Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Incompetent People Don’t Know They Suck and Other Brain Biases with David Dunning

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Experimental social psychologist, former Cornell University professor and current professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, David Dunning, joins Adam this week to discuss our brain's incredible power to be unaware of being wrong, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and why the first rule of "Dunning-Kruger Club" is you don't know you're in the "Dunning-Kruger Club"! This episode is brought to you by Dashlane (www.dashlane.com/factually), Bombas (www.bombas.com/factually), and No Such Thing as a Fish Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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and I'd like to start with a personal story today. Back in the mid-aughts, are we calling them the aughts really? Okay, fine. Back in the aughts, me and my best friends were in a sketch comedy group called Old English. We were very tight-knit. We spent all day, every day together making comedy. But we were also in our 20s, so our emotional relationships could be pretty complex. But we also had a habit of doing grand gestures for each other to let each other know that we cared. You know, for instance, one year, all of us threw one of the guys a surprise party just because he was depressed after a breakup. Oh, camaraderie, you know, so sweet.

So at one point during that period, I was kind of having a rough time of it, like you do in your 20s, you know, feeling depressed and lonely. And it was actually my birthday week and I hadn't made plans yet. So we're in our studio working. Two of the guys, Dave and Caleb, are giving each other haircuts. I'm not sure why. That's not really part of the story, just a detail I remember. They were giving each other haircuts. I'm elsewhere in the room, you know, 20 feet away working. And I overhear them say to each other, I hear Dave say, hey, so what are you doing this weekend? To which Caleb replies, oh, I think I'll go do this and that. And then I'll go to the party later. And I guess they didn't think I could hear them because when I said, oh, what party? Everyone's face suddenly fell. There was like this long pause. And Dave slowly turned to me and said,

oh, yeah, man, we're having a late Christmas party this weekend. I forgot to tell you about it. You should come. Now, I play this cool, but my mind is whirling because, look, it's March, right? There's no such thing as a late Christmas party. What is that? And while I can't be sure, it seems a lot more likely that what I accidentally heard them talk about was a surprise party for me, right? I mean, they've done it before and it's my birthday,

but you know, I don't let on any of those suspicions. I told Dave, sure, I can make it. And he looked frankly relieved that I bought it. And we went on with our days. Now my suspicion was confirmed when the day of the party approached because my friend Martha, who is not particularly close with any of those people, she called me up and said, hey, Adam, I'm going to Dave's late Christmas party on Friday. Why don't I come to your place first and then we can walk over together? I was like, that's it. That confirms it because that is what you do when you throw someone a surprise party, right? You send one person on ahead to meet them and escort them to the party so that they can text ahead and let everyone know when the surprisee is coming. And Martha didn't even live in my neighborhood, so it made no sense for her to want to come to my place first.

So at that moment, I knew this is what's going on, right? So the day arrives. Martha comes over. We hang out for a few. We head to the party. And as we're making the trip, we're walking to Dave's apartment. My heart is in my stomach because here's the problem. I've always wanted my friends to throw me a surprise party. What a beautiful way to show love and appreciation, you know, for me as a friend. But the problem is

by figuring it out and realizing that the party was going to be thrown, I have ruined the surprise. And now I won't get to experience that wonderful moment of love and friendship that they've created for me. And not only that, in order to not let them down, I now have to pretend to be surprised in order to keep up the ruse, right? Like, this is some intense acting I have to do in a second. So we're climbing the steps to Dave's apartment. I'm like practicing my surprise faces. Am I going

to go like, oh, we're like, oh my God, I couldn't believe, oh my God, here's the bed. Like, what am I going to say, right? We get to the top of the stairs. We open the door. Inside the room, I see in front of me, all of my friends arranged before me in a late Christmas party. There was a treat, there was mistletoe, there were presents. And that turned out to be the most challenging acting role of my entire life because in that moment, I had to look not surprised when in fact, I was very surprised to be not surprised. Like I was like, oh, hey, a party that isn't all about me. Oh yeah, that's exactly what I expected. Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't wear a Christmas sweater. This was without a doubt, one of the times I have been wrongest in my entire life. I in fact,

didn't tell anybody this story for 10 years because I was so humiliated about what a ridiculous narcissistic mistake I had made. But here's the thing. I now know that I wasn't wrong because I was super, super dumb. I was wrong because my brain was way, way, way too smart and pieced together an explanation of something that didn't actually happen. See, the human brain is incredibly powerful. Each of our foldy gray noggin lumps contains 100 billion neurons,

each of which makes 100 trillion connections. And there's a huge amount of info popping around in there, about 1.5 billion bits by one estimate. And by age 60, the average English speaker knows the equivalent of 48,000 words. And we've got an incredibly freaky visual memory too. A study found that people could recall 97% of over 600 photos they've seen, which is a gift or a curse, depending on which photos you're talking about. But what is really bonkers about our brainpower

is its flexibility and our ability to find patterns and seek explanations in the noise and chaos of existence. With just a couple of facts, we are able to whip up elaborate narratives to explain to ourselves what just happened to us. The problem is, our brains are so good at doing this that they'll create those narratives even when they don't exist. For instance, given a hypothetical on just about anything, we can come to equally plausible conclusions. On a logical reasoning test, for example, people showed equal ability in explaining the rightness of four different solutions, even though only one of them was actually

correct. Or if you ask people why city-born kids make better soldiers than rural ones, they'll give you just as good an answer for either one of those options, even though only one of them can be correct, right? In other words, our brains are so powerful that our own intelligence can be our undoing by spinning a narrative that is incredibly plausible and compelling, even though it's wrong, which is exactly what happened to me in the case of the surprise party that wasn't. And this is not at all uncommon. Our brains, these incredibly powerful, evolutionarily designed engines of deduction and inference, are also subject to countless biases that lead us into error, not because we're so dumb, but because we're so smart. So to talk to

us about that more, about how and why we get things wrong because of our brain's incredible power, our guest today is David Dunning. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, and he is an expert on human misbelief. Please welcome to the show, David Dunning. David, thank you so much for being on the show. My pleasure. So you study and research all sorts of different ways that our minds deceive ourselves or the ways that our brains are so smart, they lead us to incorrect conclusions.

But I want to start by talking about you are obviously most famous for, you're the only person I've ever met who has your own effects. You have an effect named after you, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Folks listening might have heard of it. Can you fill us in on what it is for those who haven't? Yes, the Dunning-Kruger effect actually is a family of effects, but the most famous one is the idea that the incompetent aren't in a position to know that they're incompetent. And it's not that they don't know that they're incompetent. They can't know that they're incompetent. They simply lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And

so often they think they're doing just fine on whatever task you're giving them or whatever job they're doing, when in fact they're doing quite poorly. And so that is the famous public Dunning-Kruger effect. So let's talk about an example of this. I can sort of imagine one from my own life of your uncle who thinks that he knows how to play the guitar, but you're listening, you're like, I can't, why does this person realize that they're terrible when they're playing? I feel like I can detect it, but they cannot.

It's that sort of asymmetry, right? It's that asymmetry. That is, we can often see the Dunning-Kruger effect in others. The problem is being able to see it in yourself. That's the trick, to know when we switch roles and become that person. And it comes in in a lot of different areas in life. I mean, it's obviously the person who thinks they can tell really funny jokes and know those jokes are not funny. Or it's the medical intern who thinks they know how to do this medical procedure. In fact, they know this medical procedure so well they can teach to other

people. When their instructors say, no, you still need to be supervised. You are not doing this procedure right. And so there's just a lot of different areas where, well, you need expertise, be able to judge expertise, as well as come up with the right answer. And whenever you're in that situation, you're not in a situation to recognize when you lack expertise. Wait, so is that Dr. One? Is that a real example?

That sounds like the way you phrased it? That's actually from the research? Oh, that's one of my favorite examples. I mean, because it clearly shows the effect. But yeah, that's from a study that was done in a teaching hospital down in Sydney, Australia. Well, that's, I mean, the example right before that is someone tells a joke and knows it's not funny. Oh, sure. That's okay. That's a fun thing to think about. But when it comes to doctors operating on us, that's upsetting to think that a doctor could be subject to that effect, to be doing a bad job and to not be able to tell that they're doing a bad job. That's very bad. I think there are circumstances in which, yes, it is very bad. And one thing to remember is that think about people who are starting businesses. It turns out that over 80% of businesses fail within five years. I don't think people go into business thinking,

great, I'm going to do this for five years and then I'm going to fail. So there is a cost associated with not knowing what you don't know. And is there any way out of it? Like you said, not only do we not know how bad our own skill might be, but we can't know. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah. Basically, if you don't know what you don't know, there's no reason to suspect that you're going to be able to see it. It's just simply going to remain invisible to you. That is, left to your own devices, you're simply not going

to be in a position to realize that you need advice. If you recognize that you needed advice, you'd already be asking for the advice. So, by definition, you really don't know that you're in a – sorry for the big word – an epistemological hole that you don't know you need to climb out of. So, the key, it appears, is – well, there's one obvious answer. It's sometimes practically not the answer you can actually follow up on, which is essentially you have to get smart. You have to get trained. You have to learn more. But the other thing you can do is you can ask other people for advice. That is, in our work, we often say that the road to self-knowledge runs through other people. So if you ask other people for advice, you have sometimes a decent shot at them being able to tell you what you need to do differently. And sometimes it pays just to

follow people or to shadow people and see how they handle situations. Because you just begin to recognize that there are different ways to handle situations, better ways to handle situations than you knew before. But the key is you have to step outside of yourself. But the real trick is, but you don't know when the critical time is that you need to step outside of yourself. So if the situation is important or if it's something that you haven't done before, those are usually times you really should seek for advice.

You should seek advice even though you don't feel like you should seek advice because you really don't know. And are those habits that – can we get in the habit of doing that? Is that something that we can build in ourselves? as medical care, is that a habit that we can sort of build into our medical systems, you know, and find ways to make sure that doctors are getting advice when they need it, etc.? I think the answer is yes. That is, we can, there is work that shows that one of the hallmarks of successful business managers is they do seek out advice, and in particular, constructive advice. So, that's really out there in the literature. So, there are things you can do seek out advice, and in particular, constructive advice. So that's really out there in the literature. So there are things you can do as an individual,

but there are also things you can do as an organization or as a profession. So it's not a surprise that doctors have checklists now that they have to follow to make sure they cover every single base they should. You don't rely on the doctor being able to carry it all in his or her head. Same for airline pilots or any pilots. Aviation turns out to be the one area where the institutions involved have become very good at dealing with this problem that people don't know what they don't know because the consequences are so severe. So there are things you can do at the institutional level. There are things you can do at the individual level. Tell me if this has any resonance for you because talking about this reminds me of something that I tell a lot of people who ask, you know, how to get into a

creative field. You know, they ask, oh, how do I get into comedy? And talking about those first couple of years when you're doing creative work, something that I realized when I was first starting out doing comedy and I think back on now is how bad it felt so much of the time to do it because you would do it and feel that you're bad at it. I'd go up and do standup and I'd bomb and I'd say, that was terrible. I did a bad job where I'd write a script and say, this isn't funny. Oh, no. And it would feel really bad. And I always tell people starting out, hey, that bad feeling, the feeling of knowing that you didn't do a good job this time, that proves that you have taste. work in a good direction because you've identified that it's poor. And unfortunately, it feels bad to notice that. But, you know, that's a good thing because you're going to be able to use that in order to improve your work. And that sort of connects to the Dunning-Kruger effect to me, because if, you know, by contrast, I do know people who during those years were getting up

on stage and not being funny and didn't seem to notice and didn't seem to mind. And they're like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to keep, oh, I'm very happy to go up here and never get a laugh for five minutes. And so do you feel like there's a connection there? Like, is the ability to detect by yourself that you've done a bad job, you know, connect with success in some way? I think it does, because it is the case that if you take a look at people's careers and whether or not they derail, and that's the technical word, one of the things that does predict whether or not a person derails is self-insight. Do they know where their weaknesses are? And so being able to develop and hold on to this mindset that you talked about, which is being

able to step outside yourself and take a look at your work with an outside eye. That can be very critical. It's not going to be perfect, but you're going to do much better than a person who isn't stepping outside of themselves and taking a look, for example. And I think the key that you have to do is hold on to that mindset as you go on and become more expert. Because part of our work has suggested that in a lot of different areas in life, rank beginners know they're rank beginners. It takes a while for them to develop the overconfidence that can be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Basically, what happens after a while, they think they've got this down when they don't have this down. And you see that once again in medical procedures,

that is rank beginning surgeons don't make mistakes. It's only after about 15 surgeries or so they start making mistakes. They got it down. And the same with airline pilots, rank beginning airline pilots are safe. But when you have around 800 flight hours, that's when you enter into what's known as the killing zone, where you may be overconfident in your ability to handle your plane and to handle new situations that you really haven't been exposed to. So that mindset I think you're talking about, I think is absolutely critical. My version of it is I think that everything I do is doomed. So do you face that as well in your life? Oh, no, that's how I'm set up. Okay. But you know, we have a kinship in that way. Let me tell you. Okay, well, I have it. But I have

a second version of it, which I don't know is very healthy, which is I think the thing is either bad, or it's really good, but I don't think anybody else is going to understand it. And the second one I'm not well calibrated on. So – but the key is that you – as you go on in any sort of profession, like the creative arts, you do hopefully achieve competence and then achieve excellence. But you have to watch out that you also don't achieve overconfidence, which is really, really, really easy to overachieve. You have to maintain that beginner's mindset. I forget who said this, but one of my favorite phrases is, you become a master of something the day you realize you are going to be a beginner at it

for the rest of your life. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, I wish. And it's so beautiful. I really wish I remember who said that. But I think that's a mindset that turns out to be important. Well, so I want to pull you back to that idea that after you've learned a little bit, that that's actually a danger zone. I mean, I think there's a phrase, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

And I feel that I've encountered that in my life. When we've done a topic on Adam Ruins Everything, we've exhausted it. We've researched it exhaustively. I often find that the people who argue against it the most are the people who know a little bit about the subject, like a college student who's studying the subject or someone who's beginning, right?

Whereas someone who's been studying the field for 15 years will say, oh yeah, you're pretty much right because those are the people who are getting our information from at the end of the day. So there's this degree to which just learning a little bit about something seems like it makes us overconfident by default. And that's very interesting that that should be the point at which we're most doubtful of our own abilities is after we've started to learn a small amount. Is that the case? of our own abilities is after we've started to learn a small amount.

Is that the case? Well, yeah. In fact, we did research on that. That is a little learning a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to overconfidence. And I do know who said that was Alexander Pope, except for the overconfidence part. But we actually brought people in the laboratory and gave them a completely novel task, which they had to diagnose patients that had potentially had zombie diseases in a post-apocalyptic world. Well, no, because you get people's attention,

it turns out, if that's the task you give them. But they knew it was a fake task. You didn't, like, fake an apocalypse. You weren't like, oh, my gosh, a virus has broken loose and we're quarantining you or anything like that. No, we don't have grant money for that. It's a lot of theatrics. But there are some theatrics to the task, but their supervisor's gone, so they have

to learn by themselves how to do these diagnoses. They do get complete feedback. And what we found is that people did learn incrementally, slowly but incrementally. They achieved some success, but they start out very unconfident and actually appropriately unconfident in their ability to do the diagnosis. But within 10 or 12 patients, their confidence explodes well beyond how well they're actually doing. And that's exactly because with a little knowledge, you don't know what's behind that knowledge, what's still to come.

You think that's it. You think you've got it down until you have the experience that, gee, my theory here isn't working as well as I thought it did five diagnoses ago. And so people become a little less confident until the very end where their overconfidence begins to grow again.

By the way, part of the reason we did that study is because for a lot of people on the internet, that's what they think the Dunning-Kruger effect is. They actually think it's that beginner's explosion of overconfidence. And ironically, a lot of people, when they're talking about the Dunning-Kruger effect, are talking about something that neither Kruger or Dunning actually studied, which was that beginner's explosion in overconfidence. So that's part of the reason why we did these studies. We found out the Internet was right, that not rank beginners,

but advanced beginners are overconfident because they really overrate the amount of knowledge they really have. And we've also found evidence for this in people's belief about their financial literacy as they go from being a teenager to being a senior citizen. There's an explosion of, oh, I know finance. of, oh, I know finance. I know how to deal with my finances. That happens in the 20s. That begins to calm down as people go on and realize life is more complicated. But in the meantime, their actual financial literacy is slowly, incrementally getting better.

So it is the case that not someone trying something for the first time, but maybe something for the 15th time might need a caution flag to be reminded about. Well, so you, this is really interesting because I wanted to ask you what people misunderstand about the Dunning-Kruger effect. And you're saying that there was sort of a folk understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect that was not actually accurate to what it was. It was a misunderstanding. But then you went and tested that understanding as well, and that turned out to separately be true. That's correct.

Wow, cool. Well, yeah, because this other understanding was wrong, but it was also more interesting than what we did. More interesting than your original research? I thought so. I went, you know, that's a really, really interesting theory. Let's steal it.

And so we did, and it worked out. But there are also some other misunderstandings as well, which is the idea that incompetent people are the most confident in their ability. And that's not true. They're just overconfident. That is, they're almost as confident as people who are really, really competent. They're not that confident, but the confidence they have is richly undeserved relative to what their performance really looks like. And so that's what the Dunning-Kruger effect really is. Well, I wonder if people also, of a common misconception about the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it's always something that happens to

other people. You know, it's something that people use as an insult online. Oh, look at this, you know, Dunning-Kruger jerk over here, you know, thinks he knows what he's talking about. But really the Dunning-Kruger effect has something that happens to all of us. Like it happens to me and you and to whoever's listening to this right now, right? Oh, that's absolutely right. That's absolutely the way to understand it. That is, I once saw this on Twitter where someone said the first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club is you don't know you're in Dunning-Kruger Club. That is, we see this everywhere in the world around us except for the times when it happens in us.

But that was what our cautionary tale really was, that there's this aspect of the human condition where we can step into our own ignorance and not know that we're doing that. And so this really is a phenomenon that speaks about ourselves in our own lives. It shouldn't be used as an epithet or an insult to throw at other people. Well, so let's move on from the Dunning-Kruger effect to talk about some other cases where we misunderstand ourselves or our own abilities. I know another question you've looked into is whether or not people can predict the actions of others. Can you go into that a little bit? Yeah, this is interesting work because the results we got ultimately were the exact reverse of what I thought we were going to get. So we created situations or just looked at situations in the world where we asked people to predict other people but also predict themselves.

There was a comparison between how well people could predict themselves versus how well they could predict other people. how well people could predict themselves versus how well they could predict other people. And for example, let's say at Cornell University, where I was at in the spring, there used to be this charity drive where fraternities would sell daffodils to help fund the American Cancer Society. And so about four weeks before that charity drive, we'd go to people in a class and say, what percentage of people in the class do you think are going to buy a daffodil? And, oh, are you going to buy a daffodil? And what we found, to my surprise, people widely overestimated the likelihood that they would buy a daffodil. Yeah, I'll buy a daffodil. I'm buying a daffodil. Then

a week goes by, oh, I never bought a daffodil. And that's right. So, yeah, because the day after the fun drive ends, there's a test in the class. We have everybody in the class. So we can ask everybody, did you buy a daffodil? And 80% said they would, and only about 45% actually did. They hang their heads in shame. No, I never bought a cancer daffodil. Well, a couple have. I mean, I've had discussions with people afterward because it's instructive that their reaction is, but I swore I was going to buy a daffodil.

It is a surprise to them. But the real surprise to the data is they were almost dead on in the prediction about everybody else. They said about 50% or whatever of students in the class would buy a daffodil. And we've done this study many, many times. What we find is that people's predictions of other people, with some exceptions, which are instructive, are pretty dead on roughly accurate. They're surprisingly good. Certainly not what I predicted. But their predictions about themselves are just way, way off.

So it turns out that in terms of predicting other people, we are pretty good at knowing the rules of human nature. What we're pretty bad at is applying those rules to our own self-predictions. And so we misunderstand ourselves. Now, why would that be? There are a couple of different things going on. One is just wishful thinking, number one. Yeah, I'd like to think of myself as someone who would buy a daffodil. That's right. So if we ask people, okay, here's an information sheet about a couple. We want you to predict, are they going to stay together in six months?

Are they a romantic couple? But we want you to put as positive a spin as you can on this information. And what happens is we recreate self-predictions. The optimism or the bias you see in self-predictions shows up under those conditions. So some positive spin is something that seems to be there for ourselves or for other people. But another thing that seems to be going on is that at least in Western culture, and I should put that condition on, we tend to think of ourselves as large and in charge. We are the ones who make our own decisions based on what we want and based on what we intend.

And if we don't want situational external forces to influence us, those situational external influences won't influence us. And so we believe that about ourselves, but we more accurately understand for other people they are going to be influenced by external forces. And so, but we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional, and we tend to really overplay how much control we really have over what we'll really do when that situation finally comes. Right. This This is everybody else is a sucker, but ads don't work on me, that sort of thinking. That's very much into this. Absolutely.

Yeah. That's really fascinating. What other sort of, you know, kinds of self-deception do we engage with on a regular basis? Well, there is active self-deception that we do. That is, the Dunning-Kruger effect really is, I wouldn't call it active self-deception. This isn't people denying that they're incompetent or denying that they're unknowledgeable. They simply don't know. I mean, it's just part of the information environment that they're in.

They're in an environment that doesn't tell them, that they just can't recognize it. But beyond that, there is a layer of active self-deception that we do. That's another half of what my lab investigates. And I think the most interesting work there that we've done is we've re-looked at the age-old question about whether or not wishful thinking, the technical term is motivated reasoning, does wishful thinking lead people literally to perceive the world differently? That is, actually see and hear the world differently. And yeah, there we have evidence that your brain is so active that your motives, your desires, your fears can really influence literally what you see in your environment. Really? Wait, tell me more about that. How does that work?

Oh, we've done that in a number of different ways. For example, let's say that we put a water bottle in front of you and ask you how far away it is. In various ways we can ask how far away it is. That's condition one. Condition two, we have you eat a big large bowl of pretzel bits.

I like this experiment. Sounds great. Can I do this today? Yes, you can do this today if you have the pretzel bits. And people will see the water bottle literally as closer after we've created the need because of all the salt that they've eaten. Oh. Versus the control condition. And we've also done something like, okay, here's a bean bag.

Can you throw it and hit that gift card across the room? There's no money on it, but can you hit that gift card? Versus a situation in which the gift card has $25 on it, and if you hit the gift card, it's yours. And there are people under throw by about a foot, if you will. And there are people under throw by about a foot, if you will. But that's so in. So in terms of whether people are reporting it or in terms of their behavior, how far away they stand from something that's influenced, that's influenced by the desirability of the thing. Is it something you want?

Is it something you want to avoid? And the data suggests that it really is because it's something that you're perceiving so they underthrow when there is money on the card because they want it more so they perceive it as being a different distance away from them yeah they perceive it as being closer it's a desirable thing and the brain um does its thing wow uh well yeah i mean that's that is well. Now, the experiment that actually ultimately convinced me is there is a phenomenon in perception called binocular rivalry where if you show two scenes, one to one eye and another scene to another eye, so each eye gets a separate image, your brain will choose one of the images to show to consciousness. It won't meld them together. It'll choose one. And it turns out that we can influence which scene your brain chooses based on which scene you want to see.

So people don't know that they're in a binocular rivalry experiment. They think that we're just showing them letters and numbers, and every time we show them a number, they get lottery tickets. Every time we show them a letter, we take those lottery tickets away. And then we show them a letter to the right eye and a number to the left eye and do all the appropriate controls. And they will tend to identify the number, the thing that they desired, over the thing that they did not desire. Wow. But they don't do that for winning lottery tickets for someone they dislike.

So, which is suggesting that the brain, in part, is molding the experience that you have based on what sort of wishes and desires or fears that you have. Now, once you're in psychology, you realize this isn't so amazing because your brain turns out to be an amazing artist that's showing you a rendition of the objective world. It's not actually showing you the real objective world. If it showed you the real objective world, you'd be dead. It needs to change things to make sure you survive. So there's a number of different ways in which the brain is, I think, the most remarkable artist, visual artist, and oral artist, if you will, that really has never gotten its due.

Okay, I have so many questions off of that, but before I do, we've got to take a really short break, and then we're going to come back, and I'm going to ask you a million more things about what you just said because it's fascinating okay so uh david before the break you said that uh our brain is not representing reality to us directly. It's an artist that's creating a new represented reality to us. And I've sort of always known that's true on some level, but still our experience of being conscious so much feels that, hey, we just have a window on the world, right? And we're just, you know, experiencing directly what is out there. And you have just detailed so many different ways in which our brain is actively shaping the reality that we experience. So, is it the case that we don't

experience the world as it is at all? Everything that we experience is a representation made by our brains? Elaborate on that. Well, everything that we experience is a representation made by our brains? Elaborate on that. Well, everything we do experience is a representation in our brains. That's just the way it has to be. We're reacting to electronic impulses going on around our nervous system. But what the brain is trying to do, though, is it's trying to represent what's important in the environment and throw away the stuff that's unimportant. to represent what's important in the environment and throw away the stuff that's unimportant. So you can have cops, for example, running after a suspect and literally jump over two guys fighting on the ground and not see them and not report them.

Because that's not important at the time. Or the brain has to do some tweaks so that we can successfully manage the world. The big thing that your brain is doing is, if you think about it, we're all actually living in the past because it takes about a tenth of a second for the brain to create the scene that we're now experiencing. And so if someone threw a baseball at our head, we'd be in mortal danger because if we tried to catch it, you know, the brain actually told you the world as it sees it, you would miss the ball, it'd hit you in the head, and who knows what would happen. So the brain, when it's dealing with motion, pushes that motion a tenth of a second into

its future to better match what's really going on in the external world. So the brain is doing a lot of tricks like this, And a lot of the perceptual illusions you see are really plays off tweaks or retouches your brain has to do in order to help you out, like live. But what's interesting to a psychologist, however, in every field of psychology, and including my field of psychology, is that the brain is a little bit of a trickster because by definition, we have to be reacting to a representation of the world. We're not actually reacting to the world, but we feel like we're reacting to the world,

that we actually are at the desk that we're sitting at. And the wall really is brown. That is, we experience things as real. We sure do. Yeah. And you can understand why evolutionarily you'd want that to happen. You're out in the savanna and this brown thing starts running at you. You don't want to spend time going, brown thing, could that be a lion?

It's a lion. You know, your brain wants to immediately go to, that's a lion. So, it cuts out the middle nerves, if you will. So, you experience the world in a way that feels objective the way that it really is. Now, that's helpful in the main, but it does cause problems because often people don't see the world the way that we see it for various reasons that I just outlined. And we extend that to things like morality, our belief about knowledge. So those people who know a little bit about something and complain about your show, they think they have the truth because their brain acts on the idea that they have, and we all do this, have access to the truth.

Right. And so that causes, it's very important for survival purposes, but it also does have some bad byproducts. And one of them is when we're in an argument, we think we are right because we have the truth and the other person doesn't. You're saying that one of the tricks our brain plays is that it convinces us that the sort of false or misleading or just slightly different representation of reality that it's created for us or for itself is real reality. So it's almost as though our brain is, we're all trapped in like a version of the matrix that we've created for ourselves.

Is that sort of what you're describing? It's a stunning way to look at the world. That's wild. Welcome to psychology. No, because that is the way to think about it. Because basically, yeah, what we're reacting to are electric impulses happening uh in our cranium and but we don't we don't experience it that way yeah that is the first that is the first uh the the first trick that our brain ever pulled on us

was like yeah those hey no those aren't electrical impulses that's uh that's your friend carl but no it's not it's just electrical impulses in your brain. Of course that's what it is. That's absolutely right. Now, this principle is called naive realism. That is that even though our brain is reacting to a retouched or authored version of the world, it convinces us that we're reacting to the world. So the phrase in psychology or one of the phrases often used in psychology is naive realism. in psychology, or one of the phrases often used in psychology is naive realism. And there's a debate, let's say, in my area of psychology

as to whether to think about naive realism as the number one bias that we all suffer. And the counter argument that it's not our number one bias is to say, no, it's a design of the organism.

That's just the way we are. So it isn't a bias whatsoever. That's a feature of who we are. But it creates some very interesting phenomena in the laboratory and in the real world. Well, it certainly seems like a bias because what you're describing is, you know, all these phenomena you're talking about are things that our brain is doing that it evolved to do over, you know, whatever millions of years, and maybe some of those things it's doing for our benefit. But if we don't know that that's what those phenomena are, right, that they're sort of mental biases, then we're going to take them more literally than we should, which is a bias or error on our part.

That's right. That is this tendency or bias, no matter how you want to call it, is responsible for our survival, but it is responsible for a lot of our consternation in life. That is, it does produce a lot of the interesting problems that we have in the world within ourselves or with other people. So a lot of these biases that we're talking about are these things that are actually helpful most of the time when the cops jump over the two guys wrestling, right? Well, it seems like that would be beneficial to have a sort of hyper focus on the thing that you're trying to do and to have a neglect of everything else.

If you were just allowing the floodgates of attention to be open all the time, that would maybe be not beneficial. So are we talking about, you know, these are, you know, these are all phenomena where our brain is well designed to do what we wanted to do in most cases, and the bias is really only getting into our way in edge cases? Or are some of these things actually you know fallacious like real problems that are that our mind has oh but it can create problem real problems that our mind has that is well well for example uh one of the things our brain is really good at doing is flexible thinking that is it's like think of it as a wet hard drive that has a lot of information that we're that when we enter into new, and practically every situation we enter into is new,

it's very good at coming up with, well, what should we do here? So let's imagine you're at a lake. Your friend is in the water and they're drowning. You look around for a life preserver. It's not there, but you see a basketball or a bowling ball, and you know which one to throw to your friend, depending on, well, are they your friend or not. And you know which one to throw to your friend, depending on, well, are they your friend or not.

But you're able to come up with creative problem solving. Now, that helps in a lot of different situations. But that sheer genius of the brain, to bring it back home, is also responsible for a lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people take whatever knowledge they have in their head, they put it together, but they put it together wrong. And it leads to bad or maladaptive solutions as opposed to helpful solutions. So there are a lot of reasons why our brain is designed the way that it is. But it also, because of that design, can create not only edge problems, but edge problems that can have some really bad consequences to them. Right. I wonder about, say, a problem like climate change, right, which folks listening to the show know that that's an interest area for me. I'm not a psychologist, but it seems as though perhaps the features of that problem are things that we are a little bit hardwired to not be able to respond to effectively because they're over such a long time span. And there's such large collective action problems.

I don't know if you find that example apt, but are there other – either that one or are there other examples of serious problems that our brains are sort of maladapted to deal with properly? Well, that's actually a good example because – Oh, thank you. Oh, no, no. It's a good example because there are two features of the brain that does make climate change or addressing climate change hard. The first is that we really overweight the present, the now. So we really are short-term thinkers, if you will. And if you think about our evolutionary past, well, surviving the day was pretty much the

victory we were looking for. So we only thought about the now. And so we're very bad about thinking about things that are distant, that haven't come here yet. Climate change is in a class of problems we're not very good at preparing for where we know the disaster is going to happen. We just don't know when. So we're very bad at planning for climate change. We kind of do know when at this point, but it's hard to know that on a day-to-day basis. You can go read a research paper that tells you when these things are going to occur. But the when for me is more nebulous and hard to think about day by day.

Exactly. And also the extent of it. So climate change is also somewhat uncertain in terms of how big it'll be when, so to speak. But things like earthquakes, people just don't think about earthquakes when they're doing their planning, for example, or the inevitable health problems that they're going to have when they're old. That's one thing. And an adjunct to this, one thing that I find particularly interesting, we've been playing around with in the lab, is part of this not being able to think about the future is not being able to think about exponential growth.

People just don't really understand it. They can think of linear growth, constant growth, but the idea that growth accelerates is just not something we think about naturally. And that has consequences. For example, people get into debt because they don't know how much debt will explode in the future because of compound interest or exponential growth. And the same sort of thing happens with climate change, that a lot of the changes that are going to happen are going to be exponential. Right.

And so people, I think, sort of have this bias toward being able to understand how soon climate change may matter because they think the changes will be incremental they'll be linear they'll be constant when in fact uh as changes happen they're probably some of them are much more likely to be exponential and there's an unfortunate lag where you know once we i mean now we are starting to feel the changes more and more across the country uh and you can only imagine that will accelerate over the next, like, say, 30 years. But 30 years from now, when, you know, cities are finally, you know, flooding, as they are currently in Miami, right? Like Miami is starting to feel that. And so you're starting to have elected officials saying, wait, hold on, we need to do something about climate change. That's going to start happening more and more, except that because of the lag between the

input and the effect, where it's going to be largely too, well, not too late, because it's never too late to improve the situation, but it would have been better to have started earlier before we saw these effects. But that's, we have trouble reacting when we don't have that stimuli. Well, that's correct, because we have another problem in thinking about the future, which is that when we finally change our behavior, we don't realize that the effects of our changed behavior is often lagged. That is, the improvement doesn't happen immediately. It takes a little while before it kicks in. So, the problem continues to get worse for a while before it gets better. Actually, we've changed our behavior, which means you really want to move up your reaction to climate change

earlier. Because whatever improvement we do now, well, it's going to be 10, 20, 50 years before the impact of that improvement starts to register. Yeah. And that's just, we're just not very, I mean, we have people who are trained in it, in a lot of different areas, in technical engineering areas and so forth.

But for the common individual, this thinking about future trends is not something we're very well set up for. Well, so let's go back to the big picture here because I just want to talk about we have this image of ourselves as rational beings, right? That we evaluate information and come to a conclusion based on the best evidence available and et cetera, et cetera, that we're all, you know, little sort of philosophical robots acting, you know, according to the best information available. And this is evidence that we do not, and that we do not know ourselves as well as we think that we do. And that we're all like every single thought process and moment of experience that we have is inflected with biases everywhere within it in ways that even if we understand what the bias is, might not resolve it. So how does this change our self-conception?

How does it change your conception of yourself as a scientist, even? Well, one thing I recognize, however, is that, don't forget, a number of these problems come from our genius. So in a lot of different situations, we're doing things okay, if not the best, we're doing them okay. So that we shouldn't think that every single thought we have, every single action we contemplate is filled with bias. Maybe, maybe not, but very likely to be accurate. Or if it's inaccurate, likely not to really have a consequence. But when bad things happen, these are the reasons why bad things happen. And there are situations where we want to be careful about what action we take because

we really don't know what biases might be contaminating our reasoning out of what we should do. So for me, there are a couple of different things I do. First, I really don't sweat it because life is too short. But if the situation is consequential, I really do sweat out the details. I really do think out advice. I really do go out and try to find out as much information as I can or become as educated as I can, for example, because when the consequences – if a bias is going to have a bad consequence, it's during consequential decisions, which, by the way, consequential decisions are ones we also don't do very often. So we're more likely to be that beginner who can make a mistake.

So then I sweat things out. We're more likely to be that beginner who can make a mistake. So then I sweat things out. The second thing is I'm just very wary of thinking I'm ever 100% right. So if I decide something and it turns out I'm wrong later, I don't fight it. Or if someone suggests that I might be wrong, I think it through much more than I would do otherwise. And part of that, by the way, is being a little proactive. And if I'm thinking about this as a solution to some problem or some issue that I'm dealing with, I also try to think of, okay, what's the best alternative solution I could also think about? That is,

I'm a little bit like a doctor. That is, doctors don't diagnose. They contemplate alternative diagnoses. That is, they come up with everything that could be wrong with a person and then start to rule out diagnoses. They don't do, well, all this points to X, therefore it's X. No, they consider Y and Z and A and B and alpha just to make sure that it really is X. They consider the differential, I guess is the way they call it. So those are the ways that I'm more likely to approach problems than I would have before. But do you, that's all wonderful advice. And that would be a great note to end on. But I actually want to go someplace weirder. Because, you know, when I was in college, I studied philosophy. That was sort of my first intellectual love. And, you know, you go down the rabbit hole of, you know, you do Descartes first. You're like, oh, does reality even exist? Right? And then you sort of resolve that problem for yourself. Okay. Okay. It exists. There's a reality outside of myself. I'm pretty sure of that.

Um, but, uh, you know, one of the, one of the things we studied was Kant, right. And,

and, uh, Kant's sort of large insight was that, uh, our minds manipulate the reality that's represented to us, right. That it, you know,

our brains are prisms that are reflecting, refracting light and changing the light. And that it's very, very difficult to know. And, you know, he was writing about this in the 18th century. It's, it's almost impossible to know anything about the world outside of yourself, apart from your own perception of it. The thing in itself, he called it. It's almost our knowledge of anything of reality as it truly is, apart from any human mind perceiving it, is very, very limited, which is a very sort of stunning and destabilizing conclusion. If, you know, like me as a philosophy student in college, my whole goal is to understand the world outside of myself. And here's this guy telling me, oh, you can't actually do that, right?

All you can sort of understand is the representations your own mind gives us. And I hadn't thought about that for a while until I was, until talking to you just now. And I think it's A, very interesting how psychology is sort of, you know, bringing us back to those, you know, those thoughts that, you know, these 18th century Germans were having. But I also wonder if you have, if you ever have that feeling of destabilization, where you're, you suddenly think, well, hold on a second, I don't know almost anything about the world outside of myself. All I know is the representations given to me by my own brain, which are fundamentally altered by it. Well, I'm a self-selected person.

I'm a psychologist. So everything you just said, my reaction is, well, yeah. You're not bothered by it because you're in the field. That's right. And I will tell you one thing that is sort of bothering me, at least something I'm thinking about, which is, and Western philosophy is a good takeoff at this point because, boy, is Western philosophy really Western. Now, by that I mean it's all about how the individual understands

or interprets the world. And the more you get into psychology, you realize that the unit is not the individual. The unit is the community or the culture, if you will. And so you can ask the question to what extent, so there's the individual trying to understand what the outside world is. But you have to understand there are also communities of people who are agreeing on what the outside world is. And now to what extent does that bring about information, knowledge, truth, or to what extent does that create more bias away from really understanding how the physical and the social world really acts. I've been thinking a little bit more at that level because the work of my colleagues, my

own work, really does suggest that we really are reacting to internal representations of the stuff that's out there, but we may not recognize just how much those internal representations are influenced by other people. Might be influenced by what their thoughts are. Might be influenced by what we can actually communicate, for example. There are thoughts we may not have because we don't communicate them to other people. And so that's sort of the level that I'm thinking about a little bit more these days. Do I have any answers?

No. And I'll hit retirement well before I do. But I think it's an interesting level to contemplate. Well, that's a really – I love that answer. And just turning things from the individual level of that narcissistic college student who's wrestling with, oh, I don't understand the world too. Like, no, we're talking about ourselves as a society and as a species here. So let me actually close with this. What can we be doing as a society to improve our own thinking and to reduce the prevalence of these biases when we're confronting issues like climate change. You spoke about what you do on a personal level to try to overcome them.

But what sort of systems can we build to help us do that societally and to help us think better as a species? Well, one thing to think about is that that's a multi-headed problem because I think the solution, the problem and the solutions you come up with really depends on what setting you're talking about. Are you talking about the doctor's clinic? Are you talking about a teenager on the internet? Are you talking about us looking at a political candidate during a debate? Excuse me, and so forth. So none of those situations require the same answer. But I do think there is one theme to think about. And I think it's particularly important, where we have so much information at our fingertips now with the internet. And the truth is out there, but so is a lot of outright fraud. The one thing, if I have a thought to put in people's heads, it's to not only think about the information but also think about its credibility. That is, I actually think we should maybe require a journalism class in high school so that people can understand sort of what standards you have to hold information to before you offer it your complete trust.

That is, how do you really weigh credibility or how do you, what information do you seek out to establish credibility? And oh, by the way, you have to worry about credibility. I mean, that's an issue that people often don't think about. So if I had a thought to put into people's heads when it matters, developing the skill about knowing what's credible information versus not. What are the hallmarks that something may not be true, but at least it's trustworthy. That's where I hope people would become more skilled. Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show

to talk to us about it. I could talk to you for hours. This is such incredibly fascinating stuff. I appreciate it so much. My pleasure. It was a joy. I don't so much. My pleasure. It was a joy. Well, thank you once again to David Dunning for coming on the show.

I hope you loved that interview as much as I did. And that is it this week for us on Factually. I'd like to thank our producer Dana Wickens, our researcher Sam Roudman, and our WK for our theme song. Hey, you can follow me on Twitter at Adam Conover or sign up for my mailing list at adamconover.net. Until next time, we'll see you next week on Factually. That was a HateGum Podcast.