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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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All right, welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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I m here with producer Jason, and today we re talking with Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic Magazine and author of several books on belief, writer for Scientific American, and multi-time contributor to Penn & Teller s show Bullshit on Showtime, if you remember that.
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We re gonna talk about how beliefs form in our brain and why they persist even when they re wrong, even when we might know they re wrong.
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why people believe weird things, and why smart people are even more susceptible to faulty beliefs, and last but not least, how our genes influence our political and religious beliefs.
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So enjoy this episode with Michael Shermer.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC.
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In the US, just text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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All right, let s talk to Michael Shermer.
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Michael, tell us what you do in one sentence.
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Oh, well, my day job is I m the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and I m a director of the Skeptic Society.
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We re a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to science education and the promotion of science and reason and critical thinking.
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I also write a monthly column for Scientific American called Skeptic, dealing with the same type of topics we cover in Skeptic Magazine.
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And you ve been on TV a lot.
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I mean, you ve been on Penn & Teller s Bullshit, you ve been on Oprah, Unsolved Mysteries, what else?
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I mean, there s so much that I ve seen personally, and there s probably a lot that I haven t.
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Yeah, just, you know, I ve pretty much done all the talk shows and Colbert report twice.
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And it s just part of my job, though, is, you know, sort of reach out to the media to get our message across that in many cases, there are explanations and answers for a lot of these mysteries.
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People just don t know them.
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And that the way we arrived at those explanations is through science and reason.
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So, you know, that s kind of always my regular job doing that.
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So yeah, just a lot of the media stuff.
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I just recently did Neil deGrasse Tyson s Star Talk, and we started Skeptic in the early 90s, when you were still pretty much restricted to the major networks and CNN, and now there s just untold.
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avenues to get ideas out there, like podcasts, for example.
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You can really reach everybody at some point.
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You can t do it anymore like in the old days where you just make one appearance on NBC and the Tonight Show and you ve reached everybody.
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That doesn t work that way anymore.
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But still, there s, it s kind of a democratization of science in the sense that the media, you know, penetrates everywhere now.
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And that s a good thing.
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So even though it also promotes crazy ideas like
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9-11 truthism, or conspiracy theories, or aliens, or whatever, because they all have their own webpages, but not the aliens, but the people that believe in aliens.
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Or do they?
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But that just gives us, skeptics and pro-science people, more channels also to promote what we think is good thinking.
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I was going to say, did the aliens use Squarespace?
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Yeah, this alien website brought to you by Squarespace.
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What s the difference between a skeptic versus just a cynic, someone who doesn t believe in anything or tries to poke holes in everybody s ideas and spoil everyone s fun?
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Well, yeah, that word cynic for some odd reason gets conflated with skeptic.
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You know, they don t mean anything, even remotely the same.
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And they don t even really sound the same.
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Although I guess in some people s minds, they just think of skeptics as being curmudgeons or deniers.
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It s a little bit like what you hear with people that are skeptical of global warming call themselves skeptics.
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although most scientists call them global warming deniers.
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So what do we mean by that?
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Well, skepticism is not a position you just automatically take on all claims a priori.
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It depends on the evidence of each particular claim.
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So think of it as the null hypothesis in science.
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Your claim is not true until you prove otherwise.
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And once you ve provided evidence, then we reject the null hypothesis and assume that your idea could very well be true.
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And that s how we treat all claims.
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So it s not that there can t be a Bigfoot, say.
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You say, I believe in Bigfoot.
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I say, well, that s nice.
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But, you know, show me the body.
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We just have to have the evidence for it.
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You know, same thing with ET, aliens.
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You know, they might be out there.
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They might have come here.
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We just need to see the evidence for it before we decide definitively what we are to believe in it.
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So skepticism, you know, you can be a global warming skeptic or you can be skeptical of the global warming skeptics.
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It s really more of just an approach to claims.
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It really just comes down to, it s just science.
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It s just a scientific way of thinking.
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Scientists are skeptics, skeptics take the scientific approach.
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They re really one and the same.
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How did you initially become a skeptic?
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Because according to your work, you were very religious when you were younger, and then suddenly, or not so suddenly, became a skeptic.
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Well, I ve always been interested in science since I started college.
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My first class in college was a class in astronomy, and that got me excited about the methods of science.
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The physical sciences were not going to be the way for me.
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I wasn t good enough in math to get through calculus and all that, so I switched to other areas I was interested in, evolutionary biology, psychology.
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But all along the way,
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this was in the 70s, interest in the paranormal was really spiking, sort of on the heels of the 60s spiritualist movement and the rejection of mainstream religion, but the rise of alternative religions or spiritual movements, which enveloped the paranormal and what we would call a lot of the pseudosciences, but the belief that there s something else out there, some kind of spirit or power, some sort of untapped forces that might be at work.
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that science could explore.
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So I thought, well, you know, there might be something to that.
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When I was in graduate school, Thelma Moss had a lab at UCLA that was running experiments on the paranormal, Kirlian photography, and auras, and chi power, and acupuncture, and acupressure, and all those sorts of alternative modalities.
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And I was pretty open-minded to it.
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I thought, well, you know, I m a mere graduate student, and here are these PhD scientists studying the paranormal.
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Maybe there s something to it.
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But it was about that time that the modern skeptical movement got started when people like Paul Kurtz and Ray Hyman, James Randi, and a few others started really looking at the research that these scientists were doing and saw that there was some deep flaws in it.
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That is, the rats were running the experiments.
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In the case of Uri Geller,
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He was kind of running the experiments for the psychologists and manipulating them in a way that made him come out a certain way, much like a magician does.
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Tell us who Erie Geller is, because I actually have his name written in my notes to ask you about, but we might as well jump there now.
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He is still alive, but at the time he was a pretty famous Israeli spoonbender.
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He called himself a psychic.
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Or you know energy worker whatever but he claimed that he could bend spoons in the head psychic telekinetic power when you see the early footage of them you know it s kind of crude by today s standards of what we see in magic but it was pretty impressive at the time and people were not familiar with the spoon bending act in fact it wasn t something that musicians routinely did.
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He kind of made it popular sort of invented as a routine but instead of calling himself a magician and appearing on, no pen and tellers for me on the reality show which didn t exist at the time or appearing at the magic castle.
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Where magicians could see his new act and applaud it and admire his skill, he said he wasn t magic, that it was actual psychic power.
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So that s where the lines began to get drawn between the paranormal and experimental scientists who wanted to know, you know, well, this guy s making a claim that it s something other than magic.
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entertainment magic so that s kind of when the modern scapegoat movement got started to get houdini is sort of the precursors testing psychic streamer spiritualist movement turn of the twentieth century this is the next incarnation triggered by this regard he was hugely popular when he was on it on the tonight show all these major talk shows and he was quite the media star.
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I definitely remember seeing him on The Tonight Show several times.
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Yeah, he was more famous than pretty much any scientist except for maybe Carl Sagan.
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So his claims then carried a lot of weight with people that believed in the paranormal because he could provide actual empirical evidence.
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Here he is, he s doing it, watch.
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Can you explain it?
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No.
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Okay, well then it must be real.
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So one of the things that people like Randy and Ray Hyman did was to figure out how he did it and then duplicate it.
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And then say we re duplicating that using magic so if he s doing it some other means he s doing it the hard way and that really launched the modern skeptical.
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movement.
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And Geller s still around.
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He s pretty much admitted that, you know, it was a magic trick, but not quite.
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He hasn t come out fully and said, I was scamming people.
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He just kind of does the wink wink.
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We all know what I was doing, sort of routine with magicians now.
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But of course, you know, the whole movement has moved on to other things, you know, alternative medicine and things like that.
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But the foundation is still there.
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There s still people that believe in the paranormal.
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Didn t he even go kind of corporate with it, and he was flying around, laying low for a while, saying, oh, I m finding oil in the ground for companies to drill for oil and minerals.
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I mean, how do you pull off something of that nature that s so vast that you re even fooling, supposedly fooling, oil companies and mineral and mining companies?
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Yeah, well, yeah, he wasn t laying low.
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He was just making more money at it quietly.
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Because you can make a lot more money if you charge a major corporation to find oil than you can entertaining kids at a birthday party or on a TV talk show.
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I mean, these TV talk shows, they don t even pay their guests.
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So, you know, that was his way of making it lucrative.
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How does he do it?
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So how does he find oil?
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Well, the same way that dowsers find water, you know, first of all, there s oil all over the place, there s water all over the place.
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So if you dows enough places, you re bound to get some hits.
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The people that are paying you remember the hits, they forget the misses.
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You know, you have your excuses that it s not 100% perfect.
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And people don t know about statistics and probabilities.
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And, you know, by chance, you re bound to get a certain number of hits like flipping a coin.
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You know, if you predict that you ll get
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five heads out of ten you know you re gonna get a lot of right you get a lot of hits correct answers just by chance so you have to do better than chance and the only way to do that is to set up controlled experiments where you re blinded and the subject is blinded to the conditions and then you run the experiment and you know ahead of time what chance results would produce and then you ask well how many does he have to get right to be above chance.
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And that s pretty standard experimental psychology protocols, which people like Ray Hyman, who s an experimental psychologist, is really good at.
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So in the 80s and in the 90s, there were a lot of those tests done to show that people like water dowsers or oil dowsers or whatever could not do better than chance.
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They were getting the predictable number of hits.
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But the problem is the average person doesn t know about any of that.
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the confirmation bias kicks in, they remember the hits, they forget the misses, their beliefs get confirmed, and the disconfirming evidence is just dismissed.
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Well, those are just misses, you know, everybody misses once in a while, like the psychic that rattles off a dozen names, and two of them have some connection to the, you know, the subject just remembers the two and forgets, you know, the other eight, so it s our job as skeptic scientists to call attention to the missing ones, not just the hits, but the misses.
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What does the fact that people believe in that say about belief in general?
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Well, that our brains are wired to be more like lawyers than scientists, that is to marshal evidence to support your client, and the metaphor of the client is our beliefs, and to ignore the evidence that doesn t fit.
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You know, if the glove doesn t fit, you must acquit.
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You know, that s in a way how our brains operate.
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We only want to read articles or listen to talk shows that support what we already believe.
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and just ignore the stuff that doesn t seem to fit.
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And everybody does it.
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The confirmation bias, sometimes it s more broadly called motivated reasoning.
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We re motivated to reason our way to finding what we want to be true to be true.
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And this includes scientists.
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They re no different.
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But the difference is that science itself doesn t allow you to do it.
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The protocols require you to be blinded to the conditions so that you don t know which box has the water in it or the oil or whatever.
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And neither does the subject.
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You know, the boxes are numbered and so forth.
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It s all done in a way to work around the confirmation bias so that, I mean, maybe you have a bias against psychic power and it really exists and you re missing it.
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That would not be good either.
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So we have to just do it fair in a way because we know now that the human brain is not unbiased.
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It definitely filters data in a way that can contaminate our conclusions.
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So the entire scientific process for centuries has been refined to work around the psychological cognitive biases that exist.
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Speaking of this, I want to talk about John Edward, who was massively popular back in the 2000s or the 90s with his sci-fi show.
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I think he was on before bullshit started.
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He was just a massive power for the paranormal.
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He got on Oprah and he was a ballroom dancer.
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You know, he was a ballroom dance instructor and he came out and being like this paragon of I can talk to the dead.
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In your book Skeptic,
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took him down, and Skeptic is all of your essays from Scientific American, which are fantastic, by the way, and you took him down in like three sentences.
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Can you explain to me why this guy got a show on the SyFy channel and was next to Oprah on the couch with literally just carny tricks?
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Right.
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Well, first of all, I have to remember television is a business.
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The business is selling commercials and you have to keep people glued to the commercials with the blank spots in between so the blank spots have to be filled with programming that keeps people from the clicker that s the court.
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There s not a lot of ethics involved in these corporate meetings that decide what s gonna be on tv it s just whatever it takes to sell commercials.
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short of doing something illegal.
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And in their mind, you know, psychics that talk to the dead, well, that s not illegal.
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And, you know, who knows?
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And, you know, so that s true from Oprah, you know, to the Science Channel, the Discovery Channel, they re all the same.
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That s why you see like on the Science Channel, Discovery Channel, all these shows about Bigfoot and conspiracies and Hitler.
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And it doesn t matter, whatever the faddish thing is,
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I think the best one is one of the Science Channel commercials is this guy like hovering in a corner under a bush with like night vision.
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He s like, there s a squatch out there.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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For a while, those are popular.
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I got invited to do a number of those shows.
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I had no interest in spending the night in the woods with a little GoPro strapped to my helmet and another one strapped to a stick that was pointing at my face so they could put a flashlight in my face and say, ooh,
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I heard a noise you know i mean it s really it s almost painful to watch there so bad but again people seem to like this stuff i mean you know all those cooking shows and whatever i mean the reality dating shows now there s just so much direct on tv we shouldn t be surprised that that kind of stuff sells anyway back to john edwards first of all he s pretty talented as an actor and it s good to remember this act this cold reading act it s an act
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It s a performance james and john edwards a few of the others are pretty good at it and i ve done it a number of times, enough to know that with a little more practice i can get really good that is cold reading that is pretending that you re talking to the dead or reading somebody s future or scope tarot cards whatever.
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And I remember doing this thinking, boy, I m pretty good with very little practice.
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If I did this every day for years, boy, I could just be a master at this.
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And that s what these guys do.
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Edwards and Van Praagh, these guys, they have a litany of lines.
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hundreds and hundreds of lines that they can use that they know from practice work pretty well.
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And then you just refine it depending on who you re talking to.
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Like this line will work with this person.
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It s not 100%, but they don t have to be 100%.
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They can only be 10% right.
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But that s where the confirmation bias comes in.
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Exactly.
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I did a show with John Stossel on ABC 2020 on Van Praagh.
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This was back in the 90s, before John Edwards.
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And Van Praagh was the big star.
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And they rented a house in LA, and he did readings all day.
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And the one for 2020 was in New York.
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There was another one for the History Channel in LA at a house.
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Anyway, I ve seen him twice all day, so I know all his tricks now.
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The one for 2020 in New York, I actually had a little counter, and I counted every single comment he made and how many hits he got.
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That is, how many times the people went, wow, that s incredible, or yes, there s a connection there, whatever.
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And he was less than 10% right.
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But afterwards, when we debrief the subjects, film them, ask them how they liked the reading they got, they would always instantly remember those 10% hits.
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Oh, he got the name of my grandfather, and he got that he died of cancer, and he got this, he got that.
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And they completely forgot about the hundreds of things he said that had no connection to them at all.
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In fact, I had a hard time remembering the message, which is why we recorded it so that we could go back and go, OK, look here.
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He says this thing about this.
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Oh, yeah.
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Yeah.
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That had no linkage at all.
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And this one and this one and this one is like, no, no, no.
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No no no no no you know and people forget that stuff so.
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You know edwards with a big audience like that you can just see him work in the crowd.
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You start very broad you refine it you get down to a couple of people then down to maybe one person even that s very much like a hypnotist works or a magician might work and you work the crowd to see who s really on board.
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for being part of the drama, who s not gonna be too skeptical, who s not gonna be grumpy, not gonna be sitting there with a scowl on their face like, I don t wanna do this.
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But if you have a couple hundred people to start with, you re gonna find a couple of super gullible people totally into it.
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And then you just work your magic.
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And the magic is what s called a cold reading.
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How does the cold reading actually work?
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So you start off very broad, you re literally reading somebody cold who you ve never met.
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So you start off broad and positive.
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I sense you re a very intelligent, thoughtful person with a good sense of humor, you enjoy the company of others, people like you a lot, and so forth.
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No one s gonna stop you and say, no, you know what, I have no sense of humor, no one likes me, and I m kind of a dullard.
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Those kinds of positive comments work for everybody.
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You just start refining it more and more.
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Like there s four areas that people care most about.
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Love, health, money, career.
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So you just go through the categories.
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Like I sense you re in a relationship right now and one of you is more committed than the other.
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Or there s some financial tensions in your budget or in your household right now.
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Or you re thinking about changing jobs or changing careers.
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I see travel.
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I sense that there s some concerns about your health.
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You have some aches and pains or weight concerns.
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You just kinda go through those categories and that can eat up a good 15 to 30 minutes just working those four because if you have somebody who s reasonably talkative, they will open up and say, oh yeah, yeah, I m in this relationship right now and she wants this and I want that.
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They go on and on and then later you bring some of those details back in and they ll forget that they told you those details.
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and they ll think you got him from on high.
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It s quite remarkable to see this unfold.
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So that s a cold reading.
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And you can keep refining it.
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And there s a book called The Full Fact Books of Cold Reading by Ian Rowland.
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And he has in there hundreds of things you can say.
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Oh, yeah, that s a fantastic book.
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I ve read that.
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It s amazing.
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Yeah so you know it s like well i sense that you have an earring and you re missing the match to it so you re hanging on to it or to a guy you know there s some power tools in your garage that are not working but you re gonna fix them or there s a post-it note on your fridge that s out of date you can take it off and you know just hundreds of things like that i sense about a white car a red dress
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a scar on your knee and just on and on and on.
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And you can t believe that this stuff works, but it really does.
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I ve tried it.
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And you just say it in a kind of a provocative.
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I m getting something about a white car.
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I don t know what this means or something about a white.
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Oh, oh, yeah, yeah.
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My first car was a white car.
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The red dress.
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Yeah, I went to my first prom in a red dress.
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Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
At some point, somebody at prom will have a red dress on.
2
SPEAKER_04
So the person actually doing the reading is not the psychic, but the person sitting there, because the psychic just asks a lot of questions or throws a lot of state, I don t know what this means, but I m getting this, and you throw it at them, and the person will sit there and you can see them thinking, okay, yeah, let me see, what is, oh, oh, wait, wait, I know what it is.
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So you re throwing a bunch of things at the wall to see what sticks, and the other person does you the favor of making a picture for you with that stuff, and then you just take credit for it as the fake psychic.
2
SPEAKER_04
Edwards, he came up with something creative, which is, don t make me come up there and figure this out for you.
2
SPEAKER_04
Oh, yes.
2
SPEAKER_04
I remember that.
2
SPEAKER_04
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_04
If the people sit there too long and don t come up with something.
2
SPEAKER_04
I mean, he basically says, look, this is what I m getting.
2
SPEAKER_04
If you can t figure it out, that s your problem.
2
SPEAKER_04
I m going to come back to you once you figure it out.
2
SPEAKER_04
It s like, oh, man, that is good.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, no.
2
SPEAKER_01
He s got cojones.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, definitely.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the reason I wanted to bring up Edward was
2
SPEAKER_01
I was kind of, you know, a child of the universe in my twenties when he came out and I was just like, Oh, maybe this is a real thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then I listened to his books and I watched his show and putting a skeptic eye towards it was what got me to become a skeptic from then on.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because I m like, Oh wait, wait, wait, no, this is bullshit.
2
SPEAKER_01
What you re saying is bullshit.
2
SPEAKER_01
It kind of snowballed from there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I was introduced to you from Penn and Teller s bullshit, which is, you know, appropriate, obviously.
2
SPEAKER_01
But John Edward, he was the linchpin, I think, for a lot of people who I know that believed in psychics before it became a mass media phenomenon.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they re like, no, he s just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
2
SPEAKER_01
That really is all he s doing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think he actually did us a service
2
SPEAKER_01
By being himself and doing his show, because most of the people I know that watched his show were just like, no, what you re saying is it means nothing and let s move on.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s super general, and I ve done this before.
2
SPEAKER_02
I had an AOC client actually a few years ago who said.
2
SPEAKER_02
Hey, Jordan, you seem like the type of guy who doesn t believe in psychics, but check out this experience I had at a college fair.
2
SPEAKER_02
And he had gotten a reading, and this is a Indian guy, he s about 21, 22 years old, maybe slightly older than that, and he told me what had happened.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it was a classic cold read, and I said, and at this point, by the way, I hadn t met him in real life, I d only been talking with him online, because his boot camp was coming up in a month or so, his live program at AOC.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I said, look, I bet you I can do this right now.
2
SPEAKER_02
There s no such thing as psychics.
2
SPEAKER_02
And he said, well, I don t know, man, it was so dead on.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I said, well, you know, your parents are probably more conservative than you, and they re ready for you to be at a certain position in your life, and you re just not quite ready to be there yet.
2
SPEAKER_02
And your mother, she really wants you to get married, and your father wishes you were in a different profession.
2
SPEAKER_02
Instead of graphic design, he wanted something a little bit more professional.
2
SPEAKER_02
And this, I blew this kid s mind, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But that s not even just every Indian kid with immigrant parents, but it s everybody anywhere with immigrant parents or even conservative parents.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s everybody in the world.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s everybody in the world.
2
SPEAKER_02
And he was just like, I can t believe it.
2
SPEAKER_02
At some level, I was waiting for him to say,
2
SPEAKER_02
Are you psychic, Jordan?
2
SPEAKER_02
Because it was just like, nailed it.
2
SPEAKER_02
And this is all done over probably Skype chat or something like that.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it was just so easy to guess, but people are looking for that confirmation.
2
SPEAKER_02
We ve got confirmation bias, we ve got different cognitive bias, and we have that deeply rooted human need.
2
SPEAKER_02
for certainty that you write about in the believing brain where the brain is that belief engine and we look for things like patterns and try to find meaning in them.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I would love to discuss more of that as well, how our brain looks for evidence to confirm conclusions or meaning in beliefs that we already have.
2
SPEAKER_04
Right, well this is true for our religious beliefs, political beliefs, and so on.
2
SPEAKER_04
Just think about how the political system operates.
2
SPEAKER_04
People on the right, for example, listen to conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and so on.
2
SPEAKER_04
Or they watch Bill O Reilly on Fox.
2
SPEAKER_04
They read the Wall Street Journal.
2
SPEAKER_04
Liberals, they read the New York Times.
2
SPEAKER_04
Every academic, liberal academic, they cite the New York Times like it s chapter and verse, like it s the Bible.
2
SPEAKER_04
Well, there s not a lot of liberal talk radio for sure, but there are certain TV channels that are perhaps more liberal.
2
SPEAKER_04
And so what people are doing there is they re filtering the information in.
2
SPEAKER_04
And it s not that the information they re getting is necessarily factually wrong.
2
SPEAKER_04
They re only getting one side of it.
2
SPEAKER_04
And that s why we need a free press for sure.
2
SPEAKER_04
But of course, a free press means you re going to get slanted press in both directions.
2
SPEAKER_04
And that s true for religion as well.
2
SPEAKER_04
Whatever religion you are, of course, you re going to go to a church
2
SPEAKER_04
that supports that particular religion, which is going to be filled with people that think like you, believe what you believe, and tell stories that confirm everything that we believe is true.
3
SPEAKER_00
Does anybody go to another church just to see what it s like in case they re wrong?
3
SPEAKER_00
They may go because a spouse or friend wants to go or something like that or maybe once out of curiosity to see what the holy rollers are like or a Buddhist is like, something like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you wouldn t go regularly as a means of double checking or retesting your hypothesis.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah because political beliefs and religious beliefs are not considered by most people to be scientific hypotheses that we want to test to see which is correct there more like moral beliefs i believe in rights i believe in liberty i believe in whatever it s not something that you want to be subject to.
3
SPEAKER_00
Say this confirmation by new data.
3
SPEAKER_00
That very much drives most of our beliefs.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is why things like global warming, it s politicized so much that it has nothing to do with science.
3
SPEAKER_00
It has everything to do with, well, if it s real, that means those liberals are going to pass laws that hurt our economy, and we re pro-free market, and we don t want to hurt the economy, so it can t be true.
3
SPEAKER_00
The science is really secondary or tertiary at this point.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s how most political and religious beliefs operate.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we see this even with smart people.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, in the book, In the Believing Brain, you talk about how smart people stick to beliefs even more because they re better at rationalizing those same beliefs.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you re smart and educated and you re good at pulling facts in support, well, you re gonna be even better at that.
3
SPEAKER_00
When somebody is perhaps less well educated or intelligence really there are five independent each other that is ones intelligence and ones release, other than the fact that it may make you better at being biased for your beliefs but it s not like.
3
SPEAKER_00
Educated smart people are less likely to believe nonsense that s not at all the case.
3
SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately.
3
SPEAKER_01
It seems like smart people believe weird things because they re better at rationalizing those beliefs that they ve come to for non-smart reasons.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s exactly the way I said it, yep.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s good to remember that because we tend to think that it s those other people, those idiots that believe nonsense, not us.
3
SPEAKER_00
But of course everybody believes stuff that they can t really prove.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just a belief.
3
SPEAKER_00
Which is why it s problematic to say something like, I believe in evolution.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just something that happened.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like saying, I believe in gravity.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I hope so.
3
SPEAKER_00
But whether you believe it or not, it doesn t matter.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re still going to fall off buildings, or plate tectonics, or the germ theory of disease.
3
SPEAKER_00
We don t think of those as beliefs in the same way as, say, rights or democracy.
3
SPEAKER_00
But in a way, the point I make in the moral arc is that they are actually more overlapping than you think.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ve arrived at democracies as a way of governing large populations because it works.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s measurably better.
3
SPEAKER_00
And in a way, these are experiments.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can run the experiment between North Korea and South Korea and you can see which one produces the higher GDP, the taller people, better diets, more lights, fewer working hours or more working hours per week.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just all these measurable differences.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we ve been running those experiments for centuries now, even like things like gun control.
3
SPEAKER_00
All 50 states have different laws about conceal and carry and assault weapons and which pistols you can buy and how much ammo you can buy.
3
SPEAKER_00
These are all experiments.
3
SPEAKER_00
We can essentially look at the data.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is what criminologists do.
3
SPEAKER_00
Look at the data between states or between counties and see which one produces more or less homicides per capita, for example.
3
SPEAKER_00
But isn t that just profiling?
3
SPEAKER_00
No, it s not.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s not profiling.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s running the data.
3
SPEAKER_00
The profiling part, I guess, would come in and what you do with the data.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s actually the difference, because it s like, oh, we have the numbers.
3
SPEAKER_02
We see what s going on and we re going to act on this data.
3
SPEAKER_02
So where does profiling begin and acting on data end, you know?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, in a way, I suppose that d be something like a political decision to make.
3
SPEAKER_00
Do we care that 30,000 plus people a year die from guns?
3
SPEAKER_00
Those are not all homicides.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s about a third of homicides, the rest are suicides and accidents.
3
SPEAKER_00
And are we willing to give up a certain amount of our gun freedoms in order to reduce the carnage?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I think we should.
3
SPEAKER_00
But as you tell, a lot of conservatives don t agree.
3
SPEAKER_00
They don t seem to care how many people die.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s really disconcerting to me.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I m not a standard liberal on this issue at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
I used to be against chem control until I really looked into it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I really see it as kind of like an experiment.
3
SPEAKER_00
OK, you know, do we agree we want to reduce the carnage?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
We are already doing this with automobile.
3
SPEAKER_00
deaths.
3
SPEAKER_00
It used to be in the 40s and 50,000 a year.
3
SPEAKER_00
Now it s the low 30,000 a year die in automobiles.
3
SPEAKER_00
And once the self-driving cars are implemented, it ll be a tenth of that.
3
SPEAKER_00
It ll be like maybe 3,000 a year die in automobiles.
3
SPEAKER_00
But seatbelts alone and other safety measures reduce the carnage.
3
SPEAKER_00
So we were willing to do that.
3
SPEAKER_00
We already do this in all walks of life except for guns.
3
SPEAKER_00
Guns have been almost fetishized in our culture.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re almost like religious
3
SPEAKER_00
icons of some kind, almost like the American flag, you know, don t burn the American flag, don t take away people s guns.
3
SPEAKER_00
But people are willing to go, well, seatbelts, yeah, of course we should have seatbelts, but wait, doesn t that take your freedom away?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I almost foresee the right to drive group of the future being the next sort of NRA in the next 15, 20 years, hey, I have a right to drive my own car, I don t trust the machines.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s the Chevy versus Dodge contingency.
3
SPEAKER_01
It ll be those guys that are saying, I have a right to drive, and they ll kill 100 times more people per year than self-driving cars around the world, and we ll have this whole constitutional issue.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, look, if you re listening to this 10, 15 years from now, tell me how close I am, because I won t remember it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But let s talk about how beliefs form.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, how does sensory data come into our brain and create beliefs?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a whole process that s involved here that we, of course, don t realize is happening.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s all subconscious, of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
Data comes in through our senses and we begin to form patterns, find patterns.
3
SPEAKER_00
What we re really looking for is causality.
3
SPEAKER_00
That is, A, really connected to B. We want to know for safety reasons, for reproductive reasons, for getting food reasons, whatever.
3
SPEAKER_00
just survival and flourishing reasons.
3
SPEAKER_00
So most of the beliefs we have are, you know, they re very basic, they re very simple.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know, if I do X, will Y be the result?
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s just, you know, connecting A to B, so to speak, or I guess in this case, X to Y. And, you know, that s classical conditioning, operant conditioning, you know, the basic step you learned in intro psych.
3
SPEAKER_00
Those are the most fundamental beliefs on which we build more and more.
3
SPEAKER_00
Most of this again happens subconsciously.
3
SPEAKER_00
You don t need to think about it and that s a good thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a lot of information processing that doesn t need to be consciously processed.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the sort of thing that happens without you really even thinking about it.
3
SPEAKER_00
And by the time the confirmation bias kicks in, you re also not aware of that.
3
SPEAKER_00
You re already pretty far down the road, you know, so by the time you get your religious or say political religious beliefs, a lot of that s very much dependent on your family background, where you happen to be born and raised, influences in school, teachers, mentors, books, things like that.
3
SPEAKER_00
All of it just sort of piles up over the course of a life.
3
SPEAKER_00
without you much thinking about it, which is why students are kind of open to new ideas when they go to college.
3
SPEAKER_00
They re in between their parental family and building their own family, so they have fewer commitments, behavioral and cognitive commitments to belief systems, which is why college is good, to teach lots of different ideas and topics, which is why open debate is so important, which is why I m concerned about the recent downturn against free speech on college campuses in the name of hate speech.
3
SPEAKER_00
to protect students from bad ideas, to make the campus safe from bad ideas.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, who decides what s a bad idea?
3
SPEAKER_00
Who decides what s hate speech?
3
SPEAKER_00
I m very concerned about that because students really need to be exposed, that s a critical time, to lots of different ideas, not just the ideas that the official dogma of the academy says is okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
Nowadays, it was social media.
3
SPEAKER_02
Everybody just subscribes to everything that they like and want to be a part of.
3
SPEAKER_02
So how can we actually, you know, get people to subscribe to the people that they actually don t like and get a dissenting opinion?
3
SPEAKER_00
My guess is most people s Twitter followers, or the people they follow on Twitter, are people they already agree with and like.
3
SPEAKER_00
I do this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Pretty much all my people I follow on Twitter are people that post articles that I want to read, that already agree with me.
3
SPEAKER_02
And you know what?
3
SPEAKER_02
I actually follow the people that I hate.
3
SPEAKER_02
I have a 50-50 percent
3
SPEAKER_02
follow ratio because I follow Fox News.
3
SPEAKER_02
I don t care for Fox News, but I follow them because I want to see what they say.
3
SPEAKER_02
And you know what?
3
SPEAKER_02
Maybe someday they ll change their mind.
3
SPEAKER_02
It hasn t happened yet.
3
SPEAKER_02
Good luck with that.
3
SPEAKER_02
I m hopeful for the day that, you know, a dissenting opinion will bring to me an idea that I had never thought of that will still make me think.
3
SPEAKER_02
It s all about thinking.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, and if nothing else, it s good to know what half the population thinks, because they do believe in, you know, Fox News or whatever, the Wall Street Journal.
3
SPEAKER_00
More than half the country is conservative, or leans conservative, and close to half liberal.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the country s pretty well split.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, the independents are in there.
3
SPEAKER_00
They go both directions, but for the most part, the country is pretty much split left and right.
3
SPEAKER_00
So if you re on one side, you really better read and watch what the other side is watching you reading.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you want to understand what they re thinking and get past the, well, there are a bunch of immoral idiots because that s not.
4
SPEAKER_01
particularly helpful.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s not likely that half the country is stupid and evil, even though that s what each half thinks about the other half.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not true.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what is it they re thinking?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, the only way to find out is to read what they read and watch what they watch.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s very enlightening.
4
SPEAKER_01
I really encourage my students to listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Bill O Reilly.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s a real eye-opener.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like, wow.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, people actually believe.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they do.
4
SPEAKER_01
They listen.
4
SPEAKER_01
They watch.
4
SPEAKER_00
They cite it.
4
SPEAKER_00
They believe it.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we ve got sensory data flowing through our senses, as you write in the book.
4
SPEAKER_00
The brain looks for patterns and then infuses those patterns with meaning.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you write that our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can we flesh that out a little bit?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, how does our brain start to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of our beliefs?
4
SPEAKER_00
I would imagine reinforces the beliefs and becomes a cycle that you can t really break very easily.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, just another classic experiment in this.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you tell somebody that the new person you re about to meet is extroverted, amongst other traits that you use to describe them, and then they meet them, they re more likely to describe the person as extroverted.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you tell another subject that this same person they re going to meet is introverted, they ll describe them as introverted.
4
SPEAKER_01
The person is just neutral not doing anything they re not leaning one way or the other introversion extroversion these are subjects that work with experiment the idea is that you re looking at somebody talking to somebody and you re only gonna notice certain features of things that they do or say that seems to fit the extroversion mode or the introversion mode that you have in your mind.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now that s kind of a simple example of a more complex process that you can see, for example, in another study that was done in which a healthcare reform bill was given to either self-reporting Democrats or self-reported Republicans.
4
SPEAKER_01
And if the self-reported Democrats are reading a healthcare reform bill that they re told was written by a Democrat, they ll praise it, they ll like it, they ll find a few errors in it,
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you tell them it was written by a Republican, they ll rip it to shreds, they won t like it very much, they ll find the flaws and errors in it, and so on.
4
SPEAKER_01
And vice versa, if it s a self-described Republicans and you tell them the report was written by Democrats, they ll rip it to shreds and so forth.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you tell them it s written by one of their fellow tribe members, then they ll like it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Everybody s reading the same words.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what they re doing is filtering out the words that they don t like and looking for the words that, you know, that confirm what they already believe.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, some more examples of the motivated reasoning.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a very, very powerful effect.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s come to light in the last couple of decades that this is probably the mother of all cognitive biases.
4
SPEAKER_00
In the book, the crux of which is that we believe first and then seek confirmation for our beliefs later.
4
SPEAKER_00
It seems like you re saying that, yeah, confirmation bias, look, cherry picking, employing other common biases, things like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
The antidote for this, as you argue, is science.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I would love to start to teach the audience how to use a little bit of science and critical thinking to get past some of the crazy things that we believe.
4
SPEAKER_00
It seems like in our human quest to make sense of the world, we ve kind of got a double-edged sword here with our brains and the way they work.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
4
SPEAKER_01
So getting back to the free speech thing, what s underneath that is just being exposed to other beliefs.
4
SPEAKER_01
The way it kind of works more subtly in science is just how the system is set up, where even though you re running experiments to see if the claim is true or not, and the experiments are blind and double blind to avoid those biases, you know, you re working in a light, you start off as an undergraduate, then a graduate student, you re working in somebody s lab, and the protocol s already set up.
4
SPEAKER_01
These are the experiments we re running here.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re a first-year graduate student, what do you know?
4
SPEAKER_01
You re just running the experiment.
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You re just carrying through the step-by-step process that the lab runs.
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And so you re kind of just sucked into it.
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It takes a while to pull back and look at the bigger picture and go, well, what is it we re actually testing?
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And have we thought about other variables that we should be including in the experiments to see if those are the effects that we should be looking for?
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And it s hard to see that until much later, maybe when you re actually a professor and you open your own lab and you start to branch out or push out a little bit.
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So science is pretty conservative in that way.
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Most scientists are not too anxious to find counter examples to their experiments.
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And the experiments are designed in a way to restrict those, because you have to restrict the number of variables you re measuring in order to determine which one is really the cause.
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But in so doing, you might be missing something completely different.
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that you re not even thinking about.
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Right, so in our quest to know, we also kinda wanna believe, so we re constantly on that scale trying to make a balance, even if we re scientists.
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Yes, exactly.
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I mean, it s rare that scientists are just collecting data with no hypothesis to test in mind.
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I mean, there s a few of these, like in astronomical studies where they re just measuring 10,000 different stars just to see how to catalog them.
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That s the kind of thing that s pretty rare.
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Usually, if you re writing up an experiment, you have to have a hypothesis that you re testing.
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Why are we collecting this data?
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Are we going to compare this to that?
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You have to have something to test, or else you re not really doing science, so you re not going to get published.
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But in so doing, you re not thinking about what else might be going on, something completely different, which is why I think there is occasionally a role for outsiders to come in that think completely differently.
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I don t want to push that too far because all the alternative theories of physics people you know come in from out of nowhere they re almost always wrong you don t even know how to play the game but you know they think that all the mainstream people are you know too narrow minded you know my only point is that science is flawed to a certain extent but it is still the best system we have.
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This doesn t just apply to scientists and scientific research.
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This applies to regular people, too.
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I mean, beliefs can be as simple as superstitions, which, as you wrote in the book, even pigeons are superstitious, as per some of the experiments that you run, which I think is kind of amazing.
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Can you discuss superstition and how this fits into the belief system and how our brains work?
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Yeah, we tend to think of superstitions as something flawed in the brain, but my point of going through those experiments was to show that, in fact, it s just how the brain is wired to connect A to B. Because usually, if there is a knock or a sound or something, a rustle in the grass, there is a chance it could be a dangerous predator and not just the wind.
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And so it behooves the organism to assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators just in case.
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Now, that s not always the case.
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You see these furfin and feathered shows on the nature channels.
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You ll see most of these animals are pretty skittish.
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They re pretty risk-averse, ready to jump at any moment, but not 100%.
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They re not in a constant state of flee.
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They re at the waterhole.
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They re
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very cautiously looking around listening and maybe they ll see a lion in the distance sleeping, but they ll kind of keep an eye on it.
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So they don t run at every little rustle in the grass.
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But my point is that assuming that it s possible that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator is what we call superstition when it turns out it s not.
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And really all that is is a type one error, that is a false positive.
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You thought A was connected to B and it s not.
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that s a harmless error to make, but the other one is costly.
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That is, you don t assume the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator, and it turns out it is.
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That s more likely to take you out of the gene pool.
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So I m claiming that we evolved this propensity, our brains evolved this propensity to assume that A s are connected to B s, even when they re not.
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And we don t have a good filtering system, because there was no science when we evolved.
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Even if there was, it s not like you can t reproduce if your beliefs are faulty.
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That s right.
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I mean, people that believe in astrology have no problem making babies.
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Yeah.
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No plumbing system works just fine.
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So regardless of your crazy beliefs, but, but you know, so why can t the organisms sit in the grass and collect more data about the rustle in the grass, whether it s a dangerous predators, just the wind.
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And the answer is because dangerous predators don t wait around for organisms to collect more data about them and decide what s true or not.
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You have to make a snap.
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which is why research in cognitive psychology and rapid cognition, that is how most of the decisions we make in life are done intuitively, rapidly, without much deliberation.
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So that s why Daniel Kahneman titled his book Thinking Fast and Slow.
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Thinking fast is how we initially make most of our decisions.
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Thinking slow is where we deliberate over it.
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It s like shopping for a house.
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You kind of try to go through and make a list of all the characteristics you want, but usually it comes down to the short list, just how you feel.
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I don t know, I just like this, I don t know what.
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And that s, turns out to be true how we shop for toothpaste or whatever.
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I don t know, I like the blue one.
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You know, there s not necessarily a lot of rationality behind it.
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You know, emotions evolve to direct behavior because
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We don t have the time to process information like a computer would in way in the balance every single characteristic of the toothpaste or the house or whatever and that s a good thing we know from studies of people that have brain damage to the emotion areas of the brain where they just become like mr spot.
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Just everything is a complete rational calculation.
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You re going to carefully consider every aspect before they make a decision.
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These people can barely get out of the house in the morning.
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They even go on their daily chores.
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They can t get anything done.
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They can t make decisions.
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They sit there in the aisle at the toothpaste section going, I don t know.
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You know, there s 200 choices.
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I don t know.
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You know, just too many options to consider.
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And that s why it s good to just say, you know, often to say, I like the blue one.
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Right, so this program s sitting somewhere in our lizard brain, our primitive brain hanging out, and then as humans, as evolved social creatures, we ve got this entirely different set of calculations going on, and this programming creeps its way in there.
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So we attach social meaning to patterns as well.
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How does this start to affect our behavior?
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Well, we re a social primate species, so often all this stuff we re talking about, motivated reasoning in general, sorts itself out in the moral tribes.
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Moral tribes are groups that think alike morally, that have similar foundational values of what they think is the most important thing in life.
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And here s where it starts to get dangerous.
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Here s where we can talk about terrorism and why people join these groups.
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I mean, who in their right mind would join ISIS?
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It s insane.
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Well, because they re in a state of mind where they want to belong to a moral tribe, they want to feel like they have meaning and purpose and something deeper that feels emotionally good.
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Again, that emotional component.
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We know about the research from behavioral genetics that people are highly genetically inclined to be either conservative or liberal.
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Or religious or not very religious.
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Well, there can t be a gene for being a catholic or a democrat.
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No.
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What it is is genes code for personality temperament.
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Like, I like this kind of world view because it makes me feel good.
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And all these other people that are in this group, this tribe, they re like me and I like being around people that are like me.
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It feels good.
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And that s where the genes and the emotions kind of meld there.
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And it ends up being that, well, we call our moral tribe Democrats or Republicans or Catholics or Protestants or Buddhists.
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And the culture ends up sorting it out in the details.
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But the deeper part is how we feel about being a part of that group.
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And we kind of migrate to it.
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Can you explain to me some of these bizarre twin studies where the people that are separated at birth and they show up as adults and they have the same clothing on, or they drive the same kind of car, or they marry the same kind of person, or they use the same toothpaste?
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I mean, they re so bizarre.
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There can t be a gene for buying a Mustang or marrying this kind of person.
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In a way, there is in a sense that I like the way I look in these kinds of clothes, because it makes me feel better.
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And your twin is going to have those same feelings, because emotions and feelings are very much genetically programmed.
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So they re going to end up more likely to buy that same kind of car, dress the same way, marry the same kind of person, and so on.
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It looks kind of bizarre, but all of that scales up to these kinds of bigger political
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moral, religious groups that we belong to.
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So you can see these commonalities in genes and in tests of genetic structure, and also even in brain behavior.
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For example, you wrote that we get a rewarding jolt of dopamine when we come across information that confirms what we already believe.
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So, I mean, this might be a stretch, but are we addicted to confirming our beliefs?
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Absolutely, of course it feels good to have your beliefs confirmed.
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I knew I was right, I knew it, I knew it.
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That s a great feeling.
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And that is dopamine.
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We know that dopamine s involved in learning and motivation.
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And neurons that secrete dopamine, it s part of the process of growing new synaptic connections when you learn something.
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Somewhere in the brain that gets recorded as feeling good.
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whatever that means qualitatively to each of us, but we know it s related to dopamine.
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It just comes down to the genetically wired biochemistry in the brain.
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It s hard to believe that that can affect such social, cultural kinds of things, but it certainly does.
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This isn t genetic determinism by any means.
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Culture still plays a huge role.
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but trying to understand why somebody would be a self-radicalizing terrorist.
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You know, we really need to get down to looking at all those different factors.
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Well, it makes sense, right, because you discuss belief-dependent realism in that reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends on the beliefs we hold at any given time.
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So that sort of explains, at least in my opinion, my understanding, my reality, how
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different political groups or different religious groups can look at the world so differently, along with the biases like anchoring bias, authority bias, belief bias, and the previously discussed confirmation bias.
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But on top of all of those biases, we have in-group bias, which just reinforces the same bias that you got by joining the group in the first place.
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Yeah, exactly right.
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And so it does make me wonder, now that I m a little older, looking back at what was popular, say, in my field of experimental psychology in the 70s, or if you look back a century before, what scientists were studying then, and it s not that they were wrong so much as science just seems to move on to other topics.
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We know that Skinner s research on rats and pigeons with operant and classical conditioning, it s pretty solid science, but it just didn t seem to go very far.
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It didn t take us very far to understanding human behavior, which is why the cognitive revolution happened in the 80s, primarily the 80s and 90s now.
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Cognitive neuroscience now is a huge thing.
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And it s not that the previous scientists were wrong so much as just limited.
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So it makes me wonder, you know, what stuff we re doing now, cutting-edge stuff now.
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You know, in a century from now, people look back and go, huh, it was really weird they went down that tangent of cognitive neuroscience or behavior genetics or whatever it is.
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I don t know.
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If I knew, I wouldn t be doing it.
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I d be critical of it.
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But I don t know what it is.
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And that s the problem we all have.
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It s like when I think about what I m gonna write in my next column in Scientific American every month, I gotta come up with something.
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And what should we be skeptical of?
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And sometimes it s really hard to tell.
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If we ve already sort of jumped the shark and everybody knows X is an idiotic belief, that s an easy target for me.
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But more challenging is I try to find stuff that hasn t already been debunked or that not everybody thinks is obviously wrong.
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And that s really hard to do.
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Because if I knew, I would already know.
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It would be obvious.
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So we start with our genes, right, our programming, our evolved programming, we develop a bunch of beliefs, they get processed through a lot of these different biases, then we end up joining a group, getting in-group bias, and then, to top it all off, we ve got this meta-bias, this belief-dependent realism, is driven by this meta-bias called the bias blind spot, and as you wrote, the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in other people, but to be blind to their influence on our own belief.
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In other words, bias against your own bias.
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where you can t see it.
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Yeah, those experiments are quite interesting.
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Even when you tell subjects about the confirmation bias, they become very adept at seeing how it works in other people.
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But then you go, well, you know, it could apply to you.
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Well, not me.
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Of course, I m not like that.
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It s almost impossible to see it in yourself.
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Very, very difficult.
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I mean, with all of this stacked against us, do we stand a friggin  chance of ever seeing anything as it is?
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I think so.
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I think the systems do shift over time on a higher level.
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That is, the science does move along.
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mentioned earlier.
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But a separate related question is how do we get people to recognize it and change their minds?
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Like, you know, you re really wrong about climate.
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You don t think global warming is real.
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You know, you re wrong and here s why.
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You know, just showing people that they re factually wrong is not necessarily the best strategy because we know that people, they just don t accept it.
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Well, but Rush was saying that that study was flawed.
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So, you know, short of like taking out the papers and going through those studies one by one, which you can do,
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But that takes a while.
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Another approach is to go tribal and just say, or go more psychological, and say, look, the scientific research here is not going to take anything away from your worldview.
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It s not a challenge to your moral tribe.
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It s not a threat to your religion, to your economic, political ideologies.
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You try to remove that barrier, which is what s there in the first place that s keeping them from evaluating the data properly, or the way most scientists evaluate it.
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In other words, it s cognitive dissonance.
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That is, if somebody holds a belief and you show them evidence that it s wrong, they don t change their mind.
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They double down on the belief.
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This is the famous experiment that happened with the UFO cult back in 1954.
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Leon Festinger went to the top of a mountain with a UFO group to see what would happen when the mothership didn t come at midnight.
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And basically, his book, When Prophecy Fails, was about what happened, which was they doubled down on their belief.
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And they had all sorts of rationalization for why it didn t happen, or even that it did happen spiritually, the world changed or some such thing.
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When it gets down to convincing somebody that creationism is wrong and evolution is right or global warming is real or whatever, you can t just start with the facts because the facts don t speak for themselves.
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They re just not gonna believe it.
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You have to start with something like it s not a threat to your foundational beliefs and then go from there.
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So is there anything else that I haven t asked you that you wanna make sure you deliver to the ASE listening audience?
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The important thing is that we now have a viable movement with a lot of resources at our hands to provide to people, which is what we do at Skeptic.
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skeptic.com is tell people to go there s tons of free material on it we have a whole skepticism one on one section i teach a course at chattin university called skepticism 101 basically how to think like a scientist and you know there s all these examples we re talking about you know they re all there and videos and articles and powerpoint presentations and so if you re a teacher and educator if you re just interested
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How to talk to people about global warming, how to talk to people about evolution and creationism.
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We have booklets and articles about that.
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Point by point, here s what to do, here s what to say.
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I think that s where we are now in the movement.
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We really have a pretty good handle on what to do about these issues and what we know and what we don t know.
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Great, thanks so much, Michael.
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Really interesting, the evolution of belief and how it still affects us today, even when we think it only affects other people.
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Really appreciate your time.
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You re welcome.
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Damn, that was a good episode.
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I m so happy about that one.
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Yeah, that was really good, Jason.
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I mean, look, he s written so many books, we couldn t even read all of them before the show, even though we had weeks.
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And I love the idea that we can explain through evolutionary psychology how beliefs form in our brain, why they persist, why people believe weird things, why smart people believe stupid things, frankly.
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And the genetic influence on our belief systems, that was a big surprise for me.
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I d love to see more data.
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on that and I m excited to have him back on the show to talk about things like empathy and all the other stuff that he writes about that we didn t even get to touch today.
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Yeah, this was a slam dunk, I think.
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If you enjoyed this one as much as we did, don t forget to thank Michael on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as some of his books and resources mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art in Most Mobile Podcast Players to see the cheat sheet for this episode.
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We ll link to that right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
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I throw down articles, insights.
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You can engage with me there.
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I love hearing from you guys, and it s a lot quicker than email, I ll tell you that.
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I also want to encourage you to join our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re in the states, text charmed to 33444.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a step-by-step that helps you improve networking and connection skills, inspires those around you to develop relationships with you, personal or professional.
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We ll also send you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show and some videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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I do those every week.
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It will make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the USA to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, please, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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SPEAKER_01
Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.