching the colors of playing card suits and seeing how people reacted to that. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that study and how that relates to the Meaning Maintenance Model.
Steven: Sure. That’s one of my favorite studies by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman back in 1949. They did something very simple in the study. They showed their participants, university students, some playing cards, one after another and they just asked the people, “What card do you see?” They added a key unexpected element to the study. Beforehand, they painted over the colors on these playing cards with a very still hand so that they changed the colors of the hearts and diamonds to black and the color of the spades and clubs to red, at least for some of these cards. And it was very curious what happened when they showed people these, these anomalous cards, because the first reaction of almost everybody was that they didn’t see any anomalies. They just reported the card as they expected it to be.
So if they were shown a red six of spades, they reported it either as a red six of hearts, or as a six of black spades. And so they didn’t even see the anomaly, they just saw the cards as though they were normal. And then after continuing to show people these cards, they noticed something curious. A significant portion of their participants started to get very anxious and they seemed very distressed. They said their participants were experiencing a disruption. And one of their participants even blurted out that, “My God, I can’t tell that’s a playing card or what that is. I don’t know what a heart is. I don’t know what a spade is,” and they really seem quite distressed. And this is a curious reaction because why should people care about playing cards?
But what Jerome Bruner was interested in there was showing how people depend on these meaning frameworks for making sense of the world. That is, we have these expected associations that we expect to see in the world so that we expect diamonds are red and clubs are black, and these are really well transit associations. And so when they’re violated, this creates this distress in us. So this led us to, we include this study to introduce our idea in, uh, what we call a meaning maintenance model. And what we’re arguing there is that people have a need to maintain a sense of meaning in the world. That we’re always trying to feel that everything around us makes sense and that fits according to our expectations of what things mean. Perhaps I should just maybe offer a definition of meaning here because meaning is one of those words that’s hard to know what it means exactly.
Zach: So broad.
Steven: Yeah. And really, I think there’s two useful definitions of meaning here. But one which people usually call general meaning is that meaning is just really expected associations. That is what ideas we expect to co-occur with any kind of event or thing. So if you were to think, what does your podcast mean to you, it would be all of the ideas that, that you associate with it, or what does Joe Biden mean to you? Or what does COVID mean to you? And it’s just all of the different associations that you would have. And so really what meaning is then is these relations between ideas that we expect and we can have many, many different ideas that are associated with any given event. And these are organized into these meaning frameworks.
So in the study with the playing cards, they were taking a very simple meaning framework that playing cards, there’s 13 cards for suits to colors, knowing that those associations are so reliably seen, like you really don’t encounter black diamonds very often. That they were interested in seeing what happens when you violate this sense of meaning. And so in our model, what we are arguing is that because people are trying to maintain meaning, they become really bothered in or experience of disruption when they encounter something that seems meaningless, at least that violates the expected associations that they have with that. So we have argued that there are a few different kinds of responses that people make when this happens. Two of these responses have been very well studied in the literature, and they go back to the 1950s, for instance, 1950s, there was this Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget.
And he was interested in how little kids go about making sense of the world because in many ways the world doesn’t make much sense to a little kid because a lot of it’s very new to them. So he is interested in, well, what happens when a kid encounter something that doesn’t make sense, that is new to them? And he argued there’s two different reactions that the kids will have there. One which he calls assimilation. I prefer the term faking meaning. And this is when you encounter something that doesn’t make sense, you force it into your existing meaning framework so that it seems to make sense. And this is what happened in Jerome Bruner’s playing card study. That people didn’t see an anomaly. They would see a red six of spades as the six of hearts.
That’s how they would see it. So that’s one reaction that we see the world as we want to see it. And so we have these anomalies out there and we just force them into it so that they-
Zach: Set our model.
Steven: Exactly. And a second response he had, he calls accommodation where I prefer the term making meaning. And that if you have something that doesn’t make sense, you can then change your meaning framework. So that after seeing these playing cards where you have red spades, at some point people were like, “Oh, I understand this deck of cards includes red spades.” That they actually change their understanding of at least this particular deck of cards. So these are these two reactions that have been studied many different ways that they’ve also been studied in terms of how people make sense of traumatic life events.
When things happen to them, they undermine their existing understanding of what life is all about, and that people have to make these changes to their meaning frameworks. But the thing with the second response of making meaning is that it’s really difficult to do. It’s really time consuming and effortful to do. And this paper, 1949 paper by Jerome Bruner, it was picked up, it was noticed by this philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn, who is interested in how scientific knowledge progresses. What he argues that when scientists have these theories and they encounter new facts that are at odds with these theories, they have to change their theories. But this isn’t something that they can easily do actually. Max Plunk once famously said that science progresses one funeral at a time.
Meaning that scientists will often die with their theories, own theories rather than update them with the new information. That we are just so dependent on these meaning frameworks that recreate, that they’re really hard to change, that we become very dependent on these being frameworks. And for scientists, their whole life might be dedicated to a particular theory that’s really hard for them to change it. So what we’re interested in our models is, well, what happens when people experience this meaning threat something that doesn’t make sense. And if they don’t have the time and resources available to make new meaning out of it, to understand it, what do they do? And what we propose here is that people seek meaning somewhere else. Then the idea is that we need to feel that things make sense.
That’s the default state we feel a need to be in. And when we don’t feel this, we have this deep sense of uncertainty. It’s deeply unsettling and, alienating, creates a lot of existential anxiety. And so what we argue is that another response when people encounter something that doesn’t make sense is that they turn to those other aspects of their life that give them meaning. So they turn to something else that makes sense and they increase their commitment to it. They double down on their existing beliefs, which ground them in another meaning framework that makes sense again. So they can return to that feeling that the world makes sense, everything’s okay. And this can be in something completely unrelated to the initial problem that they encountered. So that’s in a nutshell, what our meaning maintenance model is all about.
Zach: So is there a specific example that comes to mind from a study that is a good example of someone shoring up meaning from one threat into another arena?
Steven: Sure. My favorite study at least one that we had conducted, Travis Proulx and myself, we had conducted this study actually after we had written this paper where we are arguing that so many different psychological phenomena fit this idea that we have. Although a big challenge with our model is that it’s a very abstract model. And that there already exists other theories that have predicted these different responses that people have two meaning threats within the limits of these other theories. So just some example, theories like cognitive dissonance is a theory where when people encounter something that doesn’t make sense in their own behavior, that they change the way that they think about themselves in order for it to make sense. But we wanted to come up with a way of threatening people’s meaning that didn’t fit with any of these other existing theories.
And so we thought about it for a while, and then we thought, we are going to expose people to something that looks impossible. We’re going to expose people to a real life magic trick. What we did is we had people, they came into a lab and they were interacting with an experimenter, and they were completing some questionnaires and experimenter kept handing them the next questionnaire. And then at one moment unexpected to the participants, we swapped the experimenters just outside of their view with another person who didn’t look anything like the original person, but was wearing the exact same outfit.
Zach: Little gas lighting going on.
Steven: Exactly. Some major gas lighting going on. And remarkably, over 90% of our participants don’t notice, at least consciously notice that they’re now dealing with another person. Although from what our results show, that at some level they notice something wasn’t right. And they had this feeling that something wasn’t right, something they couldn’t make sense of. After they had this experience, we gave people this measure that’s been used in many other studies that finds that when people feel this threat to themselves, they become more likely to try to defend the status quo that is in this case here, that they want to punish someone who has broken rules with the idea that if we have rules, we expect rules to be followed. They impose a set of order on the world.
So when people are feeling unsettled here, something’s going on, I don’t know what it is, they can ground themselves again by imposing this set of order here that people who break the rules need to be punished. And that’s exactly what we found in this study. That despite that people had no conscious awareness that anything untoward, it just happened to them, they showed this reaction of wanting to punish rule breakers more. And we show this in three separate studies, it seems to be a reliable effect. And I was really this probably the study that I’ve been most excited about in my career because at the time we thought, there’s just no way this should work out. At least intuitively I don’t have any conscious awareness of ever wanting to react to things like this.
But it made sense according to our theory, and we thought we would gamble and go for it. And it worked out in this way. And the participants just, it was really quite funny how they really had no idea that this person had changed. We had one participant who came in and they actually were friends with the second experimenter, the one that they got changed into. And so we changed into the second experimenter, and the person’s like, “Oh my God, I am so out of it today. I didn’t even recognize you.” And they completely showed this faking meaning response. It’s like seeing a card for the color you assume it to be. Just assuming that-
Zach: Fit their model.
Steven: Yeah. They forced it to make sense.
Zach: So how big an effect is it there? I mean, that’s a relatively minor switch, but I’m curious how big an effect.
Steven: We see a significant change in their attitude. It’s not like a night or day change. It’s not like they’re now responding completely differently than how they normally respond. It’s, people become just a little=
Zach: A little bit more.
Steven: A little bit more. And in general, what we find is that people become a little bit more of an exaggerated version of themselves here, that they double down on their existing attitudes. And people can do it in different ways so that liberal people become super liberals after this kind of experience and conservative people become super conservative. It pushes them more in this direction that they already are in.
Zach: So when it comes to the definition of meaning, we can use meaning in a big sense as in like, our life has meaning, or we feel that we’re afraid that life is meaningless. And I’m curious how you see that as comparing to the small granular definition of meaning being having stability of one’s worldview for specific domains. Is it maybe that the big sense of meaning is the accumulation or combination of the smaller definitions of meaning?
Steven: That’s a great question. Before I was giving one definition of meaning, which is typically called general meaning. The big meaning that you’re talking to here is often called a sense of existential meaning. And I think it’s still based on the same underlying structure of expected ideas going together with the difference being that when people talk about meaning in life and existential meaning, they are connecting another set of meanings to these ideas. And these are meanings that connect us to teleological concerns that transcend our everyday lives. They connect us to ideas about having a sense of purpose is a key element in this existential meaning, to having a sense of significance that we matter in the world. And also just a sense of value, what we desire to have.
And so these are just another set of kinds of meanings, kind of ideas that we link to things. And still, I think it’s a very similar idea that when people have a crisis of meaninglessness in their lives, they’re usually talking about more of these sort of existential concerns and that people have a desire then to reestablish this set of meaning in terms of finding a way to pursue a meaningful life. And so I think it’s a similar idea that it’s just linking ideas together, but when we talk about meaning in life, it’s just these are more transcendent teleological meanings.
Zach: It’s almost like we desire this stable framework and then it’s almost like our existential sense of meaning is like ourself being part of that framework in a big sense. So it seems like there’s something about the self being part of the framework
Steven: Exactly. So I think there’s really three main kinds of meanings that we are aspiring to maintain. One is this meanings of ourselves. I want to understand who I am, why I’m doing the things that I’m doing,. We also care about the meanings in the world. We want to understand what the world is like. And then we want to understand our place within that world, how we fit in that world, how ourselves fit into that world. And we are trying to maintain these key sources of meaning as we aspire for a meaningful life.
Zach: So there could be that the so-called existential crises of various some so-called midlife crises might be one type of that, another might be adolescent angst. How do you see these kinds of crises relating to the threats to meaning?
Steven: Yes. So I think as we go about living our lives that we sometimes encounter these events in our life that just really threaten the sense of meaning. And it’s quite common for people to experience those two key times in life that you just brought up. And so adolescent angst is what I think is the existential crisis that people have at a young age in adolescence or early adulthood. And I’m a cultural psychologist by trade. In addition to studying meaning, I’m interested in how cultures vary in the ways that they go about trying to find meaning in their lives. And one striking finding from the anthropological literature is that this idea of adolescent angst is not a cultural universal by any means. And in most small scale societies, they don’t have this idea that adolescent is a time of chaos and turbulence.
Every society recognizes adolescence as a distinct phase in life. But the idea that it’s a turbulent, chaotic time of a lot of angst is not by any means universal. The kinds of cultures that have more of this adolescent angst are those that are more industrialized individualistic societies where people have a lot of different options about the kind of life they’re going to lead. And in adolescence, this is when you have this first existential crisis, potential existential crisis is trying to figure out what life am I going to lead? And when you have lots of options, it can be overwhelming, and trying to figure out what is the right life that I’m gonna lead. And people might try various sorts of things. People in small scale societies at least in terms of what they’re going to do for a career, this is not something that they have a lot of options. They’re going to do what their parents did and what everyone else in their society does. It’s not something they have to figure out. If you’re from a small scale farming society, what are you gonna do with your life? You’re going to farm? That’s like really the only option. But in individualistic, industrialized societies, what are you going to do with your life while there are so many different possibilities that people can pursue, and in trying to figure out this, what life am I going to lead, that adolescents go through a great deal of angst as they try to figure this out. And this has been getting worse over time as this period of adolescence has been expanding, this period of time when people are in this preparatory phase in life.
Now call it emerging adulthood or failure to launch. And the idea that people are now in their 20s or even into their 30s, still haven’t really figured out what life it is that they’re going to lead. And if you look at that, there’s some common benchmarks that have been used for what is achieving adulthood. And it’s things like finishing your training and education, getting a secure position, moving out of your parents’ home, getting your own place, getting married and having kids, although these last two maybe aren’t universally pursued anymore. And those have just been getting later and later as time goes on, and people are in this longer period of this existential angst where they’re trying to figure out what life are they going to lead.
Zach: Yeah. I’ve heard that referred to as the paradox of choice, that there was a book called The Paradox of Choice that talked about that idea. And I can definitely feel that in my life where we just have so much choice and freedom to make decisions about where are you gonna live? What kind of job are you going to pursue? Who are you going to date? All these kinds of choices. And that can be stressful. Freedom is a stressful thing.
Steven: Yeah. This is something that the original existential philosophers used to talk a lot about. So, like John Paul Sartre would say that life is the choices that you make and that it’s up to you to figure out what kind of life to live. And that sounds exhilarating. So many different choices. I get to choose, that’s so exciting. But at the same time, we’re responsible for all of the choices that we make then. We’re responsible for the life that we lead. And that brings with it a lot of anxiety. And I think if you go back in western history in the past, back to the medieval era, there really weren’t nearly as many choices to be made. That people would largely inherit the occupation of their parents.
That that was really quite common. Arranged marriages were still quite common in Europe and elsewhere around the world. So you didn’t who am I going to spend my life with? And also in at least much of Europe, there wasn’t really much of a competing sense of which God should you worship. It was kind of the town virtually everyone shared the same religion. You didn’t have to figure that out. And now people have to figure out what career, there’s thousands of different possible careers. They’re trying to find a partner and they’re on apps with, again, thousands of different options, so many different ways of getting it wrong. And society has been secularizing in a way that people are turning away from traditional religions.
But interestingly, they’re not that many of them are turning towards atheism. That’s increasing a little bit. What’s increasing the most though is people are becoming what they call spiritual but not religious, where they’re creating their own spiritual set of beliefs, This smorgasboard approach to the hereafter that I’m going to believe in horoscopes maybe and maybe some crystals, maybe I’ll meditate, maybe some yoga, that people will have this potpourri collection of different spiritual concerns. And again, it’s just like all the more things that people are responsible for, that they’re responsible for all these different aspects of our lives, and now they’re even responsible for the hereafter that they are choosing the path that they are going to take. And this brings with it just a huge amount of responsibility and what comes with that is this existential anxiety.
Zach: Do you think it’s true that by having all these choices, it’s almost like we’re drawn to the fact of how arbitrary our choices are and that can feel like a threat to meaning of sensing that ?
Steven: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I mean, I often look back at life choices I made. So my own adolescent angst experience or existential crisis that I had, it was when I was 19 years old and I had started off at university as a business student. And I lucked out at the age of 19. I got this great internship through this international exchange program where I got to work for a marketing company in Helsinki, Finland. And this had been at that time my dream job. I thought I want to get into this international marketing, and I’m so lucky to have this. And anyways, once I had this job, I immediately had this very strong feeling that this isn’t the right job for me. And I switched to psychology at that point, and I often look back, think, well, what if I hadn’t done that switch that the whole life path that I have been on since then would be changed. I have a very different career. I have a different social network. I would have many more business friends, and now I have more professor friends. I wouldn’t have met my wife. I would probably end up living in a different place. It’s this one decision and I’m living a very different life. And that’s kind of, uh, unsettling to think about sometimes. I mean, how many of these decisions are we making in life?
Zach: What does it mean? What does it all mean?
Steven: Exactly.
Zach: So I’m curious if you have examples from your personal life that you see as related to the Meaning Maintenance Model. And I could give a few examples if you want, but I’m curious if some come to mind for you examples of maybe having meaning threatened in one sphere and then ensuring it up in another.
Steven: Yeah. Well, one example for my own life is when I had my second existential crisis, which was my midlife crisis which I had at 48, and I got divorced. That’s a very unsettling time when life as I knew it– all the different aspects of my life– I’ve interpreted through the lens of being married to this particular person. So that was all very upended. And what I recognized that I was doing a lot of in the immediate aftermath of that was I had become a lot more nostalgic. I found myself visiting a lot of places from my past and reflecting on all these memories from my past. And my reactions actually are not unusual at all. This is a very common reaction that people have when they’re feeling that their lives are disrupted. They seek out nostalgia, and I think what nostalgia does here is that it restores a sense of meaning because you’re reflecting on your life story on who you are as a person and these different events that you had in your past that are part of you and are part of the reason that you became the person that you are today. That’s what you find is that when people are feeling, if they’re feeling lonelier or if they’re just feeling anxious or they’re feeling a little meaningless, they become a little more nostalgic.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that right now it said that we’re living in the age of nostalgia, again that everything is retro. We see this on movies that are coming out. There a lot of remakes of movies in the past, whether it be things like Ghostbusters or things like Stranger Things isn’t a remake, but a big part of the show is the setting of the ’80s and revisiting this. I think people are quite anxious these days. This is an anxious time. This is one thing that we’re collectively doing is turning to the past. And in doing so, reflecting on these earlier chapters of our life story.
Zach: A small note here, in a previous episode, I talked to Jannine Lasaleta about the psychological factors involved in nostalgia. We examined why it is that nostalgia is so powerful and why we find it so meaningful. One thing we examined was how our feelings of nostalgia can make us more carefree with our money. That being one reason, companies like to try to use nostalgia in their advertising. Okay, back to the interview.
For examples from my life, because I can definitely feel the things you talk about in my life. One example was similar to yours. If I’ve had an argument with my wife or if I feel socially isolated for some other reason, I can feel a desire to shift from social things to more intellectual pursuits. It is a need to compensate and put my sense of meaning in other things a little bit. Then the vice versa, if I feel like I’m not doing much on these intellectual pursuits or I feel like I’ve made a mistake or if I feel like I don’t really have a sense of community there, I’ll go back the other way and focus more on social things and… That’s just an example of how we can switch our focus of where we get our sense of meaning from, of what’s important throughout our lives, and even throughout the week or whatever.
Steven: Exactly. Those are great examples of it. We just need to feel that life has meaning. We can get that through many different ways. It’s just what current thoughts are in our head, that our current thoughts we want to make sense and be some aspect of ourselves that give our lives meaning. That can be satisfied by so many different ways. People are all unique. They all have these unique meaning frameworks, unique things that give their lives meaning. So people turn to different things when they’re confronting these challenges of life.
Zach: Am I understanding correctly that would set your model, your theory apart from some other comparable theories is you’re focusing on the fluidity and the equal nature of where people can find their meaning, that it’s very fluid? Was I getting that right?
Steven: I think what our model is showing is that people can respond to a meaning threat in a very fluid way by turning to a very different domain of life. You don’t have to… For instance, there’s theories about needing belongingness and what a lot of findings show that when people feel lonely so that their belongingness is threatened, they try to seek out other relationships as a way of responding to that perceived lack of interpersonal connection. I think that’s very true that people definitely do that.
But what we’re showing is that you can satisfy the underlying need for meaning that’s been disrupted by feeling lonelier interpersonal rejection by turning to something completely different, something that gives you feelings of certainty in some other areas or something that just reflects on core aspects of yourself. You can affirm yourself. You can dispel those bothersome feelings that originated from feeling intrapersonal rejection. It originated in this one specific domain, but can be tackled by a very different domain. Yes, that’s what’s unique about our theory.
Zach: A small note here, the meaning maintenance model has been compared to terror management theory, which is a theory that posits that our existential fears around death and mortality play a big role in our behavior and our desire to form meaning. The fluid of the aspect of the meaning maintenance model is one thing that makes it unique and sets it apart. If you’d like to read more about that, I’d recommend reading the Wikipedia entry for terror management theory. It mentions the meaning maintenance model there and how it relates. Also, Steven Heine and his colleagues this year did an analysis of the terror management literature. Back to the interview.
So when I was young, a young man, I had some serious mental struggles. So I’ve spent a good amount of time thinking about these kinds of topics and about how we build narratives and stories as ways to create meaning in our lives in a kind of way that’s taken for granted. Because we have these underlying narratives about our place in the world that we don’t really examine that allow us to lead so-called normal or functional lives, these narratives around who we are and our relationship to the world, our relationship to others. One thing that strikes me there is it just seems like there’s so many different kinds of stories we can create. There’s almost no limit on the kinds of stories humans can create because we are such storytellers. That’s such a part of who we are.
I see that as related to the meaning maintenance model ideas in the sense that we can construct so many narratives that give us stability about our place in the world. It’s almost like there’s multiple solutions and a game theory sense of forming different narratives that allow us to feel comfortable and not just swimming in constant chaos and anxiety. We all have that as a major goal to reach that kind of stability and not feel anxious. So I’m curious what you think of all that? Do you see our drive to construct stories and narratives as related to our drive to construct meaning?
Steven: Yes, that’s a great point. I definitely think so. And that these meaning frameworks that we have about the world get can get very complex or the ones that we have about herself get very complex. They often can have some contradictory parts of, if you just think of like who am I, and you realize that well, okay, yesterday I was with my college friends and was acting quite silly. Then today I was at work and acting quite professional. Then I was driving and I was screaming obscenities at the passenger in the car beside me because he cut me off.
Looking at this, you’ll see, well, what is the common thread here that don’t seem to be very consistent, or even just comparing me now versus when I was in high school or yesterday, I was dead set on losing some weight, but today I’m sitting in front of the TV with some Haagen-Dazs.
In many ways, we’re not very consistent. I think this is the key value of stories here that we rely on to organize this information about ourselves and about our world that I think there’s a lot of theories in psychology that emphasizes that we experience the world through stories, that we have a story about who we are and we have stories about what the world is like. The nice thing about the stories is that they can simplify, they can connect all these disparate parts together that we can edit our stories, erase the parts that don’t fit in so well and make things fit a certain theme. I think then that people really try to defend these stories, like we’re committed to the stories, like this is who I am, like I’m committed to this idea.
So yeah, if you encounter something that’s at odds with that, well, you need to defend your story and you need to focus on another aspect of your life story that fits with this theme that you think captures the real you. Yeah, I think we’re doing this.
But when we tell stories about ourselves and when we’re telling stories about the world like what is the world like, we are telling the story and we want it to be consistent. What’s remarkable is just how different people’s stories can be. If you just think like, what are people’s stories about the COVID pandemic? Some people see this as this is a huge threat to their wellbeing and their loved ones and a big challenge to society. Other people think this is all overblown or this is a hoax or billionaires are trying to control us by putting microchips in us.
People have a story that is trying to connect these different events that are happening to us. Even though really, you would think it’s the same events that are happening in the world, at some level there must be some objective reality. But we perceive these events through the lenses of the story that we’re telling them. We tell very different stories, but we want our stories to be consistent. When you encounter new information, it’s got to be find a way to weave that into the story that we’re telling.
Zach: I focused a good amount on the podcast on us versus them political polarization and one thing that strikes me in that area that seems underexamined is how stressful it can be to have big conflicts and big differences and how we perceive reality and our narratives. Aside from the more obvious and superficial aspects of disagreeing with people and arguing over important topics, I think there’s this more fundamental anxiety around the meaning maintenance type ideas that we look around and we see others around us, our neighbors, the other people in our society is believing such vastly different things and just the knowledge that we see that meaning can be so hard to establish, that reality can be so hard to agree upon. It can be existentially stressful for the reasons that we’ve talked about. It’s like the cards having a different color, but on a really large scale we look around and we just perceive this kind of chaos of meaning around us.
That to me, it strikes me that that can be feeding into the polarization in the sense that that threat to meaning that we perceive can make us really want to double down on our ideas and be like, oh, we’re going to decide this once and for all. This is the narrative and this is the right narrative. And we latch more strongly on to our narratives and such. That adds to the depolarization session. I’m curious if you agree with that playing a role in the polarization cycle.
Steven: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I think that this is one underappreciated cost of polarization. Polarization makes it hard to govern. It can lead to violence. There’s a lot of discussion of the familiar parts about it. But I think just as you were saying here that the fact that we don’t all share the same story about things, in some ways we’re not really living in the same shared reality anymore, that this can be really undermining for us. It’s because we want to feel certain, we want to feel that our understanding of the world is right so that way we feel that we can predict things and we can have control over things and we can act effectively. But we never really know what’s right and what’s true. We don’t have any direct access to that, so we have to infer it.
One thing that makes us feel much more confident that our stories are right is when everyone around us agrees with us. If it’s like if everyone’s agreeing that this is the way things are, then you feel much more certain, I’ve got it all figured out. My understanding of the world is right. I know how to act. I know the rules of the game. I know what I need to do. But when we find out that half of the country has a completely different story for what’s going on, that the stories don’t overlap much at all. And so, here we are trying to feel a sense that yes, I know what’s happening. I know what to do in the world. Now it’s just being undermined by the fact that these other people are saying the exact opposite of what I’m saying. How can I be so sure that I’m right when half the country says the opposite? I think this is contributing to this level of uncertainty and anxiety that’s in the world today.
This polarization here, which it’s been especially increasing in the US, there’s a number of different ways of measuring polarization so that the US in particular showed this big jump lately, and I think this is contributing to all of the tensions and the underlying anxieties that people are experiencing.
Zach: A note here, if you’re interested in learning more about polarization and how it’s been increasing in the world, the episode before this one was a talk about that. Back to the interview.
I’m curious if you have any thoughts about how these ideas map over to mental illness. For example, it’s known that immigrants have higher rates of mental illness than average. This can be seen to relate maybe to meaning maintenance ideas and that it can be harder for immigrants to construct meaning in a pretty alien environment, they’re more aware of the kind of the chaos and the conflict conflicts and meaning than other people are who live in more than the social majority, culture and such. I’m curious if you have any thoughts you’d care to share about mapping over of those two things.
Steven: Yeah, I think immigrants are often experiencing another kind of existential crisis. As a cultural psychologist, my field has a slogan or a mantra that says culture itself make each other up. It’s the idea that we live in this ecology of cultural meanings that tell us what is valued, what is appropriate, what is forbidden, what is tolerated. These are the norms that we live in. And that shapes our psychology. It shapes the way that we perceive the world make sense of it and try to work towards leading a satisfying and meaningful life.
The challenge that immigrants face is that their selves have been shaped by one particular culture, and then they move to another different cultural framework where the meanings around them can be really quite different and they’re no longer a good match, their self is no longer a good match for the cultural environment around them. They go through what is termed culture shock is the experience that people go through, this distressing experience after they’ve moved to a new place that can persist for up to a few years, this period where one really isn’t a good match with the cultural meanings around one.
This is something that’s very alienating and it creates a lot of distress so that immigrants have more health problems while they’re going through this culture shock period. This is like undermining their physical health and undermining their mental health. It’s only over time where they self-adjust to this new set of meanings that they are living with that they get over this this period of culture shock.
The amount of culture shock that an immigrant experiences, one thing that predicts it is just how different are the two cultures that they are moving between. That if you’re moving between two of similar cultures, it’s not that hard to learn this new meaning framework. But if you’re moving between two very different cultures that differ in many aspects, then this is particularly challenging and people from more distant cultures have had more of this culture shock.
Zach: Yeah, they also say that kids who move around a good amount when they’re young are more likely to have emotional and psychological issues, and that seems related to that too. I can just imagine… Well, I definitely remember one of my psychological issues started when I had a panic attack on my first day of high school because I went to basically a new high school system with new people. Then also in college, the stress of going to college and new people and new environment, those are all stressful situations that force us to have to build up new sets of meanings and [inaudible].
Steven: Yeah, those kinds of transitions can create a lot of distress. Mental illness is more likely to be experienced when people are going through the kinds of anxieties that come from experiencing these meaning threats, that if people are feeling that their life doesn’t really make much sense, if people are feeling that their life is low in that sense of meaning, these people are more vulnerable to depression and anxiety and substance abuse and self-harm, that there’s real consequences, there’s a lot on the line for feeling that you’re living a meaningful life. These kinds of big transitions like that are the kinds of things that can pose some challenges for us.
Zach: When it comes to the best reading you’d recommend for people who want to dig into these concepts more, what would you recommend? Maybe your 2006 paper or what else?
Steven: Yes, in addition to our 2006 paper, I like a 2010 paper that I wrote with Travis Proulx called The Frog in Kierkegaard’s Beer. This paper, the title of it is referring to this observation by Kierkegaard who is contrasting experience of death with the surprise that you would feel if you were drinking a beer and you would discover a live frog in it, just it’s exactly that it’s the same kind of thing, this thing that we can’t fully process and make sense of. Anyways, in that paper we describe a slightly more up to date version of our meaning maintenance model.
I also like a paper also done with Travis Proulx in 2009 called Connections from Kafka where we were exploring how when people feel threats to their meaning, including by reading surreal stories that don’t make sense. Kafka was a master at that like eliciting this very alienating feeling of like what is going on, that people are primed to seek out meaning and they can actually learn new things a little better, that they pick up on some patterns that they are less likely to detect when they’re not feeling this sense of meaninglessness.
I’m working on a book right now. It’s not going to be out for another… It’s supposed to be out next year. It’s supposed to be done next year. I’ll need a good tailwind to finish it then. The working title is called Navigating the Absurd: The Science of Existentialism, where I’m exploring really the kind of ideas we’ve been talking about here in this podcast, just how this desire for meaning that we have, how it shapes the ways that we interact with the world and that we try to make sense of things, try to make sense of ourself and we try to pursue a meaningful life.
Zach: Yeah, that you get on the subject of literature changing our worldview and using these meaning threatening situations and narratives to make us see the world in new ways. There’s positive aspects of that. For example, that’s why people like one of the benefits of hallucinogenics is breaking up people’s way of seeing the world and making them see it in new ways. Also on art, like you mentioned Kafka, I think of Flannery O’Connor. One of her things was trying to have these shocking endings to some of her short stories that would make people see the world in a different way. She had a religious goal there because she was Catholic, but the same idea applied where she was basically trying to threaten their meaning a bit and make them see the world as the mysterious and the mind-blowing thing it was in that sense.
Steven: Yeah. Well, I do think art is an especially powerful way for eliciting this feeling, the feeling that we get when things don’t make sense. I like to label that feeling the uncanny, it’s something that Flannery called it too. It’s often described as a feeling of the unfamiliar familiar so that you’re sensing something that feels normal, but there’s something not quite right. This is what the surrealists I think did this especially well, paintings by like René Magritte or Salvador Dali, films like David Lynch, and it was especially good at eliciting this feeling. I think art is just so good at eliciting this emotional reaction. Really, I think it’s stemming from the emotion that we get, that feeling that something’s not right and that’s prompting this.
Your point about hallucinogenic drugs I think is a great one there. Now it looks like some of these drugs are going to be approved it looks like FDA approval for use in therapy. Why there’s so much excitement around them is because they really do seem to be able to have this enduring change of how you make sense of your life, how you make sense of your world. The existing kinds of meds that people are prescribed when they’re facing mental illness challenges are ones that you need to be regularly taking, these antidepressants that you need to take every day to help people to function at their best.
Whereas these initial trials that are coming out of these studies with the psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD and MDMA and ketamine that people are having these lasting changes from having this one very intense experience when they I think are connecting themselves to some new transcendent concerns that they hadn’t realized before. And they are perceiving their life differently. And they have memories for those, that those seem to have provide some lasting changes. So there’s a lot of excitement about the potential that these drugs have in helping people to cope with the many challenges that this new era of anxiety is throwing at us.
Zach: Yeah, I think the interesting thing about the threats to meaning is it can be negative, of course, but there’s also an excitement and a mystery about it because it opens up these new ways of viewing the world as exciting and mysterious and strange. That can have a negative, you can view that negatively or as scary or you can view it on the other side of the coin as that’s exciting, that’s making the world a wild place now in ways that it wasn’t before for some people. So there’s different sides of the threat demeaning coin, I guess.
Steven: Right, yeah. I think that’s why it’s important that that these new therapies are being conducted in a therapeutic context where there is someone there to help lead people through their experience. Because there is some risk to people just that they talk about in a certain matter a great deal when people are exploring with these psychedelic drugs that if they’re in the wrong mindset, it can be a very frightening devastating experience. So it can go both ways. That’s why I think that all of these trials that are going on are, together with using the context of a guide, [crosstalk] through.
Zach: Yeah, bad trips are a real thing. Okay, well, this has been great. Steven, thanks a lot for your time and I appreciate you coming on.
Steven: All right. Thanks a lot for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Zach: That was professor Steven Heine talking about the meaning maintenance model.
One of the big takeaways for me in examining this research is how threats to meaning might make us cling more to the status quo: in other words, threats to meaning can make us more intolerant of those who violate the rules of our group, and make us cling more closely to the rules and stereotypical traits of our group. The reason I initially found Steven’s research was that I was interested in that exact idea: how extreme polarization, in making it more apparent just how much our perceptions of reality can diverge from our neighbors, can make us want to cling more strongly to our group’s narratives, and how that itself can be an amplifying effect on polarization. And if you want to read more on that idea, Steven and his colleagues’ 2006 paper on the meaning maintenance model goes into more detail on how threats to meaning can be related to people’s attempts to reinforce their group identity.
I want to thank Matthew Hornsey, who’s a group psychology researcher and who I interviewed in a previous episode. He answered some questions I had about this topic, and gave me some links to papers that eventually led to me reaching out to Steven Heine.
If you enjoyed this podcast, I’d recommend checking out some other episodes I have on some related topics. For example, one episode is a talk with existential psychologist Kirk Schneider, and in that one we talk about how the strangeness and mystery of existence can affect us psychologically, and how that might relate to our political conflicts.
For more information about this podcast, go to behavior-podcast.com. I have entries for the episodes that include links to papers and other resources we talk about.
If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. The more people listen to it, the more I’m encouraged to do more interviews.
Thanks for listening,
A talk with Andrew O’Donohue, co-author of Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization. Andrew has studied how societal conflicts play out in many countries, and the harm resulting from those conflicts. Transcript is included below.
Topics discussed include: common objections people have to thinking about polarization or considering it a problem; what American polarization has in common with polarization in other countries; the common psychological drivers of polarization, no matter where it happens; the potential effects of modern life and social media on polarization; what we can do in our lives to reduce polarization; and more. If you don’t already believe that polarization is an important topic, I do hope you give this episode a listen.
Episode links:
Resources discussed in this episode or related to the topic:
TRANSCRIPT
Zach: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. To learn more about this podcast, go to www.behavior-podcast.com. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and family; that would be hugely appreciated, because the more listens it gets, the more I’m encouraged to do more episodes.
Did you know that research shows that most countries have been growing increasingly polarized since 2005? For this episode, I talk with Andrew O’Donohue about polarization, with a focus on how polarization plays out across the world in various countries, and on the psychological drivers behind polarization.
If you’re someone who wonders how a divided country might be able to heal, or if you’re someone who is skeptical or uncertain if polarization is really a big problem, I hope you give this episode a listen. I think these are very important topics; to me, they’re literally the most important topics we could be talking about.
I’d also say if you enjoy this podcast, I have quite a few other episodes on polarization-related topics. If you go to my website behavior-podcast.com and look for the post for this episode, you’ll see links to those episodes and other resources related to this topic.
Andrew O’Donohue is a political scientist known for his research and writing on polarization and the challenges facing democracy. He is the Carl J. Friedrich Fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in the Government Department at Harvard University, as well as National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His book, Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization, looks at why divisions have deepened in numerous democracies and what can be done to heal them. Previously, he was a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In this episode, Andrew and I talk about: common objections people have to thinking about polarization or considering it a major problem; we talk about what American polarization has in common with polarization in other countries; we talk about the common psychological drivers of polarization, no matter where it happens; we talk about the potential effects of modern life and social media on polarization; we talk about what we can do in our lives to reduce polarization; and more. If you don’t already believe this is an important topic, I do hope you give this episode a listen and be willing to think about these topics.
Regarding Andrew’s book Democracies Divided: I interviewed Andrew’s co-author, Thomas Carothers, for this podcast about some similar topics, with more of a focus on what leads to democracy breakdown and authoritarian regimes. So if you enjoy this talk, you will probably enjoy that earlier one.
Okay, here’s the interview with Andrew O’Donohue.
Hi, Andrew. Thanks for coming on.
Andrew: Hi, Zach. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Zach: So I’ve talked a good amount about polarization in this podcast in the past, but maybe a good starting point for people who don’t have that context would be to try to define what we mean by polarization, because there can be different categories of polarization such as ideological and then more emotional us versus them polarization. Then there can be the point that some amount of polarization is normal and even helpful in many cases because it’s normal to disagree and things like that. So would you be up for explaining a bit about the usual context and meaning when people talk about extreme polarization being a problem?
Andrew: I think this is the perfect place to start because one thing that I think is really crucial to understand about polarization is that in many ways it’s a Goldilocks problem. So on the one hand as you pointed out, you can actually have too little polarization. And I think one thing that surprises many people is that in the 1950s, the American Political Scientist Association– a group of political scientists– came out and said the main problem with American political parties is they’re not polarized enough. So, as you pointed out, one essential feature of a democracy is that citizens need to be given meaningful choices. And so I think the key place to start is that on the one hand, you do need a certain amount of policy or programmatic differentiation between the parties. But on the other hand, where polarization becomes really dangerous and often deadly for democracy is when polarization takes on an affective dimension. And by affective, I mean a really emotional basis that’s rooted in people’s social identities; a feeling not just that I disagree with the other side, but that I hate the other side, that I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone from the other side. Then that, I think, is when we think about polarization that can be deadly to democracy, the polarization that tips into this, the category of too much polarization.
Zach: So I’m someone who believes that the effect of the emotion-based us versus them polarization is the biggest problem we face. And I’d say not just in America, but across the world. I just see us humans as having such a huge flaw on our psychology that makes us so often come to hate each other and see each other in distorted ways and it becomes this cycle that so often happens. And I see it as not just dangerous on its own and how it leads to violence and wars, but also it makes us spend all of our energy and focus on these fights and creates this gridlock that prevents us from solving other serious problems that are huge threats. But there are many people who don’t see polarization as a problem, and some of those people will even scoff that it’s a problem at all. Some of those people will have views like, “Well, of course we’re polarized. The other side is just so horrible and we can’t bargain with those people or negotiate with them.” That view is a pretty common one I hear from people on both sides and that’s just the nature of polarization. And some of those people are very polarized. Some of those people want a lot more polarization who they feel like they’re in a good versus evil war. They really view the other side with moral scorn and a lot of hatred and fear. And then there’s other people that simply just aren’t aware that there’s anything that unusual going on, and that kind of response from them would be something like, “Well, we’ve always been divided. It’s not as bad as people think.” And imagine that you’ve heard all sorts of these types of arguments that get in the way of people acknowledging or thinking about polarization as a problem. And I’m curious, is there an elevator pitch that you have about why should people care about polarization, especially for the people that think the other side is bad so polarization’s not a problem, it’s not our problem.
Andrew: I think that one of the key insights that we came away with and here I’m drawing on a book project that I did with my co-editor, Tom Carothers, is that polarization often takes on a life of its own and becomes self-reinforcing and escalates much faster than people might expect. So to start with the people who say polarization is not really a problem, I think that what that perspective often misses is that polarization often becomes this intensely escalating cycle where tit for tat gestures escalate beyond what people ever intended. That what was once a normal partisan battle can escalate to the point where democratic institutions, societal cohesion is under threat and even political violence begins to break out. And that once this cycle of polarization begins, it’s extremely difficult to reign in once you have episodes of political violence.
We’ve seen this in the United States, but also in other places like Kenya in 2007, India today, it’s extremely hard to get polarization on check. So I would say to those people, the polarization is almost like a forest fire, that it can grow out of proportion extremely quickly. To those who say that the other side is so horrible that no redemption is possible and that this is a good versus an evil struggle, I think there are really two key problems with that view. And the first is that that ignores the possibility of working with people who are on the other side, who are willing to work with you, the people in the United States, for example, that we might see as Liz Cheneys or Joe Manchins. But there are genuinely certain people who occupy a center position and that often working with those people, they casting it as a good versus evil struggle, ignores the possibility of collaborating with those people.
But secondly, I think that another problem is that when that kind of polarization sets in, you often find that the dynamics within one side become toxic in themselves. The people are afraid to call out the people that they sort see are leading their side and they become willing to tolerate undemocratic behavior even by the person on their side in the name of sticking it to the other side, beating the other side at all costs. And I think a really interesting study of this was done by two political scientistsMatt Graham and Milan Svolik from Yale, and they find that when candidates are very starkly polarized on the ballot, ordinary Americans are willing to vote for politicians who enforce decidedly anti-democratic positions. And it’s because they see themselves as locked in a struggle versus good and evil, and because they think I need to vote for my side because the other side is even worse. So I think that the key problem is that that good versus legal relationship can lead to you even excusing a certain amount of evil behavior or anti-democratic behavior to be more precise from its own side.
Zach: And one argument I make about polarization in trying to get people to see it as a big problem is that seeing it as a problem doesn’t mean you can’t work very hard towards a political goal. And it doesn’t mean you can’t criticize people who you think are doing bad things. I think for many people they think that acknowledging polarization as a problem somehow hurts them noodles then in some way, makes them weaker or makes them forced to negotiate in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. But I think the big point there is that you can still work very hard towards a political goal, but it’s about recognizing the divides of us versus them language that really plays a role in these dynamics. And I’m curious if you would agree there that it’s about seeing how the language we use and especially about the entire other group and like you mentioned, the distorted views we can have of conflating everybody in the other group as being all the same as the worst people in that group and how that plays into the dynamics and makes the other group more angry and so on part of that cycle. So I’m curious, do you think I’m getting at a good point there that it’s about focusing on how we contribute with our language to these divides?
Andrew: I think that’s a great point and that often the framing of these debates is part of what makes issues that otherwise would not be extremely polarizing, quite polarizing. But I think that this is one thing that is difficult is that often for ordinary citizens, the framing of these debates feels like it can be outside of our control. And part of that is because political leaders in many ways set the agenda and set the agenda deliberately in terms of stark us versus the minor race because they know that that is effective towards rallying their political base, rallying political support, making their side feel like they’re under attack. So I agree that I think a lot of it is, and in many ways it’s often possible to reach consensus on certain issues by avoiding that us versus them framing. But part of the problem is that political incentives often lead politicians to frame it in us versus them terms on a very narrow basis as a matter of political survival more than it is about achieving a concrete policy goal.
Zach: Right. I think that’s a good point about the leaders, the people that can either be the most polarized people in the group, the political leads, or else they’re trying to to use polarization, harness it for their own power and such or to get things done. I think it can be important to separate how we talk about our fellow citizens from how we talk about the political leaders or specific people. And I think that’s a big part of how our language plays into this because, for example, say we’re angry at Trump and we speak in ways that insult the entire other group and vice versa too for both groups we speak in. And so these people, the people that are amplifying the polarization are really in the midst of the us versus them battle can make us speak in ways that insult the entire other group which leads into these vicious cycles of us versus them thinking.
Andrew: Absolutely.
Zach: And one specific example that came to mind for that, I was reading a book aimed at healing America and aimed at depolarization by David Blankenhorn, who was the co-founder of the depolarization group, Braver Angels. He also happens to be a scholar of Abraham Lincoln. And in that bookwhich I can’t actually remember, I think it’s called something about our better angels, our bravery angels, the book title, but he talks about how Abraham Lincoln, even when he made very forceful choices, very hard, tough choices, he never used dehumanizing language about his political opponents. And Blankenhorn gives examples of that about how even in the midst of that extreme conflict, he was always cognizant to speak, attempt to appeal to make rational arguments, make persuasive arguments, and not dehumanize his opponents before and during the Civil War. So I thought that was a really interesting example of what the point is here. It’s not like you can’t make tough decisions and work hard towards things, but it’s about recognizing how your rhetoric and the way you behave and speak about the entire other group really play into these things. And I’m curious if you think that’s a good example.
Andrew: I think that the evidence is extremely strongly supportive of this idea that both political rhetoric matters, but also the media of communication makes a huge difference too. So to start with the first point about Lincoln, I think unfortunately what we’re seeing right now is the precise opposite or the mirror image. So in one case study that we conducted in this book, Democracies Divided on polarization globally, we looked at the case of polling and what we saw was that when the ruling Law and Justice party, a populist right wing party, chose to make immigration one of their major campaign issues and started really digging in on an antimigrant message. Public opinion polling on immigration just changed almost overnight. I think that resistance to refugees increased by 30% points in the span of a few months. So the key thing here is that often these attitudes are extremely malleable and that political leaders who whip up antagonism or often hatred against minority groups, end up changing people’s attitudes very quickly. But the second thing is that, as we know, these political messages aren’t just being communicated in a vacuum. So I think there’s certain media that actually lend themselves very well in the modern era to depolarization and to your credit, I think podcasting is one of them. There’s not really, in the same way that you could have a clickbaity headline, it’s very rare to have a clickbaity podcast because we’re getting into these issues and they’re nuanced. Of course, they’re, but the problem is that oftenand this will be a familiar argument to youis that social media organizations often amplify the most divisive or angry or emotive messages. And we’ve seen this in studies where people are actually randomly assigned to delete their Facebook. They’re paid to delete their Facebook. And what we find is that these individuals, they become less polarized just by virtue of having been assigned to delete their social media. What’s interesting too is that they also become less informed because they no longer can rely on Facebook as a source of information, for example. But so I think that the other key change from Lincoln Zero is that the incentives are all structured the wrong way to reward in many ways this polarizing rhetoric.
Zach: That’s a good point about how quickly the views in society can change. It’s almost as if once we have a certain level of us versus them feelings in a society, it’s almost like things can change overnight as far as how that emotion is expressed, which helps explain why things can change so quickly because it’s just such a turbulent environment. So it’s like, look over here, here’s another thing for you to be polarized around. One big obstacle I’ve seen when it comes to polarization and the people who don’t want to consider it as a problem, or even offended that people talk about polarization as a problem, I think people will feel threatened by that because the implication is that there’s something for both sides to work on in a polarized environment that you’re basically acknowledging that both sides can be contributing. And when you do that,it feels like you’re helping the other side or hurting your side. So when attempting to talk about polarization, you’ll hear a lot of criticisms like that’s a false equivalency. You’re making a both sides argument. One side is much worse, that you can’t compare these groups. So even trying to talk about polarization can trigger these tribal emotions and it seems like polarization creates an environment where it’s hard to even talk about polarization. And I see that as the reason polarization is just so hard to combat despite it being so ubiquitous throughout history and throughout the world. Currently, it’s like our tribal instincts make us unsuited to even talk about the underlying emotional causes out of fear of hurting our side or helping the other side. And an argument I’ve made for that is to try to overcome that obstacle is that you can continue thinking one side is much worse than your group while still believing and trying to see how us versus them polarization is a problem and thinking about how these things contribute and thinking about how to reduce it. So I’m curious if you would agree with all that or have anything to add there.
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Andrew: Well, I do think that one thing that is a background condition is really crucial, and that even before we talk about this issue of the blame game, both sides do need to factually agree that polarization is a problem. And sometimes that’s not even possible. So in the case of Turkey today, an extremely polarized society where a very illiberal president, Tayyip Erdoğan, has relentlessly polarized society in particular through tactics of repression. One major problem is that his supporters,specially parliamentarians politicians, systematically deny that there is polarization in Turkey society. And they say, this is just the opposition complaining, but there is no polarization. And in those kinds of situations, it’s extremely hard for any reform to occur that in cases where you are actually able to make progress on polarization, often unfortunately there needs to be some cataclysmic event that leads both sides to just shake out of it, like a fever for the fever to break. One example of this that we looked at in the book is Kenya after the election violence in 2007, which killed more than 1,000 people, where civil society, parties from both sides got together in a really serious way to draft the 2010 Constitution, which has not been perfect, but has created some institutions in Kenya as in particular really powerful Supreme Court to moderate that violence and to moderate that polarization. To your point though, I do think that you’re very right that both sides often end up playing the blame game and trying to prove that the other side is at fault, but that that’s really not a path that leads to anywhere productive. In the first place, it’s almost impossible to get politicians to admit that they’re at fault. They have no incentive to do so. But second, when you make the argument that the other side is the one to blame,ften you end up giving up hope that there are people on the other side that you could work with. And for example, I see this because a lot of people in the United States claim, especially liberal commentators, of course, that the Republican Party is to blame or the Republican Party has radicalized. And what I worry is that those people often give up hope of working with moderate Republicans, the people like Liz Cheney, and they instead target their arguments almost exclusively at liberal or democratic audiences. And I think that that’s the wrong approach, and I think that it’s something that often comes out of the idea that polarization in the US is asymmetric, that there’s no one on the other side that we could work with.
Zach: Yeah. Getting into that idea of one of the common obstacles or criticisms is the idea that we can’t negotiate with these people, and for an example, like on the liberal side, you’ll hear, we can’t negotiate on voting rights. And on the conservative side, you might hear, we can’t negotiate on trans issues with liberals who want to allow mutilation of kids. And to be clear, these aren’t my beliefs, I’m just quoting what I hear from both sides, these kinds of things. But that elides over a lot of nuance because the truth is that unless you want to enter a war, at some level, you do have to negotiate. You do have to reach negotiations because the truth is just that our fellow citizens do believe such vastly different things than us, and we do have to coexist with our fellow citizens. And I think the idea that, you know, negotiation isn’t possible or dialogue isn’t possible is impossible, is exactly part of the problem because if you start believing that, then the only option left is basically some sort of war. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on those kinds of we can’t negotiate types of statements.
Andrew: Well, Zach, I think this is one of the most difficult moral dilemmas that polarization poses, which is that often, especially in democracies, polarization results in significant anti-democratic behavior. And the question becomes whether or not we can, or within a society, people who stand up for and believe in democratic values should negotiate with decidedly anti-democratic figures. And different societies have struck this balance in different ways. In Latin America, after some extremely bloody and repressive and brutal military dictatorships, civilian governments often thought that the only way that they could rebuild democracy was to give some level of impunity to military torturers effectively. And there’s an argument that people in the left on the United States might make that voting rights should be non-negotiable. The other side is anti-democratic if they’re trying to make it harder for people to vote. And I think that that’s a balance that different democratic societies strike in different ways. There’s no one right answer to that question of whether or not it’s appropriate to negotiate with a side on the other side that is flagrantly violating democratic rules is and potentially in cases of dictatorships engaging in human rights violations.
Zach: A small note here in case it came across that I was acting like voting rights were trivial or something that we could easily compromise on, it’s definitely a serious topic, but I think there’s a lot more nuance even in that area than many people are aware of. For example, the fact that with all the anger around Georgia’s voting laws, it’s still easier to vote in Georgia than in quite a few other states, including some Democrat majority states. This is not to say that voting restrictions are not a problem and there’s nothing to worry about, but just to say that it’s possible to see some of the rhetoric around that topic as exaggerated in a way that makes it harder to have helpful conversations. And for another example, a majority of people, including a majority of Democrats, are shown in surveys to support requiring ID to vote. This is just to say that sometimes the issues we think are clearly a case of good versus bad can have a lot of nuance and a lot of room to make both sides happy, or at least both sides equally unhappy. And the more we talk about these issues as good versus bad and binary, and the more we act as if the other political group are completely irrational and incapable of discourse, the more we’ll accentuate our divides. But obviously there are no easy answers, especially the more polarized and high conflict as society becomes. Okay, back to the interview.
Zach: Yeah, there’s definitely no easy answers. The more these things get worse, I think that’s what makes these things just so hard to talk about because there’s always gonna be a range of responses and views of what the proper responses are.
Andrew: And can I add one, one point on this? I think that I wanna be extremely clear here, which is to say that I don’t think that reducing polarization is necessarily an end in itself. That reducing polarization should always be the goal of democratic activists and organizers. And I think that the best example of this is that pushing for democratic change, especially bringing new groups into politics, is often highly polarizing. And the US is a fantastic example of this, that during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, people that we now think of as rightly as American heroes like Dr. Martin Luther King were extremely polarizing and often hated figures. And so this is a pattern that repeats itself in other democracies that have serious democratic deficits, but often overcoming those deficits, especially of exclusion can be a tremendously polarizing process and often violent.
Zach: Yeah, it’s definitely not easy to talk about these things. And I would say when it comes to practical takeaways, if I had to sum things up about how I see it, it’s like aiming for depolarization is about thinking about the distorted ways that we speak about the other group and looking for ways to reduce that. It doesn’t mean not criticize or not working towards things. I think it’s just thinking about all the distorted things that we say, like on social media, like, this group is X and being aware that we can often make the same arguments but make them in a way that is more persuasive to the other side or towards the people in the middle. I think that’s the practical thing to me is focusing on like how we speak and really thinking about how we might be contributing.
Andrew: I think that’s a valuable framing that polarization, it certainly in those cases should not be gratuitous as you’re pointing out that conflict is not necessarily bad in a democracy, but it shouldn’t be in this way that distortedly demonizes the other side.
Zach: So you’ve studied polarization around the world and how it happens in many countries, how it plays out. And I’ve read that polarization has been rising in most countries since 2005. And maybe you could give a brief overview of that research and tell me if that’s an accurate summary of the way things are in the world currently.
Andrew: And I think that this is a key argument that my co-editor Tom Carothers and I make in our book Democracies Divided, is that polarization isn’t just an American problem, it’s a global one. That in many ways polarization in the United States stands out in terms of how old it is that we argue that polarization has been really gradually intensifying since the 1960s. But that if Americans take a broader view, we have a lot to learn from other countries because polarization is genuinely tearing at the seams of democracies globally. Countries like Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Poland, Turkey, Venezuela, all of these countries have experienced really sharp affective polarization around deep identity divides. So to your first point, I think it’s absolutely true in sort of survey data run by The Varieties of Democracy Project that polarization appears to be an increasing trend. Scholars have of course debated the causes of that, whether it’s globally applicable forces like social media or more particular domestic forces like the rise of populist or illiberal leaders. But one thing that I would point out thinking in global terms is that the more– in the book we looked at the experiences of other divided democracies– the more we realized that US polarization is extremely unusual and extremely worrying.
The first thing that was unusual, and I’ve mentioned this, is that polarization in the United States has been accumulating for a very long time. Today’s divisions date back at least to the 1960s, so 60 years. And most other cases of polarization are much more recent in origin. Another thing is that the US effect of polarization is extremely distinctive and that it combines a combination of ethnic, religious and ideological divisions. In many other countries, polarization really hinges on one of those key identities.
In Kenya, it’s the division between the Kikuyu and Luo and Kalenjin and other ethnic groups that often drives polarization. In Turkey, the polarization is in particular rooted around Islamist versus secularist conceptions of Turkish national identity. But in the United States, this is something that we as Americans don’t often think about because it’s the air that we breathe. Ethnic, religious, and ideological divisions really interlock in a very powerful way that we call the iron triangle of polarization in the United States. On the one hand, the US is part of this global picture, rising polarization, but there are reasons to be in particular very concerned about the United States.
Zach: So obviously, every country is unique with its own issues and different types of governance and different personalities to name a few factors. But I’m curious if you see the underlying human psychology, the group versus group psychology that arises, do you see it as being pretty much the same?
Andrew: I do think that polarizing leaders often appeal to very similar types of social identity divides and that this division between ingroup and outgroup is deeply rooted in human psychology. I think that the social or emotional bases that leaders appeal to is often different. There are different kinds of ideologies for example that leaders appeal to on the left or on the right. Polarization isn’t of all the same flavor, you could say, in every different country. But I think that these divisions appeal to deeply rooted human impulses. You need to look no further than how much people love sports teams, how much we get emotionally attached to a sports team. The stakes are so low in practical speaking terms for me whether or not the Yankees win, but we’re just emotionally attached to our group.
So I think that this desire for this group has a tendency in human life is just an incredibly powerful force. And mobilizing that into political conflict, of course, supercharges this us versus them divide. Because often so much is at stake in terms of policy resources and status in a country when these polarized divides are mobilized.
Zach: Would it be accurate to say that if there are a good number of people in a country that have high poverty and don’t have much to eat, that seems to me like it might be a separate emotional, psychological thing going on like a different class of polarization if you’ve got those kinds of things leading to polarization versus like countries that are doing better financially and such that they come to be very polarized. Is that accurate to say?
Andrew: That’s very interesting. Actually, in this book Democracies Divided, we looked at nine different countries that are along a very broad spectrum of the income distribution, so extremely wealthy countries like the United States, more middle-income countries like Poland and Turkey and then also lower income countries like Bangladesh and India. We didn’t find actually that poverty or the relative level of income in these countries made the difference in terms of shaping the variety of polarization.
What we did find is that often it’s not the amount of income that makes a difference, but rather a sense of relative deprivation that precipitates in a cycle of anger against the political class, which is not the same as polarization. But two great examples of this are Turkey in 2002 and then Venezuela in the late 1990s. Just to briefly summarize, I think that in cases where a massive economic crisis really undermines the standard of living, people often revolt against the political class and that this creates an opportunity because the political parties are so weak for a polarizing figure like a Chavez in Venezuela or an Erdogan in Turkey to come to power.
So I think that really the key is often a relative decline in living standards brought about by an economic crisis. It doesn’t necessarily cause polarization, but it can weaken and debilitate existing political parties and create the opportunity for a new polarizing force to come to power.
Zach: When it comes to comparing the polarization in the United States with other countries either up today in countries today or countries in the past, are there certain countries, other nations that you see as somewhat similar in terms of how polarization is playing out here?
Andrew: Absolutely. To begin as I mentioned, I do think that US polarization is extremely distinctive. But I think that as the US starts looking for ways to manage our divisions, we need to be thinking about comparative cases. Two countries in particular come to mind. The first perhaps surprisingly for many Americans is the Latin American country of Chile during the 1970s.
Chile, many Americans may not know, was the model poster child for democracy in Latin America in the 1960s, the 1970s. It was seen as having one of the most effective rule of law systems, the most stable democracies, one of the most prosperous economies. Polarization ripped Chilean democracy apart. In the specific case of Chile, actually, the United States was involved in fomenting the 1973 coup d’état.
Second, I think that other countries that are similar are often Eastern European cases like Poland and also Turkey that combined this ideological polarization often with religious or ethnic tones. I think that in these cases, one of the unfortunate lessons is that polarization can often totally overrun the rule of law institutions that we think will keep political competition in bounds. Poland is a really sobering example of this that the constitutional court in Poland, basically the tribunal ruled that the incumbent government populist far-right government couldn’t appoint certain justices to the Supreme Court. The president of Poland just refused to listen and obey what the constitutional orders. In Turkey as well, judicial independence is basically been driven into the ground.
I think that what’s really sobering about these comparative cases is the sheer extent of democratic erosion that’s been experienced in the Chilean case where polarization destroyed a very old democracy that people thought would be able to withstand it and in places like Poland and Turkey where institutions are not as deeply rooted as they are in the United States. But nonetheless, they’ve been extremely weakened in their capacity to constrain the government.
Zach: One thing I’ve wondered is you hear a lot of examples of right-wing authoritarian countries that have resulted from polarization. I know it can be hard to exactly quantify things in those terms, but I’m curious, are there well-known examples more associated with liberal or left-wing polarization and authoritarianism? Hugo Chavez is my understanding he would be categorized as a left-wing populist. Is that accurate? If that’s true, are there other examples like that?
Andrew: Yes. In fact, perhaps surprisingly, the Latin American political scientist Sebastian Mazzuca has argued that polarizing left-wing populist parties are in many ways more dangerous for democracy than populist right wing parties. That is to say given the fact that you have a populist party that’s come to power and wants to erode your democracy, would you rather it be a far-right party or a far-left party?
Perhaps counterintuitively, Mazzuca’s point is that left-wing parties that came to power like Chavez in Venezuela but also the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Evo Morales in Bolivia, that because these left-wing parties centered their political message on expanding state programs, expanding resources, including cash transfers to the poor, built up the state apparatus in many ways by investing in new social programs, these regimes turned out to be quite durable in terms of staying in power because they were providing lots of resources to voters. Those resources ultimately became a certain form of clientelism or a tit for tat we the Chavez guys are going to give you the resources in exchange for votes that this became a mechanism through which they stayed in power. I think that there are certainly examples of left-wing governments that have moved towards authoritarian politics.
The other thing I would say is that I think many Americans misunderstand the right-wing governments in places like Poland and Turkey. We often think of these people as being right-wing in the sense of perhaps economically conservative when in fact it couldn’t be further from the truth that the Law and Justice government in Poland, the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, both of these right-wing parties are conservative on religious issues, for example, but they spend a ton of money, they dole out patronage, they provide support for new families, child allowances, these kinds of things. That is a huge part of their appeal, which is that they give a lot of money to ordinary citizens, and especially to their supporters.
I think that there’s a mixed picture here. The story isn’t totally one of right-wing governments eroding democracy, that in many ways it’s a more complex one.
Zach: I’ve been pretty surprised and maybe even shocked at how little polarization as a concept is discussed by politicians and journalists and pundits and such. As we’ve discussed, it’s such a super common human dynamic and happens to so many countries and yet it barely seems talked about outside of academic world or a few people that are interested in depolarization. I think that gets back to what we were talking about how polarization creates an environment where it’s hard to talk about polarization. But I’m curious if do you think if we took the approach of trying to get more people to talk about it and treat that as a valuable thing to promote and got more people talking about it, do you think that’s one way to combat and lower the temperature on these things?
Andrew: I think that is very important, because I think that in many ways politics generally suffers from the problem, and I’m not just talking about the United States but more broadly, the problem of extreme motivated voices dominating the conversation. Just take a very concrete and tangible example, gun rights in the United States. There is a very broad majority of Americans who support universal background checks or some form of background checks before purchasing, especially the most lethal firearms, but you very rarely hear from the ordinary Americans… I might say, let’s put you in that position, Zach. You may be a gun rights advocate or a gun control advocate. I don’t know.
But my point more broadly is that on issues where there is actually mass agreement on an issue, one problem is that the extreme voices tend to dominate. This is, for example, groups like the National Rifle Association, or NRA, which is a very loud voice speaking up for the maximalist position on the right to own and bear arms.
I think that part of the problem that you’re very astutely pointing out is that these voices in the middle, people who care about the polarization, who care about a more central politics are often drowned out in conversation by people who have very specific policy demands. Because people who care very deeply about a specific policy, whether it’s for example a total ban on abortion or a total ban on a specific type of legal firearm, those voices tend to dominate the conversation much more than people advocating for lowering the temperature in the room.
Zach: And it might be obvious, but even aside from the depolarization attempts, the people aimed at depolarization, it seems just even trying to have that conversation is so hard even just to broach a subject. I guess maybe it’s related. It’s all related. You can’t talk about depolarization. You can’t talk about polarization. But it’s just so strange to me that it’s such a common human dynamic. And so obviously inside of us, for us to behave this way is so common, but it’s like why don’t you see people talking on the news about journalist talking more about all this is similar to other things that have happened throughout history or are happening now throughout the world.
We have this almost like some people have said it’s due to our sense of American exceptionalism that we’re different, but I almost think it’s just due to how polarization works. Because we in a polarized environment, a polarized society will always see its own issues as being unique and important and not really related to these other things that have happened to other people, then that’s what’s so pernicious about polarization because it feels the thing you’re going through is so important, it’s so life or death or whatever. That is what makes it so powerful that it’s not relatable to these other things, even though they’ve happened a million times.
Andrew: I think that’s a crucial point that in many ways, every country is dealing with its own struggle over national identity. What we find looking across different cases of polarization is that really often the core of the issue is fundamentally different conceptions of national identity. So different ideas of India, for example, is India a secular country or is it a Hindu nation? In Turkey, is Turkey an Islamic country first and foremost or is it a secular state? In the United States, what should the rule of religion be in public life? These are very… The specific context and history of course plays out in a different way, but there is a clear pattern of differences fundamentally related to national identity and to brilliant scholars of polarization.
Jennifer McCoy who you’ve hosted on the podcast and her colleague Murat Somer find that this is what they call formative rifts that often in the process of creating a country, there are unresolved divisions about what that national identity should be like. That is something that every country grapples with in its own unique way, but it’s a common pattern that we have a lot to learn from other cases, especially the United States where we’re often closed to that kind of comparative perspective.
Zach: It’s my own belief that many liberals are a bit oblivious to the ways in which liberals can contribute to polarization. I think for me, the obliviousness from some people is just due to the fact that liberal thought and perspectives dominate so much of mainstream media in the form of TV, news, shows, movies, educational institutions. And so, this can make it pretty hard to really understand other points of view, even reasonable and well-meaning points of view on the conservative side, and to really see how some liberal rhetoric can be seen as divisive. So basically, the idea that it’s a bit of a bubble basically.
A small note here, if you’re looking for an example of what I mean by some liberal rhetoric being divisive, I’d recommend a previous episode of mine where I interviewed Leonie Huddy on the topic of liberal side perceptions of racism in America. I’d also recommend checking out John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism, which examines some of the divisive aspects of liberal side stances on racism.
One politically liberal political researcher I corresponded with said that he believed that more than half of our challenge with polarization was getting liberals to see the ways in which they contributed to polarization. To take another example, and a recent paper by Heidi and Guy Burgess about applying conflict resolution strategies to polarization, they said the following, “The objective of the progressive left seems more ambitious. To cancel and drive from the public square, anyone who has ever expressed the slightest doubt about the merits of any aspect of the progressive agenda.” Those are just a few examples.
I think it’s important to understand how it is that rational and well-meaning people can see liberals as being divisive. This doesn’t mean you have to agree with that, but I do think making the attempt to see those points of view can help us understand our fellow Americans a bit better and make dialogue more possible.
Okay, back to the interview.
What’s your take on that? Do you think the more we talk about these problems do you think more people will be aware of the ways they might be contributing?
Andrew: I think in any context to polarization, whether willingly or consciously or not, both sides are contributing to polarization. I think that the biggest way you see this is often certain kinds of purity tests that take place in terms of the willingness of individuals to engage in conversation in good faith dialogue. That often part of the problem is that certain people perspectives are seen as immediately disqualifying, that there’s no need for further conversation, that that’s the end of the story. But I think that this is a problem too that often both sides live in a certain form of echo chamber, that certain types of media should have constantly exposed individuals to one perspective even if they try to be balanced in terms of the issues that they prioritize and otherwise.
But I think what’s difficult is that in any polarized society, there’s not really a neutral position. So the best that you can do is try to incorporate as a collectively as possible different perspectives to listen and to avoid that kind of critique. So I think you’re absolutely right that on both sides, people are often not fully conscious of the ways in which they’re contributing to polarization.
Zach: I’m curious if you have any thoughts about the idea that the modern world in making us more isolated from each other, more lonely as shown in studies and such has created a situation that is conducive to more polarization? Because it seems like the more lonely we are, the more isolated we are from each other socially, the more we’ll look not to the people around us for meaning, but the more we’ll look to these big distant fights, these more conceptual fights about who we are and these fights that give us a sense of meaning. I’m curious if you think that our increased isolation in the modern world could be a big factor here in explaining what seems to be almost like a modern pandemic of polarization?
Andrew: That is a fascinating question. I think the world is going through a huge test of this right now as we look at the political aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, that increased isolation and loneliness due to people’s political preferences? I think that there is evidence, as you pointed out, that loneliness can shape political preferences in that way. But polarization and loneliness can also be deemed mobilizing. It can demobilize people politically, people become less politically active. Or in terms of political science, they have a lower sense of efficacy or a feeling that they can change the world, get involved in politics, for example. So I think that the jury is still out on that question.
One thing I will point out though, as you’ve said, is that often that polarization is deeply entrenched in human psychology in many ways, these kinds of us versus them divisions. I think that what has changed is not necessarily perhaps that people are more lonely, but that they have much greater access to people who are willing to spread deeper polarizing messages. So if you think about this in a variety of contexts, it seems that political establishments that previously represented centrist political positions have been losing ground. This is partially because of media contro,l the way that social media has increased the ability of new politicians like a Trump or a Bolsonaro in Brazil to spread polarizing messages and circumvent the new usual channels of the media like TV. But it’s also the way that people like Trump and Bolsonaro are able to crowdsource funds as part of their campaign. So I think that part of the modern world’s effect has also been that political parties that were once moderators of the democratic discussion are becoming less powerful and less capable of shielding us from or constraining the most polarizing voices in the system.
Zach: Yeah, that gets into something I think about a good amount, which is we often talk about the role of social media or the role of media or whatever. I think it’s a mistake to view social media as like this separate thing from all the other technology and media that’s been in process for decades cable TV and all this stuff, the internet in general. To me, it’s like it’s just this amplification of information load, these messages flying all around us. We’re bombarded in the modern age with messages with information. It’s almost like all these things are just an amplification of what humans do in the first place. We already clearly have the capacity to be polarized pre-high technology. But then you add in basically like this accelerant, this amphetamine of human experience, these messages flying everywhere around us and it allows us to build these perspectives, these narratives, these us versus them narratives just that much more quickly because we’ve got these messages flying around. So it’s almost like I really see these things as just an accelerant of human social interactions, whether that there’s good aspects of that obviously and there’s dark aspects of social psychology. That’s how I view it. I’m curious if you have any thoughts there?
Andrew: No, I think that’s exactly right that in many ways social media is the intensification of a previous trend toward the diversification of the media landscape, that the rise of new cable channels like Fox TV, for example, are represented in the late 1990s and early 2000s and a broader symptom of a world in which political establishments have much less control over who is going to be on the ballot, who’s going to be the president.
Zach: This is great. I think we covered a lot of things. Is there anything else you’d like to mention that we haven’t mentioned?
Andrew: Just that I think podcasts are a great medium for deconstructing or rather pushing back against polarization. It’s great to have a long thoughtful conversation. So thank you, Zach.
Zach: Thanks, Andrew.
That was Andrew O’Donohue, co-author of Democracies Divided. And just a reminder that I interviewed Andrew’s co-author, Thomas Carothers, in an earlier episode.
And just a reminder that I have other polarization-related episodes. If you go to my site behavior-podcast.com and look at the page for this episode, you’ll find some links to those. If I had to recommend one episode, I’d say check out the recent interview with Thomas Hornsey, where we talk about group psychology and polarization, and persuasion.
I also wanted to say that it’s hard to talk about these topics. It is hard to talk about polarization because by talking about it, you touch on such controversial and emotion-producing topics. It’s a bit like walking through a minefield, because no matter how careful you are to speak in persuasive or bridge-building ways, in a polarized society there will be a good number of people on both sides of an issue who will take offense at the things you say, who will hear something that angers them and say “these depolarization people are clueless, they don’t really understand what’s going on.” Personally I’ve experienced people on both sides filtering the things I say through the worst possible interpretations, essentially sifting my language for signs of insults to their group, or signs of having hidden, malicious motives, or just of being clueless and oblivious.
I mention this just to say that hopefully you can see how for a society to get better, it might require more people to try to overcome our emotional reactions a bit more, and listen to more viewpoints, and try to see the well meaning motivations and goals of others, and examine their ideas. And sometimes those ideas will at first seem strange or insulting or oblivious to us, but sometimes they’ll make more sense the more you think about them and see how they can be practically applied.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. Again, if you like this podcast, please share it with your family and friends.
A talk with research Sabrina Hoppe, who specializes in machine learning and cognitive science. Hoppe was part of a team who worked on a 2018 paper titled Eye movements during everyday behavior predict personality traits. Transcript of this talk is below. We talk about that research and what was found. Topics include: how that study was set up; how strong the correlations were; the possible reasons why there might be relationships between eye movements and personality; and other research in that area.
Episode links:
Resources discussed in this episode or related to the topic:
TRANSCRIPT
Zach Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about better understanding other people and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at www.behavior-podcast.com.
There are quite a few studies that have found connections between people’s eye movements and their personality traits. These studies typically take the form of having subjects wear eye tracking hardware while performing various tasks, and then looking for correlations between the eye movements and the subjects’ rankings on various personality tests.
In this episode, I talk with Sabrina Hoppe; her last name is spelled HOPPE. Sabrina is a researcher who specializes in machine learning and cognitive science. Sabrina has worked on several research projects related to eye movements. A 2018 paper she and others worked on was called Eye movements during everyday behavior predict personality traits, and that’s the one we’ll focus on in this talk.
To quote from the abstract of that paper:
Here we show that eye movements during an everyday task predict aspects of our personality. We tracked eye movements of 42 participants while they ran an errand on a university campus and subsequently assessed their personality traits using well-established questionnaires. Using a state-of-the-art machine learning method and a rich set of features encoding different eye movement characteristics, we were able to reliably predict four of the Big Five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness) as well as perceptual curiosity only from eye movements. Further analysis revealed new relations between previously neglected eye movement characteristics and personality. Our findings demonstrate a considerable influence of personality on everyday eye movement control, thereby complementing earlier studies in laboratory settings. Improving automatic recognition and interpretation of human social signals is an important endeavor, enabling innovative design of human–computer systems capable of sensing spontaneous natural user behavior to facilitate efficient interaction and personalization.
It makes some instinctual sense that our personalities, how we experience and interact with the world, would relate to how we move our eyes. Our eyes are how we explore our environment, the things and people around us.
For me personally, I’ve noticed that when I’m more anxious, my eye movements are more restrained, more frozen. And that’s just what I’ve noticed; it wouldn’t surprise me if there were other patterns I haven’t noticed. And it wouldn’t surprise me that some of those ways I move and use my eyes are not just situation or emotion-based, but are part of the way I interact with the world, part of my personality.
When it comes to poker, one important poker tell can be how someone’s eyes move when they’re bluffing compared to when they’re betting a strong hand; often people who are more anxious will tend to be more frozen in general, and this can manifest in how they move their eyes. A player who makes a big bet and whose gaze travels around to various places, who has more dynamic eye movement; that person is likely to be relaxed and have a big hand.
I mention these things just to give some of the specific reasons I’m interested in eye tracking research. And I hope to do more episodes on this topic in future.
Okay, here’s the talk with Sabrina Hoppe.
Zach Elwood: Hi Sabrina, welcome to the show.
Sabrina: Hi, thanks for having me.
Zach Elwood: So you’ve done a good amount of research involving eye tracking and psychology. Was eye tracking something you were interested in early on? And if so, what was your interest in that?
Sabrina: I started my studies actually in computer science, and a bit later I discovered that I was also interested in psychology. And then eye tracking seemed to be a very nice area where I could use my computer science knowledge, but then apply it to psychology because eye movements are so nice to be recorded, and then you can do a lot of data analysis and stuff that this computer science part of me would be interested in. And then of course, additionally, I found that you can have so many interesting questions to answer like looking into concepts like personality, which we will talk about later, and I just thought that this was a really nice area then.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, one thing that struck me looking at the raw data was just the huge amount of data that was gathered by the computer, and it seems like that would be pretty hard to do without computers. Am I getting that right?
Sabrina: Yes, definitely. This type of study wouldn’t have worked without a computer for sure.
Zach Elwood: So maybe you could give a little bit of summary on the existing research that was around before you did the study on eye movements and the correlation with personality. Was it pretty widely accepted beforehand that eye movements were related or correlated with personality states?
Sabrina: Yes. So it was widely accepted that there is a correlation in laboratory settings. Meaning if a person comes in and then you sit them or you let them sit down in an kind of isolated room, no audio distraction, no other people, and they have this one clear task, which would be look at specific images which have been pre-selected to show them, so in this very, very restricted setting, there it was well accepted that there would be a connection between personality and some measurements that you could take from the gaze. But what was new about our study was just taking this to the real world. So we really just sent them go shopping on a campus and maybe they met other people on their way, maybe they had some everyday life things to do on their way, and yet we could still detect this link between gaze and personality, and that was the new part.
Zach Elwood: Do you see your study as strongly contributing to making the case of that link between eye movements and personality or do you think that that was already a respected idea and your work was just part of it?
Sabrina: I think the idea was respected, but we made it stronger because we showed that you can really detect this pretty much no matter what the human is doing or at least it far less matters what the human is doing than we originally thought. So if you think about it, there’s so much that could come up in the real world. Your attention could be somewhere entirely different or you look at something, at other people and so on. And through all of this, we can still detect personality. I think that was a new idea, we really contributed to showing how strong this impact of personality on your gaze is.
Zach Elwood: And if I was correct on my understanding, it wasn’t based on the situation at all, it was just purely an analysis of eye movements, regardless of the situation. They were going out in the real world and going to the shop and such, but the analysis was just purely on how their eyes moved and the traits of how their eyes moved. Is that correct?
Sabrina: Yes, exactly. So we only know kind of in a 2D setting how the eye moved, and we don’t even know what they were looking at. So we don’t make a distinction if that was a face or an object or the way, whatever.
Zach Elwood: Maybe you could talk about the specifics of what you found, what were the most interesting findings to you and how reliable were the findings and such?
Sabrina: So we looked into the big five, which would be five different personality traits. And then out of those five, we could actually detect four in the gaze. That was surprising, I would say, at first, because four out of five would be relatively broad. So it’s not just one specific trait of a human that you can detect, but actually kind of a range of potential personality traits. Plus we also looked into curiosity, which we could also detect, and the performance of our classifier, so of this machine learning method which we applied in the end was above chance. So quite clearly it’s not a finding that would have happened just by kind of random influences on the data, but the performance is not as great as you might expect. So if you just pick a person now and we apply the method on this one person, actually we would achieve at most something like a 50% chance to be right in what we do. However, why this is still interesting is that we took the personality scores for each person and we divided them into three classes. So we had people with a low score, a medium score and a high score. And then kind of chance level if you were guessing would be one third, and we reached something which is up to roughly one half, so it’s above chance level. And that’s basically the exciting part for this data science perspective and just the statistics, but it doesn’t mean that it’s actually super accurate for a single person.
Zach Elwood: So there were three classes of each personality trait. And chance would’ve been a third, but for the ones that predicted well, it was picking those at a 50% chance instead of a 33% chance. Is that basically what was happening?
Sabrina: Yes, exactly. Most of the scores were between 40 and 50%.
Zach Elwood: So what are the specific traits it predicted? Which ones stood out for you as being the most interesting and are you able to say what the actual eye movements were like for those traits?
Sabrina: So the big five that I just mentioned would be neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and contentiousness. And we could detect four, and the one we could not detect is openness. Now, I’m not sure I can make sense of that to be honest, I mean, it’s purely the finding just of our data. It does make sense to me that you can find extraversion, because as a human I would have this intuition that that is something I can see in other people. The way they look at me, I feel like I could judge if they would be willing to talk to new people and you know.
Zach Elwood: Right, they look around more, things like that.
Sabrina: Yeah. So that’s not a very scientific way to approach this, but intuitively to me, it makes sense that you can see extraversion in a gaze movement, in eye movements. On the other hand, somehow that’s also very related to openness actually, and you cannot detect openness. So certainly there would still be lots of room to look into what exactly now makes the difference between extraversion and openness. Why can you detect one but not the other?
Zach Elwood: I know in some machine learning studies there’s a bit of what they call the black box aspect, where you’re not really sure what exactly it’s finding. But I’m wondering if that’s true of this research, are you able to say exactly what it was finding that was correlated with these personality traits? For example, for neuroticism, are you able to say, what was it finding in the eye movements or otherwise that was correlated with neuroticism?
Sabrina: I guess with machine learning approaches, there’s always a little bit of this black box effect, but the method we chose at the time has it less than other methods at least. So normally in machine learning, there is the concept that you have the raw data, that would just be all this data that we recorded as you said. And then we extract something that we call features. So that would be you first analyze the gaze and you try to identify periods of time when the person executes a fixation, which would be gaze at one place for a longer period of time, typically in order to get information from this one place, and then there are saccades in which the person just jumps to the next point, those are like super rapid movements. And so there are different kinds of these movements, you analyze these. And then you extract numbers from them, how long did fixation on average take? What peak velocity did the quick movements reach? I don’t know, hundreds of them really. And afterwards we throw all of these measurements into our machine learning approach. And so at least we know what we extracted. So maybe for some reason because of prior work, for example, you could have a hypothesis that exactly the duration of fixations or something else has particular impact. And then we would be able to verify whether or not this was an important feature in our analysis. But the other way round, so just coming from what the classifier does in the end, it’s really hard to understand entirely what it’s doing, because it’s not based on a single feature, it’s this combination of hundreds of things and then they have some waiting factor and it’s really hard to tell after all. So what is it? It’s not like I as a human could say, “I try to learn this technique now, and I’m going to analyze exactly that.”
Zach Elwood: So is it accurate to say my understanding is for a lot of these machine learning studies, it’s kind of accurate to say that the machine knows something that we can’t know or find out. Is that accurate?
Sabrina: Yes, because we somehow cannot process so many small pieces of information which are seemingly maybe seemingly irrelevant or seemingly unrelated, we can’t process them together as a human, and the machine obviously doesn’t care.
Zach Elwood: If I want to know what the various data was, the specific movements and such related to neuroticism, for example, I can’t really know that, is that basically what you’re saying?
Sabrina: You can do an analysis in the end, so I could give you a ranking of which features were most important. You can know, yes, but it’s still not this one feature. It’s not like the algorithm selects one thing and then says, “That’s it, that makes a neurotic, but it’s always about this combination and that’s hard to grasp, but you could write down the math if you wanted.
Zach Elwood: Have you done that with the various personality traits? Have you shown which eye movements and such and kinds of eye movements were what it was finding in the analysis?
Sabrina: Yes, we did that. But that’s quite hard to decipher as a human.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, it’s pretty hard to… That was the challenge I was getting through. It was hard to find the summary, because like you’re saying, it’s taking into account so many things basically is what you’re saying.
Sabrina: Yes. So if you would check this table in our publication where we did this analysis, a lot of it is about what we call [n-gram] analysis. This would be sequences of eye movements. So if you think we have fixations, blinks, and saccades, then you could combine them in different ways. So it could go blink, saccade, blink or if it was linked three, you can do all sorts of combinations. And then there we just counted them and we analyzed which of the combinations of movements was the most frequent. And now you can say in the end that the most frequent movement which is consisting of three parts somehow seems to be more linked to openness than to others. But that’s very unintuitive I would say. So as a human, you go out of that and you’re like, “Okay, that’s the math, but what does it tell me?” And I think that’s where this black box effect comes in that you talk about. We can write down the math and we can show you what exact analysis we did and then we can score it, and we can tell you this was important, but it’s still not an explanation that a human is…
Zach Elwood: Right. It’s not easy to make sense of.
Sabrina: Exactly.
Zach Elwood: Probably getting into the realm of opinions and conjecture, but do you have opinions about what might be… For example, if we take neuroticism, it seems to be possible to imagine someone being neurotic and having a lot of eye movements or also having very little. For example, one can imagine different patterns existing, one can imagine scanning around for threats and such and being nervous in that way versus someone being kind of overwhelmed by sensory input or threats or whatever, the sense of threat, and kind of shutting down a bit and moving their eyes less. And I’m curious if you have any thoughts on the kinds of nuance and variations that might be involved in these kind of broad personality traits. We sometimes tend to give a general term to things that contain a whole lot of nuance.
Sabrina: Yes, definitely. I think this already starts with what these traits mean. I mean, how did we come up with the fact that there are these five factors in psychology, which is a quite widespread model for personality traits. And still the way that they were defined is basically just by looking at how we describe people. And I think in every language of the world, there are millions of words that you could use to describe another person. And then the research is around the, I think, 1950s or so, they try to figure out which of these descriptions typically come together and then try to identify only a few dimensions in which humans would typically differ. So this is somehow the collection of things which we now look at when we talk about one of these traits like neuroticism which has emerged from these verbal descriptions of people. But of course, it’s still because humans cover such a big variety and neuroticism–
Zach Elwood: And [unintelligible 19.04]
Sabrina: Yes, it’s such a collection of things that just by itself even the category we have there, detecting neuroticism, means all sorts of things. And then additionally, if we picked one, still I believe that it’s entirely possible that different people with this, let’s say, symptom of neuroticism exhibit a different case pattern, because for somebody it leads to slowing down, for the other person speeding up, who knows?
Zach Elwood: Yeah, and you can imagine the same for the PCI which I think is the perceptual curiosity index. And I think they called it perceptual curiosity because kind of in a similar way you can imagine there being different kinds of curiosity. You can imagine there being someone who’s curious about concepts and internal ideas, and that wouldn’t necessarily manifest as someone who seems more visual curious whose eyes move around to different places and such. Would you agree with that, that that also contains a lot of nuance there?
Sabrina: Yes, definitely. You’re right. So curiosity is a very broad term as well, and that’s why psychologists have invented subcategories such as perceptual curiosity. And then still perceptual curiosity could also just be directed towards sounds, and then why would that show up in your gaze? So even there we’re actually only targeting a subcategory, but I’m not aware of a default way to assess only the visual part of perceptual curiosity.
Zach Elwood: We talked about this a little bit, but what were the findings from this specific study that stood out the most to you as being interesting or surprising?
Sabrina: I think the most surprising one to me is just on a very high level that even if people just go out and follow some everyday kind of task, we can still do some prediction about their personality. I think it’s stunning that that works. And then we also checked if we look at the two ways, so the way to the shop and the way from the shop, but we cut out the shopping itself, do these measurements correlate? And then we compare the two situations, so the recording inside of the shop versus the recording on the way there and back. And actually they do correlate which means that even inside the shop or on the way, we’re kind of able to detect the personality traits. Now there are differences, the way there correlates better with the way back than with the time inside the shop. But still it’s there, and you can detect these personality traits sort of independent of this situation. And I think that’s quite interesting to see because there’s so much that changes, just the scene that people look at and you have to use your eyes in order to do the shopping and select your item you want to buy, there would be a person to talk to pay, maybe you meet somebody and so on.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, it is interesting that, and it makes sense instinctually that the way we experience the world would play out in how we look at things. There is an instinctual element to why these findings would exist.
Sabrina: Yes. And there are also studies for other types of how we perceive the world. So I know that there are studies about optimism. So optimists have a significantly different gaze at certain images than pessimist people.
Zach Elwood: Right. If I remember correctly, they were more likely to look away from bad negative images. Am I getting that right?
Sabrina: Yes. So I only recall one study in particular, probably there are more out there. But there is this one study where they presented skin cancer images to optimists and non-optimists, and then the finding was indeed that optimists tend to look less at the negative images while there’s no difference in sort of more neutral face images.
Zach Elwood: And there was another one that stood out to me, it involved doing trivia questions. And people who ranked as more curious, their eyes would look more towards the source, the incoming source of where the answers would come from later. And so there was this correlation between anticipatory eye movement basically and curiosity.
Sabrina: Ah, yes. That’s actually a good example for a well-controlled study. So it’s just participants who look at a specifically designed interface, and it’s designed in such a way that the answer would come from somewhere where there’s nothing else to see. So basically in the end you can really derive something about who was looking there and why would they look there.
Zach Elwood: And you’re saying, because it was so simple and there were so few factors to study, that it really was a well-designed study.
Sabrina: Yes, exactly. And then so maybe it’s a little less surprising that it works, so it seems more obvious that you can detect something. But this type of study makes it much more easy to derive thorough statements in the end. You really know it’s this anticipatory gaze, for instance. Maybe this occurred in our study, but actually we don’t know to be honest, because all sorts of things could have happened.
Zach Elwood: Right. It’s almost like yours is studying everything which includes all these minute things that people can find in these very specific studies, but yours is grouping all these various things together which makes it hard to disentangle.
Sabrina: Yes. And that’s then also this kind of computer science data analysis challenge which I personally like which would be, given this enormous mess of effect, can I still come up with something that would be able to detect one of them in the end?
Zach Elwood: So when it comes to maybe the more practical aspects of these kinds of studies, what do you see the practical aspects as?
Sabrina: We already discussed that actually the performance for you human that you would pick and where you try to detect which personality they may have is relatively low. So therefore I think the main application, if you would call that application, which is [B science], I would hope that it just inspires more people to look into eye movements or understanding humans in general which would just be research, basic research. And then if one day these methods would work better, I think there’s also wide range of applications where you could use them, just we’re not there yet. So this could just be something like smart gadgets that we have. It could be a household robot which is able to detect what personality does my owner have and then react to that. Maybe you need to talk more to an extrovert person as a robot than you would need to talk to somebody who’s less extrovert. Or maybe it’s about teaching scenarios. So if there is a remote tool that students are supposed to be using in order to learn something, then it would be useful probably if the tool could automatically realize what kind of kid is it sitting in front and how could I motivate them in order to learn. Because there, again, maybe you need to talk differently to them depending on their personality. And finally, I think probably there are also opportunities for clinical usage. So being able to understand gaze more holistically I think would also enable us to kind of filter out the relevant information for specific gaze-related symptoms that clinical patients would have. So normally of course, we don’t look at their personality so much, but there I’m more thinking if you record gaze from a patient who has some symptoms which are gaze-related, then it would be nice if you could kind of subtract the impact that their personality has in order to be left with only the signal that you’re actually interested in.
Josh: Hey, quick question for you. Are you someone who wants to be fit healthy and happy? And what if I told you you could get your dream body by simply just listening to a podcast. I’m Josh.
KG: And I’m KG. And we are the host of The Fit, Healthy and Happy podcast.
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Zach Elwood: Yeah. It makes me think of futuristic therapy scenarios where somebody walks into a therapist’s office and they get scanned in various ways. And it’s almost like it would pick up some pieces of information from their eye movements, some from their tone of voice, maybe some from their actual content. And it just makes me think of these scenarios where all these things combined could be a quicker way to get started and diagnose what people are suffering from theoretically.
Sabrina: Right, yes, I could imagine that as well.
Zach Elwood: Very far off obviously, but just thinking about potential future applications.
Sabrina: Yeah, and slightly scary.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, a little scary.
Sabrina: I’m not sure that’s the kind of setting where I envision myself to be proud of, “Oh, see, look, that’s where it led us.” I guess it would be possible.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. I think there’s a lot of risks of even if it’s done well, those kind of things are exactly the kind of things that make people nervous, the kind of people suffering from those things. So it’s kind of a catch 22, even if it was very well done. Feeling like there’s some machine analyzing you is exactly what many people suffering from delusions think. So there can be some problems with that. So I was curious, with the kinds of correlations found in your study and other eye tracking and personality studies, do you think some of those things it finds are pointing to things that people know kind of instinctually that we may just not know consciously? For example, we sometimes get a sense of how people are and what their personalities are from interacting with them, and maybe some of those things that we’re gathering from people in an instinctual social way are some of the things these studies are finding in a more explicit way. Do you think that’s possible?
Sabrina: Yes, I would agree to that. So I also have the impression that we do have a lot of knowledge just as human very implicitly, in particular about other humans, that’s kind of our daily business dealing with them. And I think looking somebody in the eye or watching other people is a very good example. Humans are really trained to have some impression of another person. It’s like this first impression just within a few seconds you have made so many decisions about the other person. And none of us can put into words how we would do that. It’s actually quite an incredible skill. And we are very, very far away from doing this with something like artificial intelligence or with… So just being able to say what it works like, but then also building something which does the same analysis is near impossible. But I think you’re right that with a lot of studies, and in particular with these more controlled, well designed studies, researchers try to get closer to understanding what exactly it is.
Zach Elwood: I think the uncertainty and the noise in the data, the ambiguity in the data, from the other side it helps explain how badly our human instincts can go wrong too. For example, we sometimes have these mistaken assumptions about other people, these kind of stereotypes. So if someone’s not looking us in the eye or their eyes seem shifty as we call them, we can have the instinct that they’re not trustworthy or such, but it could just be that they’re nervous and they’re completely trustworthy and completely friendly. But just in that moment, these instincts can go bad. So there’s kind of like this flip side. I guess the practical takeaway might be just recognizing how much nuance there is and how much complexity there is in human behavior.
Sabrina: Definitely, yes, you’re right. And there’s also quite a lot of research on machine learning where a system tries to learn something which humans are already able to do or which humans have done in the past, and then it’s actually a problem that this AI if it just learns from human behavior will also learn negative aspects on this human behavior. So for instance, if you’re thinking of building some autonomous hiring tool which some human resource department could use to decide if this is the right candidate or not, if in the past all the decisions that the system sees in order to learn from if they were somehow racist or sexist or have any other kind of bias which is actually unwanted, the machine learning methods are really good at picking them up unfortunately, because they just look at these statistical relations. And if the numbers point to most likely this person would not be hired, then they’re not going to be hired in the future as well.
Zach Elwood: Right, it’s just learning from our patterns. Yeah, exactly. It’s like the studies that show people who have racial minority associated last names are less likely to be hired or whatever it is. It’s going to learn from our bad habits or whatever.
Sabrina: Yes, exactly. So there we need to be really careful because on the one hand, of course, it’s very fascinating what humans can do and how there are amazing people out there who know which person would be good at a job or not. But then if you just collect any data, it’s also quite likely that it inherits flaws that humans have in their judgment.
Zach Elwood: I’m curious, with your work on eye tracking and psychology, do you feel like in your personal life you’ve become a better reader of people? And if so, how has that played out if at all?
Sabrina: So I think the biggest impact was actually thinking about personality or psychology in general, that has definitely affected my personal life as well. But this particular work that we have talked about in doing these data analysis, I don’t think that really had an impact. Because as we discussed before, the types of eye movement, characteristics that we looked at are not very intuitive. So I don’t think any precise knowledge there made it into my personal perception. What does happen more likely is actually that you realize much more about your own gaze. So after spending hours of analyzing where people would look or not look, I did have some episodes in my life where I’m just walking along somewhere and then suddenly I become aware and I’m like, “Oh, see, now you looked at this and that and here, and why did you not look at this stimulus?” That’s more this self-observation maybe.
Zach Elwood: Which is interesting, I think that’s where a lot of ideas for research comes from, it’s examining your own instincts and being like, “Oh, maybe there’s something here.”
Sabrina: True, yes.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. I think a lot about eye movements and gaze just because I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression in my life. So I sometimes have thought about how the eye movements relate to that and how I’ve sometimes felt self-conscious because I felt like my eye movements were restricted and that was an indicator of… My eye movements were very locked down and anxious seeming in the sense that they were more frozen, and I’ve sometimes felt self-conscious of that as an indicator of anxiety. So I’ve had a lot of reasons to think about that and dwell on it maybe a bit more than I should, but yeah, I have had similar experiences of thinking about how those relate to personality.
Sabrina: Yeah. And there are quite some studies which look at links between eye movements and anxiety, so definitely you’re not the only person who had this idea.
Zach Elwood: I should look into that. That’s one area I didn’t look at at all. Any other things that we haven’t touched on that you think would be interesting to this audience maybe about that study?
Sabrina: One thing I found quite interesting is actually also on the data analysis side, and that is that I told you before that we discriminated people into three classes. So for each of the scales that we looked at, there would be people with low scores, medium, and high scores. And then actually one thing you always have to keep in mind with these studies is that in the world’s population, kind of medium personality traits are most common, far most common. And so actually these classes are designed such that they roughly have the same number of samples, but this actually also means that the middle class is really narrow in comparison to relatively large ones for low and high scores. And somehow this is an inherent effect because how would you recruit people with a really extreme personality? It’s very hard to get. But I think it would be interesting if somebody managed to get these participants to look at what really extreme personality leads to in terms of eye movements.
Zach Elwood: Do you want to share about other… Are you working on other work related to eye movements or other psychology work in general?
Sabrina: No, unfortunately, no. I changed a bit. So my field of research at the moment is more in robotics and data analysis, so kind of back to my computer science roots. So I have to say no, but I think my co-authors, all of them, are still in the field. So definitely there’s a lot of interesting work going on.
Zach Elwood: So I was curious, it seemed like you had 42 maybe subjects in the study, and I could just be pretty ignorant on scientific studies, but sometimes I think about these studies is that the sample size seems small, but am I just off base on that? And maybe you could talk a little bit about the sample size and why that’s an okay number to get a statistically significant finding from.
Sabrina: So on the one hand, I think your iteration is entirely right, that more people would’ve been better in any case. But this is probably true for every single study ever. As long as it’s data-driven, the more samples you have, the more reliably you can detect something. And then also the more subjects we have, the more we actually cover the scales of personality. But the other aspect to consider is just practicality. So you really need to find these people, they need to volunteer to participate in your study, and then they come in and you need to set up the eye tracking machinery, and then they need to fulfill the task, they need to go through some questionnaires. So it really just causes hours and hours of work. And so in practice, you need to find a balance somewhere. Now, if you wanted to do one of these restricted studies in the lab, there are actually statistical analysis that you can do beforehand. So if you have particular assumptions like let’s say I assume the personality score is actually following a Gauss distribution and I want to detect some hypothesis with a particular significance level, so I can set this to some percentage and I expect the effect to be of a certain size. In this particular setting, you can actually do the math and you would get a number. You need at least, I don’t know, 50 people in order to detect your hypotheses with 90% probability if the hypothesis is true. So this exists, but in our case, since it’s one of the more exploratory, just sending people out into the world and then we apply machine learning, which is a slightly different setting, this is not possible or I’m not aware of how you could derive this number mathematically. So basically what we do is just looking at previous studies, how many participants that they have, and then what’s our experience with past studies we did, so we somehow set the number.
Zach Elwood: And for your study, if I was understanding it correctly, you were actually doing multiple runs where you would choose one set of the subjects as the analysis group and then another set of the subjects as the ones that you would try to predict for. Was I getting that right? That basically you were making multiple runs to both train the algorithm and make predictions for the remaining subjects?
Sabrina: Yes. So the way we train the algorithm in computer science is called cross-validation. And this means that we divide all the data that we have, and in particular the people that we have into these different sets. But if you only said, “Okay, I take, let’s say, the first 30 people as my training set, I train my algorithm on this data, and then I evaluate on the other 10,” you would actually run into trouble if these 10%, if these 10 people in your test set are somehow not representative. So I mean, by chance maybe no person with high neuroticism is among these 10 people, so to correct for this effect, what you do is you do multiple of these splits. So let’s say once you really take the first 30 people for training and you evaluate on other people, and then in the next round, you actually take people 10 to 40 and you would test on the first 10 and so on. So you shuffle the data multiple times.
Zach Elwood: That’s great. I think we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything else you want to mention about work you’re doing or things you’re excited about?
Sabrina: No, actually I can’t think of something right now.
Zach Elwood: Well, thanks a lot Sabrina for coming on. This has been very interesting and thanks for taking the time.
Sabrina: Yeah, thank you.
Zach Elwood: That was Sabrina Hoppe. You can learn more about Sabrina’s research by looking at her Google Scholar page.
If you’d like to see some of the studies discussed in this talk, go to my site behavior-podcast and look at this episode’s entry.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. If you like this podcast, please leave it a review on Apple Podcasts. That would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks for listening.
A talk with communication researcher Tim Levine about nonverbal behavior and deception detection. Tim Levine is the author of Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. His work was featured in Malcom Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers. Transcript is at bottom of this post.
Topics discussed include: what the research tells us about the usefulness of nonverbal behavior for detecting deception; why it’s so hard to find indicators of deception; common myths about nonverbal behavior; why we expect others to tell us the truth and why we tend to tell the truth; Paul Ekman’s work, including micro-expressions and “truth wizards”; the differences between analyzing verbal content and nonverbal behavior; the TV show Lie to Me; poker tells; and more.
Episode links:
Resources discussed in this episode or related to the topic:
TRANSCRIPT
Zach Elwood: Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast aimed at better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. If you’re interested in deception detection, I have several related episodes; for example, I have an episode where I talk to David Zulawski about interrogation techniques, and one where I talk to Mark McClish about analyzing statements for hidden meaning. And quite a few others that are related.
As humans, we tend to think that we’re pretty good at spotting when people are lying. But research shows that almost all of us are quite bad at telling when people are lying. The existing research shows that, as a group, we’re slightly better than chance at detecting deception.
We also tend to think that there are certain behaviors that are associated with lying; for example, not making eye contact and having shifty eyes, or being physically fidgety or stumbling over words. But research shows that there’s almost no reliable information in such behavioral cues; there’s a lot of variation.
Tim Levine is a communication researcher who has studied deception detection for more than 30 years. He has a book called Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. In that book, he criticizes some of the more popular theories of deception detection – for example, some of Paul Ekman’s well known ideas – and he presents a new theory called Truth-Default Theory, which he says explains a lot of the findings in this area that other theories can’t explain.
To quote from his book Duped:
My objectives here are ambitious and radical. I want to start a revolution. I seek to overthrow existing deception theory and provide a new, coherent, and data-consistent approach to understanding deception and deception detection. For more than twenty-five years, I have seen a need for a new theory of deception and deception detection. Ekman’s idea of leakage was hugely influential, but the deficiencies were apparent almost immediately. His focus shifted over time from the leakage hierarchy to a focus on the face and micro-expressions. But my read of the ensuing literature reveals more excuses for why the data do not seem to support his theory than solid, replicated, affirmative scientific support. Interpersonal deception theory is even less viable. It is logically incoherent, and I knew it to be empirically false four years before it was eventually published. The new cognitive load approach in criminal and legal psychology does not seem to be the path forward either, for the theoretical reasons identified by Steve McCornack, as well as weak, inconsistent, and just plain odd empirical findings. The need is clear. Existing theory does not cut it. A new perspective is needed. [end quote]
If you’re someone interested in understanding behavior and detecting deception, I think Tim’s book is a must-read. If you happened to have read Malcolm Gladwell’s 2019 book Talking to Strangers, you might recall that Gladwell talks about Levine’s theories in that book.
A little more about Tim: he’s a Distinguished Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Chair of Communication Studies. If you’d like to learn more about him, just search online for ‘tim levine psychology’ and you’ll find his website and his wikipedia page.
If you didn’t already know, my own main claim to fame is my work on poker tells. I’ve written three books on poker tells, and I have a video series. I’ve also worked at analyzing tells for several high-stakes poker players; two of them were World Series of Poker Main Event final table players who were playing for millions of dollars and wanted to look for behavioral patterns in their opponents or in themselves. And my work has been called the best work in this area by many poker players, and that includes some professional high-stakes poker players.
And some people might assume that, because I’ve worked on poker tells, that I’d disagree with Levine’s work, or find it disappointing. But I don’t: I’ve always been skeptical about the idea that there’s much value from studying behavior in real-world situations like interviews, speeches, and interrogations. When people have asked for my takes on such things, I will tell them I think that it’s mostly a waste of time to concentrate on such things, and that I have very few opinions on such things, because there’s simply just so much variance. There’s many reasons why, for example, someone who’s innocent might be or seem anxious. I do think there’s a lot of interesting patterns when it comes to verbal behavior, the actual content of what someone says, but I’m pretty skeptical about getting a lot of value from nonverbal behaviors, although I think there’s a lot more use for such things in games and sports.
And I also think that poker, and most competitive games, are completely unlike the scenarios studied in most deception detection setups; and also completely unlike interrogations and interviews. Many of the reliable tells in poker are not even related to deception detection, but more just related to the tendency people have to leak their level of relaxation when they’ve got a strong hand, which isn’t related to deception but more just about people sometimes feeling good and having fun, and not being as fully stoic and unreadable as they could be. To take another example: some tells in poker are related to being mentally focused or unfocused, and those kinds of tells are also not related to deception detection. And for another example: some tells in poker are about someone not wanting to draw attention to a strong hand, in a similar way that people in competitive situations don’t like to draw attention in general to their “treasure”, so to speak, and that can manifest as, for example, a player being less likely to stare at strong cards and more willing to look away from strong cards, things like this. There’s just a whole lot of differences I could name. And all that said, I always try to make it clear that tells are a small part of poker; I think they can add at most something like 15% to a poker player’s win rate, but for most people it’ll be significantly less.
In this talk, Tim and I do talk a little bit about poker tells, but if you’d like to hear more about that, I’ll add some more thoughts at the end.
Another reason I find Tim Levine’s work so interesting is that we are surrounded by a lot of bullshit when it comes to reading behavior. I’ll give a specific example, as I think it’s just such an egregious example; there’s a so-called behavior expert named Jack Brown, who’s main credential seems to be having a lot of Twitter followers. As I’m writing this, he has 167,000 Twitter followers. You can find him often making extremely confident claims on Twitter about people’s behaviors that are just so off-base from what real research and even common sense would tell us. And people eat this stuff up. He is regarded by many on Twitter as an actual expert in behavior, despite just being so clearly wrong and irresponsible in so many ways.
To take one example: Jack Brown promotes the very debunked idea that you can tell if someone’s being deceptive or not based on the direction of their gaze. So that’s a pretty big giveaway right there of the quality of his analysis. He also makes very confident pronouncements about what people’s behaviors mean, based on very ambiguous and high-variance behaviors that just simply don’t contain any interesting or meaningful information. To give one example: he once confidently proclaimed that Trump is quote “a severe, long-term drug abuser” end quote, and that he believed that Trump had a hole in his hard palate from cocaine abuse. He often confidently states that public figures are exhibiting signs of deception and shame and guilt in interviews, based on them exhibiting very common and very ambiguous behaviors. And the long story short of why so many of the behaviors he draws attention to aren’t reliable or interesting is that there are many reasons people can be or seem anxious that have nothing to do with guilt or deception.
So-called behavior experts like Jack Brown are basically trying to squeeze blood from a stone. They want you to think they have this amazing secret knowledge that gives them amazing insight into people’s motivations and what they’re hiding. If you’d like to read a piece I wrote about this guy and see some examples of what I’m talking about, just search online for ‘jack brown behavior’ and the piece I wrote should come up pretty prominent; you can also find it on my readingpokertells.com site, on my blog there.
And so Tim Levine’s work is important for making us more skeptical of such things, and drawing more attention to how little we’re able to read people. People interested in reading behavior should recognize the uncertainty present in these areas; they should avoid trusting the Jack Browns of the world. We should be skeptical of people who make confident pronouncements that, for example, public figures are lying or hiding something based on reading their nonverbal behavior. Because often those ideas, if we absorb them, will just be reinforcing our biases about people and actually make us worse at navigating the world. For example, when people listen to Jack Brown and think that they can now read these common and ambiguous behaviors and tell that someone is lying, people will use that to filter the world through their existing biases, while feeling that they’re doing something sophisticated and smart. It lends a veneer of respectability to our biases. And this stuff lends itself to, for example, police interrogators or job interviewers being highly confident about someone’s guilt or abilities when they really shouldn’t be; these things have real-world negative effects on people’s lives. And such things even add to our us-versus-them polarization, in terms of someone being more likely to see a political leader speak and think something like ‘oh, see, Hillary Clinton lowered her gaze at that question; I saw Jack Brown talk about that; I know she’s lying.’ These bullshit ideas lend themselves to what I see as one of our biggest problems: being too certain about others and too certain about the world. I think uncertainty and humility are needed more than ever.
I think combating bad and simplistic ideas about behavior is important. I think that drawing attention to nuance is important. And so I think Tim Levine’s work is important.
Okay, here’s the interview with Tim Levine.
Zach: Hi Tim, thanks for coming on.
Tim Levine: Oh, happy to be here.
Zach: So maybe we could start with how I first learned about your work which was a study you did about the show Lie to Me. Could you talk a little bit about what that study found?
Tim Levine: Sure, that’s a fun study. First to lay out just the general experiment, research participants come in, they do a standard lie detection task where they have to watch several interviews, some of which the people are lying, some of which the people are telling the truth. And those interviews are scored to see how well they do, scored just like a true/false test. In the experiment part of it, people either just did the task normally or one third of the people, based on random assignment, watch the TV show Lie to Me, which is about a psychologist who can detect lies based on nonverbal communication, it’s based on the work of Paul Ekman. And another control group watched a different crime show called Numbers in which people solve crimes through, it’s a math professor who solves crimes through math. And then the third control was just not watching any show at all. What the findings were is there wasn’t really much difference between the two groups. If anything, the people who watched Lie to Me were a little worse at detecting deception, and the show tended to make them more cynical, but it didn’t make them any better at lie detection. And the reason is because nonverbal things just really aren’t very useful in lie detection.
Zach: One of the things you talk about in your paper was the show makes a claim, I’m not sure if it made it once or if it keeps repeating in the show, I’ve only seen one episode of the show, but the show repeats the claim that people lie really often, I think it says three times in 10 minutes. And can you talk a little bit about that and what they got so wrong about that idea?
Tim Levine: Yeah, they actually used that in their promotional materials and it was on their website. And unlike some claims about how often people lie with the implication of people lie all the time, this particular claim actually has a basis in research, but totally taken out of context. So the experimented question was people had to come in and they were told to make a good impression on somebody else. People presumably took that instruction as make an unrealistically good impression on other people. So if you come into a lab setting and you’re told what you understand to be make an overly good impression, then people follow instructions and do that and as a consequence say up to three false things in 10 minutes. On the other hand, if you’re just normal… So in the first 10 minutes of this podcast, chances are there won’t be any lies probably during the whole thing.
Zach: Yeah. If you were to ask me how many lies I’ve told recently, I mean, I would be hard pressed to think of a situation where I lied recently. So yeah, I think it’s a very pervasive misunderstanding. It kind of reminds me of the common myth that’s so often repeated that nonverbal communication makes up most communication. For example, I was just Googling now and saw one of the top things was most experts agree that 70 to 93% of all communication is nonverbal.
Tim Levine: Oh, false. Oh, that is so wrong. I mean, it says that in books, it says that in textbooks.
Zach: Exactly, yeah. It’s wild. It’s just wild how pervasive these myths are. Do you see these kinds of things as related and are there other things in this area that you often see repeated even though there’s no good reason for them?
Tim Levine: Oh yeah. But before we get there, let me give your listeners a little background on where that most communication is nonverbal finding comes from.
Zach: Yeah, that’d be great.
Tim Levine: So the actual finding was when what we’re doing nonverbally contradicts what we’re saying verbally, then people will often believe what is done nonverbally over what people do verbally. But that most communication is nonverbal is just ludicrous because how could we possibly do this podcast nonverbally? I’m making all these great expressions, communicating very expressively and using all this body language, and you can’t see it. Now you can get the tone in my voice, but if we stripped out the content of the words and you’re just hearing the tone in my voice and you’re hearing me get a little bit excited about this topic, you could take that away, but that would be just a tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of the message. Most communication is conveyed through the words.
Zach: Yeah, and that totally relates. And I almost didn’t realize how much it relates to your truth default theory until talking about it now, and we’ll talk more about that later. But getting back to one very important point you make in your work is about how important it is that lies are rare and understanding that point. So when you’re trying to determine if someone is good or not at detecting deception, it matters a whole lot how many lies are in the mix. And I think you relate this to something you call the veracity effect, and maybe you can talk a little bit about that angle.
Tim Levine: Sure. So one of the oldest findings in lie detection research is something called truth bias. My good friend, Steve McCornack, coined the term in his undergraduate research. He now works with me at my university. The idea is that if you see a bunch of communication and you’re asked to guess, “True or false? Do you think they’re lying or telling the truth?” People guess true more often than lie completely independently of whether they’re seeing a truth or a lie. And so this is called truth bias, people guess true more often. So the veracity effect is an idea by a professor named Hee Sun Park, who saw rather obviously. But before she saw it, people didn’t really tune into this, that if you think most things are true, then you’re going to be right when they are true, but you’re going to be wrong when they’re lies. So for example, the average across hundreds of studies of lie detection is people are just 54%, a little bit better than 50/50. But if you break it out by truth and lies, people are better on truths. And the more truth bias, the more better they are in truths and they’re worse on lies, so accuracy is below 50% for lies. And the more truth bias, then the worse they are at detecting lies per se. And the veracity effect is simply the difference between your accuracy for truths and your accuracy for lies. The consequence of this is it the best predictor of whether you’re going to be right in deception detection is the honesty of the person you’re talking to. So if you’re talking to somebody who’s honest and you believe them, you’re going to be right. Not because you’re good at this, but just by chance. But if they’re lying, you’re going to be wrong about this. Well, now, if most communication is honest most of the time, then people are right most of the time. And lie detection experiments create a very unrealistic portrayal because lies are much more prevalent in deception studies than they are in the actual world.
Zach: Yeah. And to tie this back to your Lie to Me study, one of the points you make in your book Duped and elsewhere is that simply if you’re in a test situation or just the fact that we are so prone to believe people, if you give anyone any sort of education no matter how bad it is about deception training, it will make them detect lies more often simply because we are prone to believe people. So for example, if you watch Lie to Me, even if the information is bad, you’re going to increase your ability to detect a lie a bit just from being more skeptical. And maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how that ties into maybe the perception that doing any sort of detection training or education can make it seem like you’re actually becoming better at detecting deception.
Tim Levine: Yeah, but it almost always comes at the cost of getting more errors about–
Zach: Exactly, you’re not getting better, it just seems that way if you’re in an environment where you’re being made to find lies like in a study environment where they’re giving you more lies than you find in your everyday life. So it seems like you’re getting better at it, but you’re actually getting better at the cost of detecting accurately when people are telling the truth.
Tim Levine: Yeah. So cynicism only works well in an environment where there’s a big risk of being deceived about something important.
Zach: Right, which isn’t the case for our day to day lives, which is the basis of the truth default theory that there’s reasons for why we have a bias for finding things true. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what sets the truth default theory apart. That was one thing that was a little bit hard to understand how this was such a revolutionary idea differing from the previous ideas.
Tim Levine: So we already talked a little bit about truth bias and the veracity effect. So let me now talk about how defaulting to the truth is a little different. So in the standard deception detection experiment that’s done in the social sciences, people see some collection of truths and lies and then they’re asked, “Do you think this is lie or do you think it’s truth?” Now, the second I ask you to judge or to make that assessment, now you know this is a lie detection task. But in everyday communication situations like you’re just sitting around listening to a podcast, if the podcast isn’t about deception and maybe even if it is, is that true isn’t necessarily coming to mind unless prompted. So the idea of the truth default is unless there’s something to get you thinking about it, the idea of truth, falsity, honesty, deception just don’t even come to mind. So if I’m showing you now I do the study a different way and I’m showing you interaction between two people, and I’m just asking you open-ended, “What are you thinking about?” The idea that one of them might be lying to the other just doesn’t come to mind. People are thinking about what they’re wearing, they’re thinking about their mannerisms, their idiosyncrasies, they’re thinking about the content of what’s said, and they just kind of accept it at face value. It’s remarkably difficult in a lot of circumstances to knock people out of their just passive belief and get them to be skeptical. Now, there are times when we can be skeptical, we know somebody’s trying to sell us something, we’re hearing people we disagree with or unpopular ideas, then suspicion can be triggered. But in much of our daily life that just doesn’t happen. We’re on this communication autopilot where what we say is honest unless we have a reason not to be honest, and we believe people unless we have a good reason, strong reason not to believe.
Zach: So if I’m understanding it correctly, Hee Sun Park’s big contribution, big awareness, the revolutionary thing was that she realized that all of these studies that were being done were basically biasing the experiment by getting people skeptical from the beginning by the questions. So basically it was throwing off all the results. Is that accurate?
Tim Levine: I think the statement’s accurate, I think that’s more kind of a later implication of her idea. I think she had two really big ideas. First was the idea that accuracy’s different for truths than for lies, which is the veracity effect. Related to that, what matters is the ratio of truths and lies in the environment, that’s one of her really important things. And she had another really important thing which we haven’t talked about yet, which is that most lies are detected after the fact. So most of the times we do actually detect lies in real life, we’re not detecting them in real time based on how people are coming off, but the truth tends to come to light at some later point in time.
Zach: Yeah, it’s kind of you might have a suspicion once you get into the skeptical realm of thinking someone might be lying, but you’re not going to really know it’s a lie until you actually confirm it with real evidence or something.
Tim Levine: Yeah, exactly.
Zach: So let’s talk about the nonverbal behaviors, and you obviously take a very skeptical stance on the idea that there’s much relevant or reliable information to study when it comes to nonverbal behavior in the realm of detecting lies, detecting deception. Can you talk a little bit about the main reasons for why you believe that, for example, based on the meta-analysis studies and other things?
Tim Levine: Sure. Well, first off, my position is that nonverbal things are incredibly important in how people are perceived. What I doubt is the diagnostic value of nonverbal things, that is that they have a set fixed meaning, especially when it comes to truths and lies. So almost everybody everywhere believes that you can tell when somebody’s lying because of some set of nonverbal things. The most common belief, folk belief, is probably that liars won’t look you in the eye. And that’s been found pan-culturally.
Zach: That people believe that.
Tim Levine: Yeah, people everywhere believe that.
Zach: The shifty eyes thing.
Tim Levine: Yeah. It just has no validity at all. Last I saw almost 50 studies of this, and the average difference in eye gaze between liars and telling the truth is zero. So there’s been decades and decades and decades of research trying to find kind of the magic tell for deception and either linguistic behavior or more commonly nonverbal things. So there’s all these studies that look at what liars are doing and what honest people are doing and looking for differences in them. And a lot of studies find that this difference or that difference happens. The trouble is the next study finds the exact opposite thing or nothing at all. So when you plot out findings of all these studies over time, they just don’t hold up. And the more they’re studied, the less difference, the less the average difference between truths and lies. So you reference meta-analysis, for the listeners who don’t know, a meta-analysis is simply a study of studies, so we’re looking at trends across a whole bunch of different studies. And what I noticed when I was looking at meta-analyses of nonverbal cues and deception detection is that the more a given nonverbal behavior was studied, the less difference it made in research. Which suggested to me that the findings that were there were probably smoke and mirrors.
Zach: Right, it was reverting to the mean kind of idea.
Tim Levine: Yeah, where the mean was zero.
Zach: Another common conception or maybe it actually has some truth is the voice pitch thing, but it seems very slightly reliable or do you think that’s not reliable either?
Tim Levine: It depends on reliable in what sense. So if we analyzed a couple hundred people who are telling the truth and a couple hundred liars, on average liars have a slightly higher about two-tenths of a standard deviation higher vocal pitch. But to use it as a lie detection tool in any one person it’s just completely useless.
Zach: If it’s there, it’s just so small.
Tim Levine: Yeah. So maybe a baseball analogy, somebody who has a 0.3 batting average is more likely to get a hit than somebody who has a 0.2 batting average. But that doesn’t mean that the person with 0.3 average is going to get a hit and the person with 0.2 isn’t if that makes sense.
Zach: Yeah. And if I was understanding this correctly in your book, I think you were making a point about the difference between something… We talk about something being statistically significant, and sometimes that seems to be people will interpret that as being actually significant. Was I understanding that correctly that there’s some like confusion or language confusion there that people talk about things that are statistically significant as if they’re very meaningful or something?
Tim Levine: Yeah, that’s an unfortunate term. Statistically, what it means is that a finding of absolutely no difference across a large number of people would be sufficiently improbable to presume that there’s something there. So it’s a statement of probability, but it’s even worse than that because the math behind it presumes that you’re only testing one hypothesis. And the trouble that with modern research is people are using a probability statement for testing one hypothesis when they’re actually testing a whole bunch of things statistically. So that probability doesn’t have that meaning anymore. But that’s way too statistically nerdy probably.
Zach: Is it accurate to say that some people, say lay people, will see something about significance and think like, “Oh, it’s significant,” which might explain how some of these misperceptions about nonverbal behavior gets started in the common audience. Do you think that’s–
Tim Levine: Yeah, that’s accurate, I think, but it’s also accurate that 90% of professional researchers or 95% also think that.
Zach: Okay.
Tim Levine: So it’s not just lay people and it’s not just the media, these kind of misunderstandings are more widespread than that.
Zach: Does that get into the replication errors area of people interpreting the results of things too confidently or mistakenly?
Tim Levine: That’s my read on it. So social sciences are undergoing a huge replication crisis where findings in the best peer review journals just aren’t holding up at a really disturbingly low rate, and findings are almost always small. It is not just deception cues, findings are generally smaller when they’re studied again. My read on why that’s the case is this opportunistic use of statistics. They’re using this statistical idea of significance in a way that really is not justified probabilistically.
Zach: A small note here, if you’d like to learn more about what Tim was talking about, you can Google the research replication problem. Long story short though, what Tim was referring to was the fact that if you collect a whole bunch of data, you’ll end up finding some correlations in the data that may seem interesting, but may just be due to randomness and the fact that you’ve gathered so much data that some random correlations are likely to be present. And that aspect can help explain why some findings are hard to replicate later. I actually talked to a previous guest about this if you’re interested. I talked to Brandon Shiels about his poker tells research, and we spent some time talking about the problem of finding illusory correlations in data and how one way to combat that is with pre-registering your research, which requires you to write down your predictions beforehand so that any correlations found are things that were theorized about and less likely to be a random illusory thing. Okay, back to the interview.
So getting back to why it is so hard to find reliable nonverbal behaviors tied to deception, I mean, I think basically it’s not surprising to me because humans are just good at deceiving. I mean, it’s not surprising that we have control over our behaviors in a pretty good way most of us. So I think that helps explain it. I think the question that you sometimes see the question, well, why is it so hard to detect deception? It’s almost like, well, why would it be easy to detect deception? I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.
Tim Levine: Yeah, I think that’s half the answer. So I think for most of us, but not all of us, by the time kind of we get through high school we’re pretty good about telling a lie if we need to. I think there are probably a few people out there who can’t lie well. I know just anecdotally if you ask people, some people say, “Nah, I can’t do this.” And I suspect they can’t and they don’t lie very much because they know they can’t. But I think there’s another reason too, and this really gets at the heart of the idea of the truth fault is that there’s probably no single thing more important to humans than our ability to communicate. Humans are able to share information and pass down knowledge which makes all our technological and scientific advances possible. We are able to cooperate and work together which enables all kind of modern production. And it enables us to make friends and form good professional, social, personal relationships, which is incredibly important to our wellbeing and physical health. Communication only works if you can trust what’s communicated. If you have to second guess everything, you can’t really learn anything because everything’s uncertain. You can’t work together because you don’t know that you can trust the other person you’re supposed to work with. You can’t form relationships because you can’t trust this person. So if we can’t trust other people and what they say, and if communication loses its functionality, and this is just way, way, way too important to us, we have to believe other people. Because if you did the kind of thought experiment of what it would be like if we didn’t believe anything we communicated, we would absolutely absolutely be lost. If you can’t trust, you can’t get on a plane, you can’t get in your car. You can’t drive through a green light if you don’t believe the people on the red light are going to stop. Functioning requires this. So I think it’s not only that people can tell good lies, but it’s that we have to believe them as the business as usual. It’s not that we can’t, suspicion can be triggered. But as our kind of business as usual default mode of working, we have to have to have to take things at face value because otherwise we just immediately get bogged down. It has to be this way.
Zach: To get off topic a little bit getting into the fake news and misinformation area, so many people focus on the idea that like, “Oh, we need to get people to believe the right things, the things that we believe.” And I think that’s actually a mistaken goal. I mean, for one thing, it’s never going to happen. But the second reason is I think we actually just need more people to be as equally skeptical of everything as they are of the things that they perceive as biased. For example, for people who doubt the mainstream media and think it’s mistaken and biased and corrupt or whatever, we need those people to not trust random theories they see on Facebook or whatever. We just need more skepticism and less truth default for things across the board. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that.
Tim Levine: No, I could not agree more.
Zach: So to get back to the people who aren’t good at lying, which is a very important point in your work too when it comes to explaining the slight ability across meta-analysis, the 54% ability to detect deception in these studies, the general average, the slightly better than chance average, you point out that some of that is just due to some percentage of the population being pretty bad at lying, at deceiving. Would you say that’s basically because they’re portraying the stereotypical behaviors that we have that we associate with lying like not being good at eye contact or stumbling in their words, those kinds of things?
Tim Levine: Yeah, I think that’s exactly what’s going on. There’s also another group of people who just come off, what I would call the transparent liars. They’re transparent. When they’re telling the truth, you know they’re telling the truth, but they just can’t lie. So there’s some people who are kind of the opposite of poker face people, you know exactly what’s in their hand. And we tend to get those people right. But there’s this other group of people which is probably larger which I call the mismatched folks, and they come off differently than they are. So if you think about people who are perfectly honest but who have social anxiety or maybe they’re a little bit on the autism spectrum. So they’re doing these things that people associate with deception, but they’re honest. So people tend to systematically get those people wrong, and that’s part of the thing that pushes accuracy down towards chance. So there’s these transparent liars that makes accuracy better than 50/50, but then these people who are mismatched who keep us from being very good at it.
Zach: Yeah, and the interesting thing too is for the people that are bad at lying, that have the stereotypical behaviors and are more easily caught in these kinds of studies, it’s actually almost meaningless to judge them on a case by case basis because in a practical sense the only way you would actually be able to catch that person lying in a meaningful, reliable sense is if you studied how they behave when they’re telling the truth and how they behave when they’re telling a lie. So in other words, in a study environment, you might correctly guess that someone’s lying because they’re seemingly bad at lying, but that could just as easily have been a person telling the truth. So it’s almost meaningless in a practical sense.
Tim Levine: Yeah, and it’s even more complicated than that because then you have to have a lot of other people watching them lying and telling the truth over multiple instances to see that there’s regularity in how other people are seeing them.
Zach: Right, you really need a statistical sample size to know that like, “Oh, this person’s actually bad at lying, and I’m actually finding something,” versus like, “Oh, they’re just one of the mismatched people or just they have random variations that make some people think they’re lying when they’re not.” It’s so much more complex and requires more study than it seems on the surface. And we have these simplistic ideas of how this stuff works in the popular culture and in our minds about this stuff that’s spread through media and such. So one thing I wanted to ask you about was Ekman’s truth wizards thing, which seems to be another popular idea that’s in Lie to Me and other places that there are people amongst us who are exceptionally good at detecting deception. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tim Levine: Yeah. So generally, if you don’t work with Paul Ekman, who’s maybe kind of the biggest name, most famous researcher in the topic area, most academic, modern academic, deception theorists and researchers are deeply skeptical of the idea of the wizards. That said, I’m not a hundred percent sure what to think about them. If the claim is that there’s kind of maybe one in a thousand people who can do this, modern social science isn’t very good at dealing with the super rare disease or the super fluky sort of person. It’s hard to study. It’s very hard to study kind of very rare events or very rare people, because how do you go about finding them? How do you know it’s not just kind of fluky? I will say I had one of Ekman’s wizards contact me one time, and I did test them on some of my deception detection materials, and they did amazingly well. But I don’t want to say because of this one person and this one instance that, “Oh, now they exist,” that wouldn’t be very good science of me. But at the same time, I’m reluctant to be as critical of it as some people are just because I think, it’s easier to test ideas that where you can find examples of them easier if that makes sense.
Zach: So one thing in that area, it seems like, correct me if I’m wrong, but someone can be… We’ve been talking so far about nonverbal behavior, and that’s a lot different from reading logical inconsistencies or what people call statement analysis, which is just examining language for evidence. And I’m wondering, could that have played a role, for example, in the test you did or was that only nonverbal?
Tim Levine: In the test I did, if you know what to look for, you can do better than 54% if you’re really familiar with the context. The content can help you, but it probably couldn’t help you enough to make this person as good as they were. On the other hand, somebody wins the lottery, so chance fluky things happen. I don’t think people appreciate how lumpy randomness can be.
Zach: Right. And then we form perceptions based on those outliers.
Tim Levine: Yeah. If we flip enough coins that really truly are fair, there’s going to be some point where long streak of heads comes up in a row. And it’s just hard to sort that out.
Zach: I’ve read that there hasn’t been much evidence for people being consistently truth wizardy over time. Am I wrong on that? And why haven’t people studied that more, that a person is consistently good?
Tim Levine: Well, it’s hard to do overtime studying. And you’re right, that is the evidence. My best thinking is there might be people who are good, but it’s because they know a whole lot about the particular circumstances. So my guess is that a really experienced financial forensic accountant is going to be much better at spotting lies about financial issues than you or I. Particular type of criminal investigators might know a whole lot about this particular genre of crime in this particular area, and that knowledge really helps them use what is said in a useful way. Similarly, people who have really good critical thinking skills are going to be better at spotting logical inconsistencies than people who are less critical thinkers. But if I’m right about that, what it means is the financial forensic accountant isn’t isn’t necessarily going to be good about detecting the honesty of their spouse about non-financial things.
Zach: So getting back to that idea of the nonverbal versus the verbal and the statement analysis actually analyzing statements and logical inconsistencies and sort of psychological aspects of people’s language, do you have much thoughts on… Because to me, for example, personally, I’ve read Mark McClish’s book, I Know You Are Lying, which is about statement analysis, and I’ve written a book about verbal poker tells called Verbal Poker Tells, and that stuff to me is so much more reliable because it’s about how people communicate. And there can be so much hidden information in how people communicate and what they avoid talking about, for example. So it’s not nearly as ambiguous as nonverbal behavior, it’s not to say it’s very reliable either, but it’s just to me so much more meaningful and so much more there than nonverbal. I’m curious if you’d agree with that.
Tim Levine: I’m not sure if I do or don’t. So one of Ekman’s ideas that I really like is the idea of the hot spot, which is something that doesn’t seem right. And hotspots could be nonverbal. So somebody might be reacting in a particular nonverbal way, or let’s say at the poker table, they might be doing something nonverbal that strikes you as off or might mean something or it might be verbal. So if we view these as not as, “Oh, they’re lying or oh, they’re bluffing,” but instead as, “There’s something that I need to dig deeper on or explain or pay attention to,” then I think these things have real utility. So in the statement analysis, if it is being used then to go into an interview and ask deeper questions about these areas, then I think that’s a fabulous idea. If you were saying that, “Oh, they seem to be dodging around this issue, that means they did it,” then I think that’s tenuous because it could mean a lot of different things.
Zach: Right. And to be clear, it’s not like you can ever, even if something’s seems very obvious in the verbal things, it’s not like you could ever be like, “Oh, I’m very certain about this.” I mean, you might feel you’re certain, but you’ll still need some evidence. Which gets into how almost unimportant some of these things are when it comes to interrogations. For example, if you’re bringing someone in for interrogation, you probably have a reason to interrogate them. And your approach probably won’t be that much different. You’re just going to keep plugging away at them using the traditional interrogation techniques and do your thing. You spotting some nonverbal or verbal thing that makes you think they’re guilty probably doesn’t make too much of a difference because you probably already have good reason to think they’re guilty anyway. So I think that gets into almost the practical low value of them in practical interrogation and interview situations. Would you agree with that?
Tim Levine: Let me phrase it a little differently. There’s actually two things I want to jump off on. First, I think the best practice in the interrogation room is what you try to do is if you don’t have evidence already, you want to ask questions where you can kind of nail them down in ways that you can go do more investigation and check if that makes sense. So what I’m trying to do if I’m trying to question somebody is I’m trying to get information out of them that I can then use later to investigate and that I can check. Because if I already have evidence, then I don’t need to be really talking to them. But I’m talking to them because I don’t have enough evidence right now. So I’m trying to figure out what I need to go investigate and what I can check. But about the earlier point, let’s say, so as a deception researcher, I notice perhaps to a fault when people are leaving things out or when they’re changing the topic on me, and I have this kind of ongoing debate with another deception researcher who does political deception. And so he’s thinking you got a reporter who’s talking to a politician, and the reporter asks a question and the politician goes off topic and talks about what they want to talk about. So the question is, is that politician, they’re definitely being evasive, but are they being deceptive? This other researcher thinks, “Yes, evasion is deception. They’re being deceptive.” And I want to say, “Well, wait a minute, who gets to set the topic of what we’re going to talk about? Why is it that the reporter gets to say, ‘Here’s our agenda,’ and the politician has to stick to the reporter’s agenda?” So to this point of you need to pay attention when things are being left out or topics being shifted or people are being ambiguous, but you also want to really contextualize that.
Zach: Yeah, to be specific about interrogations or even poker because I think that one of the most meaningful tells in interrogation and in poker actually too is the conciliatory behavior from people who are guilty or bluffing. So for example, one of the most prevalent things, one of the most telling things in interrogations is when the interrogator makes an accusation directly or indirectly, and the person being interrogated basically just acts neutral and acts conciliatory and is not. An innocent person would understand immediately that they’re being accused and would be defensive. But you see this kind of subdued conciliatory behavior from someone who’s guilty just because their instinct is to be subdued and not arouse anger or more anger from the interrogator. And similar in poker too, you can find these things of when someone’s bluffing, they’re less likely to act in an irritating or aggressive manner either verbally or nonverbally to their opponent. This is interesting because it’s kind of a mix of both verbal and nonverbal. It’s just a demeanor almost, it’s a collection of things. And so I wanted to throw that in there to say it’s not as if we can’t get information from these things, but I guess the real question is if you’re in an interrogation spot, for example, I guess that can be very valuable for the investigator to feel that they have the right person, but obviously that’s not evidence, it might help you in feeling like you’re questioning the right person. I wanted to throw that in there to say there can be meaningful things, I think, in these areas.
Tim Levine: Absolutely. But at least in the interrogation point of view, I really urge caution and jumping to conclusions based on that at least in my own kind of deception tapes I’ve created which mimic interrogation situations pretty well, I think. Honest people respond all different kinds of ways, and so do deceptive people. Some deceptive people definitely go figure best defense is a good offense. Not everybody responds the same. There might be these patterns over large numbers of people. And if you’re playing the odds, you’re more often right than wrong, let’s say in poker, but you’re going to get some wrong because not every person responds the same.
Zach: Right, for sure. And I guess that gets into the impractical aspects of it because if the only thing you have is your feeling based on this person’s conciliatory behavior that they’re guilty, unless you have much else, that’s not really a reason to follow someone as a suspect for very long if you don’t have much else going for you. So I think that gets into the impractical aspects of it. It’s like how much is it meaningful really when you get down to it?
Tim Levine: Yeah, there’s this huge, huge, huge variability in how humans respond in given situations.
Zach: Very high variance lot as humans, yeah.
Tim Levine: Yeah.
Zach: A small note here, one thing that stands out to me as being pretty consistently meaningful behavior in interrogation situations is the tendency of guilty people to answer pretty straightforward questions with long meandering stories with way too much detail and divergences when innocent people will tend to answer straightforwardly. And this can be seen to be related to conciliatory behavior because we can see that guilty people can have a motivation to attempt to seem likable and cooperative, whereas innocent people just don’t have that desire, they just want to answer the questions. I wanted to elaborate on that a little bit more as a way to emphasize the point that what people say and how they say it can be interesting to study and pay attention to, even if we can debate how meaningful or actionable specific situations really are. Okay, back to the interview.
So I’m pretty skeptical about microexpressions and I’m sure you probably are too. I see that people often bring that up, people ask me about microexpressions and poker and such, and I’ve basically never based a decision on a microexpression and I don’t find them generally in poker. And so I’ve always been skeptical of them in terms of genuine. There are some things where people do like weak means strong and strong means weak things in poker where they’re basically conveying the opposite of what they feel and sort of a duping aspect. But that’s different from the idea of microexpressions as a leak of genuine emotion or feeling. I assume you’d just be very skeptical about that too, but I wanted to ask about that.
Tim Levine: Yeah. So the research community is very skeptical of microexpressions, there isn’t strong evidence. I would guess that microexpressions if they even exist and if they are useful, they might be more useful in poker particularly among novice players than in lie detection. The reason is because the emotions you’re expressing, the link between those and truth telling or lying is pretty tenuous, but I could imagine, do you ever see somebody who’s got like a really good hand who just lets this little smirk out when they first look at their cards? I’m sure professionals have got this under control, but–
Zach: Well, I think there is something to that for the very beginner level people. And I think, interestingly, we could talk about that for a while, but the more experienced they are, the more the opposite things leak out where they’re slightly trying to convey the opposite of what they have. But I think you’re right, at the very beginner level stages, there are those kinds of genuine leaks.
A note here: when I was talking here, I was focused on microexpressions. There are larger macroexpressions of genuine emotion that occur pretty regularly from all types of players of all skill levels. For example, it’s pretty often a player who makes a big bet with a strong hand will have genuine smiles and things like that. I’ll talk a little bit more about that at the end. I just wanted to emphasize that I was attempting to talk about just microexpressions here. Okay, back to the talk.
Tim Levine: Yeah. So there might be a kernel of truth to the microexpression thing, but I don’t think they’re going to be useful at all in lie detection.
Zach: It’s so different, it’s just such a different environment.
Tim Levine: Yeah. And so poker, can people fake microexpressions?
Zach: Well, that’s a really interesting question because when I’ve thought about this in the past, and I should probably write something up about this, but the thing I’ve have seen is that there’s actually these small, what people might consider microexpressions, but they’re the opposite. So for example, someone who’s betting a strong hand would have a very quick expression just briefly pass their face of having like an irritated look or their brows would be furrowed, almost like a confusion or an irritation microexpression. But it’s the opposite because they’re strong, and it’s almost like they’re not even trying to purposely, consciously do that, which is the interesting thing, because I don’t think the people who do these things are always planning to fool their opponent. It’s almost like because you’re in such a deceptive realm, poker is such a deceptive realm and most games are, you’re automatically just trying to almost subconsciously convey the opposite of what you have. So it’s almost this instinctual trying to do the opposite of what you have, weak means strong, strong means weak, which is interesting because I think a lot of people would think like, “Oh, they’re trying to fool me.” But the fact that a lot of these things are microexpressions, they just briefly… And actually in my video series on poker, I have a lot of examples of this, and you just don’t find that from bluffers because bluffers are very much aware of what they’re portraying. So they’re going to have a much more neutral, stoic thing. So it means that you’re pretty unlikely to detect these things from a bluffer, detect meaningful things from a bluffer, because they are trying to be so stoic and so neutral and that’s how most people behave. But some people with strong hands will leak out these small, opposite emotion things that give them away really. They’re really highly reliable because a bluffer is not likely to leak out these small things of uncertainty or irritation, these small expressions. So yeah, it’s an interesting area and it’s very interesting. I should write something up about it more official.
Tim Levine: I’m not an experienced poker player, but so one strategy is to just be poker faced or stoic and be unreadable.
Zach: Right.
Tim Levine: So what I would call zero transparency, there’s just no signal there. The other strategy would be try to be very unreliable and throw other people off their games. So you mix in some real things and some false things and some stoic and just convince everybody else at the table that what they think they’re seeing could mean any number of different things.
Zach: Yeah, and the interesting thing about that is that that would actually be good, but in practice it’s like most people are afraid of looking stupid. And this actually plays a big role in poker, we could go on for a while about how poker and other games are so different from interrogations and interviews. But one of the things in poker is you might think that’s a good strategy, but in practice you’d be like, “Well, what if I do something and that person reads it as a weak hand and calls me and then I’d feel stupid for trying all these?” So in practice that explains why people just try to be stoic because it’s more effort, more conscious, mental load and thought, and you have to think about, “Am I being balanced on all these spots if I’m trying to be high variance, for example, and throwing out this noise?” So that just helps explain why the best approach is to just be as stoic as you can. We got a little bit off topic there, to get back to your work, one thing I heard you say in a talk, I think it was a podcast was the nuance you’re bringing to this discussion isn’t the most exciting thing because people do love the sexiness, the excitement of tells in general and the idea that we can read people. And I think the thing you said was you’re not likely to be invited to do a TED Talk anytime soon. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about the public’s perception of we have this kind of love affair with behavioral cues, people love shows like Lie to Me or other shows or even poker tells. There’s this perception in the public eye that poker tells are really important and they play a big role in poker when I emphasize in my work they’re a very small part of poker. They come up occasionally, you might just use them once or twice a session that actually changes a decision. So it’s a pretty uncommon thing. But in the public eye, we have this kind of love affair with behavior and reading people. Do you have thoughts about what attracts us so much to those ideas that we can read people well?
Tim Levine: In part, people always like the little secret, get rich quick ideas. And to some extent maybe the idea of reading nonverbal communication is a lot like a little mini get rich easy solution. It has appeal. Again, getting into poker, I’m sure there’s all these little, “Here’s the secret to being a great poker player, and you’re going to learn it in 10 minutes.”
Zach: There’s a lot of bullshit, yeah.
Tim Levine: Yeah, but there’s a market for it. So I think there’s probably some of that.
Zach: Yeah, you’re right. It’s like if people feel like they have some secret knowledge that’s going to make them better at their jobs, make them better in their intimate relationships or whatever it may be, they feel like they’re getting an advantage on society. I think you’re right, there is some aspect of that.
Tim Levine: Oh, I just went through a job training thing where the consultants come in and they’re going to teach us how to do difficult communications, and they’ve got their little consultant soundbites. I don’t know how much money they soaked out of my university to do this, but it was just all junk. They would never let them in the classroom teaching real communication skills to real tuition paying young adults. But there’s a market for this and they’re selling it. People want the easy path to something that takes a lot of skill and learning and practice.
Zach: Yeah, there is just so much junk out there to name a couple examples. I was watching some podcast where they were having an FBI behavior expert weighing on things, the behaviors in interrogation. I just thought most of the things he was saying were just so not meaningful and just could easily have been found in an innocent person. And compared to the things the person was saying, it was just like, “The nonverbal stuff is just so uninteresting and non reliable.” I’m just like, “Why even focus on that?” Just watching interrogations in general, I’m like all the things that stand out as interesting are just based on what the person is actually saying, not the non-verbal stuff. But let me change direction, I think one really interesting thing to me, one surprising thing to me is just how much people dislike lying. We have a real aversion to directly lying to people. And this helps explain some of the verbal behaviors, verbal indicators in interrogation situation and in games like poker. For example, even someone who’s murdered someone often doesn’t seem like they want to come right out and say, “I didn’t kill that person,” or directly lie, and they instead use hedging language or avoid making a direct statement. And you can see some of that in poker too, people don’t like to directly lie about their hand strength when they know it might be exposed later. For example, someone who actually has a pocket pair of eights is unlikely to say, “I don’t have pocket eights,” they’re unlikely to make these direct statements, it’s just very rare. And so it’s kind of been wild to me that in areas where you think lying would be completely understandable considering the situation, whether it’s poker where you’re allowed to lie or when someone’s committed a serious crime, you’d think they would have no problem lying, but it seems like people still don’t like to lie. And I’m curious, do you see that? If you think that is there, that tendency to avoid lying, is that related to the truth default idea and is it possible that the reason that we so instinctively trust others is that there is some serious deep down aversion for us as social creatures to lie? Is there something to that?
Tim Levine: Yes and yes. So part of the truth default is that we are honest. Most of us are honest unless we have reason not to be. Because most people are honest, then this makes believing other people very functional adaptive. But the thing to remember too is that lying behavior is not normally distributed across the population. There are people out there that lie a great deal and seem to have no problems with it at all. I’m currently working on an essay on something I call bold and shameless lying. So bold lying is when I lie even though I know the truth is easy to check. And shamelessness is when you call me out on it, I’m going to double down and just keep asserting the falsehood. And maybe we can think of people in public life who do this, but they are out there. So I think your observation is true for the vast majority of people, but there are a few people out there that just are not tied to the truth at all and seem to have absolutely, absolutely no problem saying complete obvious falsehood and are completely without shame when people try to call them out.
Zach: And presumably those would be people with the more narcissistic or psychopathic traits, is that fair to say?
Tim Levine: Yeah. I think both of those could account for that, maybe some Machiavellian traits too could produce something like that.
Zach: And probably the context and the motivation for lying would… Well, I guess that wouldn’t explain why they’re lying frequently. Yeah, nevermind.
Tim Levine: So when I teach deception classes, people keep a deception diary, and I pay attention to my own too. But what I’ve discovered in these diaries is some people who lie a lot do it in a particular situation. So they have a particular job that requires them to tell a particular lie in a particular circumstance. And they do it a lot, but this is the only time they lie. They don’t lie to anybody else in their life, it’s just this kind of one place where the truth doesn’t work. Then there’s this other group of people who just lie a lot. In the extreme case, we’ve got the pathological liars who lie when the truth would work better for them. And there’s not many of those people out there, but boy, if you meet one, once you figure out what’s going on and that there’s just no pattern to their honesty or deception, it’s really unsettling.
Zach: Yeah, it is. I think it’s so unsettling for the fact that we do have such a tendency. The truth default, it’s like if that’s our logical default stance to the world and then we stumble across people that just have no problem lying, that is disturbing at some existential level, I feel.
Tim Levine: Yeah. And I think this is why bold and shameless lying actually works because most people think nobody would do that.
Zach: Yeah. They’re like, “It can’t be happening. No, it can’t.”
Tim Levine: Right, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense.
Zach: Yeah, exactly. No, that explains a lot I feel like of people’s trustworthiness. So one thing I had a question about, I haven’t delved into the research enough to know this, is it common to set up a study where someone rates not just whether they think someone is lying or truth telling, but also rates their confidence in whether they’re correct?
Tim Levine: Yes. I wouldn’t say it’s super common, but it happens enough that there’s a good amount of research doing that.
Zach: Okay. I might ask you afterwards if you have examples of that, because the thing that strikes me there is say if you forced me to guess a bunch of poker spots, for example, if you put a bunch of different poker behaviors in front of me and said, “Guess all these things,” I think I would have a very low ability to tell bluffs from value hands from strong hands. And that’s in fitting with how I say the times you’ll actually spot something that’s meaningful, that is reliable are actually pretty rare. So in other words, if you put all these spots in front of me, I would have low confidence for most of them, but occasionally I would have very high confidence. And then if you just judge me on the ones I was highly confident on, I think you’d see a significant difference. I’m just curious, it seems like such a rather obvious way to try to detect the people that are good at detecting deception in whatever situation. And I’m curious if you think is that a good idea and maybe people should do more of that in these kinds of tests?
Tim Levine: I think it is a good idea when people have some degree of expertise in the context and when there might actually be kind of real tells or real signal there in some proportion. So when there’s signal variability and when there’s expertise, then that can help. So in the literature as a whole, there’s really no correlation between how white people are and how confident people are. But those generally come from your standard deception to text experiment where there’s no real signal there.
Zach: Yeah, there’s no signal if they’re just saying, “Yes, I did this or no, I did this.” There’s not much signal to these very simplistic ones. It’s like the more context there is, the more verbal stuff there is, whatever. The more signal there is, the more likely you are to get something.
Tim Levine: Yeah, so when there’s a variable signal and you have enough expertise to kind of understand that, then I think confidence becomes very important. So my colleague, Pete Blair, and I designed this lie detection task and we had it run, and we didn’t know who was lying and who was telling the truth. But we built it, so we thought there would be a signal there. And so we’re both trying to do lie detection in this with this new set of materials, it was a few years back. What we found is we both got 86% on them. The ones we missed were different, but we were sure about the vast majority of them, but there were four particular interviews that we were uncertain about. And we went exactly different ways on the ones we were uncertain about, but we agreed a hundred percent on the four we were uncertain about if that makes sense. And it was absolutely what you were saying. We knew the ones we might be missing, and we knew the ones we were probably right about, and we were absolutely chance at the ones we just didn’t see a signal or we saw mixed signals. But where the signal we were looking for was there, kind of we knew it and we got all this right.
Zach: So is there anything you’d like to add here that we haven’t touched on that you think would be interesting to throw in?
Tim Levine: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground.
Zach: Yeah, this has been great. Thanks a lot, Tim. And thanks a lot for your work, very interesting. Your book Duped was great, and you were mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers, which must have been good for you to get some extra attention. That must have been exciting.
Tim Levine: Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell’s been very kind in dropping my name around.
Zach: Okay. Thanks a lot for coming on, Tim.
Tim Levine: My pleasure, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.
Zach Elwood: That was deception detection researcher Tim Levine. He’s the author of Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. I highly recommend that book if you are interested in behavior and deception detection.
To come back to the discussion of how poker tells differ from general deception detection scenarios: one anecdote of mine can help us see how different these areas are. In 2013, I was watching the final table of that year’s World Series of Poker Main Event as it was being broadcast. I was live-tweeting it. These were players playing for millions of dollars; they’d outlasted thousands of other players. First place was $8 million. At one point, a player made a big bet and another player was thinking for a long time. Based on the bettor’s demeanor, specifically their genuine-seeming smiling and laughter, I was very confident they had a strong hand; bluffers can smile but it’s rare for them to have more exuberant and genuine-seeming smiles; these are smiles that affect their eyes and that are more dynamic with more movement and looseness. I was so sure about this that I tweeted “If Jay is bluffing here, I’ll eat my hat. No way.” His opponent ended up calling. He was wrong and I was right; the bettor did have a strong hand.
Now clearly, with my poker tells books and work, I have a lot at risk to make a public guess like that. And it’s seldom that I would make such a pronouncement. As I emphasize in my poker tells work, it’s seldom that you can be very confident in a tell. But sometimes I will see spots where I’m highly confident, almost certain, that someone is strong or weak. Some of these can be cold reads; some behaviors are very unlikely with certain hand strengths, even not knowing anything about a player. In other cases, the confidence might come from seeing how someone behaves over several hands, to have more player-specific knowledge.
And so for this example of me correctly and confidently reading that player in the World Series of Poker, we can see that it doesn’t have much to do with deception detection. A lot of tells from players making big bets have to do with them leaking information about how relaxed they are, and some of that has to do with the fact that players who have a strong hand can just be feeling really good about things; they could be savoring the moment; they could even have some tendency to goad their opponent a bit, which can manifest verbally or even with just more direct eye contact, or with more irritated or belligerent-seeming facial expressions. But these behavioral patterns are not about deception. And there’s no equivalent to this in an interrogation or interview scenario; most people being interrogated don’t suddenly feel great about the situation and happy to be there, whether they’re innocent or guilty.
To take another example: another class of tells in poker are related to a player’s level of focus or lack of focus. For example, early in a hand, a player who gets a strong hand, let’s say pocket Aces, will have a tendency to be more mentally focused, because they seldom get a strong hand and because they don’t want to waste it; they want to play it as well as they can and know they’ll be in the hand for a while. But a player with a weak hand who makes a bet or raise early in a hand, is often less mentally focused. They know they have the option to fold if someone raises them; they know they can always check and fold; basically they haven’t invested much in the hand yet. And these dynamics means that the more loose and ostentatious behavior, whether verbal or nonverbal, early in a hand when the pot is small, will be more linked to weak and medium-strength hands and not to strong hands.
And those are tells that also are not really related to deception; they’re just tells of focus versus lack of focus.
And another different thing about poker is that players are constantly going into and out of these highly emotionally polarized but also short-lasting situations, and that means there’s a chance to look for imbalances over time. And a lot of people just aren’t that good at being balanced and aren’t even trying that hard, especially when it comes to doing that over many situations over many hours, or even days or weeks or months when you play with someone regularly for a long time.
And finally, in poker, behavioral information can be valuable even when it’s slightly reliable. In poker, you’re often put in spots that could go either way from a fundamental strategy perspective. In other words, leaving aside any behavioral stuff, it’s often a toss up whether to call a bet or fold to it. So if you see a behavior you think is slightly more likely to mean one thing than another thing, that can be valuable in the long term, because you’re making so many small decisions in poker. So small edges can be valuable. And there’s just no equivalence in interrogation; interrogators aren’t going to change big decisions based on one small behavior they spot. And this aspect of poker doesn’t even map over to most other games or sports, and that’s because poker involves so many decisions that are based on low-information; for example, in chess, there’s no equivalent to this, because all information is on the table and is known, whereas in hidden information games, especially versus skilled players, you’ll often be put in spots where your decision could go one of two or even three ways. And that’s one big reason skilled poker players find tells valuable; the cumulative effect of small edges over time.
I could talk about this for a while, but I just wanted to help make the case that reading poker tells is quite different than deception detection and real-world situations like interviews. And part of the reason I wanted to do that is to encourage any behavior and psychology researchers listening to do more studying of poker tells, to show that there is still much to study in poker that hasn’t yet been studied.
If you find this stuff interesting, check out my poker tells site, readingpokertells.com. I also have videos on youtube on my Reading Poker Tells youtube channel. You can sign up for a free email series on verbal poker tells at readingpokertells.com.
I wanted to give a shout-out and thank you to Alan Crawley, who goes by the online handle SinVerba, which is Spanish for nonverbal. Alan does youtube videos and classes on behavior. I was recently talking to him and he got me thinking again about comparing interrogations and poker and that was what led to me finding Tim Levine’s work and what led to me doing this podcast. So thanks for that, Alan.
This has been the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. If you like this podcast, please leave it a rating on Apple Podcasts. That’s a great way to show your appreciation. And of course please share it with your friends if you’ve liked it; that’s also hugely appreciated.
Okay thanks for listening.
Music by Small Skies.
A talk with addiction specialist Dr. Casey Grover about behavioral indicators of so-called “drug-seeking behavior,” which is when people try to deceptively convince doctors to prescribe them drugs. Grover hosts the podcast Addiction in Emergency Medicine and Acute Care. We talk about: why Casey thinks “drug-seeking” is a bad, unhelpful term; what behavioral clues doctors use to determine if someone might be “drug-seeking”; why most behaviors aren’t that reliable; America’s drug problems (opioids, fentanyl, methamphetamines).
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Resources discussed in this episode or related:
This is a reshare of a 2020 talk I did with psychology researcher Neguine Rezaii. We talk about her research using machine learning to find patterns in language used by teenagers who were at risk of schizophrenia that were correlated with later schizophrenia diagnosis. The two language patterns found in the subjects’ speech were 1) a low semantic density (i.e., low degree of meaning), and 2) speech related to sound or voices.
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This is a reshare of a 2018 talk with Christina Marinakis about reading and understanding jury behavior. Marinakis works for the firm Litigation Insights; you can see her bio here. There’s a transcript of the talk below.
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TRANSCRIPT
Zach Elwood: Hello, and welcome to the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding other people and understanding ourselves. You can learn more about this podcast and sign up for updates at behavior-podcast.com. If you like the podcast, I ask that you leave me a review on iTunes, that’s the best way you can show your appreciation and encourage me to do more. I’ve been pretty busy working on my book aimed at reducing American anger and political polarization. So I’ll continue re-sharing some of my early interviews. This one will be a talk from 2018 with Christina Marinakis, a specialist in jury selection for the organization Litigation Insights. In this talk, I ask Christina about some of the more psychology and behavior-related aspects of jury selection.
When it comes to how people in serious high pressure jobs make use of psychology and behavior, I think it’s one of the more interesting talks I’ve done. It was my original goal with this podcast to talk to people from a wide variety of fields about how they read and make use of people’s behavior. Because I think there’s all sorts of interesting domain-specific knowledge out there that we just don’t hear much about unless we’re in those niche areas. And I think some of that knowledge can be valuable to people who work in other fields or even just in our personal lives by increasing our empathy and understanding of other people. I’ve been a bit distracted from that original goal due to my interest in political polarization, hopefully I’ll get back to that original focus as I have a long backlog of ideas for guests from various fields and pastimes that I’d love to interview. And if you ever have ideas of interesting people to interview or subjects to tackle, feel free to send me your thoughts via the website which is behavior-podcast.com.
One interesting recent thing about Christina Marinakis, she was a consultant for the prosecution in the case against Derek Chauvin in Minnesota. If you search for her name and Derek Chauvin, you can find some pieces about the jury consultancy work she did for that very high profile case. Okay, here’s the talk with Christina Marinakis.
Today is September 24th, 2018, and today we have Dr. Christina Marinakis joining us. Dr. Marinakis’s education includes an undergraduate degree in bioscience psychology, a master’s in clinical psychology, a doctorate in psychology, and a law degree. She’s currently the director of jury research at Litigation Insights, a national trial consulting firm, and she has 17 years of jury research study and applied practice in law and psychology. Her case experience includes but is not limited to product liability, antitrust litigation, class action, legal and medical malpractice, contract disputes, patents, securities, fraud, and criminal work. And she does this work for both prosecutors and defendants. Dr. Marinakis contributed to a new edition of the book Pattern Voir Dire Questions, a compilation of tips for voir dire strategy. And that book includes over 2000 questions for investigating and a listening bias from potential jurors. Besides jury selection work, she also is hired for witness preparation and communication training, and that involves giving feedback to witnesses who are preparing to testify to make sure they’re perceived well by the jury. So today Dr. Marinakis and I will mainly be discussing jury selection, the basics of how the process works, how strategy and game theory can play a role in the process, and how an understanding of psychology and behavior can impact jury selection. So without further ado, welcome to the podcast Dr. Marinakis, thanks for coming on.
Dr. Marinakis: Thanks so much for having me.
Zach Elwood: So we’ve got a lot of interesting things to talk about today, and a lot of questions people will find interesting I think. So let’s jump right into those questions. Could you give a simple explanation of how the voir dire process works for people who don’t know much about that process?
Dr. Marinakis: Sure. So a lot of people refer to what we do as jury selection, but the more accurate term would be jury de-selection. We’re not really picking who we want on our jury, it’s more of an elimination process of picking who we don’t want on the jury. So there’s essentially three ways that you can get a juror off the panel. And the first way is through hardship. And so if a juror says that they have an extreme financial hardship or a personal hardship such as they are caring for a young child at home or caring for an infirm adult, the judge decides whether those people meet the statute for whether they should be excused for hardship. And the attorneys can often comment on that and can make arguments whether a juror meets that statutory hardship language, but that’s really a decision that ultimately rests with the judge. The second way that people can be removed from the jury panel is through what we call peremptory strikes or peremptory challenges. And in every case, both sides are permitted a certain number of what we call strikes, meaning that you can remove people from the panel for no reason at all, any reason, and you don’t even have to tell the other side or the judge what the reason is. Now there is an exception, and you can’t remove someone based on race, gender, or in some state’s sexual orientation. That is against the law. But other than that, you can remove that person from the panel and you don’t have to give a reason why. There’s a balance number of strikes per side, and that varies by jurisdiction. Most of the time in state cases and civil cases, it’s anywhere between three strikes per side to about six strikes per side. In some cases, if you have more than one defendant who has adverse interests, the judge might decide to allow you to have eight strikes per side if that’s what you want. But it’s always balanced. In criminal cases, it tends to be more, you might have up to 20 strikes per side, but that’s what we call peremptory challenges. And they usually alternate. So once you have a panel of jurors, usually the prosecution or the plaintiff will strike first and they’ll say, “We’d like to thank and excuse juror number four.” And then the defense goes and they say, “We’d like to thank and excuse juror number 12.” And it goes back and forth until both sides pass. So you can pass and try to save up your strikes. And so you might say, “We pass, we accept this panel,” the other side then makes a strike. Now you get to go back and make another strike. Now once both sides pass and they accept the panel, that’s your jury. So that’s the second way. And then the third way, which is really where a lot of the psychology comes in, is what we call cause challenges. And there’s an unlimited number of cause challenges. And what that involves is each side is trying to get the jurors that they don’t want on the panel to admit that they can’t be fair. There’s statutory language that differs by state in terms of what you need to get the jurors to say. For example, in California, there’s a number of ways you can get a juror, what we call, kicked off for cause. If they evidence enmity against or a bias in favor of one party or the other, that’s enough reason to get them off the jury panel. In most states, it’s whether they can be fair and impartial, but there’s certainly some differences. Again, in New York, they have to give an unequivocal assurance that they can be fair. If they can’t do that, they get kicked off for cause. So each side gets to question the jurors, and that’s what we call the voir dire process or if you’re in the staff they call it voir dire. And it’s a process where each side gets to ask jurors questions and ask follow up questions. And the ultimate goal is to identify the people that you don’t want on your panel without exposing the people that you do want, because if you expose those good jurors, now the other side is just going to be able to identify them and get them kicked off for cause or they might use one of their peremptory challenges if they can’t get the juror to say they can’t be fair. And so since there’s an unlimited number of those cause challenges, that’s really the end game, is the side that gets the better jury is really the side that is able to get as many of their bad jurors off for cause which gives you a leg up on the other side.
Zach Elwood: So how many people are typically starting out in a jury pool, jury selection pool, before the process starts?
Dr. Marinakis: It varies a lot by jurisdiction, but in general, I’d say you’d need anywhere from fifty to a hundred jurors. And sometimes it just depends on how many jurors sit on the final panel. So although many states have juries of 12, there are certain states like Maryland and Florida where you’re only sitting juries of six. So obviously you don’t need as many jurors. So the way they decide how many jurors we need is you take the number that are finally seated, whether that’s six or 12, and then you add up the number of strikes that each side has. So again, that could be anywhere from three to six. So just for example, if you have a jury of 12 and then each side has six strikes, that means you’re going to need at least 24 jurors, 12 for the box plus the 12 that are stricken. And then you want to have a couple extra jurors because you anticipate that some of those jurors are going to be gone for cause. Now the longer the trial is, the more jurors you need. Many of my clients have trials that run 5 to 12 weeks long, there’s going to be a lot more jurors who will have financial hardships. And so if you know your trial is going to be a longer trial, you might need to start with 200 jurors to get enough jurors for the final panel. If it’s only a three-day trial, you might be able to start out with 40 jurors and be just fine. Now, same thing goes with whether it’s a high profile case or involves some really sensitive issues. Clearly if you’re trying a case for Bill Cosby, there’s going to be a lot more jurors in the audience who have already formed an opinion about his guilt or innocence, and so you’re going to lose more jurors for cause.
Zach Elwood: Right. So when you ask the questions of the potential jurors, can you ask anyone questions or do you pick one person at a time or do you ask it to the group? How do you decide answers to those kind of questions?
Dr. Marinakis: Again, it varies by jurisdiction. Each state has different rules on how they conduct voir dire. The states that are in the northeast like New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, they question the jurors individually. So each juror comes back into the room, into the chambers, sometimes the judge is present, sometimes the judge is not present, and the parties ask the questions individually of each juror. Because of that, the jury selection process in those states can take several days up to several weeks in certain trials. Other states like Texas do a panel. So each person in the veneer, people that are sitting in the benches, will have a paddle almost like an auction that has their juror number. And then the attorneys have to ask the question of the entire group. “How many people feel like corporations put profits over safety?” Then people who think, “Yes,” they raise their panel, and you jot down their numbers and then you have to follow up with them. Most of the time the follow up is done in open court. There are some jurisdictions where you ask the questions of the entire group, but then any juror who raises their hand or raises their paddle then comes up to be questioned individually. So it just really depends on the rules and the court system. But usually the jurors are in a certain order. In the field, we call it a random list. Now the jurors may not realize what order they are in. Sometimes they’re seated in order in the courtroom, and sometimes they’re not. But the attorneys always have a list of who’s first and who’s coming up because the jurors they’re seated in an order or they’re in an order in a list. So if we have a list of 50 jurors and I know that we only need to get 24 to sit the jury, I’m only going to focus on those first 30 people on the list. There’s no point in me asking questions to the juror who’s seated in seat 60 because the chances that we’re going to get to that juror are very unlikely. Now once we start losing jurors for cause and losing jurors for hardship, we can calculate how deep into the panel we will get and know who we need to ask questions of.
Zach Elwood: But you know the order, so there’s theoretically some reading ability that you could base on how a person acts or looks theoretically to know something about what some of their stances might be theoretically if you know the order.
Dr. Marinakis: Certainly. I’d say we know the order at least 90% of the time. And so we’re looking at who are those people in the first group of 30. And many times we get a little bit of information about those people. It might just be a card that has their occupation, their marital status, maybe the ZIP code where they live, their age, or sometimes we get a huge questionnaire where they filled out several pages of questions. Now, the other thing and I anticipate we’ll get more into this that we do is we’ll look up these jurors, we get the list of names and immediately start looking up folks LinkedIn profiles, their Facebook, their blogs, their public records. So we have an idea of who is on our panel. And then there is a little bit of stereotyping. So if I’m representing a corporate defendant, most likely people that are wearing business suits are going to be good for my side. I’m not going to start off asking those folks questions. I’d probably start off asking questions of people who might look to be more blue collar or maybe aren’t dressed as sharply, maybe look like they’re of a lower economic status who are more likely to identify with a plaintiff who’s suing that large corporation. I’d target my questions to those people first. Now the other thing we do is we’d ask one of those general questions again, “How many people think corporations put profits over safety?” If 10 people raise their hand to that question, I’m going to go to those 10 people first to do the follow-ups.
Zach Elwood: Got you. So the legal process often seems like a game with its team versus team nature and its sometimes obscure roles that can lead to complex strategies. And this seems especially the case for the voir dire process. Is there a lot of strategy and game theory involved? I guess you’ve already answered a little bit of this, but…
Dr. Marinakis: Absolutely. The best jury consultants and attorneys who participate in voir dire are able to anticipate the next side’s move and what the consequences of that move will be. So when I’m trying to decide who we want on the panel, the only way we can do that is through the striking process. I have to think about if I strike this juror, who’s going to take their place? So if there’s 12 jurors on the panel, I strike juror number four. Now juror number 13 is going to move into that seat. Well, now the panel composition has changed, and I have to think about now who is the other side going to strike. If the other side strikes juror number nine, now juror number 14 is going to move into that seat. And you have to be able to anticipate who is the other side going to strike and who is going to move into those seats and how many strikes do you have left. If you use your strikes on someone who is a juror you might not want but not the worst juror, well, if someone worse takes their seat and you run out of strikes, now you end up with a undesirable jury. The other thing that I mentioned was the passing system. So I might strike a juror, if the other side passes, they could pass because they think that there’s someone on the panel that I must strike, a juror that I cannot have on there. So they would pass in order to start saving up their strikes because ultimately that gives you an advantage. If you’ve got four strikes left, the other side only has two strikes, now you’re able to control the panel easier. However, you can call the other side’s bluff. And if the other side passes and you pass, now you’re stuck with that panel. So there could be someone on the panel that they don’t want and they’re passing because they think that you need to strike somebody and then you pass, now you’re stuck with the panel. So it absolutely is a game of chess. And because it moves so quickly, it’s really a game of speed chess.
Zach Elwood: Right. You said for a lot of them they can be only 30 minutes long.
Dr. Marinakis: Right. And really that’s the process for asking jurors questions, when it comes to doing your strikes, it’s right there in court. The judge usually won’t even give you time to confer with your co-counsel. They’ll just say, “Okay, plaintiff, what do you want to do?” And then you make your strike immediately.
Zach Elwood: So it goes very quick?
Dr. Marinakis: Yes. Immediately the defense says, “Okay, plaintiff, who do you want to strike?” And the actual striking process can occur within a minute.
Zach Elwood: And are the potential jurors in the room at that point too?
Dr. Marinakis: Depends on the state. In California, you say, “We’d like to thank and excuse juror number four.” And the juror number four gets up, they leave the courtroom. The next juror the judge will say, “Okay, juror number 14, now you take their place. Now the other side, you strike,” and it works like that. In other jurisdictions, they say, “Okay, attorneys, you’ve got one minute, write down the six people you want to strike.” Other side does the same. And then you submit the list, the judge cuts those people, and you’re done. And you don’t get to see the other side, it’s not a back and forth process. The funny thing is sometimes when you do that, both sides end up striking the same person which is interesting. Either they’re concerned that they don’t know that person well enough and they’re afraid to leave them on the panel or sometimes one side or the other just gets the juror wrong.
Zach Elwood: Oh, that’s interesting. That sounds like a very stressful process for having to be done so quick. I mean, it sounds like that could easily lead to some frayed nerves.
Dr. Marinakis: Right. The jury selection process isn’t for anyone, there’s a lot of different consultants who work with attorneys, and some of them just do the witness work that you mentioned earlier, where you’re working directly with witnesses, working on their communication strategy. And some consultants just do the jury selection piece, because they really require two different skill sets. And it’s not for everybody, you really have to be able to have calm under pressure, to be able to think quickly, anticipate the other side’s moves, and really just having an excellent memory and being able to remember exactly what each juror said and having great organizational skills, being able to keep track of who’s on the list, who’s coming up next, what did they say.
Zach Elwood: Right, that’s a lot of factors, yeah. So considering all that work and complexity, how much influence do you think voir dire strategy has on a case, in your opinion?
Dr. Marinakis: A lot. It’s almost sad to say, but I think the composition of the jury has a bigger influence on the outcome of the verdict than the facts of the case sometimes. The other piece of my work is performing mock trials. So before a case goes to trial, we will present the case to people in the community, many people, sometimes up to 60 people. And test the case with them to see what the likely outcome is and what the strengths and weaknesses are of the case. I can tell you in the many, many years I’ve been doing this, I have never had a case where all the people agree on the verdict, never. Yet they’re hearing the same exact evidence, hearing the same exact arguments, and yet they view the evidence differently. And that’s because each of us has our own experiences and our attitudes and our history that creates a lens. And we view the facts of the case through that lens. And because of our backgrounds, we either accept and remember the things that are consistent with our preexisting beliefs or we reject, we forget, we misinterpret things that don’t correspond with our preexisting beliefs. And so the same piece of evidence is going to be viewed differently depending on your outlook. And so you can’t necessarily change the facts of the case, but you can change the lens that it’s going to be viewed through. And so ultimately the jury selection piece and deciding who’s on the jury will decide how the facts, the evidence, and the arguments get interpreted.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. That can give you a sort of pessimistic view of how likely a defendant is going to get a fair trial, just makes me think of that. And so I’m wondering, how much do you see jury selection as working on behalf of your client and how much of that process is a collaborative attempt from both sides to make a jury most fair? Or is it, I guess, one could lead to the other?
Dr. Marinakis: Well, really our system in the United States is based on an adversarial system. There’s other countries out there where they have a single judge or a panel of people who are supposed to be neutral and who decide the case and decide the legal issues. And I think the great thing about our system is it is adversarial, but I think that leads to better, more accurate results. If you have one person like a judge or a supposedly neutral panel deciding the case, who’s going to challenge that panel when they make mistakes? Who’s going to challenge that panel’s bias? Because people are still people. And so someone may be a neutral moderator or a neutral panel of observers, but even those people are going to have their own biases. And if there’s not an adversary or someone on the other side pointing out those mistakes or those flaws, that’s going to lead to a flawed system. Now because our system is adversarial, we are pointing out the mistakes in the other side’s case, the holes in the other side’s case, the injustices in the other side’s case. And ultimately that leads to a better truth. If you’ve got two people arguing and really fighting for their position, that helps weed out the truth for a neutral fact finder. And the same thing is true of jury selection. So while I’m doing that for my client and trying to get off the jurors from the panel that are the worst for my case, the other side’s doing the exact same thing and they’re trying to get off their worst jurors. The end result is really to get a fair and impartial jury, but honestly, that’s not my goal, my goal is to get the best jury for my client, the other side’s jury consultant, that’s their goal to get the best jury. And maybe the person who’s more skilled will get the better jury in the end, but most of the time you end up with a fair panel.
Zach Elwood: Got you. Let’s move on to the behavioral psychology part of the interview. And I’ll ask you, what role does physical behavior play in a typical jury selection process?
Dr. Marinakis: Sure. There’s really two things that we’re looking for when we’re observing people’s behavior. And one of them is to identify how they’re answering the questions. Because whether a juror is a good juror or a bad juror or even if it’s just the difference between a bad juror and a very bad juror, sometimes depends on not what they say, but how they say it. So for example, there may be many people in the audience or in the, we call them the veneer, who have had maybe a negative experience with something, maybe this is an employment case. Let’s pretend it’s an employment case, I’m representing a company who’s being sued because they discharged someone and they’re being alleged for wrongful termination. So there may be multiple people there who have been fired from a job, but how they respond to that situation will determine who I get rid of on the panel. I might say, “How was that experience when you lost your job?” If one person says, “That was a tough experience,” another person says, “I was devastated,” there’s a difference. And if I only have one strike and I need to exercise it, choose between those two individuals, I’m going to strike the person who says they were devastated and they say it with a sigh, and you can see the pain in their face as opposed to someone who says, “Yeah, it was tough.” To me the person who says, “Yeah, it was tough,” they say it quickly, they don’t seem upset, they were able to move on versus someone who might still be clinging on to the pain of that experience. So I’m looking at their facial expressions. Do they look pained? Do they have a furrowed brow? Are they hesitant? Is there a quiver in their voice? Their body language, do they look sullen and sulky? Or are they confident and able to move past it? Same thing goes in cases where maybe we’re dealing with a cancer case and the plaintiffs are alleging that my client corporation’s product cause their cancer. A lot of people have had losses due to cancer in their life, but it’s how they dealt with those losses and how it still affects them today that determines whether they’d be a good juror or not. So again, I’ll ask them, “Tell me about that experience.” And if they look like they’re on the verge of tears and they’re having a hard time talking about it and then they say, “But yeah, I can still be fair to your client,” I’m going to have a hard time believing that they can really be fair to my client versus someone who says, “Yeah, it was really tough when we lost our mother, but we enjoyed our time that we had with her.” How that person dealt with that situation will determine how they view the evidence and that filter and that lens that they see the evidence in your case. Go ahead.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. I was going to say, one of the things that I was remembering from the voir dire book is looking for reactions, when someone’s being questioned, someone else might have a reaction like shaking their head slightly. You had one example of someone shaking their head in what they thought was probably a very subtle, minor reaction to a question someone else was asked, but that enabled you to say, “Oh, this guy probably has some anger and some bias on this issue.” So looking for reactions like that.
Dr. Marinakis: Absolutely. It’s interesting because we ask these questions, how many people feel this way? And there’s always people who don’t raise their hand. Usually they just don’t want to speak in front of a hundred strangers and talk about their biases in front of a bunch of people or they’re shy or they just don’t like public speaking, which is most people. So if I’m talking to someone who did raise their hand and I see someone else who’s making faces, who’s nodding along or maybe disagreeing, maybe I’ll follow up on them and I’ll say, “Mr. Smith, I know you didn’t raise your hand to that question, but I saw you nodding along, do you feel the same way?” And then that juror might now open up that, yeah, they probably should have raised their hand. And so each person shows their emotions differently. There are some people who wear their emotions on their sleeve, and they’re nodding along and they’re making facial expressions and they’re wincing or they’re furrowing their brow or they’re scoffing or laughing, and then other people are very stoic. So certainly some people are more difficult to read than others, but those are all cues that I’m watching for when both my client is asking the questions and when the opposing counsel is asking their questions. If they’re asking questions and I see folks in the audience who are either agreeing or disagreeing with them, that gives me some insight into whether that juror would be good or bad for my client.
Zach Elwood: How often would you or how often in general will lawyers face decisions or follow up questions on the physical behavior or behavior in general of potential jurors? I was just wondering how often it played a role, many times or seldom?
Dr. Marinakis: For me, it plays a role every time. Most of the time my clients are focusing on the conversation, and they need to do that. They need to be tuned in to what people are saying. They can’t both watch the audience and question jurors at the same time. That’s why it’s important to have a consultant or someone else there who can do the watching for you. So they might not even realize the different body language and reactions that people are having or they just don’t have the experience to identify what that means. And it’s very easy to misinterpret body language if you haven’t seen it over and over and over again. But for every person, I’m looking at them, seeing how they respond to questions. And then I didn’t get to the second thing that I’m looking for, which I think is even more important, is signs of group dynamics. And ultimately a jury decision is a group decision, whether it needs to be unanimous or whether it’s 9 out of 12 or something similar, it all depends on who you have on the jury and what are their personalities. So I’m not just thinking about who’s going to be a good or bad juror for my case, but who’s going to be a leader in the deliberation room, who’s going to be a follower, who’s going to be what we call a consensus builder, someone who’s going to try to get everybody to agree. Oftentimes you think teachers, they tend to be consensus builders. They try to get people to negotiate. You’re also looking for people who are what we call contrarians. A contrarian is someone who will always challenge the status quo. They like to play devil’s advocate. And then you’re also looking for people who might alienate others. Someone might be a great juror, but if they’re kind of a unique individual or maybe a little weird or maybe they just smell bad, are they going to alienate the rest of the jurors and people aren’t going to want to agree with that person? He might be a great juror, but I’m not going to want him on my jury if I feel like he has a possibility of alienating others. So I’m looking at how jurors interact with one another, who’s having lunch with who, who’s talking with whom in the hallways, who’s opening the door for everybody, passing out pens, that person’s probably going to be someone who’s a consensus builder. Or people who are making jokes who other people are laughing, that person has a possibility of being a leader, who respects whom? So you’re really looking at the jurors and how they interact to determine how they’re likely to interact once they get in the deliberation room. And that plays a huge role in determining how I’m going to exercise my strikes.
Zach Elwood: And there’s different applications for recognizing there’s different types of people. For example, we might talk about this more later, but one example you gave was when there’s a contrarian in the group, you might want them on the panel if you think that they might lead to a hung jury in your favor, right? You might want that kind of person in there.
Dr. Marinakis: Right. So it depends on the facts of your case, your client, your attorneys, what kind of group dynamics you want. And it also depends on the jurisdiction. There’s some jurisdictions and some cases that require unanimous verdict, and other cases you only need 9 out of 12. So I think you’re referring to I had one criminal case, and I don’t do that many criminal cases, but we do a few a year. And in this criminal case, the evidence was really stacked against my client for the most part. It was a murder case that involved a strangulation, and my client’s DNA was found on the murder victim’s neck and cell phone and then also on the knob of a stove, and the gas on the stove had been turned on all the way up, and a candle had been placed next to it, presumably so that they could blow up the crime scene. So we thought this would be a very challenging case given the popularity of DNA evidence in shows. At the time CSI was really big or Criminal Minds. And so we had some serious concerns that we would lose the case for our client, who we believed was innocent. And so we thought that probably the best we could get was to get a hung jury. And so we were looking for a contrarian who would be able to challenge no matter what the group thought, would always play devil’s advocate, would stand his ground and be a strong voice and ultimately hang the jury. So we looked for someone who in the process, the jury selection process, was challenging everything. The judge says, “Sit in this order,” “Well, why do I need to sit in this order?” “Here’s a piece of paper, call this number.” They’re just always challenging the bailiff, the other jurors, the judge even, and really are expressing unique views. So any time an attorney would ask a question, they might say, “Well, yeah, that’s true most of the time, but other people, other times this happens.” And so immediately we were able to identify this juror as a contrarian, and I don’t think the other side really did. This contrarian was dressed well, he was a successful banker, and so I think the prosecution thought he would be a good juror for their case. Usually people that are higher SES, Republican tend to be more likely to decide for prosecution in criminal cases. So they left him on the jury. We left him on the jury because he was contrarian, and ultimately he was the one that fought on behalf of our defense. Just briefly, our defense was DNA transfer, that our client had used a towel in the victim’s apartment, and that the murderer, the true killer, used that towel to then clean the crime scene to wipe the victim’s neck, to wipe the knob, and he transferred the DNA from the towel to the crime scene. And it’s a very unconventional defense, there is scientific basis to it, but it’s not well known. And so this juror who was the contrarian was able to argue that, and ultimately we ended up not with a hung jury, but with a full acquittal for our client.
Zach Elwood: Oh, wow. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit about some specific behaviors from the potential jurors. Does eye contact tells come into play at all? How they look at you and you can read maybe some anger, frustration from the questions you’re asking, does that play a role ever?
Dr. Marinakis: It does play a role, but I really caution against trying to, what we call, reading tea leaves. Because oftentimes the signs of nervousness are often the same signs as someone who might be lying. And so this is what we work with our witnesses a lot with in terms of building their credibility. So someone who’s not making eye contact, it could be that they’re just nervous, especially jurors. I mean, being asked questions in front of a group of people by lawyers and judges is very unnatural for them. And so most of the time there’s a lot of jurors who are nervous to do so. And they might not be making eye contact because of that, not because they’re not telling the truth. So you really have to be cautious. Same thing with people whose arms are crossed. There’s sometimes lawyers or clients or jurors who feel like if someone’s arms are crossed, they’re being standoffish, they don’t like your position. Well, maybe that person is just cold. Or sometimes if someone has a big belly, it’s comfortable to put your arms on top of your belly.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, exactly. You always hear that stereotype about the arms crossed being standoffish. Just because of that, even though I know it’s often untrue, but I find myself uncrossing my arms in groups just because I don’t want people to think I’m standoffish, even though I’m not. So yeah, it’s like everything, it’s often ambiguous and doesn’t give you as much information as some people think.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. And so that’s when we work with our witnesses, we work with them on things, uncross your arms, make good eye contact, because we don’t want their nervousness or personal ticks or habits to be misconstrued as untruthfulness. What we do look for though is inconsistencies in how someone is reacting depending on who’s speaking. So for example, if someone has their arms crossed both when the plaintiff is asking the questions and when the defense attorney is asking the questions, it probably doesn’t mean anything. But if their arms are always crossed only when the defense lawyer is speaking and yet they’re sitting forward and they look more attentive and they’re leaning in when the plaintiff attorney is speaking, I might take notice of that and then try to make an interpretation from the differences in their behavior. So it’s not the behavior themselves, but how it differs between who’s speaking and what evidence is being shown.
Zach Elwood: Looking for those imbalances in behavior, as we sayin poker a lot imbalances.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. So let’s see, what else do I have on this list? Are there certain things that prospective jurors often lie about such as knowing how to read or using drugs in the past, things like that?
Dr. Marinakis: I think more often than not people are honest. I mean, most jurors are told they have to swear to tell the truth, and I think most people do take that very seriously. Certainly you hear stories about people trying to get off of jury duty maybe pretending that they can’t speak English or that they can’t read or write or the big thing is pretending that they’re racist, even though it’s often silly, because race rarely plays a role in these cases. But more often than not, I think people are trying to be honest. The bigger issue is that most people are unaware of their own biases. People want to think of themselves as good people, fair people. And so regardless of their backgrounds, most people will say, “Yes, I can still set that experience aside and be fair and impartial.” But usually they do have biases, in the industry we call them implicit biases, that people are unaware of, but that will influence how they view the evidence in the case. And so my role is not to necessarily detect lying, but to detect these implicit biases and get the juror to ultimately realize that they can’t be fair. And we have a number of techniques that we use to do that to try to get a juror to realize that maybe this isn’t the case for them, and they actually, despite their best efforts, can’t be fair to my client.
Zach Elwood: That was an interesting thing in the book with the voir dire suggested questions. The book was aimed at trying to get strategies for getting potential jurors to admit, verbally admit, their bias and walk them through. Once they started to show bias, get them to verbally admit in a clear way, “Yes, I’m biased. I can’t be unbiased on this.” So that was interesting seeing those strategies in that book.
Dr. Marinakis: Yeah. It’s a difficult thing to do, again, because most people feel like they can be fair. So you really have to get the juror to feel the bias. So here’s just an example, instead of just coming right out of the gate and saying, “Who here is going to have a hard time setting aside sympathy for this person with cancer?” You can’t ask that question right away because not that many people are going to raise their hand. But if you preface it with, “Mrs. Smith has been through dozens of surgeries. She’s spent months in the hospital. She can’t breathe because of this illness, it’s like suffocating.” And you start to describe it that way. “Her family has had to quit their jobs. They’ve had to put their house on the market to pay these medical bills.” Now all of a sudden you start to conjure up these images and these emotions, and now the juror can really start to feel in the gut of their stomach that sympathy and emotion. So I’m going to build that first, and then I’ll say, “Okay, given all that, who’s going to have a hard time at the end of this case looking at Mrs. Smith and her husband and her children in the eye and telling them, ‘You know what, we can’t give you any money because you didn’t prove your case.’ How many of you think you’re going to have a hard time doing that?” So now they felt that emotion, and you’re going to get more people that raise their hand to that question than you would have if I came right out of the gate and asked it.
Zach Elwood: And you would be asking that from the other side, you wouldn’t be asking that from the plaintiff’s side?
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. And I should have brought this up in the beginning, my firm, we primarily represent defendants in civil cases. So we might work for plaintiffs every now and then, but probably more than 90% of the time we’re representing the company, the corporation or the manufacturer, the employer, we’re usually on the side of trying to identify people who are going to have a hard time setting aside their sympathies.
Zach Elwood: Right. We’ll talk more about that later about some specific strategies. So my next up question is, how many of the decisions you make are based on quick read kind of stereotypes? For example, this person’s an older blue collar woman, she might have certain stances, or this person’s piercings and tattoos would make them more likely to side with the underdog, the plaintiff. How much do those kinds of stereotypes play in general would you say?
Dr. Marinakis: It depends on the jurisdiction and how much you can question the jurors. What we like to say is that a juror’s attitudes are the most predictive way of how they’re going to view the evidence, but there are some states and some judges that won’t let you ask about the juror’s attitudes, you can only ask about their experiences. Now, sometimes experiences correlate with attitudes. So the fact that someone maybe has had a relative with cancer might mean that they’re more empathetic. Now it might not, but it could. There’s some jurisdictions where you don’t even get to ask about that. You might only get to see their demographics. And if a juror doesn’t raise their hand, there’s no opportunity to ask follow up questions and yet you need to make a decision whether to keep or to strike that juror based on someone that you’ve never even spoken to. And unfortunately, you have to rely on stereotypes because the truth is stereotypes are a statistical advantage. I gave an example that I’m a white woman, and if you went to Starbucks and you didn’t have time to call me to ask me what I wanted from Starbucks, and you ordered me a pumpkin spice latte. Now more often than not, you would be right that a white woman would enjoy a pumpkin spice latte. Now, me personally, I hate them, so you would’ve been wrong. But even if it’s just 6 out of 10 white women who like pumpkin spice lattes, you’ve now increased your odds of getting the right answer. And in my field, it’s all about increasing odds. You will never be able to 100% predict anything, but if you can increase your odds of getting the right person, that’s the end game. And unfortunately, it’s awful that sometimes you have to use a stereotype because it’s not going to apply to everybody, but it’s a statistical advantage.
Zach Elwood: You’re kind of forced into it. I mean, you have a very limited amount of time to make decisions on very limited information. So you’re just trying to pull information from wherever you can, even if it’s not the greatest information.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. So if 6 out of 10 times a blue collar worker is going to side with the plaintiff and all I know about this person is that they’re a blue collar worker and I have to decide between them and a white collar worker, you’re right, I would probably strike the blue collar worker if that’s all I had to go on, because that’s the best chances that I have. So that’s why we really advocate to judges, “Please let us talk to individuals, let us get to know them,” because otherwise we’re left making unfair and quite frankly, unconstitutional, if we’re basing our decision on race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other what we call cognizable group, that’s unconstitutional. But if a judge doesn’t give us an opportunity to ask questions, then that’s all we have to go on.
Zach Elwood: Right. It does seem strange considering what you’ve said, and it does seem logical that the voir dire jury selection process is very important. I’m surprised that the time limits given are so short.
Dr. Marinakis: Yeah. It just really depends on the judge. And some judges don’t see the value, and they feel like, “Well, people can be fair and impartial, the case should rest on the evidence.” But I don’t think those judges have sat in on all the mock trials that we have to see how much the juror’s background really influences the verdict.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. It’s a very optimistic view of the average jury I feel like. That stance that, “Oh, it’ll all be the same probably.” So are there laws pertaining to researching jurors like looking at their social media accounts? You had mentioned that, and I was just wondering if that was always allowed or not sometimes.
Dr. Marinakis: Presently there are no laws that prohibit researching jurors. There are however ethical rules for attorneys and for people who work for attorneys about contacting jurors. So what constitutes contact can often vary, and there’s an opinion out there that basically says that even if you don’t initiate the contact but you cause a contact, that could be an ethical violation. So here’s an example. If you look at someone’s LinkedIn page and you are not logged in the privacy settings, that person will get a notification that says, “Christina Marinakis viewed your page.” Under certain court rules, that’s a violation because that is a direct contact between the jury, even though I never sent the juror a message, I never tried to request them, to connect with them, because now they know that I looked at their page, that’s a violation. So really if you’re doing research on jurors, you need to understand the applications and the platforms that you’re using and the settings to ensure that there’s no unauthorized contact.
Zach Elwood: So you got to be very sneaky.
Dr. Marinakis: And just ethical. You can’t go around the rules and say, “Okay, well, I can’t friend request you, but I’m going to have my secretary friend request you so I can see your private page,” that is against the ethics rules. And I say ethics, but ethics rules are also actual rules. If you violate those, you could lose your license and you could lose the case. So those are the rules and laws that pertain, but there’s really no limit unless a judge has particularly said, “In this case you cannot search the jurors.” So it’s really more judge-based, but in my career I’ve only had one judge who ever did that. And that’s because the jury consultant for the other side had her laptop up and was looking at jurors pages, and one of the jurors saw it and reported to the judge that it made them uncomfortable when they saw their Facebook page on the…
Zach Elwood: That would not make you feel very safe.
Dr. Marinakis: Right. But everything that we do search, and this is unlike probably what you’ve seen in TV or movies, everything is public records. We do not search anything that is private. So, yes, we might look at property, deeds or vehicle registrations, history of bankruptcies, liens, criminal records, these are all public documents that anybody could find if they had enough time.
Zach Elwood: You’re not hiring a private investigator, it’s open source. Got you. How often is your read of a juror accurate?
Dr. Marinakis: It’s hard to calculate, but it’s something that I do keep track of because I always feel like… People ask me, “How many cases have you won?” And I don’t feel like that’s a good indication of whether you’re a good consultant. Sometimes the facts of the case are bad or you can only control who’s on the jury panel and you only get so many people to strike. But what I feel like is an indication of whether you’re a good jury consultant is what you say, how often do you get a person right? And so I’ve kept track of it, and I feel like overall it’s about 10 out of 12 that I’m able to identify whether they’d be a plaintiff juror or defense juror. And we often try to predict who’s going to be a leader versus a follower, and I think about 10 out of 12 times we’re right. Sometimes it’s 12 out of 12. I think that’s pretty good. I don’t know what other people’s stats are, I’ve never compared it with anyone else, but me personally, I have kept track of that.
Zach Elwood: That’s interesting.
Dr. Marinakis: And some people are more difficult to read than others certainly, so it does vary from case to case. Sometimes I’ll get all 12, sometimes it might only be 9 out of 12, but I usually say there’s always one or two that surprise you.
Zach Elwood: Are you able to say or see after the trial is over what every juror voted or how it worked, what the breakdown was, if that makes sense?
Dr. Marinakis: Yes. So in every case, either the jurors have to sign the form. So say there’s 12 jurors, and we’ll say, “Okay, everyone who agrees with this verdict must sign the form.” So you’ll get to see the names of the people who signed it versus the people who didn’t. There’s also something called polling the jury. So the jury foreperson might say, “Okay, we the jury find the defendant liable, not liable.” And then counsel can request to poll the jury. And they’ll say, “Juror number one, is this your verdict? Yes or no? Juror number two, is this your verdict? Yes or no?” I think you might have seen that if you watched the OJ Simpson or one of those documentaries, that they poll the jury to see. And then oftentimes we interview the jurors afterwards. We talk to them individually, we do interviews, we take them to lunch to really find out what they thought of the case, what were the strengths and weaknesses, and how can we improve for other future cases?
Zach Elwood: Yeah. I would think that would be very interesting just to break down how these people you chose at the beginning of the process went through the whole process and what their thought processes were along the way. It seems like that would be very interesting.
Dr. Marinakis: Oh, absolutely. One of my favorite things to do is if I’ve been involved in the jury selection is then to interview folks afterwards. And it’s funny, because almost always I finish the interview and I say, “What questions do you have for me?” And inevitably they say, “Why did you pick me?” I don’t go into this entire podcast, but we talk about how people’s backgrounds can influence how they view the evidence, and really it’s not that we pick them, it’s just we didn’t pick to get rid of them.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, you didn’t not pick them. You didn’t strike them. Let’s see what else we have here. How often is it that potential jurors act angry or aggressive or act out in order to give the impression that they really don’t want to be there? And does that make them more likely to be rejected by acting that way?
Dr. Marinakis: I don’t think people are acting when they do that, I think they’re legitimately distressed, especially a lot of the cases that I do are multiple week trials, and it is very nerve-wracking for most people to even think about having to miss six weeks of work or having to miss a vacation if that’s what they think or not being able to pick up their child from school every day for the next six weeks. That is very anxiety provoking. Some people handle it better than others, but I have definitely seen people break down, cry, throw a temper tantrum, and I don’t think they’re acting, I think they’re really in distress when that occurs. And ultimately this goes back to the hardship issue, and so it’s the judge’s decision whether to let that person be excused or not. But there are certainly times where someone is so distressed and maybe they don’t meet the statutory requirement to be excused, and the judge will kind of look at the attorney and say, “Well, what do you guys think? Do you want to agree to let this person go or not?” And sometimes we’ll look at the other side and say, “Do we really want this kind of bad karma? Is this good for either of us?” Probably not, because that juror might take it out on one side or the other. They could take it out on the plaintiff for filing a frivolous lawsuit or they could take it out on the defendant for refusing to settle what they see as a legitimate lawsuit or it might not bother them at all once they get seated.
Zach Elwood: Wild card.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. And usually neither side is willing to take that chance and will agree to excuse the person. But again, it ultimately rests with the judge. And if the judge says, “Look, they don’t meet the statute.” Say for example, they say they have an extreme financial hardship, but the truth of the matter is they actually get paid for a lot of the days of jury service or they’ve got a savings account, and it’s not as extreme as someone who doesn’t get paid at all. That judge might refuse to let them go. Personally, I wouldn’t waste one of my precious strikes on someone like that.
Zach Elwood: That’s what I was going to ask, is if you have someone who both sides suspect they want to get rid of, because somebody has to strike that person and you don’t want to waste strikes, and so it seems like there’s not a good way to collaboratively strike a person. So it’s kind of wasting a strike if you do it.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. And neither side will be willing to do that, usually the judge will. If someone is truly, truly that distressed, most of the times most judges will let the person be excused. Or the other thing is if the juror gives a hint of a cause challenge. Maybe it’s a cancer case and their mother just died of cancer, we could say, “Okay, plaintiffs, you agree that this juror probably couldn’t be fair, right?” [wink, wink] And we agree to excuse the juror on cause basis, but it’s really truly because we just think the juror’s going to be disrupted
Zach Elwood: Not using the strikes, right, yeah. So you can still find a cause that you don’t have to use strikes for. I was wondering about, I don’t think we’ve talked much about those initial questionnaires, and when do you use those written questionnaires versus doing them more in person?
Dr. Marinakis: We almost always suggest to our clients to submit a questionnaire. And that’s just because people tend to be more candid when they’re writing something down versus in open court in front of a bunch of strangers. But especially in cases that involve sensitive issues. So I’m involved in a rape case that’s coming up, and this judge never uses questionnaires, but we feel strongly that it is to the disadvantage of everyone in the courtroom to try to ask questions about people’s abuse history in open court. That puts everyone in a bad position, the judge, the lawyers, the juror. But we need to ask those questions because it’s important to know their background and history. So we’re going to advocate strongly to this judge like, “Look, this case is very unique. We don’t want to embarrass jurors, but we need to get these questions answered. So pleas allow us to use this questionnaire.” And we present the questionnaire to the judge in advance, and hopefully the judge will agree to that.
Zach Elwood: You wrote a piece on the TV show Bull, which I’ve never seen, but that show is based loosely on Dr. Phil McGraw’s jury consultancy business. It seems quite exaggerated from what you wrote of it, which is not surprising considering it’s a TV show. One of the things you wrote about it was in the pilot episode, Dr. Bull shows his client an ultra high-tech jury monitoring system complete with over a dozen flat screens and devices that monitor mock jurors physiological reactions through palm reading devices. It claims to have a system exclusively used by Homeland Security to collect a wealth of information about jurors and their family members that cannot be obtained elsewhere. So can you talk a little bit about how unrealistic and exaggerated that is?
Dr. Marinakis: Yeah. And I think I already touched on that. He talks about using Homeland Security to get private information. That’s not something that we could do. Even if we had the technological capability to do it, ethically, legally, that’s not something that we would do. And the biggest thing I’ve noticed about the show, and I’ve only seen a couple episodes, is they talk about it in terms of a 100% guarantee. “We can 100% predict whether someone will be a plaintiff juror or defense juror based on their physiological responses or their responses to questions,” and it’s never 100%. My whole occupation is based on increasing the odds, increasing the odds that this juror will be favorable. And in the show they use what they call mirror jurors, in our industry we actually call them shadow jurors, where we try to find people who are similar to people who are on the actual jury. And they sit in the audience during the trial and watch, and we talk to them at the end of the day. The value in that is not being able to predict exactly what the jury’s going to do, the value is in learning what are the strengths and weaknesses of our case. What is confusing? What do we need to clear up on? What are some things that might be bothersome? It’s more of that qualitative feedback than a quantitative statistical prediction of what the actual jury’s going to do. And that’s because no two people are alike. You can find a mirror juror or a shadow juror who’s very similar to someone, but surely they haven’t had the exact same life experiences. You never know how someone’s experiences are going to influence how they view the evidence.
Zach Elwood: Right, you’re just trying to get another set of hopefully somewhat similar eyes to give you different points of view and feedback. So in the voir dire questionnaire book that you helped write, you had some strategies for listening bias from potential jurors. And I really like this strategy that you talked about in there of downplaying the strengths of your case during voir dire, in essence drawing jurors out to reveal the strength of their prejudice. And in the book, there’s an example where by giving a very simple synopsis of their side’s case, the jury then let its biases be known, was more willing to let its biases be known by seeing the weaknesses in that case. And the most prejudiced people, most biased people were more easily exposed. And doing that too, the other side of the case was not able to know who to strike because most of the potential jurors were focused on the weakness of one side of the case. So that strategy made a little bit of sense, and I wonder if you’d talk about that a little bit more and I’m wondering, is it a pretty well known and standard strategy?
Dr. Marinakis: So this is what I like to call throwing your mini opening. I should start off by saying in most jurisdictions the lawyers are allowed to give a little synopsis of the case before they start questioning jurors to help orient the jurors to what is the case about and what is each side’s main arguments. And this is a very counterintuitive approach, and I’ve actually never seen it done before. I don’t want to say I invented it because I don’t know what other jury consultants are doing. But I had noticed that when my clients were giving very strong mini openings and coming right out of the box and saying, “You know what, our product was approved by the FDA, the plaintiff who is alleging it caused her cancer has a family history of genetics, and we firmly believe that our client did not cause her cancer.” They open up with that type of what we call mini opening, now all of a sudden you start getting jurors raising their hands who are saying, “Well, wait a minute. If your product is approved by the FDA, then I’m already on your side. If she’s got a family history of cancer, then no way your product caused her cancer. I can’t be fair.” And now we’ve just lost our best jurors in the case are now gone for cause. And so I noticed that was happening, and I thought there’s got to be a better way. So I then recommended to a client who trusted me, I’ve worked with him a lot, we’ve never had a bad verdict ever. And I said, “You know what, I think you need to throw your mini opening. Don’t get up there and tell them this stuff.” And said, “Give the bad parts of your case. Let them know that there’s 50 people out there who used your product and all 50 of them got cancer. Put that types of facts out there. Talk to them about how your CEO doctored a piece of evidence. Put the really bad stuff out there.” And so he thought, “Oh, no, I can’t do that. We’ll lose the case. My client will kill me.” And so we did that, and the other side came out really strong and they put all that strong evidence on their case. And what happened was the jury started saying, “Well, obviously I’m going to side with the plaintiffs. Your CEO already admitted wrongdoing and your product, clearly a lot of people have died from your product or gotten cancer. I can’t be fair to the plaintiffs.” We got rid of 27 jurors in that case for cause, which is unheard of really to get rid of that many people who said they couldn’t be fair to the plaintiff or couldn’t be fair to the defendant, my client. And now my client’s sitting in the courtroom and they’re like sweating bullets thinking about, “Wow, these people really hate us.” Well, you know what, all those people who really hate us are off of the panel now.
Zach Elwood: You’re really drawing people out. It’s like putting a trap in the ground and people are just falling into it exposing their biases.
Dr. Marinakis: Right, and so we got rid of all those people. Now, who are the people that are left? Now, the people that are left on the panel are the people who heard all of those terrible things about my client and about the company and who nevertheless still kept an open mind and were still able to be fair. Now those are the jurors that are truly going to be fair and impartial. And now the other side, they didn’t identify any people who might be for the defense, who might say, “Well, I think corporations are good. Corporations employee people. Plaintiff lawyers are always chasing ambulances.” Nobody said that because they were so focused on the bad conduct.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I’m sure the other side, if this isn’t a very common strategy, the other side was like, “Oh, this case is going to be so easy. Everybody hates this company.” And then you are left with weeding out the worst potential jurors and left with a more analytical group of people.
Dr. Marinakis: Yeah, they never saw it coming. I’ll tell you, in that case, we took a lunch break, and they were high fiving each other, they thought, “Wow, wow, all these jurors hate these people. We’re going to win the case.” And then as the judge excused, “You’re excused, you’re excused, you’re excused,” you could see the smile on their face just all of a sudden turn to severe panic. And they got no cause challenges, we had 27, and they had no idea who to use their strikes on. We ended up with an amazing jury that they just settled the case at that point because they knew that there was no chance of winning. So it really is counterintuitive. But I tell my client, “Look, voir dire is the time to identify those people. Do you want those people to say those horrible things about you now in voir dire or would you rather have them say that in the deliberation room when they’re trying to come back with a verdict?” It’s like get rid of them now. And then you know what, now that you’ve got your jury seated, now come out with a really strong opening statement. Now that you’ve got your 12 fair people you say, “We’re approved by the FDA, and this woman had a history of cancer, and all those other 49 women, they too had a history of cancer in their family and they use these other products or whatnot.” Convince the jury of your case during openings not during voir dire.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. It’s also interesting too because that process of getting them all talking and on the same side in the very beginning draws people out too, because other people are talking about it. If the group was talkative like that, it seems like it would lead to more volunteering of bias basically.
Dr. Marinakis: You’re absolutely right about that. Once one or two people start opening up, other people feel more comfortable opening up. And a technique we’ll use too is say Mr. Jones just voiced that he hates corporations, I might say, “Okay, Mr. Jones said that, how many people feel like Mr. Jones?” And then people start raising hand. “Okay, Mr. Jones said he couldn’t be fair, do you kind of feel like that too?” They say yes. Okay, now I just got two jurors off for cause very quickly.
Zach Elwood: Right. And I also like something else you talk about in that book was using your own body language to encourage people. Like that question you just mentioned, how many people, you’d be raising your hand too to kind of show that’s socially acceptable or to encourage them to express their bias.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. That’s all part of getting people comfortable opening up, and almost subconsciously, if we see someone doing something, we want to emulate it. You almost say like monkey see, monkey do. And I don’t want to imply the jurors are monkeys, but personality-wise and behavior, if I’m raising my hand when I’m just asking the question, “How many people feel this?” And I raised my hand, that’s almost subliminally sends the message to the jury like, “It’s okay, raise your hand.” And it also goes to the way that I ask the question. So instead of saying, does anyone, if I say, does anyone feel that way? It almost implies that this is an unpopular belief or an unacceptable belief versus when I say how many of you. How many of you implies that this is a common belief, and certainly there’s going to be people in the audience who feel this way. So how many of you feel this way? Using that body language and the wording of the question together gets people more likely to raise their hand to those types of questions. Another example is just nodding my head slightly. Someone is telling me about their experience with cancer, I’m nodding along very, very, so slightly or I have my client do this. You can’t even notice that they’re nodding along, just very slowly nodding, “Yes, I’m following you, I’m feeling you.” Match the juror’s facial expressions. If the juror’s wincing, the attorney should be wincing. If the juror is smiling, the attorney should be smiling. These are all techniques that I’ve learned in my experience as a clinical psychologist doing therapy, it’s about matching a person’s emotions and getting them to tell me more about that and reflecting back. A juror says, “Yeah, it was a tough experience.” “Wow, that sounds like that was a really tough experience for you. Tell me more about that,” and reflecting back to the juror what they said.
Zach Elwood: That reminds me of a popular interviewing technique where you ask someone question and then they answer it, and then you give a little pause. And the person being interviewed or asked questions will sometimes fill in that slightly awkward silence, they’ll volunteer something even more meaningful at the end. Does that ever come into play, giving the little silence?
Dr. Marinakis: Yes, absolutely. People are uncomfortable with silence, and so I recommend attorneys to do that during voir dire to draw out more information. And it’s funny that we give our witnesses the opposite advice, “Don’t fall into that trap.” So something we teach them is these are the tricks that the opposing counsel will do during cross examination to get you to volunteer more. Be comfortable with silence.
Zach Elwood: So when you answer your question you can stop talking then.
Dr. Marinakis: Yeah. The other thing people will do, another kind of trick, is to ask the same question but in a different manner. And people will think, “Well, if you’re asking the question again, you must be looking for something different,” and they’ll give a different response or give more information. So we tell our witnesses, “Look, no matter how the question is asked, even if it’s asked in five different ways, your response is always the same.” I answered that question, this is my answer. Don’t volunteer more.
Zach Elwood: Getting to your witness preparation and communication training. A couple questions about that, are there any rules around how you’re allowed to advise a witness on how they should speak or act when they testify?
Dr. Marinakis: Well, first I should say that when we’re meeting with our witnesses that is protected by client-product confidentiality, attorney-client privilege. So anything a witness says to the attorney that’s on the case is confidential. So when we conduct these sessions, we always have an attorney in the room there to ensure that our session is covered by that lawyer-client confidentiality. Now I’m a lawyer myself, so I don’t have to worry about that as much. But if there’s a jury consultant who does not have a law degree and is not bar-ed, an active member of the bar, you must have an attorney there to keep that conversation privileged. Now that said, there’s still some rules, and these go back to those ethics rules for attorneys which are actually laws. You cannot tell a witness to lie. And in fact, you can’t even ask a question on direct examination if you know that witness will lie, that is against the ethics rules. But we never do that anyway. We don’t want witnesses to lie. Most because they have poker tells, and jurors will call them out on it. So we’re not telling our witnesses what to say, but how to say it. How do you word something both verbal, behavior, and non-verbal behavior to give what you say more credibility so that the jurors believe your version, your truth? How do you effectively communicate that truth so the jurors believe you and they don’t misinterpret signs of nervousness or personal ticks as being signs of dishonesty?
Zach Elwood: Right. That brings an interesting point because the fact that you have to do this is mostly due to the fact that everybody thinks they can read people well, even though they can’t. So you’ll have a lot of people in the general population who are like, “Oh, she looked down when she said this, she’s lying. Or she was blinking a lot, she’s lying.” It’s just like in poker where usually those things are so ambiguous you would have to have such a big data set to even reach a conclusion like that. So you’re basically trying to make your witnesses unreadable basically, because people are going to draw all sorts of weird conclusions from their behavior.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly. And people watch these TV shows, the Lie to Me, The Bull, those types of things, and they think that they know the signs of untruthfulness when you’re right, more often than not, those are signs of being nervous. Even just having your hand over your mouth is a huge thing that when I talk to jurors and they say, “Oh, I didn’t trust that witness because he had his hand over his mouth. He was afraid that the truth was going to come out because his hand was over his mouth.” And usually that’s just the person’s nervous and it’s a nervous tick. So I have to work with witnesses to get them to, you’re right, be unreadable and to be confident. Even if you’re not confident, even if you’re nervous, speak confidently, keep your hands down, make eye contact, that’s going to make you more credible to the jury.
Zach Elwood: Right, yeah. You just want them to get across the content of their testimony and leave out all the extraneous behavioral stuff.
Dr. Marinakis: Right. And in a way, jurors will remember it. So we talk about themes and having thematic content. Most jurors have very limited attention spans, especially in today’s age of 40-character news stories. And a jury’s not going to listen to a two-minute diatribe about something, but they will listen to a couple seconds. So we work with the witnesses on their non-verbal skills and also their verbal skills and being short, direct, to the point. Otherwise, they’re going to lose the jury and the jury will tune out.
Zach Elwood: Right, makes sense. Any other interesting examples of reading people from your work come to mind? Any great reads you’re proud of or that you’ve witnessed other people in the industry make?
Dr. Marinakis: I think I probably have more stories about bad reads, where I have the lawyers who, yes, they have a lot of experience, but so many times they’ll be like, “Well, I just don’t like juror number seven. There’s something about her. I just don’t want her on my jury. She gives me the hibbie jibbies. She’s given me a bad look.” And I have to say like, “That juror just has resting bitch face. That’s just how they are. Everything on paper, they look like a great juror.” So many times I have clients say, “We got to strike her, I got a bad feeling,” and I really have to talk them off the ledge from that and explain to them how, “Look at her face. She’s making the same face when the other side is talking too.”
Zach Elwood: Right. So just her baseline and they’re overreacting to small data points.
Dr. Marinakis: Right, or they’ll say, “Juror number seven is totally on our side. She’s nodding, she’s taking a lot of notes.” Then all of a sudden that juror comes back with a complete opposite verdict, and the attorneys are just shocked. And I talk to the juror or I’m observing them, and I realize that they’re nodding along not because they agree, because they’re following. People do that. I’m following what you’re saying, I’m nodding along. Or I’ll talk to the juror, and they say, “Yeah, I was doodling. I was drawing or he was talking and I was writing down that’s BS, I don’t agree with that.” So just because someone’s taking a lot of notes doesn’t mean they’re writing down what you’re saying, they could be writing down that they hate what you’re saying.
Zach Elwood: This guy’s an idiot, yeah. The nodding is interesting because I do that a lot when I talk to people. Nodding a lot, small nods, just as an encouraging way to set people at ease. And I think it does lead people to like tell me things they otherwise wouldn’t because they think I’m on their side. So I get random people confessing weird things to me sometimes, and I think it’s just because I nod and look like I’m interested and sympathetic.
Dr. Marinakis: Exactly, and that’s what I was talking about earlier when you’re talking to the jurors, doing that very subtle head nod gets them to open up even more to you.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, I think that’s pretty powerful. We’re near to wrapping up here, I won’t keep you too much longer. Do you think recent popular documentaries that show the inner workings and frequent mistakes of the legal system have lowered people’s trust in how fair jury trials are? Do you think that impacts your work?
Dr. Marinakis: I do worry about this a lot. Before when I told people what I do, they had never heard of it before. But now with the documentaries and with the show Bull, people have a bad impression about what we do. They think we do things unethically because in the show they’re always doing things that are unethical. Talking to the judge, manipulating the jury, talking to jurors, and that’s not really the reality of what we’re doing. So it gives our profession a bad name. The other thing that I see is that you’re seeing more and more stories about misconduct, whether it’s corporate misconduct, government misconduct, and people being bought off, that’s what all these TV shows are about, documentaries about an unfair justice system. And the truth of the matter is that yes, that happens, unfortunately it does, but that’s not the norm. But unfortunately, because people watch these documentaries and these shows, they come in with these expectations, that’s almost their biases about what they think is the truth. And usually being on the defense side, that works against my client’s favor, where people think, “Oh, okay, you’re approved by the FDA, but I’m sure you guys probably bought off the FDA and you manipulated the scientific studies.” It’s like come on, I know that happened…
Zach Elwood: Everything’s a conspiracy.
Dr. Marinakis: Yeah, and so we’re finding we’re having more and more difficulty getting fair jurors for our cases because so many people have been tainted by these… And there are bad companies out there. There are the [end rounds], there are certain companies that have done bad things, and it might only be one or two individuals within that organization that were corrupt, but people feel like now everybody’s corrupt, all corporations are corrupt, and it really works against… The other thing I feel that we see a lot is people feel like, “Well, the corporations must have more resources, so it’s not fair. Corporations can hire people like jury consultants to do that.” And the truth of the matter is it’s actually more balanced than you might think. Corporations are usually insured, and the insurance carrier will limit how much resources can be spent on trial. They might limit it. Whereas plaintiff lawyers, you see a family versus a corporation, but what you don’t see is that the corporation is really defended by the insurance company with a limited budget, and the plaintiff lawyer, they’re coming off of maybe five other trials where they just got multi-million dollar verdicts. So you say, “Oh, the family doesn’t have resources,” but plaintiff lawyers represent people on contingency basis. So if the attorney they don’t win the case, the plaintiffs pay nothing. That family loses the case, they pay nothing, and the law firm is putting up all the costs ahead of time. Now that law firm is going to take 100 million dollars they just got on a previous case, use those resources to hire their own jury consultant to do the mock trials, and they’ve actually got the money to do that stuff that maybe even the big corporation doesn’t. Seems hard to believe, but that’s actually more often the case than not.
Zach Elwood: Interesting. That’s an interesting thing because I would’ve been in that group that thought it was quite unbalanced usually.
Dr. Marinakis: No, I can tell you, in terms of clients, the plaintiff lawyers are the ones with the private jets and the multiple yachts, because they’ve got these 100 million dollar verdicts in the past. And then my clients, I’m not saying they’re not well to do, they’re big corporations, but they’re nowhere near the type of stupid money that some of these plaintiff lawyers have.
Zach Elwood: And they’re also limited by how much they can spend on that too.
Dr. Marinakis: Right, and now in the criminal realm, it might be a little bit different. You certainly have criminal defendants who can’t afford a jury consultant or the best lawyer and that there is definitely probably more imbalance, but neither can the state. The state is not going in there and spending a lot of money trying to argue these cases or to hire people, so it’s almost balanced there too. And in fact, if someone is on trial for capital murder and they have a public defender, they are awarded funds for a jury consultant. I’ve done many cases where we’ve worked for criminal defendants who are indigent or just we offer our time pro bono, for free, representing criminal defendants to give ourselves more experience, to do something and give back to the community. And so you find more evenness and parity there than you might otherwise think.
Zach Elwood: Nice. So my final question would be, as you’ve worked in the profession so long, do you have any opinions on things you would change in the jury trial legal system that would make cases more fair in general? Anything that you would change?
Dr. Marinakis: I touched on this earlier about relying on stereotypes, and I think we really need to advocate somehow for jurisdictions to allow a better opportunity for the jurors to be questioned. There’s some states, again, like in the northeast where the judge is the person who asks the questions, and the attorneys never even get to talk to the jurors. And so you might know nothing about them, all you can see is their race and their gender, how they dress, maybe their education. And as I mentioned before, that really forces us to base decisions on stereotypes, and that’s just really unfortunate. So there’s certain laws and the judges who don’t allow sufficient questionings are really doing society a disservice.
Zach Elwood: Okay. That’s about it. And we will end with some places you can go to learn more about Dr. Marinakis’s work. There’s litigationinsights.com, that’s the company she works for. And there’s a blog series on there with some interesting blogs that people might find interesting with client questions and answers from Litigation Insights.
Dr. Marinakis: Oh, absolutely. We post two blogs a month, and these are all based on questions that our clients have asked us, and they range anywhere from what is the statistical social science research behind something to should I shave my beard for trial and what should I wear? So there’s a variety of different questions that have been asked of us, and we answer them for people, and it’s all available on the website under our blogs.
Zach Elwood: There’s also the book, the voir dire book. And to find that if anyone’s interested in that, that’s at jamespublishing.com, and just search for voir dire questions on that site. The book is called Pattern Voir Dire Questions, and it’s the second edition that Dr. Marinakis helped out with and added contributions to. That was a talk with jury selection specialist Christina Marinakis. This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter @apokerplayer. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave me a review on iTunes or another podcast platform. Music by Small Skies.
This is a rebroadcast of a 2019 episode where I interviewed Olu Popoola about indicators of fake online reviews. Popoola is a forensic linguistic researcher who specializes in finding indicators of deception, or other hidden clues about traits of the writer. His website is at www.outliar.blog.
Episode links:
A talk with psychology researcher Matthew Hornsey about group psychology, polarization, and persuasion. Hornsey has been a researcher on over 170 papers, with many of those related to group psychology topics.
Want a transcript of this talk? See the transcript.
Topics discussed in our talk include: why people can believe such different (and sometimes such unreasonable) ideas; persuasive tactics for changing minds; tactics for reducing us-vs-them animosity; why groups mainly listen to in-group members and ignore the same ideas from out-group members; the effects of the modern world on polarization; social media effects, and more.
Episode links:
Here are some resources mentioned in our talk or related to our talk: