Navigating Misinformation with Empathy: Misbelief with Dan Ariely

Regardless of political affiliation by understanding the psychology we can mitigate its effects. Grounded in research and our guests personal experience as a target of disinformation today's book analyzes the psychological drivers behind adopting irrational beliefs. He reveals the emotional cognitive personality and social elements that drive people towards false information and mistrust.

Despite advanced AI generating convincing fake news our guest offers hope and awareness of the forces fueling misbelief that makes individuals and societies more resilient . Combating misbelief requires empathy not conflict. It is a huge pleasure to welcome the author of "Misbelief,, what makes rational people believe irrational things", Dan Ariely, welcome to the show

Aidan McCullen (2): i was sent to when i was a kid i used to say to my parents you know the innocent things kids say. Is that shows on tv all time is goin' if Angela Lansbury came to my town i get the heck out of there and somebody's gonna die for sure if she's in town maybe you'll tell her audience a little bit about that show particularly cause a lot of audience Dan, are in the us, Yeah. So, this is a show called The Irrational on NBC and Peacock, which is their streaming platform.

And, the hero is a professor. He's a professor at the Institute for Advanced Hindsight. My research center at Duke is called the Center for Advanced Hindsight. So it's a little similar, it's a little different. And he also has scars, although he, he got injured in a different setup than I did. And he basically teaches social science, behavioral economics, and solve crimes. And the origin for that story is, is real. I was approached by some.

law enforcement agency generally to, to help figure out some things about human nature and the way it interacted with them. And it was interesting and fascinating and complex and challenging. . But it's been it's been an unbelievable treat because the team that is working on this are absolutely committed to the science being real science. So, things happen quicker and so on, but the science is the science and every episode there's an element of human nature that is revealed. So it's very nice.

And , the first episode we aired I went to the party in la. To, to air it and there's a scene in the end of the first episode where Alec, the guy who's playing me, is meeting with this veteran that had PTSD and he gives him some advice. And I talked to the actor who, who got this advice. And I said, I, I wrote this advice thinking of your character. I, this is like, like my real psychological advice to, to somebody in your thing. And, and he said, it was such good advice. He said.

He was, he was kind of touched to, touched to get that advice. It's not just an advice for his character, but, but in general. So anyway, it's, it's a real, it's a real treat a huge adventure and a huge treat to do something like this. Aidan McCullen (2): It's amazing how life gives you these opportunities by you putting yourself out there but unfortunately putting yourself out there also means you can be the target.

, Dan Ariely: you're absolutely right that putting yourself out there gets you to do positive and, and negative. But, I know that, that you're, that you generally you're interested in, in innovation in all kinds of ways. And I think that one of the things people don't think about enough in the role of innovation is the role of trying more things.

So, when, when you look at the question of, are there people with more luck, the answer is yes, but the answer is that the people who have more luck do two things, they start more things. And they stop them if they see they're not going anywhere. So imagine life is a basketball. And imagine two people. One that waits until they're 100 percent sure they'll make a basket. And one shoots when they have 50%. The first one maybe will have two baskets in the game. The second one might have 20.

but baskets are binary. It's either in or out. Life is not binary in life. We start lots of things and we see what works out and what doesn't. And it turns out that people who are lucky, first of all, try more things. They don't wait and wait and wait. And then the other thing that they do is they see something is not working out very well. They stop putting too much energy into it. They cut it and, and try more things.

So I'm certainly in the, in the category, the, the adventurous category that, that tries a lot.

Aidan McCullen (2): for saying that and you know it speaks to something that is very much at the heart of the show and you talk about how we all have frames or biases or heuristics through which we see the world and one of the ones that i've tried to force into place for myself is what i call Kinstugi thinking and it's based on this beautiful art of Kintsugi where you repair the cracks but instead of disguising them you celebrate them so you paint them with golden lacquer and.

The heart of that is an innovation that you're going to try things. They're going to fail, but it's what you learn in the effort. And the thing that comes out of this is there's always assets in the ashes.

And the reason I share that is that you had, you mentioned a severe incident as a child you went through some severe pain for a long long period of time and for a while you did try to disguise those cracks but now you actually see as leonard cohen said that "there's a crack in everything that's where the light comes in." Yeah. So first of all, I, I love this kind of art and I actually bought, I bought some today. And most, most of the Kintsugi art, it creates whatever the vessel back.

So, so you could see the cracks, but all of the pieces are, are there. And and you're right in everything you've said, but, but the piece I bought today is a piece that they're still missing parts. So it's, it's, I'll send you a picture later, but there's still, there's still missing part. And there's something about that that looks to me is a, is a both emotional, both negative and positive. Reminder, but because you mentioned it, so I'll, I'll say that.

So, obviously I have half a beard , and the reasons for these half a beard is that many years ago I was badly burned. So. This side is full of scars. Just hair doesn't grow, grow here. And for a long time, indeed, I, I shaved and when I shave it's less stark. Yes, you can see that it's red and you can see , it's a scar, but it's , not as strange looking. And a few years ago I went on a month long hike and I stopped shaving. And when I finished the hike, I looked like this.

And then I look in the mirror. I didn't like myself. It's a very strange look. Just imagine that you would look like this one day. And and I thought I'll shave it, but I thought I'll wait a few weeks until the memory for the, it kept me some of the memory from the hike keep in my mind. But two very interesting things happened. The first one was that I started getting notes from people who thanked me for the half a beard. And why did they thank me for the half a beard?

These were people who were struggling with their own injuries. They felt they were hiding something themselves. And they said that if I'm so out with it without care, maybe they can. hide it a little bit less as well. So I decided to keep it for longer. And then the really surprising thing happened about four months later, when, when all of a sudden I felt better with my scars, I have lots of scars. My hand don't, a lot, lots of things are wrong with me.

But but all of a sudden I felt, I felt the scars in me were the same. I did not feel the separation that it's me and my scars. I felt more connected to my injury. And I started wondering what happened. Why? Why now? And I think that what happened is you think about somebody like me shaving, I start the morning smooth hair, stubble hair, and then I half shave and smooth and smooth. I, the act of shaving for somebody like me is also the act of reducing asymmetry.

In, in fact, the act of shaving is exactly what those people told me that they wanted to stop doing, which is to hide. And, and stopping shaving, I think was a very healing process of self acceptance. And, and by the way, because we talk about new things and understanding and where do ideas come from? I have to admit that I did not predict that having a half a bill would be good for me. And this is an interesting thing, right?

If you asked me, before I had the half a beard, if you asked me, Dan, how would half a beard feel like? I could tell you day one would not feel good. People would ask questions, kids would point, some people would laugh. And if you ask me, but yes, but how would month four look like? I wouldn't be able to tell you. Because this process of psychological adaptation and acceptance is not something we have a good intuition about.

We have a good intuition about day one, how would other people react, but we don't have a good intuition of how we would change. slowly to something. And I think those are some of the barriers for human progress that we have a hard time imagining how things would be in the long term. And, but they also were social science is supposed to be helping. Here's some insights, right? I don't expect everybody to go through this process, but here's an insight about something about self acceptance.

Yes, hiding has its functions, but in long term, it might actually impede progress.

Aidan McCullen (2): i'm so glad you did it and you know it's a reminder of sincerity you know that i found out the beautiful origin of the word sincerity comes from, Sin Cere which means without wax and it was from a time where the sculptor used to hide cracks in the statues with wax, i just love that and also reminder of the contrast in life there's always highs and lows you know that this is life because i say that to say that, Maybe as a context setter for

this book and why you wrote this book and all the research you put behind it and the real pain that is in this book as well. Is a signal of that as well. It's a, it's a symbol of that because at a very peak moment in your career, all of a sudden you woke up to a faithful morning when you were just attacked in , many ways. Maybe we'll share that as a context for, the book Sure. So highlight of my career. You're absolutely right. So roll back the time, early COVID days, the world is crazy.

And all of a sudden everybody realizes how central social science is. And I get questions from government and people all over the world. What do we do with distance? And what do we do with distant education? And what do we do with releasing prisoners? How do we decrease domestic violence? How do we get people to adopt this crazy thing of wearing a mask? Just the number of questions were incredible. And if we give people money on furlough, how do we give it?

Should we give people fines if they misbehave or do something else? Anyway lots and lots of questions and I feel I'm the most helpful I've ever been. I have two phones and my, and I, I just work all day. Aidan McCullen (2): they're listening they're finally listening that's right. That's right. That's right.

Not, not only do they finally listening, not everything I had data on something that I tried to get data very quickly, but, but I felt that, we, we talked a little bit about this in a different context before the show started, the generally life is smooth. People don't doubt their assumptions. Why would you by the way, I'm digressing, but one of my standard approaches , when they go and talk to companies. Is to ask them, what if people are amateurs in whatever it is you're doing?

So let's say we have a company that does financial education. I said, what if people are amateur in that we have an organization that help people with couples therapy? What if people don't know how to live together? And it's about the fact that we, it's so convenient to keep on with our standard assumptions about what happened yesterday. And sometimes it's very healthy to break them.

COVID was a time when those assumptions were broken and all of a sudden people realized like how much we don't know. By the way, with education, it was an opportunity because, we didn't know much about education before, but all of a sudden it became clear how little we know. Anyway, so I'm very, very feeling very helpful and being as helpful as I can. And all of a sudden I get this email that says, Dan, how have you changed? How have you become that person? I don't think much about it.

I say, how have I changed? I don't see any way. And I get the long list of links. Among them is a link that I'll just describe one that shows pictures of me from my early days in hospital. badly burned, all kinds of bandages. And then it's described it's, I was badly injured. 70 percent of my body burned almost three years in hospital, true and true. And then it says that because of that, I started hating healthy people.

And that's why I joined Bill Gates and the Illuminati to create COVID and to create the vaccine that would kill, kill more people anyway. There were many, many videos, many comments, all kinds of things. And I, my first instinct was to defend myself and I tried. I said, how can these people think about this? I'm waking up every day, working for free for everybody's benefit, just doing good in the world. Like how, how can they think about this? Anyway, I tried to convince them terrible, terrible.

I only made things worse. Like I could not convince anybody. And we, we all heard about people who believe the earth is flat or all kinds of things that, but when somebody sits across from you on zoom or telegram or something, and they tell you. that you have done something yesterday and you say no. There's something extra eerie about that. It's not about something third in the world. The earth is right. It's about, it's about me.

These people felt they know me better than I knew myself and no matter what I showed them, no matter what I thought, I could not convince them. Now I tried for about a month, very tough month. Lots of nightmares, lots of difficulty during the day. We all hear sometimes like the ping of email or something coming and we don't know what it is.

But if you add to the mix expression of hate and death threats, all of a sudden you hear this vibration or ping and you say, oh, is, is it another one of those very Anyway, after about a month, I realized I'm making no progress. I took a step back, and I decided to study the topic. I, I decided this was an important topic. That there is something very strange about it. Something I, I don't understand as a social scientist. I think we as social scientists don't understand well enough.

And I have to study this. So for the next two years, I, I did a combination of, it's, it's, it's different from my other books because I'm more of an anthropologist here. I talk to many mis, misbelievers. I described some, some research as well, but I'm trying to understand the psychology of somebody that five years ago, we looked at them and we say, Hey, me and this other guy, we're the same. We look at the world in the same way.

And now we look at them and we say, Hey, Something is really wrong inside. Something is really wrong inside. I don't understand how me and this other person are seeing the world in a, in the same way. And, and the book is, is helping us see what is the process they went through. They're not different. It could have been us, but there was some things that happened along the path that got them to go in this, in this path.

And, and I think the main lesson from, from the book, there's a lot of lessons about the psychological path, right? But for me, the main lesson is not to discount the people and not to discount their beliefs. Yes, they're wrong, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to start believing that there's G5 chips in the vaccine and they're going to kill me and my kids. These misbeliefs are, it's like a bad autoimmune response. It's a, it's a response to a real need.

There's a real psychological need for these misbeliefs. They answer, they answer a need, right? In the same way that the cookie answers a craving for sugar, fat, and salt. And in the same way that somebody designed the cookie to make us want to eat one and then want to eat again in, and like more and more and more. The, the funnel of misbelief answers a real need. And then and then it gets us people to consume more and more and more, more and more. Now, that doesn't.

Solve the problem, of course. Understanding the funnel of misbelief, and I say it's a real need, doesn't solve it. But it does mean that it's a problem that could have attacked all of us. We can't just say us versus them. And it also means that we need to approach this with the empathy. These are, people have not chosen that, that path. They psychologically got, got that path, but it's not good for them. It's not good for us.

And then the last thing I would say is that if you asked me 10 years ago about what are the big challenges facing humanity, disinformation would not be there. Misbelief. Now it is. If you think about all of our challenges now, I think disinformation, misbelief is it's the, the, the bottom of all of them.

Whether you're thinking about the war in Ukraine, American elections, you think about geopolitical issues in Europe, you think about Israel and Gaza, whatever you think, these questions about what information do we trust, who do we trust, what are the, The ways we talk about this, how open are we to conversation? What are motives for believing misbelieving and so on? All of those things are barriers in everything we do.

Aidan McCullen (2): well said and it's one of the things i was telling you my son who's fourteen loved the book you listen to in the car as i drove him here and there and everywhere as you do these days. And i was so pleased with the way that it's so empathetic the book and i want to say that if you are somebody who is. A misbeliever , this is not an attack. The book is not an attack actually, as somebody who maybe doesn't believe with you or ostracizes you.

It asks you to be more empathetic. And this episode is not going to be an attack on misbelievers as well i want to say that and i just based on something you said there i know Yuval Noah Harari endorsed the book but there was a quote by him that i thought was so relevant to the book he said that "censorship no longer works by hiding information from you.

censorship censorship today works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation of irrelevant information of funny cat videos until you're just unable to focus anymore." And that is one of the huge problems we face in this age. And we're only at the start of it with AI and chat GPT, et cetera. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Yeah. Lots of people are worried about AI in terms of flooding more information. I think that's one fear.

There's another fear of what's called deep fake that there'll be a video and you wouldn't know who it really is. But my big fear is actually that if there's a system that understand each of our psychological weak points and these tailored to our particular unique weakness, then it's a piece of information that can change us in a, in the most dramatic way. I, I try sometimes to use the term corrosive information because when, when people use misinformation, it seems that the solution is simple.

Just show the real information. There's missing, the antidote seems seems simple, but the moment you think of it as corrosive information, Then you're saying there's no way back. Corrosion is very hard to take away. And I think that if there was this engine that would figure out our psychological weak points and attack us specifically, that would be very hard, very hard to escape.

Aidan McCullen (2): I read Dan, about Mattel, the toy company created this product called hello barbie this is before the barbie movie and it was basically a barbie doll that could communicate with the child, And the challenge became then and this is unforeseen challenges that what if the child shares intimate secrets what if it shares abuse whatever who owns that data. Because it has to be stored somewhere in order for the Barbie doll to be able to interact.

And it got me thinking exactly to your point that this is coming. It's already here. I don't know if you use Chat GPT, but if you use the voice one, it's absolutely incredible. The latest one and the accuracy of how it communicates to you, it adapts to your style. It's absolutely phenomenal. As I mentioned, we're at the start of this exponential jumps that we're going to see in it. I think that's why this book is so important.

So much so, that i really think that children should have a module to be taught about being able to filter information these days because this is gonna be a huge problem for them and even for their education going forward. Yeah. So, so let's, let's, this book really reads a little bit like an introduction to psychology book because the funnel of misbelief really attacks all of our psychology. Yeah. Right.

If we think a cookie goes for salt, sugar, and fat misbelief attacks almost every aspect of our psychology. And very quickly it, it starts with emotions and stress, then it goes after a cognitive system. The way we process information and reason then goes after our personality. Some personality are more susceptible, less susceptible, and then it finishes with the, with the social structure and the social structure kind of seals the deal.

It, it both the ostracism you mentioned, but also the affinity groups and things like social media and so on. Now, if you think about that emotion, stress, cognition personality and, and social, it's basically almost every aspect of our. Psychology and every after, our psychology needs to defend in a, in a different way and we need to think about it in a different way.

And for kids, for all of us, but for kids in particular, I think the, the, the cognitive parts of how we process and think in information and the social parts are, are things that are relatively easy to do something about. But, but maybe, maybe to start with, let's actually go back to stress. So, so stress in my mind is the necessary condition for misbelief. Why is stress a necessary condition? So consider the following example. Consider two tribes. One is fishing in the deep ocean.

One is fishing in the lake and ask yourself who has a more predictable life. The answer is the lake. No storms, no currents, lake, ocean, very unpredictable. Which one of those two types of tribes develop more superstitions? Obviously the ones in the ocean. We have a need. To seek a sense of control with superstitions don't really help. They don't really create control, but a sense of control. Now think about the period of stress. Think about the period of stress. COVID is a good example.

Tremendous amount of stress. What is this virus? Where is it coming from? What is happening in China? Quarantines the world over people are dying. What's happening in Italy? Just tremendous amount of. Just how to understand where things are coming from, where, where, where it's coming from. And people want a story. And they don't just want a story, they want a story with a villain. Why a story with a villain? Because now it's not our fault, it's somebody else's fault.

So we want a story with a villain, and interestingly, it's also beneficial if the story is complex. Why is it good? Is the story complex? If I feel that I'm an underdog, the people are looking at me and say, Oh, Dan doesn't understand what's going on, and so on, he's lost his job, he's not doing so well, all kinds of things like that.

If I now can say, Oh, you think I don't understand things, but let me tell you, it's really Bill Gates with G5, and here's a whole nother story with the World Health Organization, and so on. People all of a sudden feel in control. So, so the first, the first insight Is that stress not stressed?

Oh, I'm so busy stressed of the sort that says, I don't know where things are going, and I'm really worried and creates the conditions for a story with the villain and a complex story, by the way, when we look at the world now, I think COVID was a time of unprecedented stress up to that moment. Again, virus, financial and so on. I, I think that even now, four years later, we're not out of it in terms of the emotional turmoil of that stress and loneliness and all the things that came with it.

And I think that now we are at even higher amount of stress than we were in COVID. Think about the Houthis. Where did they come from? Why? Like, if you think about that, right? It's like you have to be saying, Where is my world view? What happened? What are they doing? How is Iran exactly fueling them? And why? And what's happening with Russia? And why are American bases in Syria being attacked?

So there's a whole sense I think about the instability Of, of the world stemming from the Middle East. That is incredibly unsettling. You look at all the the uprising of pro Palestinian students in American universities. I think this surprises everybody. I think it surprises the people from the right. It surprised the people from the left. How can it be that Harvard students are looking at the problem 3, 000 miles away?

And rather than talk about it and try to be creative or propose solution and so on they harass other students in campus. Like it's, it's very unsettling and AI is adding a lot to the complexity for young people. I can't tell you how many students have approached me and asked me, what do I think would be viable jobs 10 years from now, like, if you think about some professions. This is like shaking them.

I don't know which profession you think would suffer the most, but let's assume that lawyers will suffer a lot. Lawyers basically write very similar contracts all the time. Yes, the nuances are important and so on, but lots of things are very, very similar. All the things that are very similar could easily be replaced. And even some of the things that are not that similar, Now, would lawyers go away from the world?

No. But would one lawyer be able to do the work of many, many, many lawyers with, with technology? Most likely. Think about somebody that studies law. They're in their last two years of college. They want to go and do a master's and then be a lawyer. It's a long, painful path with lots of education and complexity and so on. And then they say, where is this profession going? It looked like almost in a day, a rug was removed. Taken from, from them. Like, where would it be? And it's not just that.

And ChatGPT very quickly passed the medical exams. Where exactly is it going? We don't know. And, and those of us who have already a career are less worried, but those of us who in the beginning, Of that, of that career, like, where's it coming from? I didn't, I didn't see it coming. It almost, it almost came in a day. So anyway, so all of this is to say that we are living, I think in a, we haven't finished the recuperating from COVID.

And we have these geopolitical social polarization, American elections plus technology. challenges that are creating this tremendous stress. So if you ask, are we in an environment now that it's easy to create more misbeliefs? The answer is, the answer is yes. . The story doesn't end with just stress. Now our cognitive system comes to play and there's a couple of things that we all know. So for example, we all know there's a huge selection of information to watch from the right to left.

And we get to choose what we watch. And I don't know about you, I, I try occasionally to watch information from the other side of the political spectrum. But even though I try. It's a small percentage of what I, what I try. Mostly you wake up and you want to see information that supports our beliefs. So, so there are things in the cognitive side that ranges from confirmation bias. Let's just look at the things we know and believe already. And then of course it becomes a stranger and stranger.

And one of the strangest ones is, is called the illusion of explanatory depth And the illusion of explanatory depth, I, I demonstrated it with a toilet. So imagine I say, do you understand how a flush toilet works? You say, yes. Great. On a scale from zero, I don't understand at all, to ten, I understand very well. Really well. Great. Luckily for you, We have all the pieces of a flush toilet here, please assemble one. Of course, nobody manages to assemble those things.

And then we ask them, and how well do you understand the flush toilet? And they say, not so much. Now if you think about what it does, it's usually when you try , to change somebody's opinion, we attack them, right? I come to you and say, oh, you don't understand this, here's another piece of information, here's another piece of information, we attack. Ha, ha. But, but do the following reflection. In the last three years, how many people have you truly convinced?

How many discussion ended up with somebody on the other side saying, you know what? I never thought of it this way. Thank you very much for spending all this time with me. I completely changed my mind. You're absolutely right. And I really appreciate you changing my mind so deeply. Doesn't, doesn't happen or happen very early. And, and, and the other side, and the other side also doesn't happen. It also doesn't happen that we go to people and we say, Oh, you convinced me.

So thank you so much for changing my mind. Now, what happened in regular conversations? . In, in regular conversation, we, we, we fight, we fight with people. And what we often don't admit, but it's true is when they argue with us and they develop an argument, we pretend to listen. But what we actually do is counter arguing. From the second word that they utter, we already think about what argument we're going to come with to completely demonish the argument.

So they, we think that we've been listening for half the time, but no, we've been only thinking about their own position. When we talk, we talk about our position. And when they talk, we think about our position. So we end up at the end of the hour, even more convinced than we started because we spent the whole time. Thinking about their own position and defending it and attacking it and building an argument. We did not spend the whole time thinking about maybe we're wrong.

What's the real argument? Now the illusion of explanatory depth proposes something else. It proposes that there's a gap between what people know and what people believe. This kind of metacognition, right? What is our knowledge about our knowledge? The idea is that we don't know that much, how it flashed or it works, but we think we know. And that's an interesting gap. So what the illusion of explanatory depth says, you know what?

I come to you and I say, you know what what is your opinion about X zero? And I don't attack. I come from your perspective. I say, help me understand how exactly would it work? You tell me, imagine a very complex topic. We're talking about. Israel and Hamas and you say that, that you want an immediate ceasefire and you want Israel to get out of Gaza and we know already arguing doesn't, doesn't work, but, but imagine instead I say, help me understand your position. What now?

And you say, what, what do you mean what now? I say, we know Iran is in the picture. Do we, do we let them help Hamas with nuclear weapons? And he said, no, no, no, not that. And I said, do we allow them to have an air force? He said, well, maybe not. What if there's another attack like October 7th? What, what then? And, the point is that in almost every argument around the world, there's no right side and wrong side. There's usually two wrong sides.

And, and two offended sides, and the picture is complex and difficult and figuring out the path forward is, is always, always difficult and complex and painful and so on. And, and the way to, to get people off their, I'm-a-hundred-percent-sure- horse is to basically say, you tell me how your approach would work out. And then people would say, I'm just not sure. And really that's what we want as a starting point, right?

What we want in any healthy society is we want people who are not a hundred percent, not a hundred percent sure. Right? So think about something as difficult as a discussion in the US about abortion. The reality is that there are people who are pro and there are people who are against, and we have to live together and we have to move forward together. And, and there's a way to look at the other side as an enemy. They're just broken. They're not seeing the world as it is.

But what we really need is to, is to come up with solutions. And, and the attack approach is not helping. It's not helping. Like, nobody gets convinced. Like, okay, if, if, if people would get convinced, I would say, okay, let's, let's go for it. But the reality is that we, We have to work together. We have to live together. We have to collaborate together.

And we certainly don't want the system that it's like an arm wrestle between who has 51 percent of the votes and they get to to dominate a much, a much healthier approach is basically say. Help me understand your view in a, in a deeper, in a deeper way. And once people are not a hundred percent sure, everything gets better. Everything is not solved, but everything gets better. So, so we said we have the cognitive component, of course, there's lots of nuances and so on. It's fascinating part.

Then, then the next part is personality Aidan McCullen (2): Before we go there, would you mind, I just wanted to slip in there because this, this is a huge problem in innovation because a feeling of us versus them. If i'm working in transformation, you're, you're driving change in a university, you feel like you're against the dinosaurs. This is the kind of us versus them. Oh, they will, they'll never cop on. They'll never change.

That a lot when somebody in, in your work is trying to change a paradigm. You're trying to, the max plank thing where science changes one funeral at a time, you're trying to avoid that, , and , throughout the book, Dan introduces these little columns called hopefully helpful, which are ways to, in a way, excuse the pun, given the topic, inoculate a certain way of thinking.

And i thought that was really important and there was a quote here you quoted my fellow countryman WB Yeats i love this quote in the second coming he said, " we need to avoid a world where the best lack all convictions while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Absolutely, brilliant quote.

And I thought maybe you might just share before we go on to personality traits, which is another huge part of the book, the Dunning Kruger effect, because , the Dunning Kruger is linked to the illusion of explanatory depth, but it's something that shows up a lot of this is like, I've read a little bit, so therefore I think I know a lot. So I mentioned to you, I saw, I spotted this in my son. I said, that's very dangerous. Because you saw a Tik Tok video and you think you know it.

And there's a whole lot there's a whole tome of work behind that and one of the great things there's a japanese term for this i don't know but when you're surrounded by books like i am here it just reminds you as newton is it's a portion it's a credited newton this quote what we know is a drop it reminds me that i know it's so little and this is the dunning kruger effect.

Yeah. So the Dunning Kruger effect is also a very important metacognition effect, and it's an important issue about this gap between what we know and what we think we know. But it says that this gap changes across our real knowledge. So there are some things that we're ignorant about and we know we're ignorant. Me and string theory. I went to hear a few talks, don't understand it. Okay. So with string theory, I'm not a danger to myself. Why?

Because I don't know much and I know I don't know much. Now on the other side of the spectrum, let's talk about things like I do a lot of, I've done a lot of research on dishonesty. I know a lot about dishonesty or the psychology of money. I know a lot and I know I know a lot, right? So I'm also not a danger to myself. But at the middle level, the Dunning Kruger effect is showing that that's where we are at the most danger to ourselves. Why?

Because that's where we think we know, but we actually don't. And, and I think the world is becoming more and more of that. That's part because I think that some of those you said TikTok videos, but just as a metaphor of a TikTok video, I think they create a higher level of feeling of knowing without the real knowing, right? So there's all these amazing people who create these videos that give you the sense that you have just learned something, just know something, you understand something.

It's a, it's a tribute to the people who've done the videos, but they also make people people. I, I use this example in the book. I said that I went for like a driving school for two days. We, we went to drive these cars and all kinds of difficult races and in, in rain and, oh, it was amazing by the way. So, so you do these laps with this. Car and then you sit next to a professional driver and they do the laps and like day and night you say I thought I Knew how to drive.

No, no, there's a whole like, but but anyway after two days of They do it in the beginning and you get a little bit better in these two days But after those two days, I think my confidence increased more. No, not think I know now that the increase in my confidence was higher than my increase in my real skill And then a week later, I got into a car accident, I'm, I think, I think what happened is that, that's, that's what confidence does.

And by the way, when I've been talking to some of the the misbelievers about COVID. I sometimes, when they would talk to me about the virus and they would talk to me about the vaccine and so on, I would say, but my PhD is not in biology, so I'm not an expert in those things. And you would expect that they would say, well, I never, I don't have an undergrad in biology either. Last time I took a class was in high school. Often, I wouldn't get that very often, right?

But, so, so I think, I think, for example, with, with this particular issue, I think lots of people felt that they understood ivermectin, mRNA, that they understood all kinds of things like that, but not, they didn't really. Aidan McCullen (2): Dan, on that you mentioned and this is i think it's really important and hasn't been talked about much and really builds on the whole idea of.

Know what you don't know is that people remember differently as well you mentioned for example the studies on alien abductees and this kind is a nice bridge for personality traits as well that oftentimes people will be doing their research and when you go digging and go did you actually read that or did you imagine that and that's not a criticism of these people it's just a personality trait.

so first of all, it's a feature of memory in, in the first episode of the irrational, one of my phrases was memory is the great conman of human nature, Alex says that in the, in the show and, and, and it's true and it's true exactly for those reasons. Why, why is memory the great conman of human nature is because we trust it when we shouldn't. Right. When, when we have a memory of something. We feel that we really have that memory, but the reality is not so much.

It's very easy to plant memory to us, very easy to distort memories. Memory is not that reliable, but the trust in memories is incredible. So if memory was trying to, do a con game on us. It will be very, very successful because we, we over, we overly trust it. But, but when we move this to, to personality, if we think about things like stress and connecting dots and all of those, And, and too much confidence and all of those things. Some people are higher in those things than others.

It's just not the same for everybody. And the people who have a higher tendency on those things are just more likely to go down the funnel of misbelief. So let's take one, one example. There's a little math problem we call the bat and the ball. Okay. So ready? It's a little math problem. I know, you know it, but okay. So how does the math problem goes? A baseball bat and a baseball ball cost together $1.10. A baseball bat and a baseball ball cost together $1.10.

The bat cost $1 more than the ball. The bat cost 1 more than the ball. And now the question is, how much does the ball cost? And for most people, the vast majority, the first thing that pops to their mind is 10 cents. And some people say, 0. 10. You sure? Yes. You want to change your mind? No. 10 cents. And some people check themselves. And they say a baseball bat and a baseball ball cost together 1. 10. The bat costs 1 more than the ball. It sounds like 0. 10, but is it true?

Well, if the bat costs 1 more than the ball and the ball is 10 cents, the bat will be 1. 10. So we'll have 0. 10 and 1. 10. But a baseball bat and a basketball ball cost together 1. 10. No, together they're 1. 20. Doesn't work out. Oh, so maybe it's 0. 05 and 1. 05. Yes, that works. Okay, so this is simple math. Everybody can do it. If they get it wrong, everybody understand that they, they got it wrong and they can figure out the answer. It takes a couple of seconds.

What's the difference between the people who say, yes, it's 10 cents and the people who test themselves. The difference is whether when something fits our intuition, We, we trust it without question, or whether we test ourselves, by the way, no, this is a general strategy for life, right? We have intuition about lots of people. You meet somebody and they offer you a deal. You have intuition about them. You meet somebody online and they tell you to.

Post something for them or buy something for them. We all have gut intuitions. That's fine. The question is, do we trust those gut intuitions or not? And it turns out that people who trust their gut intuitions are much more likely to be misbelievers. Why? Because there's all kinds of things out there that are designed to make sense to us, to our intuitive self. And the people who say, yes, let me go for it, are more likely to do it.

Of course, there are other, other interesting elements to personality, but it's important to understand that if somebody has failed the bat and the ball question, it doesn't mean that they'll be a misbeliever. And if they got it right, it doesn't mean that you can think about it as a lubricant. If you have the personality trait, if you, Connect dots.

If you are more likely to get stressed, if you're more likely to trust your intuition, if all of those things happen, you're more likely to go down the funnel of misbelief, but it's not the guarantee and it's not the protection. Okay. So we have personality and lots of interesting things there, but the last component and a very important one is the social one and the social one starts with ostracism and, and I saw that a moment before we got on the call, I saw that you sent me something about.

But I didn't get to read it Aidan McCullen (2): No worries it was about goldfish where populations of goldfish live in a proportion of the. It's like a packing order and if they grow above the next in the packing order they'll be ostracized and they'll be cast outside the little tiny group it was work by a lady called dr marion one anyway i thought it might be interesting for your work if you haven't seen it. I'll have, I'll have a look. So, so ostracism is very interesting.

And the thing that is so interesting about ostracism is that to feel ostracized is incredibly painful. It's incredibly painful. And almost everything good about humanity goes away when people feel ostracized. And the guy who did most of the work on ostracism has this very beautiful beginning to his, his work. He says how he walks in the park with his dog and he sees two people playing frisbee. Just so happened the frisbee falls next to his feet.

He picks it up and throws it to one of them and they throw it back to him. And for a few minutes, the three of them play frisbee. And all of a sudden they stop throwing it to him and they just throw it between themselves. And he felt ostracized. He felt terrible. Why did they stop? Am I not good enough? Don't I play well? I'm not a nice person. Anyway, he replicated this study. He basically did something very similar. Somebody came to the lab, waited outside.

Two other people that they did not know that played, that worked for the experiment, showed up. And in half the cases, one of them picked a ball, and the three of them played for ten minutes. In the other half of the cases, one of them picked the ball, the three of them played together for five minutes, and then for five minutes they stopped throwing it to the real participant. So in half the cases, the real participant came to the lab after playing for ten minutes with two other people.

In half the cases, they played for five minutes with two other people and being ostracized for five minutes. Again, everything good about human nature became worse. Less optimistic, less supportive. People were less likely to help, more likely to lie, give less money to charity. Everything that you can imagine. And in brain imaging, they show that the effect feels like pain. Looks like it's in the same centers of the brain that process pain.

Now, here is something that I, I have to admit that when I started thinking about ostracism, I, I re I realized that I've made some big mistakes and the mistake I've, I've made is that I had this phrase of what color is the sky in your world. So when somebody started adopting, somebody from my circle would start adopting some strange belief, I would use that phrase and I thought it was slightly funny and I'm sure they found it very offensive.

Imagine somebody who is just starting to play with some alternative views and the most likely stress things are not going well, they're trying to explain the world to themselves and they're starting to play with some alternative theories about what's going on. And what do you want at that moment from your social network? You want support, love, caring, and so on. But it's very, what I did is very natural and very human is to. It's to ostracize, right? Is to basically say, snap out of it, right?

What, what, what are you doing? We have, we have these really crazy way to, to approach the human psyche, someone, somebody wrote me a while ago and say that I'm lucky that I have half a beard. And what they meant by that was this was a person who was suffering from a mental challenge. And when it's true, like when you have a physical disability, Other people can see and watch and have empathy. Like I show you, I say, look, this is my hand and this is the only movement I have.

And now you can imagine all the things that are very difficult for me. You can imagine the pain, you can imagine the difficulty and so on, right? It's, it's very easy. But, but when we have people with mental issues people say it's only in your head. Nobody, nobody tells to me, Oh, it's only in your head. But, but, but we say things like it's only in your head. Get over it.

Now, now the reality is that when, when people are starting to develop these needs for alternative theories, it's the time that they need help the most. Somebody helped the most and, and anyway, I, I've made this mistake, right? I've made this mistake of, of basically, Making this not so great. It's also not very funny, but, just a little funny, but probably very offensive to them.

And now what happens when people, what happens when people feel ostracized and they want to fix it, how do they fix it? They find a group that would show them nothing but love. And thanks to what's happening online, it's relatively easy to find those groups. Okay. So, so we get. ostracized and we, we start finding a group that we could identify. But now we're in this group that we can identify with and we want to show up above the fault to be leaders.

We don't want just to be there in the, in the shadows and in the corners. So what do we need to do? We need to say things that are extreme, that people would notice us and like us. And here's a, it is a term that is called shibboleth. And Shibboleth is a term from the Bible. And it's a story about two, two tribes from the Bible that had a very difficult war. They settled at the end of the war on the two sides of the river.

And now they would walk around and they would try to figure out if the people that we meet are from our tribe or from the other tribe. Now these two tribes pronounce the name of the plant, Shibboleth, in two different ways. One of them said, Shibboleth. And one of them said, Seabullet. So imagine now I'm from the tribe that says, Shebullet. I would walk around and I would meet you and I would say, Hey, you, how do you call these plants?

And if you said, Shebullet, like I do, we're brothers, everything is fine, we hug. If you said the way that the other tribe is saying it, now I try to chase you away or kill you or do something. And we use the term Shebullet now as a social science term. For a speech that is not really about the fact, but it's about identity. So when I show you the plant, do I care about the plant? No. I care about which tribe do you belong to.

And I think that if you, if you look at a lot of speech these days, you would find that it's not about, it's not about the facts. It's about a sense of identity. So, I, I think for example, I see a lot of kids in American university now saying from the river to the sea, and you've probably seen the statistics that many of them don't know which river and which sea. Is it question or, or what it means, it's fun to make fun of generation, whatever, but I don't think it's generation, whatever.

I think it's, it's just a part of the speech these days in other places to including my generation in which a lot of speech now is a speech about identity. And not a speech about facts. We do virtue signaling. There's lots of things about it. And, and by the way, it's very easy to look at our side of the political aisle and to say, Oh, we don't do it. It's the other side. But the reality it's, it's both sides, right? Both sides exaggerate. Both sides have identity.

I think gender issues, environmental issues. All of those things have a lot, a lot of those elements that are basically signaling and they're not about the truth. And then anyway, so there's a couple of, of, of social elements that we said ostracism, we said finding like minded people shibboleth, which makes things more aggressive and more extreme. And then the last component is, good old cognitive dissonance. Okay. And, and we use cognitive dissonance a lot, but sometimes we forget the basics.

So indulge me for a few minutes. So the original story with Festinger is a story about this woman who said that on a particular day, the earth will be destroyed, but aliens would come and they will save her and her followers. , and Festinger assumed that the earth would not be destroyed and he wondered what would happen to her followers. Now, think in simplistic terms about two types of followers. Die hard followers, all in, and on the fence followers.

The die hard followers sold their homes and said goodbye to their families, did everything. They're ready, they're with suitcases ready for the aliens. The on the fence followers didn't do anything. They didn't say goodbye, they didn't sell their home. They just showed up, they said, maybe it will happen, maybe not. Who would get more disappointed? That's it. And common sense would say the people who gave everything would be the most disappointed. They lost so much.

They said, why did we sell our homes? Why did we say goodbye to our families? Why did we convert everything to gold or whatever? But Festinger thought the opposite would happen. He thought that the diehard followers could not admit disappointment, that they would have what he called cognitive dissonance, which is the idea saying we invested everything we could in this woman. We trusted her fully. We sold our homes. We said goodbye. We did all of these things. And now nothing happened.

How do we reconcile this? Now we can't change what we've done. We can't say we didn't sell our homes or we didn't give up our property and so on. So what they would do is they would solve the cognitive dissonance by saying, Oh, she's amazing. Even more amazing than I thought. And that's actually what happened is that we are so unable to admit that we're wrong, that when things show up in, in a, in an opposite way from , what we act toward, we change our beliefs.

So , the on the fence followers left. But her diehard followers the next day were even more committed to her. They tried to recruit more people, raise more money, and so on. And the same thing is true for, the same thing is true for, for COVID, as it was more and more clear that COVID is basically over, that the, the ideas of, Hundreds of thousands of people with vaccines are going to be dead on the streets and all these people with heart attacks.

By the way, there were lots of COVID only dating websites because they thought that it, it hurt fertility so that you not want to, they still exist. Anyway, could people at the end of this say, well, we were wrong. Let's just go back. The answer is no. And actually the answer is no for two reasons. The first one is once like cognitive dissonance, once somebody has been invested so much effort and time into something, they can't just give up. They can't, Oh, it turns out I was wrong.

Not human, not human to ask that. So what they do, they say, Oh, we were really right. We were not wrong. We were really right. It's really the alumni in the globalist agenda, but guess what? What they're really after is oil. Now, you see what's happening in the Middle East? You think it, no, no, no. It's all the, the oil pipe from Russia and the globalists who are, so, so part of it is to say we were even more right than we thought. But the story is not covid.

The story is trying to control people with oil and, and but the other thing is, I use, I use the term misbelief, and for me misbelief has two components. It has the component of believing something that ain't so but it also has the component of truly adopting that as a belief. And that is now used as a lens from which to view the rest of the world. So, for example, you could say would you date somebody that believes the earth is flat?

And you can say, well, it's an innocent belief by believing the earth is flat. You don't change the earth. You just believe this or that. On the other hand, if you believe that COVID is a hoax that can change the people who are next to you. But so you might say, Oh, I don't care so much if, if I date somebody who believes the earth is flat, but again, so believing something that ain't so, but it's adopting it as a central tendency.

And the people who believe the earth is flat believe that NASA is lying to them and the US government is lying to them and that every government in the world is lying and every pilot knows it. And that every space program is a hoax. And, just think about the range of things that people don't believe. And now it's a lens from which to view the rest, the rest of the things. And this is why it doesn't end with one misbelief. It becomes a bigger issue.

So, so I want to end with talking about two big principles that we haven't mentioned so far. One of them is resilience and one of them is trust. So first of all, I want to say something about resilience. When we, we started talking about stress, why, why is stress so important? And, of course it would be great to reduce stress very hard because, stress exists and the world is AI comes along, right? There are reasons to create stress, but our standard antidote for stress is resilience, right?

And they're two, two Ways to think about resilience. The standard way of thinking about resilience is you go around life ups and downs, ups and downs, and then boom, there's a huge reduction. Something really bad happened. Injury, tragedy, something. And then resilience is do you bounce back? You bounce back above to where you were below where you were and how long it takes you to bounce back. So one way of thinking about resilience is to, is to characterize this part. Of the, the bouncing back.

But the other part of resilience is how do you walk around the world before something bad happened? And, and there's a, there's a concept called secure attachment. Imagine you have a kid, the kid is four years old. You take the kid to a playground and you say, kid, go to the swings. The kid goes to the swings. They come back 45 minutes later. You've been successful. You have a kid with secure attachment.

On the other hand, if you say, kid go to the swings, they go, but every 90 seconds they look behind their shoulder to see if they're still there. Not so successful. And resilience in that period before something bad happen is like secure attachment. Is how do we walk around in the world and do we walk around in the world believing that if something bad will happen, somebody will catch us. And for me, this is essential.

If you walk around in the world with a feeling of trust, feeling that, I have friends, I can take risks that's an amazing feeling. By the way, it's the feeling that we should all give our kids. I, I, I say as a, as a, as a metaphor, I recommend to people to be the venture capitalist for their kids. Think about what venture capitalists do. They say to a young entrepreneur, take a risk. You're taking a risk with my money. Feel free to take more risk. It's my money.

If, if it was the, the entrepreneur's money, they would be very afraid, right? But the venture capitalist says, look, I have lots of money. Take some of my money. Be risky. Go ahead and be risky. And I think that's what we want to tell our kids. We want to tell our kids, take risk, take risk. If something bad will happen, I'm here. Don't worry about it. But, but that's what we want. So, so I think we are at the, at an all time low of resilience.

And we're all time low of resilience for all kinds of reasons. One of them is income inequality. They showed it as, as income inequality increases we have less resilience. Why? Because even if a level of a neighborhood, If income inequality increases, you're less likely to ask for help from other people. Our knowledge of other people, our deep friendship has eroded. We know more people online, but these are not necessarily people who would bail us out if needed.

We spend more time with our nuclear family, but less time with our friends. All kinds of things are happening that our resilience is, is at an all time low, and that's an important antidote for stress. So I think we have all kinds of reasons for stress is increasing, but all kinds of things are happening. reduction in resilience that that make us less able to handle the increased stress. So, so, so that's, that's a kind of an important, I think, social, social issue to solve.

And of course, social media is connected to it, less face time, less time with other people and so on. But, but it's not just that there's lots of other things that are happening as well. And, and, and the good news is there's things we can all do to fix it a little bit for ourselves. Right. Just imagine I said, look, go ahead and for the, for the rest of 2024, invest in your resilience, what would it be like, you would find things to do, right, probably more Guinness with friends.

Having deeper discussions. Perhaps Aidan McCullen (2): Less Guiness with friends um, No, I think, I think, every time I've been to Ireland, I think that the time in the pub is very important and especially the people that I call friends in Ireland, alcohol is a social lubricant.

Like if you ask to what extent would people share deep, complex topics, So there's a limit, of course, but, but yeah, but I think, I think, I think this is anyway, I'm not just recommending getting drunk in the pub, saying invest in your own Aidan McCullen (2): We have to be careful about that. After your Jonathan Swift moment be Yes.

Aidan McCullen (2): I let I let people read the book to find out what that's about But the second big, big part is we said that, that misbelief is about a worldview. And it's a worldview in which trust is eroded. And if you think about it, it's really hard to imagine living in a world without trust. We trust so much. We trust that we put money in the bank. It will be there. Just think how crazy is that? We trust that when we go into an elevator, somebody has inspected that elevator.

We trust that somebody has washed the lettuce that we buy in the supermarket. Aidan McCullen (2): Their hands Wash their hands in, in, in restaurants. Like the amount of trust is just incredible. Think about it. We get into a car, we drive at a crazy speed that could kill us. And we trust that that car is built well enough. Planes, you name it. Like, every time you look at it and you say, how much do I trust it? Some, lots of people have done their job correctly.

And the moment trust is eroded, you don't trust the police to the same degree. And you don't trust, we don't trust the government to the same degree. And we don't trust the healthcare systems. Think about what happens when you're sick and you go to your doctor and you trust them. And think about what happens when you go to your doctor and you just don't trust. Being sick and scared.

is much, much worse than being sick and knowing that you're on the right medication and in three weeks from now, things will do better. If you don't trust very, very tough. Anyway I think that the other component of all of this is that we are living in a world in which trust is eroded and the reality is that as people adopt this perspective of misbelief and they lose trust, everybody loses.

Think about elections in the U. S., there is no question that lots of, lots of Republicans have lost trust in the American elections. Where are we going in the next election? Are we starting from zero? Or are we starting from when we left the last election? I think we started from where we left the last election. Not so good, not so good.

So, so we really need to think about the the little details, how we redesign social networks, how we don't do ostracism, how we get people not to either watch NBC or Fox News and not be aware of other people, but we also have to think about some big social topics. We have to think about resilience. We have to think about trust. We have to think about misinformation and maybe, maybe as a one final, final thought I love freedom of speech. I think it's a tremendously important right.

But I think that when freedom of speech was invented as a principle We did not necessarily understand the downward consequences that could happen. Some of the costs, I don't think we thought about bullying, for example, we did not think that kids could not see a reason to live being so hated by other people. I don't think we understood political polarization. I don't think we understood corrosive news.

So I think there's lots of concepts that in this new technological world We really have to re examine, not sure what the answer is, but I think we have to understand that these topics are some of the most important topics that we need to deal with, and we have to elevate them, think about them, and deal with them. Aidan McCullen (2): Beautiful Dan, nothing to add to that I had loads and loads more questions because we.

We probably got through the spine of the book if we're lucky and one of the things that i absolutely love in the book is that. There's lots of little hopefully helpful sections to inspire your own thinking for example how to live in ambiguity.

Think about it you've done it before so you can do it again and to build that as a muscle for both yourself and for children and you mentioned about where the world is going with jobs etcetera i think the thing we need to build is the muscle to reinvent ourselves and know that we can do that we don't have to overly identify with a job. Dan, before i close where is the best place to find you for people who want to reach out find out more about your work your books etc. My website online www.

DanAriely.com com, and I'll only also mention that I posted eight episodes of a podcast. Where I went to talk to people who suffered tremendous injuries and I tried to find out , how did they find happiness? So it's also on my website. It's only eight episodes. But if you're thinking about trying to figure out your own resilience, have a look at that. It might, might be interesting.

Aidan McCullen (2): Author of misbelief what makes rational people believe irrational things Dan Ariely, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Aidan McCullen (2): nice one brother.