Think Bigger and Innovate w/ Sheena S. Iyengar - podcast episode cover

Think Bigger and Innovate w/ Sheena S. Iyengar

Mar 07, 202443 min
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

This week Scott is joined by Columbia business professor Dr. Shena Lyengar on how we make choices and innovate. Scott and Sheena discuss the essential tools of becoming a good chooser, the neuroscience of creativity and innovation, and how outsiders can come into a field and become an expert in it. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Look, I'm gonna fuck up at least one or two things. Let's just take that as a given. A balanced life includes fucking up. There should always be something fucked up. In fact, if there isn't something fucked up, you're probably leaving value on the table. You just want to make sure that whatever's fucked up keeps moving. It's something different.

Speaker 2

Today, we welcome Sheena Iyngar to the show. Doctor Youngar is in a clean professor of business in the Management Department at Columbia Business School and a world expert on the science of how we make choices and how we innovate. I've been wanting to chat with doctor Jngar for a while now, since we have so many overlapping areas of interest, including our mutual interest in the science of creativity. I really admire doctor Yengar as a blind Indian American woman

in academia. She intuitively used her own approach of thinking bigger to find her calling and inspire others to do the same. In this episode, we discussed the essential tools for innovation and how to maximize potential. We also discuss how non experts and outzeiders can learn just enough about a field to innovate in it, and we discuss some intriguing ideas such as the notion of the quote strategic copier. So, without further ado, I bring you one of Colombia's most

popular professors, doctor Sheena i Angar Shina. Welcome to the Psychology Podcast.

Speaker 1

Thank you, it's good to be here.

Speaker 2

Thank you so much for coming. Your legend a legend in the field, and i've esteem professor in the Business School at Columbia. Can you, and your own words, tell our audience a bit about your main research focus.

Speaker 1

I have spent my entire career studying the answer to one big question, how do we get the most from choice? We're people that love choice, that love freedom. We all know what the power are we supposed to give us right, a better life, better everything, and yet we all struggle and how do we how do we get the most from it? And so I've looked at it through two lengths. One is how do we become better picker and finders? And that was my first book, The Art of Choosing.

And then after that I developed my second book, which is really based on a methodology I created called Think Bigger, which is designed to help you do two things. First, how do you become a better picker and finder? And second, how do you create meaningful choices when there's no known solution to the problem at hand.

Speaker 2

Yeah, divergent thinking, you know. I love how you integrate these two topics together, choice and creativity. And creativity, as you know, is a big area of research of mind and interest of mine. So that's wonderful. I really enjoyed your new book, Think Bigger. I want to just double click for a second on the choice aspect you know, your first book. I'm a huge I'm a humanistic psychologist.

A lot of the humanistic psychologists, like Abraham Abraham Maslow talked a lot, a lot about the importance of choosing wisely. He often said, we need to, we need to, we need to help people become good choosers. And what he was referring to was choosing growth, you know, choosing that

growth option in our lives. Do you think people know deep down fundamentally whether or not they're making a choice that's good for their organism or is not good for their organism from an evolutionary point of view.

Speaker 1

See, I think they have an opinion. Well, okay, let's back up. I think that's a few things going on. I think many people or almost everyone will, at some point in their life, if not at multiple points in their life, discover they don't know what they want, they don't know what to choose, and they are genuinely buffuddled by what to do. Then you have the times when you feel like you ought to choose X, but you

don't really know if it's going to work out. Then there's other times when, of course you know that whatever you're doing is really not a good idea, but somehow you can't help yourself, but you still do it, like eating cake and not exercising all that other stuff.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so there's two. Do you separate these things out from each other?

Speaker 1

I would separate the map?

Speaker 2

Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, that's good.

Speaker 1

I do think that they are separate categories.

Speaker 2

You know, yeah, I definitely agree. Well, how can people become good better? How can people become better choosers? That's a big topic. You wrote a whole book about it. But is there any specific tangible advice you can just give our audience before we get into the creativity.

Speaker 1

I would say the single best piece of advice is to be choosy about choosing, particularly in this day and age. You have to. You're not going to be able to be good at choosing everything. You shouldn't try to optimize on everything. You really just have to figure out on a regular basis, what's the most important thing that you need to make a choice on, because choice is always effortful to choose well is effortful?

Speaker 2

Yeah, you're bringing to mind the maximizers versus satisfacers distinction.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so I'm not somebody who says, don't maximize. I'm somebody who says, figure out, what are the things you want to maximize on? Nice?

Speaker 2

Nice? Can we ever maximize anything?

Speaker 1

Yeah? Fully? Okay, Okay, well I think that's a subjective thing. But yeah, you know, I I think the best choice I ever made was the choice to study choice, and I honestly don't think there was a better choice for me. No, you might argue and a Nosina, you could have been excellent at a bazillion other things, and so maybe you could say I didn't really maximize, but I got what everything I wanted from it.

Speaker 2

I feel the same way about psychology. Yeah, No, I love that. Yeah, I mean there's just so many it could be overwhelming. When you look at your Instagram feed and ecy post after posts saying life is short, maximize your day, you know, don't waste your life. You know, it feels like you feel like a lot of pressure.

Speaker 1

And it's a lot of pressure, and they're trying to tell you to do so many things, like I'm literally supposed to wake up every morning, love myself, exercise, you have to take care of my body, pay attention to what I'm eating, meditate, uh, you know, buy things that I love, only do things that I love and am passionate about. Make sure I socialize, make sure I you know, smell the flowers. And on top of that, I'm supposed

to develop core competencies. It's something. Now, how am I going to have time for all of that?

Speaker 2

It's overwhelming.

Speaker 1

So that's why I say, look, I'm going to fuck up at least one or two things. Let's just take that as a given. A balanced life includes fucking up. There should always be something fucked up. In fact, if it's there isn't something fucked up, you're probably leaving value on the table. You just want to make sure that whatever's fucked up keeps moving. It's something different.

Speaker 2

So let's let's like connect some dots here with the creativity work. I love this new book, Think Bigger the Innovation method. What does it mean to think Bigger? Let's start there, Let's uh, how do you conceptualize that?

Speaker 1

So it is literally based on neuroscience. It's how do I think beyond the options put before me and create something that's a meaningful option to solve for a problem for which there isn't currently a solution. That's essentially what I think Bigger is striving to do. And it's a methodology. You know, we think that for the most part throughout history we've had this view, and you know, philosophers and religious figures certainly helped create this assumption, which is the

idea that you know, ideas come to us almost like magic. Right. You're maybe you're sitting under a tree and some through divine intervention, something comes to you, or you climb a mountain and at the top divine intervention or God comes down to you and speaks to you. And so we have this view that it just happens, right, that it's not really in your control. If you're going to get a great idea, you know, maybe I can put myself in certain places, maybe I can expose myself to some stuff,

but it's not something that's truly in my control. And think Bigger really debunks that. It really says, no, there actually is a very structured way in which you can go about creating an idea. Go on, okay, okay, Well so basically the most I mean it is a you know, structured process that we can take people through. But its simplest form, what it's saying to you is, when you have a problem, you ask yourself first what exactly is that problem? Define it in concrete terms, it's how do

I do X? Whatever X is? Right? And then it's saying, okay, well, how has this problem been solved before? Right? And first you obviously look at whatever is the available choice set, and let's say that's dissatisfactory. And then you say, well, how have analogous problems been solved in totally other domains or spaces or industries. And now you say, okay, well, given the way they solved it, does it give me some insights on what I could combine together to create

a solution for me? At its core, that's all thing Bigger is.

Speaker 2

I love it.

Speaker 1

I'm sure we come up with a set of six steps of structured process, but at its core, that's all it is. It's a structured way of thinking about what's my problem? And then how am I going to search for pieces of a solution that can be combined together to give me an answer, to give me a new choice.

Speaker 2

We're going to go and and talk about some of the spefic components of that in a second. Thank you for that higher level overview. I know you have a whole chapter on the creative brain. That's a topic very near and dear to my heart as well. What do you see as the most relevant findings from the latest neuroscience of creativity?

Speaker 1

I would say Eric Kendell's work on how we form thoughts is the most relevant. That essentially everything comes from learning and memory. So if you think of your brain as a giant Excel spreadsheet or a library system, you're essentially encoding lots and lots of information bits, and you're constantly encoding them and putting them in different shelves of

your mind. And you know, obviously you're also organizing it and reorganizing it in different ways, so that anytime I ask you a question, you're pulling different information bits from different shelves and making new combinations that's essentially what you're

doing whenever you're engaging in an act of creativity. Now, of course, when I say an act of creativity, I think of it as something we're doing all the time, So I'm not just focusing on the stuff we bucket as creativity, like that piece of art or that that song or that new piece of technology. Every sentence you utter is an exercise in creativity.

Speaker 2

Yeah, because some people, you know, some of my students are like, oh, I'm not creative? You know, am I a creative person?

Speaker 1

Everybody's creative. I mean, unless you're having saying the same sentence all day long, you're creative enough.

Speaker 2

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Role may in the courage to create, just to find creativity is the capacity to bring into being something that did not exist before. It's just that.

Speaker 1

Most of what we create, all of us, what we create on a daily basis is you know, banal or you know, just maybe it sucks. But that doesn't mean we're not creating. We're all create And we think that the ones who create the super amazing things that we all talk about, whether it was Einstein or Steve Jobs, we think that they have somehow had a special brain,

and that's I don't think that's true. I think there's just a process that can be used by anybody to come up with any sort of interesting solution if they're willing to put in the work.

Speaker 2

Yeah, let's talk about some of that process. You have, the kind of this first stage is finding the problem in the first place and breaking it down. And that seems to be very linked to your prior book, you know, in Choice. You know, but how do you find the problem that's right for you to solve out of all the problems that exist in this world?

Speaker 1

So, as Einstein once said, if I had an hour to save the planet, I would spend the first fifty five minutes thinking about the problem, in the last five minutes thinking about the solution. And the way I interpret what he's saying is that, you know, any time I have a problem, you know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? What am I going to major in in college? You know? How am I going to motivate myself? How am I going to make myself happy? How am I going to save my company?

You know, take a bazillion problems that we regularly present ourselves. You take that problem and you have to be willing to really engage in the process of framing and reframing that problem until it's concrete and solvable and one where you know, is something you want to solve. Yeah, and that makes sense for you to solve. So many times we just pick up problems because you know, we should solve it or it sounds good, but it's actually pretty vague.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that's for sure. Well, there are a lot of problems that that humans don't know are problems. You know, some people are really good at at creating problems. That's true, and their equip put it that way before. What is the benefit of thinking about it in terms of sub problems, you know, and taking each problem apart, and it's to its poll.

Speaker 1

Because most of the time, because we think about it as a big problem and we don't break it down, that's when it just is too overwhelming. And it's only when you break it down. So I have so maybe I should pick an example that would that make it easier to talk about.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

So one of my favorite examples is, well, let's take like Netflix. Everybody loves watching TV, so in the nineteen nineties, most people might forget about this now, but in the nineteen nineties, if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you went to your local blockbuster and you reached a movie. Well, and if you were late in bringing the movie back,

you paid a late fee. And so a guy named Reed Hastings was like late in returning Apollo thirteen and was jacking up his late fees and got really irritated because he was going to get yelled at by his wife about this. And so what's the problem? He ultimately decides for himself. He goes, well, how do we create home entertainment that's pleasant? Right? And so what was unpleasant for him? He doesn't want to raise his bot to go to the local blockbuster to return the movie. He

doesn't like this whole late fee thing. So you know, is there a different financial law? So once and also he wants a larger collection of movies and so what does he do he? So those are so notice how we broke down the problem, like how do we make it pleasant? Well, how do I make it so that I don't have to lift goat leave my couch? How do I make it so that I can just pay and not have to worry about late fees? Because that's

also annoying and unpleasant. And you know, how do I make sure I have a really nice selection of movies and it's not so dependent on whatever that local shop happens to have. And so now he looks at solutions for each of those. He says, well, how do I get something without getting off my couch. Well, there was this new thing that was going on back in the nineties called Amazon, which was selling just books. Well, if you could order books online, could you order a movie

online and it would come to you in the mail? Right? And turns out, well, yeah, you could get a DVD in the mail and it would come intact. H I don't want to I don't want to pay late fees because they were a different financial model that would still allow us to make money. Well, back then, your membership was becoming really popular. And what was your membership? You paid a flat fee every month and you could use it as much or as little as you want. What

about that for movies? Okay, Now, how do I make sure the inventory is really big? Well, let's go back to Amazon. If I put it online, you can just order it in the mail. Then I could create my warehouses where I would store the movies in places that are not as expensive. And by the way, we often forget that that's actually how Netflix began.

Speaker 2

Wow Yeah, I love following him on Twitter. He talks about his early business model and how long it took them before it finally took off. As well, they weren't an instant success. H cool, great example, great example of Netflix. So what how does this relate to the idea of triangulating desire?

Speaker 1

So you take your problem, you break it down, and usually I have people break it down to no more than five main challenges. If you have a lot of challenges for different problems, of course, but I want you to pick your no more than five big priorities. If you have more than five big priorities, then that's an opportunity for you to take the problem you're trying to

solve and make it less big. So then before you try to solve it, I have you identify, you know, if you were to solve this problem, how should the ideal solution feel like? That should look like, what should it be, what it must needs? Must it accommodate? Now? What should it feel like? And what should it feel like? Not just to the customer, we often either tell you'd only pay attention to what the entrepreneur wants or what the customer wants. Well, have you look at it from

three perspectives? What does the entrepreneur want it to feel like? What is the what would the customer want it to feel like? And what would other stakeholders, whether they be your shareholders, whether they be the government regulators, I mean,

what would their feelings be like? And so what you're doing is you're coming up with these feelings, these most important adjectives before you go into generating a solution, because this is going to be your criteria for judgment, because you could potentially generate a lot of different solutions to your problem. And then how are you going to make sure that you choose one that actually makes sense? You

don't want to just vote. If you vote, then it just becomes a popularity context contest and they can actually be biased in what they choose. So you want to have that selection criteria set beforehand.

Speaker 2

How does that relate to the third eye test? Can you use the third eye test to help you with that?

Speaker 1

What happens is you use what we call the big picture scoring is what we use for the triangulation of desires. So let's imagine after you go through the think Bigger process, you've now generated our twenty twenty five thirty different solutions. You use your big picture scoring to rank thumb and so now you know, let's say you're top five, and now you pick let's say your top one or two or three, not more than three, and now you practice

the third eye. The third eye is a special way of collecting feedback on your idea that enables you to forecast how sticky that idea is likely to be. So it's a cheap way to do it long before you ever prototype.

Speaker 2

Where did you come up with the idea? Like, how did that come about?

Speaker 1

The idea of what for third eye?

Speaker 2

Eye test?

Speaker 1

So that's a great question.

Speaker 2

Question.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's funny, and nobody ever asked me that. So, as a blind person, one of the things that I've always done, which sometimes drives people nuts, but for me was very intuitive and I just created it because it was my own way of dealing with biases. Is I discovered very early on as a blind person, if I ask somebody, hey, what do you think of this outfit? One person's gonna say, oh my god, I love it. The other person's gonna whisper in my ear. You know, look,

you can count on me. I'm always going to tell you the truth. But I really think this looks awful. And what you would discover is that getting asking people if they like something was really unhelpful. It was unoverwhelming, It was confusing to people would have totally different opinions. And so I began to realize that that was the wrong question and that the better question to ask people wasn't do you like this? The better question was to ask what does this look like? What you know? When

I wear this, what image comes to mind? Or what image am I presenting? What does it make you think of? And then you know, one person says, oh, you look really glamorous, or another person says, oh you look so warm, another person says, oh, it looks so reserved. But what I'm getting is what is the consensus in terms of people's perception. Yeah, that now gives me the tools to understand, you know what, whether I want to edit, how do I want to edit? What part of it needs to

be edited? That was actually far more useful. So it actually started just as a way for me to get information on visuals that were, you know, tended to be perceived as subjective, and it became a method that I created, and then I realized that actually there was a lot of science that was consistent with what I was doing, because it turns out that if you ask, if you there's a wonderful study done by Duncan Watts where they take songs and they present them to young people and

they find and they put them in eight different worlds. Two worlds you just hear a bunch of songs and you give your ratings independently, and in the other six worlds, you hear a song, but you also see how everybody else rated it before you got there. And it turned out that in those crowd situations, how a song was going to be perceived was all over the map. It was really uninformative. So and you got a little more

consistency in the independent worlds. But you know, that's one of my favorite examples of how asking people do you like or dislike? Is really not informative to know if it's a good thing, you really want to know first and foremost, how do people see it? What are they seeing? Is it even even what they're seeing in line with what I want them to see? Well, I might think in my mind, what the outfit I just created is warm and amazing, and yet other people see it as ow.

Speaker 2

She's so cash, Yeah, brilliant. I love how you like you And only you could have come up with something like that based on your own personal experiences. You're you're a fascinating person. You're you're you're a blind Indian American woman, one a top most popular professors at Columbia University. And you know you have a creator. You're you're a creative being, and that that informed your creative doing. And we've been remiss not to not to make that linkage. So I'm glad I asked the question.

Speaker 1

I asked, Oh, well, thank you, well, thank.

Speaker 2

You for answering it. Now were you were you born blind?

Speaker 1

I was born with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, so I was born legally blind and then I lost the rest of my vision while I was young.

Speaker 2

Okay, okay, So you've had to develop other pathways and ways of of of of perceiving the world.

Speaker 1

And I would say that was part of what led me to study choice and led me to create Think Bigger because as someone growing up blind, the three words I hated most where It's not possible.

Speaker 2

Yes, I hate that, hate that too.

Speaker 1

And I would hear that too much, so I would always rebel.

Speaker 2

Yo, homegirl, I get it. I was in special education as a kid and uh and always was told I couldn't do things, and even though I couldn't go to college and just you know, being able to prove people wrong. There's a professor at the University Pennsylvania who studies the underdog motivation and I will always love that research wonderful. You know, in the in your book you talk about this, this idea of the singular creative genius. Can you can

you talk a little about what where? What's the research show on that?

Speaker 1

Is that?

Speaker 2

Is that a thing? Is that true? And also what is a strategic copier?

Speaker 1

So we often think of like Einstein as a great genius, and we think he must have had a special brain. But in fact, you know, when he died, there was some people that stole his brain, preserved it and compared his brain against other people's brain. And we've never been able to uncover any you know, real evidence that it was any different from anybody else's brain. But what we do know is that he spent quite a bit of

time as a patent officer. And when he was a patent officer and burned, he reviewed about thousands of different patents, and he even developed some patents like a patent for a typewriter, a refrigerator, a camera, a really funky blouse that I gather nobody would ever wear. But what he's doing is he's collecting lots and lots of information bits which are being added to the collection that's going into his shelves of his mind, like we were talking about before.

And so if you think about what he ultimately does in creating the law of relativity, if he's just got more pieces to work with to be able to combine. He himself described that time as a patent officer as the time in which he hatched his most beautiful ideas. So that brings me to your second question, which is a strategic copier. So, as T. S. Eliot once said,

immature poets imitate and mature poets steal. And I actually, you know, sometimes people laugh at that quote because it's meant to be funny, but it's also quite profound as well, right that in fact, it's when you're able to steal a core concept from something like read Hastings did he stole the core concept from Planet Fitness and said, well, can I adapt it and use it for renting movies? That's strategic copying and it's not like a it's not

like I P violation. I'm not talking about doing something illegal, but it is understanding how to you know, essentially, take what you got from somewhere else and figure out how to adapt and edit edit it in a way that works in your context.

Speaker 2

Well, what, so, what do you what do you make of the notion of talent? Then certainly there there's something that that the word talent means. What do you think Einstein's talent was? Then?

Speaker 1

So this is going to perhaps be controversial for me to say, but I think that to the extent that you become brilliant, that X or Y or Z has to do with how much how many information bits you put in your brain and how much time you spent really understanding how to manipulate those information bits in as

many different ways as you could. Now you could argue, well, but you know, some people are musicians and some people are mathematicians, and I would say yes, but I don't think I think which one you choose to be has more to do with your preferences than any innate skill. You have a preference, and maybe that preference. They say personality matters, and it probably does to some extent, But I also think exposure matters when you're young. I don't

know how you disentangle those two. But let's just say you have some preferences, and now those preferences drive you know where you're going to invest more energy collecting more information bits?

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean I think that where that talent may lie then, is your your inclination towards a certain symbol system or a certain mode of information processing that you're You're intrinsically motivated and enjoy manipulating and learning and synthesizing.

Speaker 1

Maybe sure, like you know, you might think I'm a really smart person, right, you and I? But if you ask me to write a song, make a drawing a.

Speaker 2

Bepathetic fair enough? This being smart zooming out to all the sort of various aspects of your entire life. What is the importance of choice for and really becoming a good chooser for? How How wide does this go? Does it cover relationships? Does it cover your careers, your identities? You know, what's the zoomed out version of this? Look like.

Speaker 1

I mean, choice is the only tool we have as humans that enables us to go from who we are today to whom we want to be tomorrow. Right, So that's true across the board. Relationships. You know, you can choose everything from the little things like what you wear, what you eat, so the big things, what career you undertake, whom you marry, how you live, how you die. So it's certainly the thing that you're doing consciously and subconsciously, you know, every single minute of your life. But do

I think you should obsess over every choice? No, I think that's suboptimal. Do I think you should pay more attention to identifying what are the choices that are really important that will really affect your life? Yes? I think you want to think about, you know, what are the things that are most important. So when you said relationships, you know, like one of the really important choices you're going to make in life is who you're gonna marry, let's say, or spend a lot of time with. It

doesn't have to even be marriage. Right now, if you were to obsess over every little thing that would be good for you, if that person did or didn't do, if you'd be paralyzed. But you do need to be able to say, look, what are the things that are let's say the three to five most important things, and to think thoughtfully about that because you want to be able to get those things and be able to be clear right about it. You're never going to be able

to optimize across twenty thirty things. You could optimize across three, maybe five. Same thing is true for your career.

Speaker 2

Well, let me I want to follow up for a second on you saying that even though you're super smart, there are certain demeans that if you entered them, you wouldn't be too good at. I want to link that to this very interesting section of your book where you talk about how non experts and outsiders can orange just enough about a field to create an innovation for it. It's possible that your lack of expertise in those other fields could actually make you innovate in them in some way.

I'm not counting you out in music and art, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1

Sure it can help it. Yes, you know exactly what you're looking for and then can understand how to manipulate it. Right. So, for example, I am not somebody I'm terrible of knowing even musicians, right, But I could understand the story of Paul McCartney and how he created the song yesterday, and that that was an important story because it showed you something really important about the third eye. I learn things from art and going on art gallery tours even though

I am blind because in the descriptions, because I'm not. Yeah, I thinking about, oh, most art fits in this tradition, which builds on glovety blood tradition, which build one blowdy blood tradition. No, as a blind person and an somebody who stood his innovation. When I look at art, I'm seeing the pieces that are coming together and how this is going to affect the future in domains outside of art.

So that's why I'm able to talk about things like how Picasso came up with his idea or what's the difference between why Brock versus Picasso became more influential because I'm able to look at it through a different lens.

Speaker 2

Yeah, that can be yea very valuable, But I'm.

Speaker 1

By no means an art expert or a music expert.

Speaker 2

Yeah, well yeah, but your your point is that non experts can still contribute to a field. So I'm not kinding you out. Thank you, You're welcome. I want to Anthonay's interview talking about one of my favorite scientific papers ever published which you and you are a co author on it. It's called positive more than unbiased self perceptions

increased subjective authenticity. I'm really interested in this topic of authenticity and the idea that I've called it the authenticity bias, where we tend to think the real me is really the positive signs of ourselves. Can you unpack a little bit about what that research study found and some of the implications of it.

Speaker 1

So this is a study actually that my PhD student who's now faculty at Berkeley, Erica Bailey. That's her main topic. She's passionate about authenticity and we've find in lots of studies both included in that paper, and then there's another paper right now under review. Essentially, when we do things that you might say are fake, you know, like actually, we currently have a study under review where we look at people that do different cosmetic procedures, you know, like

botox fillers, et cetera. It turns out that even though they're doing this thing which we might say is you know, artificial, they the people who do it actually afterwards feel more authentic, and they feel more authentic because it is enabling them to be more in line with what they perceive to be. They're more unvarnished best self, ideal self before it got tainted,

for example. And so essentially, we have a number of studies that show that when when we are able to identify or be seen in the ways that bring out our better qualities, you know, that's when we feel most authentic. One of my favorite quotes is from Dolly Parton where she says, you know, everything about me might be fake, but I'm really real.

Speaker 2

Well that you just quote a dollar part is No, that's wonderful. This research, I mean, this is a really rich series of studies and we can't get in all the findings, but one of the findings really interesting is that this positivity bias that you're describing does not extend to other rated authenticity.

Speaker 1

That's right.

Speaker 2

Can you talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 1

Well, when when we have positive things about ourselves, we see ourselves as that means we're authentic, but we don't, you know, when it's other people who are doing things that are positive, we don't see them as being We don't give them the same brownie points of authenticity.

Speaker 2

M what does that make us? Does that make us hypocrites?

Speaker 1

Well?

Speaker 2

What does that mean about humans? What does that mean about humans?

Speaker 1

I mean, I think we're a bit suspicious, right if somebody else seems too good, then we you know, don't always know if there we can trust it. Also, the other thing that's very interesting is even when we are being authentic and know that we're not faking it, even though we see ourselves as authentic, that doesn't mean that others will see us as authentic, which we have a hard time wrapping our heads around because we believe that since we're being authentic, obviously it'll be self evident to

other people. But it's actually not so. I think what I take away is that authenticity is a social construction. We think of authenticity as being purely self generated and self defined, but it's actually not true. To the extent. That you're authentic depends on both your perception of you and my perception of you, and it's only when there's alignment between those two perceptions that you're authentic.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so the whole notion of the real me is a social construction as well. Then there's no real me. Yeah.

Speaker 1

Yeah, yeah, it's just like the third eye test. There's no real idea that exists until it exists in a way that both you and I understand what it is.

Speaker 2

If the tree is not perceived in the forest, doesn't exist, it's interesting question. Yeah. So the takeaway from that paper said, taking together these findings suggest that being quote unreal through positive self illusions can paradoxically make one feel more real. I just find that I find that that research so fascinating and kudos, big kudos to her. Oh, thank you and to you and your student on that really terrific work. Shina, thank you so much for your time today and being

on my podcast. And I hope our listeners have learned how to make better choice is be more creative and construct a version of their own self perceived authenticity that makes them happier in life. So thank you, Shea, thank you, Take care you too.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file