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The illusions of memory and self, with Anne Wilson

A talk with social psychologist Anne Wilson (annewilsonpsychlab.com) about memory and how we define who we are. Topics discussed include: the nature of self; the nature of memory; the fallibility of our memories; the theory of temporal self appraisal (which is about how we experience ourselves as being close to or far away in time from different versions of ourselves); false memories; the role creative storytelling plays in constructing our views of self and the world; and political polarization. 

A transcript is below.

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TRANSCRIPT

(All transcripts will contain errors.)

Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about better understanding other people, and better understanding ourselves. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. 

In this episode, I talk to social psychologist Anne Wilson about memory and how we define who we are. Anne has studied how people build their self-identity using memories, and how we can filter through our memories for the versions of ourselves that we believe really define us, while ignoring or downplaying memories that we decide don’t represent us. And there can be a lot of fallibility and mistakes in that process; sometimes our conceptions of ourselves are based on inaccurate framings, just as our memories are often wrong. 

So in this talk, Anne and I discuss the nature of self, we discuss the nature of memory, we discuss how our memories can so often be so distorted and what purpose it might serve for our memory to be so malleable and imperfect. We talk about false memories and the so-called Satanic Panic of the 80s, where many people were convinced there was a bunch of satanic ritual abuse of children going on, which was based on some people’s false memories. I share a story of mine where I misremembered something quite badly and what the psychological reasons might have been for me misremembering it. 

We talk about some research that blew my mind, which was done on people who had had their left and right brain hemispheres separated, and what that research showed us about the illusions we can construct about the world and our selves. We also talk a bit towards the end about political polarization and how the distorted narratives we can build about the quote “other side” are related to our distorted narratives about ourselves and the world. 

A little bit about Anne Wilson: she’s a professor in the Psychology department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. The following is taken from her professor page about her research interests: 

Her research focuses on identity, motivated social cognition, and subjective time. She examines how people’s identities extend across time, how people reconstruct the past and envision the future, and how these temporal perspectives, in turn, affect the present. She’s interested in how these processes work for the personal self, interpersonal relationships, group/social identity, and national identity. 

If you’d like to learn more about her work, visit her site https://www.annewilsonpsychlab.com. 

Okay, here’s the talk with Anne Wilson:

Zach: Hi Anne. Thanks for coming on the show.

Anne: Hi, nice to talk to you.

Zach: So maybe we could start with something I read on your university page, which was describing your research interests, and you said, quote, I examine how people’s identities extend across time, how people reconstruct the past and envision the future, and how these temporal perspectives in turn affect the present.

I was wondering if you, if you were gonna explain that those research interest to someone completely ignorant of psychology terminology and put it in layman’s terms, how would you describe that?

Anne: [00:04:00] Sure. Um, so that is kind of a fancy way of saying that. Um, I’m really interested in the ways that we tell stories about ourselves, um, as well as about, um, others and the world around us.

So, um. I’m interested in how people think about themselves across time. So we often make up our understanding of ourselves in the present by looking back to the past and forward to the future. But the only part of that reality that we really have direct access to is the present moment, right? So if you think about any kind of objective reality, if that even exists, um, so when we think about the past and the future, we’re always simulating.

Or, uh, try to construct or reconstruct based on whatever, um, cues we have. And we have quite a, a lot of poetic license in, uh, how we end up telling those stories. So I’m really interested in the ways in which those stories are really [00:05:00] malleable. They can change over time, even for the same person. They don’t necessarily stay the same.

And that’s true for how we think about ourselves as well as how we think about many other things in the world.

Zach: Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you got interested in that area of research. What made it so interesting to you?

Anne: Well, one of the early reasons that I became interested in memory in particular and how unreliable memory seems to be is because my mom’s family has eight siblings, and if you ask any one of them to.

Tell you about their childhood experiences, you’ll often come away with the impression that they lived in entirely different universes. Um, and not just because, you know, the, of course there’s gonna be some difference because of birth order and, and context, but very, very different interpretations of just the entire experience of living in that family.

Um, so I was always curious about. How much leeway [00:06:00] people seemed to have in their memory and what ended up leading people to have such different recollections of their past.

Zach: When it comes to a research project in that area that you’re most proud of or, or most excited by, uh, what, what comes to mind for, for those, for that research?

Anne: One of the projects that probably represents that most in terms of how people think about their own memories over time is some of the early work that we did where we were looking at how people remember the very same point in their own past, and we actually. Documented it at the time, right? So we could actually see how people saw themselves in the present.

And then we waited a while and asked people later on to recall that same point in time after a period of time has passed, right? So then you can actually compare people’s. Real experiences at the time to the way that they recall themselves later on. And we find that people systematically tend to [00:07:00] recall themselves as worse than they actually remembered being at the time.

So, um, the tendency that people have that we first documented. Was to retrospectively remember their past selves in a way that allowed them to imagine themselves as marching onward and upward. Always improving bit by bit over time, and that might sometimes be because people are really improving, but a lot of the times it seemed to be because people were retrospectively downgrading how good they were in the past.

So they’re remembering a worse version of themselves in the past than they were experiencing concurrently. So that ended up leading us to start exploring, um, a number of other ways in which people can manage their memories in ways that actually help them to have better self-esteem and wellbeing in the present, and to also have more hope for, uh, who they can become in the future.

Zach: So in that area, if, if I’m remembering it right, it might have [00:08:00] been your work or I might have been reading someone else’s, but if I was understanding it right, it sounded like there was this kind of conflict between. You know, wanting to feel consistent and have a consistent sense of self over time. And then that conflicting with what you just described as wanting to have, have, uh, incremental improvements and feel like we’re on some, you know, upward trajectory to.

Improvement. Uh, did, did I understand that correct? That there’s, this can seem to be this conflict between those two ideas?

Anne: Yeah. I think that there is some conflict between those ideas, um, but that people can have both going on at the same time to some extent. And so there’s one concept called self continuity, and this is the idea that people do want to feel a sense of like a stable self over time, but at the same time, they don’t wanna experience.

Nation. So you can often tell a story of improvement while at the same time still feeling like there’s [00:09:00] something core about the self that remains the same. Um, the other way that this is examined, both in some of my work as well as other people’s is, uh, by thinking about the lay theories that people have about the world.

So some people believe that, um, individuals as well as in some cases, groups of people are, um. Kind of a particular way at core. So they have some kind of essential qualities, um, that don’t really change over time. And other people believe that humans are infinitely malleable. They can change with time and effort and so on.

And depending on what kind of lens we have, we can have different expectations about ourselves and others over time, and that can end up shaping the way that we recall the past and how we end up predicting the future as well. Because of that poetic license that we have, there isn’t one way of recalling the past.

It means that the beliefs that we have at present can really end up [00:10:00] changing the way that we imagine ourselves in the past and the way that we can think about ourselves going forward in the future.

Zach: And, uh, this might overlap with some things you already said, uh, but the, the term temporal self-appraisal is, can you do explain what that is?

Because that, I know that comes up a lot in your work.

Anne: Yeah. So temporal self-appraisal theory is the core framework that we, my supervisor actually in grad school, uh, Mike Ross and I developed. That I’ve been working on, on and off for a couple of decades. And the idea there is really, it ties to some of what we’ve already talked about, but the idea there is that the self is extended in time, right?

So both the past and the future. Um, I also think about the self as extended. Past just the individual self. So, um, thinking about the relational self social identity or the self that we have when we consider the groups that we belong to, right? So we can think about this even in terms of [00:11:00] things like our, our ethnic groups or our national groups and how we extend ourselves in the past, in the future, in those dimensions as well.

And the, the variables that we. Look at, um, with regard to temporal self-appraisal theory have to do with, you know, how do we remember the past? How do we think about the future? How do those conceptions of the past and the future affect our conclusions about the present? We also focus a lot on, um, the role of subjective time.

So this is the idea that even though there’s some relatively objective sense of the passage of time, right? We recognize that there are, um, minutes and days and months and years and so chronological time. Passes, uh, in a way that we generally all agree on. Um, but our subjective sense of time or the psychological experience of time is a lot more fluid and [00:12:00] elastic.

So sometimes we might think about something that happened a year ago and it feels just like yesterday and another time. Something that happened just a month ago might feel like ancient history. Right. And the way that we feel about the subjective closeness or distance of past events or future events can end up really mattering for the, um, relevance that those events have to our sense of self, um, in the present.

And, um, so it’s another thing that ends up being very malleable, that we can push away certain events and pull other ones forward. And. Continue to make them feel more relevant to the present.

Zach: So the idea is that if there are versions of yourself in the past that you like or that you want to feel close to you, you would put those in more prominence in your mind and feel more.

Close to those [00:13:00] moments in time, even if they were quite far away, as long as they were, were versions of yourself. You like, is that, is that an accurate way to say it?

Anne: Yeah, that’s often the case. So, and I’ll, I’ll add one piece though to that. So a lot of times we think about the way that. Someone will consider the past in the, in the future, when they’re psychologically healthy, when they’re doing well, and when, when they wanna think positively about themselves.

Right? So somebody who’s got relatively high self-esteem, um, might feel really close to their past successes and feel like their past failures are often the distance. And, um, someone though with. Who’s experiencing depression or, you know, who’s struggling in some way, may not have that same experience. So, um, we’ve, we’ve looked at that, um, in other contexts too.

So, for example, people who are in happy relationships. Tend to think about a fight that they had with their partner as often the distance, [00:14:00] that’s a long time ago, that’s no big deal. Um, whereas someone who’s unhappy in their current relationship often holds on to those past conflicts and, um. They feel very close, even if they happened quite a long time ago.

So that subjective sense of time can end up having implications for how we feel about our, our relationships in the present, in that context, in the same way as our memories about ourselves can affect our current identities.

Zach: Do you have stories about your own memories and, and self, uh, visions of, of self that you, that come to mind for examples of this that, that you use in.

In your work?

Anne: Well, one thing that I always do when I tell stories about my own past is I’ll sort of have the caveat that like, at, at least as, as far as I remember, this is the way it happened. Um, but I’ve encountered a number of cases where I know for sure that what I remember is not really what happened.

Um, and [00:15:00] so there are only a certain number of cases where. You actually get faced with the reality, right? The documented reality of what happened and how it’s different from whatever it is that you’re perceiving or remembering. Um, I have memories that I swore for years I could remember firsthand. So I have a, a, a memory of, um, being held by my aunt, um, when I was, uh.

In a particular room, in a house that we used to live in. And it turned out that this memory was when I was an infant, when I was a baby. So it was before I could actually possibly have anything, like a real memory that I would’ve been able to hold onto. Um, but I learned later that, uh, that was a, a memory that I held because there was a particular photo.

So I had seen that photo and, um, I had. Mix that up with, um, the actual memory for the event. Um, so certainly I’ve got lots of those little cases and, uh, one of the [00:16:00] things that it’s definitely led me to do is be pretty humble about the degree to which I can claim for sure that I know what really happened in a particular situation.

Mm-hmm. Um, I’m always a little bit suspicious of the validity of my own memories.

Zach: Right. And there’s all that, this work about the, the false memories that people can have and, uh, bringing up traumatic, uh, memories and such. And yeah, it’s, it is smart to be very humble about that because I think we’ve all had those experiences of realizing, yeah, this did not happen at all how I remembered it.

Anne: Yeah. And although I haven’t studied, um, false memories. Extensively in my own work. I will note that when I was in grad school, so this was in a couple decades or so ago, uh, was at the height of some of those, um, I don’t know if you recall these this time. Uh, it’s sometimes. Called the Satanic panic. Mm-hmm.

But the, this period of time where, uh, really there [00:17:00] was just a, a lot of battles going on about the possibility of recovered memories. Um, and then Elizabeth Loftus, uh, as well as some other researchers started to examine how. How possible it was for, uh, memories to actually be constructed really out of whole cloth by certain processes within interviewing, right?

So if you interview people about the same thing, you get them to imagine, um, an event happening over and over again. Like being lost in a mall, for example, was one of the, the classic studies, um, people who. Definitely didn’t actually have that experience on the basis of, um, you know, family reports and so on.

Uh, sometimes actually really came to, to recall that false memory very, very vividly. Um, so I remember those, those battles going on when I was in grad school, and I found that that really profoundly affected me both in terms of my interest in. The subjectivity of memory [00:18:00] and also in, to some degree the, the politics that can go into these kinds of processes, right?

So the, the fights that people were having about recovered memory and false memory were pretty emotional. And it was more than just about the science, but it was also about the implications of. Potentially say, um, denying the, the experience of a victim. Mm-hmm. Uh, nobody wanted to do that. But at the same time, uh, we needed to apply really rigorous scientific standards to evaluating the validity of memories.

Otherwise, in some cases, justice would not be done.

Zach: There was a, I just thought of there, there was this psychology researcher in New York State, I can’t remember his name now, but he, he was known for doing, uh, memory research basically where he. Tested people’s memories even of, you know, very big events like, um, I dunno if it was nine 11, I think it was before that, but it was events like that and seeing how [00:19:00] people’s memories of those even very emotional and, and important memories were, were, were changed over time.

Do you, do you know who I’m talking about by any chance? I.

Anne: Don’t re I I don’t, well, my memory, one of the things about my memory is it’s very, very bad. Um, I don’t remember the name, but I, I do recognize the research that you’re referring to, I think. Um, so flashbulb memories, this is a term that’s been used in the literature.

It’s the idea that, uh, we sometimes for really, really. Profound, um, important events. We may have a, a memory that we feel is just seared into our brain, right? So these, uh, very vivid memories that don’t fade over time. And for quite a while it was assumed that those memories didn’t really follow the same.

Process of forgetting and, um, you know, degrading over time and that they actually stayed really accurate and vivid. And it turns out that they do stay vivid, but they don’t necessarily stay accurate. So as we tell and retell them over time, they [00:20:00] continue to feel very vivid. Um, but the details may still really change, right?

Mm-hmm. Over time. Um, and so we can fool ourselves into thinking that they’re really, um, accurate and seared into our brain when really they’re not.

Zach: It’s almost like we retain the, the element of being certain about what it was like and the emotions, but not the, the details. But we retain the Oh, I’m sure that’s how it happened.

Aspect.

Anne: Yeah. And certainty is not a good predictor of accuracy when it comes to memories. We can be very certain about things that are really not true.

Zach: Yeah. So maybe that’s a good segue into, I’ll, I’ll tell a, a story of my own and you can. Say what you think of it and say if it’s a good example of, of this kind of thing.

But, uh, so I had this thing a few years ago where I was talking to my parents and they were remembering how. The, this thing I did in high school where, uh, I, I played a public performance of the song sending the clowns where I played piano. And a, a girl I knew in high school sang and they [00:21:00] were saying it happened in high school.

And I was, I was saying, no, I’m certain it happened in middle school. And I was very adamant about that. And I was actually kind of angry that they were so certain that they thought it. Was in high school, and then slowly after, you know, several hours, I realized that they were completely correct. And, and I thought about, you know, I was thinking, why, why did that make me a so angry, and B, why did I want to have a psychological, you know, uh, ma maybe motivation to shift it backwards in time?

And I thought there were a few things. There was one, you know, that, that incident kind of reminded me how I was. Felt like a, a bit of a social loser in high school because that, that, uh, when I performed with that girl, we practiced a few times and, uh, I was attracted to her and she was kind of in my social circle, but I felt really awkward around her and, and barely talked to her.

So I had sort of this negative memory about that, that I think maybe want to push it back maybe. And then also there was another thing where that same day I’d gotten [00:22:00] into a. A car accident that made me feel really stupid because it was basically my fault. So I had these various things where I, I think there was a psychological urge to kind of distance myself from that memory and put it back in, in middle school.

And I’m curious if you think is, is that a good example of like, kind of like the forcing out of the, the temporal aspect?

Anne: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting example and one where probably there’s some self-esteem protection that mm-hmm. Um, causes us to push memories that are painful or that we don’t really wanna associate with what we’re like now into the more and more distant past.

Right. And it seems like that’s an example where you were doing that quite actively, not just saying, oh, it feels like a long time ago, but mm-hmm. You’re actually saying, no, I’m actually putting that back in middle school. Um. It’s also interesting that in that case, um, I’m guessing you probably weren’t driving a car in middle school, so, so there are these objective indicators that would

Zach: stick Well, [00:23:00] I think I, I, yeah.

That, that came to me later where I realized, I, I, I knew that there were two things where I was doing performances, but I’d gotten mixed up and I was like, no, that wasn’t that performance. That was a different performance. You know? So it was, it was kind, it was all convoluted, but I was just very certain in the moment.

Yeah,

Anne: yeah, yeah. And that. Piece about different performances. That’s one of the ways in which we can end up conflating memories. So if there are similarities that, um, we could end up, you know, creating some kind of a mapping, right? So if you were in performances in middle school as well as in, in high school, then you could mix up the details, um mm-hmm.

Because we often really don’t, um, recall things in any kind of a precise way, right? So there’s a lot of reconstruction that’s going on. Um. Often people who aren’t, uh, kinda experts in, in memory think about memory almost as though we’re replaying, um, you know, a, a. Recording of whatever happened at the time.

And that’s [00:24:00] not at all the way memory happens, right? So I think of it more as maybe like a, a paleontologist who’s, you know, digging up bones and then you have to take all of these little bits and pieces and uh, put them together into something that, um, is as close to correct as possible. And we know that sometimes that might.

Makes sense, right? We have the right cues and we put them together. Um, but in some cases we might really get it wrong and, um mm-hmm. And imagine something that’s quite different from what it actually was like at the time.

Zach: Right. It’s kind of like I’ve seen it compared to like every time you access a memory, you’re like creating a new version of it in a way.

Like, you know, overriding it a little bit. Is that, would you say that’s feels accurate?

Anne: Yeah, and it’s also true when we tell stories about memories or you know, if we are. Uh, sort of socially describing them with other people. Then they can get overwritten with each other’s views of the stories, right? So we can kind of conflate things and, uh, tell them and [00:25:00] retell them in ways that can really change them over time as well.

Zach: So one of the most wild. Studies, mind blowing studies I’ve, I’ve read about was the gica studies where they, he studied people with split brains where they had no, uh, what they call the corpus cossum between their right and left hemisphere brains. And uh, so basically for people that don’t know, they did studies where they put dividers between their left and right side and would ask them to do various tasks and ask them questions.

And for example, they would. Ask them to push a button if they saw something specific and one eye would see it, but the other eye wouldn’t. So the, the person’s opposite hand from their eye would, would push a button when, when told they, you know, if, if they see, see something or not. But the person wouldn’t be able to consciously or verbally express why they pushed the button.

And so the, the interesting thing there was the people would often just confabulate and make up reasons for why they did. What they [00:26:00] did and the details of those studies are, are really interesting. Like the, the specific things that people would make up about why they did things or, or why they said things or, or things like this.

Uh, just kind of mind blowing in the sense that it showed how much creative storytelling is a part of being human. And we, we make up these things that are, are running narratives of, of the world around us and, and also our own selves. And, and I’m curious, am I describing. The importance of those studies correctly, and do you see that as very much an indicator of how much we, you know, simply make up things about.

World on ourselves.

Anne: Yeah, I think that, um, there are multiple conver converging pieces of evidence that suggests that, you know, people are really good at making things up as they go along. And there could be evolutionary reasons why this is even adaptive. So in some cases it [00:27:00] may be that we’re not really gonna be most benefited by.

Pure accuracy. Mm-hmm. But rather by, um, you know, telling the most persuasive story, making the pieces fit together, convincing other people. And, uh, sometimes we do that better when we’re also able to convince ourselves Right. Another way, one of. My favorite, I’m not really a brain researcher per se, but one of my favorite, um, observations when it comes to the brain and memory is that it’s, it’s clear that the way that we remember things is often inaccurate.

But what is pretty neat is that sometimes people think about that inaccuracy as as a bug, but it’s. Quite likely to be a feature instead of a bug. So what I mean by that is it’s probably really important that our memories are malleable, that there’s [00:28:00] some room for error in them, in part because the same parts of our brain are used for both, um, what’s called episodic memory, right?

So like the storytelling kind of memory that humans have, not just the semantic memory of like knowing. Things that you’ve seen before, um, that episodic memory and the ways in which it’s malleable happens in the same parts of the brain as thinking about and planning and projecting for the future. So a large part of why humans are.

So capable of, um, envisioning these amazing futures, right? And then building things that even go beyond our own lifetimes and building culture and, you know, passing things on and so on. Um, a lot of that. Capacity for, um, future vision and for planning and for prospection probably is because of the ways in which our systems are [00:29:00] so malleable, right?

So it’s kind of like we’re doing the same thing we do with episodic memory, but we’re putting it into the future direction. And it’s really important for that to allow for a lot of creativity, right? So that we’re not just, um, running the same exact, um, set of. Of scenarios on a loop, but we can change it up each time.

Zach: Yeah. I sometimes think about the, uh, the value, the strength of, of having, you know, certain narratives and, and aligning on a narrative, even if it’s inaccurate. It’s, it’s like having some certainty about what happened to you or what the meaning was. Is, is, is a value, much more value than an unclear and confusing, uh, you know, the, the reality of, of living with this kind of uncertainty and confusion.

Like when I think about. Mental pain or, um, or, or just, uh, confusion about what something meant. It, it, there. I can feel this pressure sometimes to, you know, I have to, I have to pick a [00:30:00] narrative of these competing narratives and just move on, you know? And I, and I feel like it’s kinda like what you’re saying.

It’s like there’s, there’s a value to having this creative structure that allows us to say, this is the way it happened, and, and just move on and build on that instead of like. You know, living with the uncertainty and the ambiguity, which is the reality.

Anne: Yeah, I mean, humans do have a pretty powerful need for, um, meaning, right?

So being able to, um, develop a sense of meaning and have the pieces fit together in a way that doesn’t just seem random and uncertain and like, I’m not even sure what really happened, right? So, so there’s a lot of reasons, uh, both in terms of, um, our, our memories and our. Perceptions of ourselves over time, as well as just the way that we see everything else in the world, um, to, to tell a story and then to stick with it sometimes.

Zach: So, uh, as you’ve worked on this research over the years, is it, is it [00:31:00] difficult, uh, for you to accept that, you know, our, our, our memories and our narratives can be so faulty? Or do, do you have a hard time seeing that in your own life? Or has your work gotten you to more and more realize, you know, I’m living in this kind of.

Uh, you know, often illusory construction and, and, and maybe that’s okay and I can accept that, and then it’s not that, that stressful, if that makes sense.

Anne: More often than not, it has allowed me to have, maybe I’m patting myself on the back for this, but, uh, to have a fair bit of intellectual humility and to be a little bit chill about the fact that we all get it wrong sometimes.

Because like certainly I do and I know everybody else does, and so if I were to hold other people to some standard that I know I can’t achieve myself mm-hmm then that wouldn’t be fair. Um, and that, uh, it’s generally not because we’re choosing to get it wrong, but um, [00:32:00] simply because of the way that we process information.

I think it also. Sometimes allows me to be a little bit more, um, em empathetic and, and forgiving of the ways in which sometimes people who, um, come at things from very different angles might end up having different conclusions about the world. But, uh, you know, we’re all processing information in ways that’s pretty subjective and, um, trying to bge things together, right.

Piece things together, um, without any real direct line on objectivity. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, there’s. I think it’s important to have some acceptance of that and to recognize that that’s just simply the world that we’re all trying to navigate through.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Uh, so this might be a big question, but, uh, we, we, we know each other through the polarization, um, political polarization that’s.

You and I initially, um, knew each other, and I’m curious, how do, how do you [00:33:00] see your work in the, the self identity and memory space mapping over to the work you’ve done in the, the political polarization space?

Anne: Yeah, so I’ll say there’s probably. I’ll, I’ll try to be very brief, but there, there are three things I think that, um, all came together to really influence my interest in political polarization.

The first directly ties to my interest in identity over time, so I’ve talked a lot about. Personal identity, right. Selves over time. Um, but mentioned that I’m also interested in how this plays out, say at group or collective levels. So one of the places that I became really interested in looking at that had to do with how.

People’s psychology about the future may pertain to our understanding of climate change and the ways in which we sometimes, maybe in, in my view at least, were [00:34:00] perceiving the, the risks of climate change, but not necessarily acting on them. So for a number of years, I worked away at that and tried to look at temporal cognition, right?

So all of the subjective ways in which we perceive the future. And how that may affect our reaction to information about climate change. And one thing that I kept coming back to over and over again was that I could find small variations, right? So you could move the needle in small ways, looking at things like temporal cognition.

But there was this huge effect of politics. That I just simply wasn’t accounting for. And one of the best predictors of people’s beliefs about, uh, environmental issues and climate change right now, this certainly hasn’t always been the case, is their partisanship. Mm-hmm. So that led me to take a couple of steps back and think about, okay, well how, how could I approach that problem?

Looking at the. [00:35:00] Bigger issues that might be leading to some of the reasons that there’s a stalemate mm-hmm. Over, um, issues having to do with climate change more broadly though, I also, because of, um, my interest in just the, the subjective nature of our realities, as I became interested in people’s political divisions, I also was really interested in how they, they may be partly illusory, right?

So the idea that we imagine our. Political opponents to be a particular way, may be partly based on fact, but partly based on our imagined enemies. And so that really, uh, struck me as something that was interesting to consider with regard to political polarization because if we’re fighting. Over real elements of disagreement, then that’s, that’s actually, that’s not a kind of polarization I even have a problem with.

I think that sometimes, you know, real disagreement is a super important part of any [00:36:00] healthy functioning democracy, but if we’re fighting about or hating one another for things that are maybe like overblown or in some cases even imagined, then we’re really. Putting our energies into issues that, um, that are maybe taking us away from the really pressing problems of society that we need to be working on together.

Zach: Mm-hmm. I, I was, I, I saw an interesting paper recently. It, it was talking about how, uh, the, the US versus them polarization is. We often focus on like the untrue things or the misinformation or the, you know, or uh, just the inaccurate things. But then there’s also this element of just filtering through things that are real and pulling the things out that align with our, you know, conceptions.

And in the same way, you know, you could make the analogy. To what we do with our memories and our sense of identity. We, we pick out the things that align with the things we want to believe, [00:37:00] right? So it’s like we accentuate the, the things that say our, our political enemies, you know, that we build up the case and, and pull out pieces to, to shore up this case about.

What the other side is like, just like we might do that for our constructs of ourselves and such. Yeah. And you, you had a recent study, uh, that showed how in-group descent can lower anger. And I think that’s a really important point when I learned about some of that research. Can you explain what that work found?

Anne: Sure. So I’ll back up one step and say why we started getting interested in that as, as an approach. Um, so we’d been studying false polarization. This is the idea that we have these illusions of what the other side is like, that are often based on the worst caricatures of the other side, right? So we might be exposed, if you’re a liberal, you might be exposed to deplorable and racist [00:38:00] conservatives through media, through social media and other things like.

That and come to imagine that most conservatives are like that, when in fact we find that it’s actually a, a minority of conservatives who hold those views. But if you ask a liberal, they think that it’s a majority who do. Similarly, a lot of conservatives think that most liberals are extremely, um, intolerant of dissenting or like, you know, different viewpoints, um, might be against free speech, um, and really judgemental and so on.

Again, a lot of times we find that, um, it’s actually a minority of of liberals who hold those views, but conservatives think that it’s a majority. So we often really overestimate. The number of people who hold the views that we might find most unflattering about the other side. So there are different ways to try to address that, right?

If you’ve got something that you find really egregious about the other side, um, and you dislike them, you don’t wanna have anything to [00:39:00] do with them because of those really negative views, you can try to correct that in various ways. But one of the, the things. You know, you sometimes see is that it’ll be somebody from the other side who’s trying to correct that, right?

So somebody pushing back from the other side and often if that’s how it goes, then people within an in-group will circle the wagons, right? They’ll kind of try to bat away criticisms because they don’t want the other side to gain any points. Um, so then that leads to this question of what about in-group descent?

And so we thought that one way of potentially reducing. The degree to which people imagine that everybody on the other side is all the same, right. Or are all the same. Mm-hmm. Would be to, to demonstrate the cases where actually there are lots of different viewpoints on the other side. And we decided that a way of getting at that might be to try to simulate.

The sorts of [00:40:00] situations where people often get exposed to others with different political viewpoints. So we simulated a social media context where somebody was, uh, espousing really extreme fringe viewpoints from one side or another, and then we exposed them to people who. Said that they were on the same side, right?

So this is an, uh, a dissenter who’s coming from the same group as the extreme viewpoint, then looked at whether or not people who are, are, are the political opponents here. So, um, I’ll try to be clear about that. So imagine it’s a, a liberal who’s looking at a conservative with an extreme, uh, viewpoint.

Maybe something like being opposed to, to immigrants who are not white, right? So this would be an extreme, uh, kind of racist viewpoint. And, uh, and then another, uh, conservative speaks up and says, Hey, wait a minute. Um, that’s not what we’re about as Americans. Uh, you don’t have to be white to be an American.

Uh, I think as a, as a Republican, that it’s [00:41:00] perfectly fine for people from, uh, you know, any background to become American. And we, that’s part of what makes our country great, right? So. So the, the notion would be that people from the same side can push back against an extreme viewpoint on that side, and that’s gonna land in a different way to people than if it’s a criticism coming from somebody on the opposing side.

Mm-hmm. And what we find is that that does actually. Do quite a bit to correct people’s views of what the other side is like, and so we tend to dial back on the extremity of our negativity about the other side, how much we think that the other side is all the same. By recognizing that actually there are these varieties of viewpoints on the other side.

Zach: I think that’s just such a hugely important point when I, it, it was kind of like I was, when I was thinking about all my, my depolarization work, I, I was kind of instinctively arriving on that, where I was [00:42:00] like, this is really important to criticize your own group, you know, because we can’t convince the other side and such.

And then when I was, I interviewed Matthew Hornsey, which was one of the most popular episodes of the podcast last year about group psychology and persuasion. And he, he was the one who showed me those, um. Those studies, uh, I think it was by Sge. I’m not sure if they’re pro, if I’m pronouncing their names, but Sge and Helper in studies.

Mm-hmm. Amongst others, I think. But yeah, it just seems so hugely important because the basic point is, yeah, you can’t, you can’t really influence, uh, people who are, you know, on the other side or politically different from you when in a, in a polarized environment, they just view it as, as an attack or, or, or your motivations are, are wrong.

So it’s like we’re, it’s really the only people we can, we can shift. Uh, behavior of is, are those people on our, on our sides. And because it also, because it, it demonstrates to the other side how complex your side is, which is the Yeah. The point of your study.

Anne: Yeah. And I think there’s, [00:43:00] there’s real potential for in-group descent, both for.

Changing our opponent’s views of us, right? So if our opponents think that we’re all the same, that we’re basically write offs, you know, then showing that there’s actually a, a variety of viewpoints may open the door again to more productive engagement between sides, even if you’re not gonna agree on everything.

Mm-hmm. I also think that. Dissent is really important for the ingroup. So in cases where somebody is disagreeing with another person in the ingroup, that can be actually pretty scary. And in some cases it can be socially costly, right? So in some cases, if you disagree with other ingroup members, they might.

I wanna kick you outta the in-group. So it’s, it’s something you gotta navigate in a careful way. There are cases where people are pretty accepting of in-group dissent and other cases where they’re really not, uh, happy about that, right? And they might wanna police the boundaries of what’s allowable, [00:44:00] uh, discourse within their group.

But one of the. Best things and the most loyal things we can do, I think to help our group is to speak up when we think that our group is going off course in some way. It’s a risky thing to do. It can be, uh, a bit dangerous and, um, you know, sometimes costly, but especially if we can convey it in a way that makes it clear that.

We actually have our group’s interest in mind. You know, I think that, that that’s a really important role that we can play.

Zach: Well, this has been great, Anne. Thanks for your time and, um, thanks for coming on to talk about your, your work. Great. Had fun talking

Anne: to

Zach: you. That was social psychologist Anne Wilson.

You can learn more about her research by going to her site, anne wilson psych lab.com or by going to the entry for this episode at my site behavior podcast.com. One thing that struck me from Anne’s talk that I wish I had focused on more was the pathological ways our false constructions [00:45:00] of the world and self can make us more dysfunctional.

Anne mentioned it briefly, the idea that sometimes our illusory constructions about the world and ourselves can be used to bolster depressed and anxious narratives, and I think that’s a very important idea. I know from experience that part of getting healthier emotionally is learning to distrust some of the very negative, pessimistic and scary narratives you can form about yourself or the world when you’re feeling very bad, it can be good to remind yourself that your views can be very inaccurate, that you can fool yourself into believing very distorted things that are not realistic, that are exaggerated to form depressing narratives of all sorts.

And that’s one reason. Talking to other people can be so good when you’re depressed and isolated because it forces you out of yourself and forces you to be a version of yourself that you’re not when you’re alone and reminds you that you can have different narratives. Anyway, with my occasional focus on mental health, I just wanted to throw [00:46:00] that in there as I think it’s such an important point that it’s good to have a healthy distrust of the stories we tell ourselves.

Thanks for listening. Music by small skies.