How Identity Literally Changes What You See (with Samuel Bagg)

Summary

Podcast Summary:

The 404 Media Podcast – "How Identity Literally Changes What You See" (with Samuel Bagg)

Date: February 2, 2026
Host: 404 Media
Guest: Samuel Bagg, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of South Carolina

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Episode Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation between the 404 Media team and political scientist Samuel Bagg, centered on Bagg’s essay, “The Problem is Epistemic. The Solution is Not.” The discussion explores how social identity fundamentally shapes not only our beliefs but even our perception of reality itself—impacting everything from political divides to the way we interpret videos of controversial events.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is Social Identity and Why Does It Matter?

[04:11 – 07:47]

• Definition: Social identity is any group affiliation people feel—race, gender, religion, region, profession, or even something as arbitrary as being assigned to "the blue team" or "red team" in a study.
• Influence on Perception: These affiliations, even when randomly assigned, quickly shape trust, belief, and perception.
  • "Even if you and I have different identities, we might see the same thing and literally perceive different things about it." — Samuel Bagg [06:47]
• Multilayered: We all hold multiple, overlapping identities that change in salience depending on the context.
• Cognitive Impact: Social identities don't just bias our thoughts but determine what facts or arguments we find convincing, how we remember information, and even what we physically see or hear.

2. Experimental Evidence: How Do We Know This?

[08:44 – 11:35]

• Survey Experiments: Studies manipulate cues (like a flag or website branding) to test whether people remember information or trust sources associated with their in-group.
• Neuroscience Connection: Neuroimaging shows different brain regions activate depending on the social identities in play when processing information.
  • "Depending on whether you think the news source is coming from somebody from an identity group that you affiliate with, that is going to color not just whether you trust it, but also literally what you remember from it." — Samuel Bagg [09:45]

3. Institutions, Trust, and the Role of Social Identity

[12:54 – 17:02, 21:49 – 25:50]

• Institutional Checks: Journalism, science, and law include feedback and correction systems to minimize individual bias, but these systems themselves are not immune to group identity effects.
  • "It's not that people don't trust media. They don't trust certain media, they trust other media instead." — Samuel Bagg [22:15]
• Group Identity and Trust: Most people base which institutions to trust on group membership signals rather than purely on facts.
  • "Our perception is... colored by the prior commitments that we have, including social identities." — Samuel Bagg [27:54]

4. The Limits of Fact-Checking and Media Literacy

[33:45 – 38:01]

• Partial Solution: While fact-checking, media literacy, and rational debate matter, they are never enough. People's identities scaffold which facts they accept.
  • "The effectiveness of those strategies is mediated... by whether they are pursued in tandem with other sorts of strategies [including identity-based strategies]." — Samuel Bagg [34:19]

5. Identity Work and Democracy

[38:01 – 44:20]

• Changing Identities: It’s possible (and routine in politics) to shift which identities people emphasize, but such changes can raise moral concerns.
  • "Any political strategy is going to have some element where it's [affecting identity], even if it's not implicit." — Samuel Bagg [40:41]
• Moral Dilemmas: Appeals to national (or other) identities can be double-edged, sometimes oversimplifying or even distorting reality for strategic purposes.
  • "At least in some circumstances, the kind of democratic benefits of that kind of claim can outweigh the problems of what's essentially a kind of deception." — Samuel Bagg [43:10]

6. Application: The ICE Shooting Video & Divergent Realities

[25:50 – 33:45]

• Case Study: Analysis of public reaction to controversial video evidence (ICE agent shooting Good) illustrates how identities shape not just opinions but what viewers actually "see."
  • "There isn't just one thing that those videos show objectively, right? All we have is the things that we perceive." — Samuel Bagg [27:51]
  • "If you have an institution... but all the participants in that institution share a certain set of a certain kind of perspective, then it's... going to miss certain types of errors." — Samuel Bagg [32:00]
• Bias Awareness: Acknowledging one’s own bias is necessary, but not sufficient.
  • "Everybody has a perspective, and everybody tends to underestimate the degree to which that perspective colors the way that they perceive the world." — Samuel Bagg [31:05]

7. The "Scary" Solutions: Identity-Oriented Strategies

[37:13 – 38:50]

• Identity Work: Real democratic improvement demands reshaping the landscape of social identity—not just correcting knowledge gaps.
  • "Anything we can do in terms of shifting identities in that way is... going to be necessary for convincing the whole... society." — Samuel Bagg [36:20]
• Practical Examples: Political campaigns, coalitions, or labor organizing can shift identities, but must do so transparently and conscientiously.

8. Future Directions: Organizing for Democratic Power

[44:56 – 48:19]

• Collective Institutions: Labor unions and political parties can organize countervailing power and healthier epistemic communities—if they avoid replicating groupthink or harmful hierarchies.
  • "The question of the next decade... is what the Democratic Party does, how it structures itself and mobilizes people... to change the rules of the game." — Samuel Bagg [47:50]

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• "Even if you and I have different identities, we might see the same thing and literally perceive different things about it."
  – Samuel Bagg [06:47]

• "Our perception is before we can access it... colored by the prior commitments that we have, including social identities."
  – Samuel Bagg [27:54]

• "It's not that people don't trust media. They don't trust certain media, they trust other media instead."
  – Samuel Bagg [22:15]

• "The effectiveness of those strategies [fact-checking, media literacy]... will never ever be sufficient."
  – Samuel Bagg [34:19]

• "We don't have the choice of whether to do [identity work] or not. So the question is not whether to do it, but how."
  – Samuel Bagg [40:41]

• "Everybody has a perspective, and everybody tends to underestimate the degree to which that perspective colors the way that they perceive the world."
  – Samuel Bagg [31:05]

• "If you have an institution... but all the participants... share a certain kind of perspective, then... it's going to miss certain types of errors."
  – Samuel Bagg [32:00]

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• 00:04–03:08: Host introduces the core problem: democracy’s epistemic crisis and Bagg’s essay.
• 04:11–07:47: Defining social identity and its fundamental role in perception and belief.
• 08:44–11:35: Experimental evidence for identity-based filtering of knowledge.
• 12:54–17:02: How institutions check (and are limited by) identity-based biases.
• 21:49–25:50: How group identity drives trust and mistrust of institutions.
• 25:50–33:45: Application to ICE shooting video; divergence in perception explained.
• 33:45–38:01: Solutions: why fact-checking and media literacy cannot be the full answer.
• 38:01–44:20: Identity work in politics; moral and strategic trade-offs.
• 44:56–48:19: Bagg’s future research directions: collective organizations and democratic structure.

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a nuanced, empirically anchored perspective on why democratic societies fracture over shared realities and what deeper identity-based solutions might look like. Through the lens of political science and lived political events, Samuel Bagg explains why addressing collective identities—and not just individual knowledge—is central to sustaining healthy democracy.

Recommended further reading: Samuel Bagg’s essay (linked in the show notes) and his forthcoming book (contact him directly for a copy if interested).

Transcript

[Samuel Bagg]

Foreign.

[Podcast Host]

Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founding company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. And they get early access to our interview series too, like this episode. Gain access to that content at 404 Media co. This week I'm speaking to Samuel Bagg, Assistant professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. A little while ago, Samuel published an article, I think he calls it a blog post, a write up, an essay, whatever, which really, really stuck with me. The title was the Problem is Epistemic. The Solution is Not. Essentially, the epistemic problem being that we have a lot of people in the United States, the uk, Europe, around the world, wherever, who believe a lot of stuff that frankly does not reflect reality. And they end up doing stuff which is based upon that, you know, the January 6th riots because people genuinely believed the US election was being stolen, various Covid stuff, anti vax, all of that sort of thing. And that's an epistemic problem. Right? They don't have the knowledge that is accurately reflecting reality. So a lot of people, and I think, myself included as a journalist, because this is literally my job, thinks that, well, if we give people more knowledge, if we give people more access to this, then they are going to come to the same conclusions as us and then that's going to be better because we can all be an informed society and we can participate more fruitfully in a democracy, in a democratic process, all of that. Well, that's not true according to Samuel, and this right up in all of this research he points to, is that at the end of the day, social identity plays such a big part in what we believe. Now, I'm sure you've already thought of that before. I'm sure you already know intuitively. Well, of course, people believe what they sort of want based on who they are and their identity and all of that sort of thing. Yes, I feel like we all intuitively know that, but Samuel has articulated it in a really clear, robust and scientifically supported way that I think everybody should listen to. And I absolutely think you should go read his piece as well, which I'll put in the show notes. But rather than that, I'll let us just get straight to it. And here is my conversation with Samuel. All right, Samuel, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Samuel Bagg]

Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. So, as we were just saying before I started recording, there is a lot to get into here. It's honestly kind of hard to know where to enter, so I'll try to do it in the most logical way possible. Let me just read out two very short sections from your piece. The first is, democracy is collapsing around us in large part for epistemic reasons, because so many people have become so profoundly detached from reality. And then the second part is, more than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies. So could you start us there? Like, what is a social identity, and why is it that that is so important for what people believe?

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah, great. So a social identity is anything, any group that we feel that we belong to and that we identify with. So often when people are thinking about this, the most obvious, salient ones people think about in politics have to do with categories like race or gender, and those are social identities. You can feel yourself to be, you know, a member of one of those groups or an ethnicity or a religion, something like that. But there are also many other types of social identities. And I should say also there are many different types of ways that one can identify as a, you know, as a black person or a Jewish person or a woman or what have you. But there's also many other types of affiliations and identities that one can have that aren't so easily categorizable into those externally observable categories. Right. So it might have to do with the region that you're in, or the occupation or the profession or the hobbies, but it can also just have something to do. You might not even be able to put a finger on exactly what it is. It's just people like me are like this, right? So in the psychological experiments that started getting people to think about this in terms of social identity, in fact, the identities are basically fake. They're just invented on the spot for the purposes of the psychological experiment. They'll give people, okay, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team. And then they'll have people answer questions about whether they believe information that's coming from somebody else on the blue team. And even though they've just sort of received that identity five minutes ago, they. They already trust people from the blue team more than the red team. So it doesn't have to, you know. So these identities can be basically Anything, as long as you have a genuine kind of affiliation for it. You know, you're. You, you identify with that group. It can shape your. It can shape the way that you perceive the world. I mean, it's not, not. It's not just that it can shape it. It inevitably shapes.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Samuel Bagg]

The way that you perceive the world, the way that you process information, retain information, things like that. So, yeah, I guess I just to put that point on it, the psychological and social, you know, social psychology evidence is pretty overwhelming. Yeah. So we never just have one identity. We always have lots and lots of different identities. But they have different, you know, they overlap, they have different. They take on different importance, different salience at different times. But, you know, the, the identities that we do have and the ones that we find salient in a particular moment, at a particular context, they very profoundly shape a lot of our cognition, ranging from literally, what do we see? Right. What do we perceive, what do we hear? Even if, you know, if you and I have different identities, we might see the same thing and literally perceive different things about it, notice different things about it. And then, of course, all the way from that through, what arguments do we find convincing? What pieces of evidence stick out to us? What. What do we believe when we hear it? All of that stuff. So our social identities are going to shape every bit of that process from beginning to end. And so that's why it matters so much for what people believe. For what. For what you can call the epistemic dimension of politics. Epistemic just means about knowledge. Right. So what do we think we know? What do we perceive? What do we believe? Those are all epistemic questions.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really good way to put it. I was going to ask this a little bit later, but I'll bring up now, since you touched on it, your post, which will be linked in the show notes, of course, so people can go and then sort of click through the references. I've been doing that myself where, you know, you'll have a paragraph that says all of the. Or a lot of the research points towards everything you just said that, you know, our identities are maybe warping, as you didn't use the word warp. I'll use the word warp heavily influencing what we're literally perceiving. And then you link to various studies. And I've been going through those, and they're really, really interesting for a moment. Can you just drill down a little bit more on what some of those studies were you mentioned? You know, like a red and Blue team example, what's some of the evidence that is pointing to social identities really heavily influencing how we even come to obtain knowledge?

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah. So I'll admit that it's been a few years since I read some of these studies myself. This is based on research I've been doing for a while, so I apologize if I get some of the details wrong. But here's a sort of example of the kind of thing that political psychologists, social psychologists are doing to get a grip on what's, what's happening. You might have somebody read certain news, you know, either real or fake pieces of, of. Of news. Right. As part of the study. And then, you know, later on in the study, you'll be asked, like, what, what to summarize, like, what did that thing, what did that news, you know, what did that news bulletin say? You might also be asked, you know, do you trust this news source? Right. And what they'll do is they'll manipulate between different treatments, you know, between different groups who receive the treatment. You know, various details. Right. So in some news treatments, there will be a cue. There might be an American flag behind it, for instance, and in others, there might be, you know, like it's on a website that, you know, has Patriot in the name or something like that. Right. And there's another, you know, for other participants. They'll use a different sort of, you know, branding, basically, that, that links it with a different sort of identity group. Right. And so depending on whether you think the news source is coming from somebody from a sort of identity group that you, that you affiliate with, that is going to color not just whether you trust it, but also like, literally what you remember from it and all sorts of other things that you perceive about it. So that's one way to do it is that, that's, that's usually called a survey experiment where they, it's basically just a survey, but they're manipulating different, you know, randomly assigning people to different treatment groups and, and being, and, and, and, you know, drawing conclusions from that. Right. But then this, of course, this is linked to much deeper mechanisms. And there's also, you know, neuroscience, you know, neuroimaging work that is, you know, exploring the foundations for this sort of psychological mechanism that is exploring, you know, which, which brain regions are, are activated when, when you're reading certain kinds of, of text or, you know, processing certain kinds of images. And that's going to vary depending on which identities you hold. And also, you know, which identities are kind of queued up at the time. So, yeah, I, I I do encourage people to go read these studies and, and take a look for themselves because, you know, this is. I'm. I'm not the author of these studies. I'm. I'm. I'm processing. I'm using them. I've developed an understanding over many years, you know, engaging with them of the sort of big picture. And that's what I'm trying to contribute here. But in terms of the details of the studies themselves, that's. No, that's.

[Podcast Host]

Well, that's for them.

[Samuel Bagg]

That's better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for them. Yeah. Thanks.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. So, of course, you are providing this overview and you are interpreting them, interpreting the results after these many years of your own study and your own work and all these different results in a very multidisciplinary manner as well. So I definitely recommend people go and read them if they wish, which is kind of a meta layer of irony, of course, because part of your essay discusses that people could go and review all this evidence, but they might still come to a different conclusion because of their social identities. Right. It's very much. We're trying to talk about a problem while also being in it. And of course, I. I have my own social identities. You, of course, have your own as well. But I think about a third of the way through your essay, you start to bring up the idea of institutions, right? We have journalism and some government agencies, maybe less so now in the United States, some lawyers, et cetera. How are they impacted by people's social identities? And probably more importantly, how does that end up with people? Where we are now with January 6th and that sort of thing. Some of the examples you give at the top, how do institutions play into this?

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah, So I think there's two interesting questions there. So maybe I'll start on the first, and if I don't get to the second, please remind me. But no space of human life cognition is free of this influence, Right? And that's one of the things that we just have to learn to grapple with and get over. But it doesn't mean there's no hope for reaching truth, or at least closer to the truth. It doesn't mean that there's no hope for coming to some sort of consensus on things. What it means is that we have to take the emphasis off any individual reasoner's ability to approach or approximate that on their own. And so some of these institutions that you're mentioning are institutions that are designed, you know, not necessarily intentionally designed this way, but have evolved over the years in such A way as to kind of minimize the impact of individual biases or sort of, you know, there's procedures for when those individual biases inevitably come into the picture.

[Podcast Host]

You have an editor at a newspaper, you have a masthead, you have a copy editor, you have a second editor who may come in and say, I think you might be wrong there, these sorts of checks.

[Samuel Bagg]

Sure. And also there's a kind of structure that if somebody points out later on. Oh. That you, you got that detail wrong in. Right. There's a, there's a structure of incorporating that feedback and saying, oh yeah, I guess we did get that detail where there's a structure for we're going to go back, maybe we'll make a correction or maybe we'll just do it differently next time. Right. There, there's, there's norms and it's not just the sort of institutional, oh, there's an editor, there's a, there's a fact checker, there's a copy editor. It's also a set of norms that, well, when we are corrected in this way, that's important to us. And not just because after the fact we'll make a correction, but because we want to get it right in the first instance so that we don't face that sort of sanction. Right. There's, that's one of the things that's missing in a lot of sort of alternative news organizations that don't take that sort of feedback seriously. It's not like they're not getting that feedback. They clearly are. They're being fact checked, they're being told. They get this fact wrong. They got this wrong. That doesn't, the thing that has, that sort of disciplines, ordinary news organizations, in a way that I think it doesn't discipline these alternative news sources is that they're not responsive to that sort of feedback. Right. Every news organization, every journalist, every news organization is going to get things wrong. That's inherent in the, in, in the, in the news cycle, in the process. Right. I mean, even journalism is a fast pace, you know, compared to what I do and academia. Right. It's much more fast paced. So there's going to be more errors there. Right. But even, even at the slow pace of scholarship, of science. Right. There are still errors that get into the system. The, the question is whether you're responsive to the kinds of corrections that you get from within that system. And, and so it's really not, it's. For me, it's less about the sort of individual institution of the editor versus the, you know, the writer. And more about the whole structure of journalism as a practice where people, you know, if, if the New York Times stopped responding to corrections, stopped responding to, you know, feedback that it was getting things wrong and it didn't care about that sort of feedback, then it would lose a respect within the kind of journalism profession. And the same is true of, you know, scholarly institutions, scientific institutions, right? It would lose respect and it would lose, ultimately it lose influence and it would lose power. Right? So what's going on is not just that there are alternative news organizations that individually don't care about, about these norms. It's about that there's a whole ecosystem that can support an alternative set of norms where, whereby this sort of correction doesn't matter. It doesn't, doesn't count for them because there's whole swaths of, of, of types of people who could be doing that correction that don't. Whose opinions don't.

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[Podcast Host]

And then I think the second part was how does social identity play into those institutions? As in, as you point out, and I think everyone knows a lot of people don't trust the media or a lot of people don't trust government agencies to the point where now the, you know, the health secretary in the United States is someone who is basically an anti vaxxer and it's like completely flipped. How does social identity play into that?

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important to say it's not that people don't trust media. They don't trust certain media, they trust other media instead. Right. Everybody's trusting somebody and they're getting their news from somewhere. It's, it's going to be a media, some sort of media source, even if it's not a traditional media source. Right. So the question is not whether we trust, you know, these established institutions or whether we trust some institutions. We, we all have to trust something in order to have any information about the world. We can't know, you know, 99.9% of what we want to know about the world just through direct observation ourselves. We have to trust some sort of input. So it's important to say, and you know, this is important, they don't trust government agencies. Well, yeah, they, they don't trust, you know, the old version of the government agencies. Well, now I don't trust what they, what the, what you know, comes out of DHS or, or hhs. Right. Because I think I have good reason not to trust the, the recommendations that are coming from rfk. Right. But so, you know, it's not just a case of, well, some people don't trust the government. Well, know that. Yeah, it depends who's there. Depends which media sources you're talking about. But, you know, of course, I think my internal perception is that I have good reason to do that. Right. But you asked about social identity and of course the point is that a lot of what we understand to be our reasons to have trust in certain institutions and not others comes down to social identity. So it's not, I don't want to say that it's all social identity. There is something there. There's, you know, there is reasoning process, there are reasons, but it isn't just like a logically solved problem. Right. It's not just that, you know, if you and I, you know, disagree about something and if we just had long enough to present evidence to each other and, you know, we could just talk in the most, know, rational way possible that, you know, eventually we would, we would, we would just have to come to an agreement about who is. Right. Because there is just a logically correct answer. You know, in most cases, that's just not going to be the case. Because what we perceive to be our kind of reasoning capacity is fundamentally a social capacity. So there's a socially mediated part of it. Our social identity is part of how we process and, you know, access and debate and evaluate information that we're getting. So part of, you know, why some people don't trust, let's say legacy traditional media has to do with the fact that people in their identity group that they trust as sort of signal givers for people, people like me, they've gotten the signal one way or another that people like me don't trust that.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Samuel Bagg]

That media source. Right. People like me don't trust that government agency. Right. And so, you know, in their, in your, in your mind, that is going to feel like, oh, I have, I don't trust this media source because they're X, Y and Z because they're corrupt, because they're, they've done this. Right. You're not going to say, oh, I, I don't trust that media source because people like me don't trust that media source. Right. That's not how it's experienced internally. But, but the, the point of the sort of psychological studies is, is that is what's going on at least partially, and it's there in the background, even if there's also other stuff going on. So that's going to shape which of those arguments we find convincing about should I trust this media source or not? Does that answer the question?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. Even if they're not aware of it and they certainly can't articulate it, that is what the evidence shows is happening when it comes to when people choose to trust certain institutions and not. How do you apply this concept to the concrete example of the shooting of Good? Right. You have many people, including myself, who believe the ICE agent did not act in self defense, was not in imminent danger in part, or I would say mostly because we have these very extraordinary videos of the scene. You know, there's one from one angle, one from another, and then the third one. There were the three videos that came out when I did my piece saying DHS is lying. And then I think the day after we got the first person perspective from Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot Good. And then that just, I feel like further supported my conclusions and I think many, many other people who watch those videos as well. But that same time you have the Vice President coming out, you have others as well going onto social media and saying, look, this video proves our hypothesis, which is the complete opposite of the conclusion I've come to. And I think there was even a tweet from someone on the right saying, look, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there, the left is always going to believe their own version of events. I was like, that's literally the conclusion I've come to about you. So it's a really, really horrible case for a million different reasons. But I was thinking about your writing when those tweets went out. So I'm just wondering, how do you apply this frame of thinking and this concept to that shooting where people are coming to completely different conclusions despite everybody seeing the same videos?

[Samuel Bagg]

Referring to these underlying social identities is probably the only way you're going to come up with a sensical explanation for what's going on. Right? So it's a good sort of case study of the phenomenon that we're talking about, right? Which is that there isn't just one thing that those videos show objectively, right? All we have is the things that we perceive. And our perception is before we, before we can access it, before we can evaluate it, before we can draw information from it, even the very act of our perception is colored by the prior commitments that we have, including social identities, right? So I mean, that doesn't mean we can't have conversations About. Well, this detail shows this and this. You know, it looks like the wheels are turned this way. And like, I think that obviously we have to have those conversations. And, you know, there are maybe some people who are not committed in one way or another and can be influenced by this sort of thing. And also, you know, it's. The videos are grainy. There are lots, you know, there's, they're, they're ambiguous. Right. In some, there's some degree of sort of ambiguity about certain things that enables there to be more. Like some videos are going to be harder to sort of interpret in different ways. Right. There's enough ambiguity in these videos that it lends itself to precisely this sort of divergence. You know, of course I interpret, I see them and interpret them the same way that you do. But it's not surprising to me that there are other people who feel just as strongly about their interpretation of what's happening because there are very strong identity investments in which way you come down on, like whether the officer was in danger, etc. Like, if that's clear to you what the stakes are from the start, then you are going to see different things in that video. Now, one of the one interesting thing would be, okay, you try to show the video to somebody who doesn't know the context and doesn't know what's embedded in it and all of this stuff and just ask them, right. There's going to be less identity investment in that. Right. It's harder to. Obviously there's, there's police, there's. Right. There's some cues in the video that would explain that would. That would suggest somebody what opinion they should have about it. Right. But conceivably there could be ways of testing on somebody who is for, you know, not. Who's not neutral, but is sort of by default neutral because they don't know the, what the context is.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, they don't have the baggage. View it sort of thing.

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah, they don't have the baggage. And so that would be one way to sort of try to correct for the biases that most of us are going to bring to it. Ultimately, I think we're, you know, you and I are right about the interpretation. Right. I, I have to believe that. So, you know, when I say bias like that doesn't. A bias isn't always. Doesn't mean that you're wrong. If you're biased, you can, you can be biased and still reach the right conclusion. What we shouldn't do is pretend that it's not there.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, it's Not a bad thing, necessarily. But if you are aware of it and you can acknowledge it and you can address it if needs be, like it's. You're just describing that everybody has biases, basically. That doesn't. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. Right.

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah. Everybody has a perspective, and everybody tends to underestimate the degree to which that perspective colors the way that they perceive the world. So I think it's important to always remind ourselves of that. And I don't think it's possible to eliminate that, you know, just by. Oh, but let's. Let's just be aware of the bias, and then we can sort of mitigate it. Those kinds of attempts at individualizing the problem are, I think, always going to fail. And so what we have are these collective institutions that. That do it for us. And even they, of course, fail sometimes. Often indeed. Right. Like if. If you have an institution that is supposed to do this, but all the participants in that institution share a certain set of a certain kind of perspective, then it's, you know, maybe it will iron out certain kinds of errors, but it's going to miss others, right? So an institution of science, for instance, that is, you know, all male and all white, it's going to iron out lots of. Lots of errors, right. That don't have anything to do with those identity investments. It's going to make progress as science, but it's also going to miss certain other things. It's also going to miss certain types of errors because everybody comes to it with the same sort of perspective. Right? And, you know, I'm just using that example as, as. Because it's very easy to see. Right. But, you know, you might have something similar if everybody in a political administration, you know, some administrative agency, has a degree in public policy where they studied a certain type of, you know, economics, right. They're all going to see, and they identify in this way as policy wonks who believe in utility calculus or something like that. They might correct each other's errors about how to apply this calculus correctly, but they're still going to have a kind of bias as a group that's going to affect the conclusions that they reach. Institutions like that can still be valuable because they're still correcting the errors within the space that's shared by everybody who are participating. But it can also, you know, there are also biases that are shared by the entire institution itself. And I think, you know, to the extent that there are real legitimate complaints about mainstream media institutions, you know, legal, legal institutions, administrative agencies, scholarship science, like that is the main source of those, of those legitimate complaints. And it doesn't mean that the institutions are worthless and should be shut down. It just means that there needs to be more done to, you know, sort of mitigate those sort of remaining sources of collective bias that are, that are still impacting on the sort of results that are reached by those institutions.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that totally makes sense. So the title of your essay is the Problem is Epistemic. The Solution is not. We'll talk about the solution in a minute because that's the scary bit. But you are not saying that purely epistemic things like fact checking or media literacy or people just, you know, getting better at assessing evidence themselves, you're not saying that, you know, they're not important, but they're not the solution here. Is that fair?

[Samuel Bagg]

I think it's fair to say, you know, sometimes you overstate things a little bit to sort of draw out a contrast. And I think you could say that it's part of the solution. But I think the, the, the, the, the error that most people fall into is to think that that is the main part of the solution or that it's the only, perhaps that it's even the only part or that it will be sufficient. And I think that the point that I really want to drive home is that it will never ever be sufficient. Right. It's the effectiveness of those strategies is, is mediated. It's going to depend on, you know, whether it is pursued in, in tandem with other sorts of strategies, you know, and, and it could also just be some things. Sometimes this happens just by luck. Right.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

It.

[Samuel Bagg]

Shifts, can happen by luck or for other reasons. It doesn't have to be a strategy and it's difficult to make it a political strategy. But to the extent that we're, you know, trying to make things better, we really, we really ought to be including sort of identity focused strategies in the, in the arsenal, I suppose. Right. So what, you know, identity focused strategies, meaning we need to think about how to shift the, what, which identities people hold and how they interpret the implications of the identities that they already hold and which they find salient at given times. Right. So all of these, all of these things are going to make certain arguments that are already being made and need to be made. Right. But they're going to make certain arguments more appealing and more, they're just going to seem more convincing if certain identities of theirs are activated and others are not. Right. If, if they have, have shifted a little bit what they interpret that identity to mean, if they start to Take on a new identity. Right. So to bring it back to the case of the videos, Right. An identity focused strategy is one that is going to not go over exactly the angle of the wheels again and again, which obviously I think that does need to be done. Right. Those arguments need to be had. But whether or not people are going to find. Are going to see what we see when we see the picture depends on what? Which, you know, what identities they hold, which identities they find salient, which identities, how they interpret those identities when they're looking at the picture. So things that are going to change that, you know, the overall result we want, which is that people should see what, what we, we see, which I think is the truth, that means shifting whether people identify with a driver in that situation, a protester, or whether they identify with the, with the ICE agent. Right, right. And, you know, it's probably more complicated than that on the whole. But, but that's, that's fundamentally what it comes down to. And so anything we can do in terms of shifting identities in that way is, Is going to be necessary for convincing the whole, you know, the broader society that, that of the, of the view that I think we think is, is. Is. Is Right.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. You want people to see what really happened so we can make informed decisions as a society, as a population, as a democracy as well, which we can't really get into here. But you do writing about democracy as well, and maybe we'll bring that up in the future at some point, but that's the reason behind it. And I guess just to step back ever so slightly, a while ago I spoke to Craig Silverman, who's a really, really good journalist, and he does a lot of fact checking, or he did do a lot of fact checking, and sometimes you just can't convince people. And I know that's a very much more simplistic way of just saying what you just said. But ultimately there is something else at play here and the idea that we'll just fact check our way out of this is incredibly naive. It sounds like.

[Samuel Bagg]

That's right.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So you touched on it there and you mentioned in the piece that it is possible to change people's social identities. Actually, political campaigns do this all the time. That's kind of the whole point that you can now latch your identity onto a certain candidate. I don't think that's really a controversial thing to say. I think that's pretty obvious what is going on. But you mentioned this briefly and I imagine it's brief because it's a whole other rabbit hole we don't have to go down, but I just want to flag it quickly is that there's obviously moral issues with that as well. It's like, why should we be the ones or anyone be the one to decide to change someone's social identity? Just briefly, what do you think? Without trying to map out an entire, you know, moral framework. But you're right in that, as you say in the piece, there are moral issues there.

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah, good. So I mean, I think the first thing to say is that we don't have a choice about whether to affect people's identities. Everything that we do, we're always, you know, affecting one another in just by the way that we live in the world. And especially in politics, if we want to build a coalition or if we want to be successful in politics to have any sort of traction, we need to do things that are going to draw on people's identity. So again, identity sort of oriented strategy doesn't have to be like changing somebody's fundamental core identities, right. It can be appealing to certain ones over others, rendering them salient at a particular time. It can be shifting, you know, what, what, how they interpret an identity. Right. An identity as a rural American right now has a lot of associations that, you know, rural Americans are people perhaps who, you know, we know overwhelmingly they, they, they vote for the Republican party, but they also, you know, it's associated with distrust of certain sorts of elites and so on. But that, of course, that wasn't always the way it was. Right. Rural identity has had different implications over time. And that's one of the things is not to necessarily make people not feel like they're rural anymore, but instead to say what does, what can rural identity actually imply about the world? Right. It can apply a more economic, populist, kind of, kind of orientation perhaps, or perhaps a more conservationist, environmentalist identity. Right. There's all sorts of directions that people could go. And again, this is all, this is all sort of very top level, simplistic, oversimplifying way to think about it. But that's the kind of underlying task is to do identity based work, which doesn't always mean like shifting, you know, shifting somebody's identity from one thing to another. But the point is that, you know, any, any political strategy is going to have some element where it's doing that, even if it's not implicit. Right?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Even.

[Samuel Bagg]

And I think most politicians, most political strategists don't probably think in identity terms that much, but what they're doing is often implicitly about Identity. And some of it is effective and some of it isn't effective, but we don't have the choice of whether to do it or not. So the question is not whether to do it, but how. Right. How can we make political appeals and formulate political strategies and organize people in ways that are going to have effects on their identity? Because all strategies do that. But how can we do that in a way conscious of the fact that it is going to do that and that it is a sort of dangerous form of power? How can we exert that form of power essentially in a way that is sensitive to the sort of worst outcomes and the pathologies that can come with that? Right. So again, yeah, without articulating a whole moral theory, I mean, I think the main concerns for me in terms of political strategy are types of identity oriented strategies, identity shifting, shaping, you know, mobilizing that are important for democratic ends in the sense of, you know, mobilizing, countervailing power, you know, getting people, shifting people into identity groups that are going to be aligned with these epistemically reliable institutions and so on. So they have a democratic function, but they also might have democratic dangers. Right. An identity appeal is going to be a little bit, is going to be more compelling, persuasive, if it's. It, maybe it oversimplifies a little bit. Right. So there are, there are nationalist appeals, right, to a national identity which may glide over elide some complexities about that nation's history. Right. If you, you know, you have appeals to this is not who we are. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Well, history is more complicated than that.

[Samuel Bagg]

Every time something bad happens in a, in a country, there's a police shooting or whatever, you know, you have a lot of people saying this is not who we are. And you know, the obvious response is, well, it is who we are because that's who we, you know, over and over again it keeps happening. And also, you know, it's, it's in our history at this and that like, are we an inclusive nation or not? Some people are saying, you know, you know, the right is now leaning heavily into like, no, we're not. And of course there is a, like, if you look historically, there are certainly foundation for their interpretation of things that historically we haven't been always an inclusive nation. Right. But of course there is also something on the other side. You know, there are also trends on the other side and I think so to lean into the, you know, sort of this is not who we are, it's kind of an aspirational identity claim and it papers over obviously, real complexity. But I think that at least in some circumstances, the kind of democratic benefits of that kind of claim can outweigh the problems of what's essentially a kind of deception. Right. There's deception involved in saying this is not who we are, when in fact, of course it is, and it has been who we are. Right. But insofar as we're sort of using this for a kind of positive democratic purpose, it can be sort of valuable overall. But, you know, the point is that we shouldn't lose sight of that. You know, even if we think it's valuable on the whole, we shouldn't lose sight of the dangers that are. That are there. So that's just one example of how you might think about kind of the moral quandaries there. And I tend to think about it in terms of democratic values.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Samuel Bagg]

Like that's the scale, you know, what is serving democratic values. Of course, there might be other moral questions in play, but I think those are going to be the one, the most important concerns on this. On this scale.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, just to wrap it up, are you planning to continue to write specifically about how the problem is epistemic and the solution is not? I mean, of course, you already have a very long and large body of work that I'm going to start working through, and of course, this was my introduction to you, and you do have this book about democracy as well, which I'm really looking forward to reading. What happens for you now? Are you still exploring this problem? Are you doing it in a different way? Are you thinking about the same things? What do you think you're going to do?

[Samuel Bagg]

Yeah, so one of the main strands of my current and future work really is about following up on one of the questions I think that you asked is about what is it to do identity work institutionally, organizationally, and how do we. How do we ensure that the identity work that we're doing isn't manipulative and that it is actually going to serve the democratic ends that we want. Right. So we framed it in. In sort of moral terms as like, well, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. But it's also an institutional question, of course, and it's an organizational question of, Well, I think the most important avenues for really powerful shifts of identity are these spaces of collective organizing and, you know, building countervailing power, which I think there's, you know, it serves two purposes, right? It. It integrates people into a kind of identity group that is opposed to the real, you know, threats to democracy. Right. And it builds collective power that can be used to fight back against them. Right. So that I think is the most important priority for defending democracy because it serves both these kind of epistemic and these sort of power based functions. And so, you know, the, the, the one thing I've been thinking about is the kind of moral questions involved in, in, in shaping identity. But the other question that, and, and perhaps even more central to that is what are the organizational structures that can do this? Right. So I often talk about labor unions as one of the key forces that has done this historically. Both, you know, serving both of these functions and epistemic function, integrating people into healthier epistemic networks and the function of countervailing power against the sort of powers that be. So, but of course, labor unions also have, have, you know, many, many bad things in their history. And so the question is, okay, how, so how do you organize those kinds of institutions that are going to be doing this identity organizing work so that we can minimize those sort of bad outcomes and just get the good outcomes right? I think, you know, in general, people often overstate the bad things that labor unions have done. On the whole, it's very clear to me that they've, it's, it's been positive. But of course we can't ignore the bad things. And I think a lot of what we need to do in sort of moving forward is not just figuring out how to sort of revive labor in general as a force, but also think about what are the sort of internal structures that labor unions need to have in order to ensure that on the one hand, we can do this sort of identity work and persuasive work and integrate people into these collective identities and build collective power that requires some degree of hierarchy. It's not just a matter of like, oh, everybody needs to vote on every single decision, right? That's going to defeat the purpose in both respects. But it also obviously can't just be give some labor union boss the power over everything. There needs to be some appropriate degree of, you know, feedback up and down the chain. And so that's, that's the kind of institutional question that I'm starting to look into now both at the, you know, for unions in particular, but also for political parties, which I think are inevitably going to be an important part of this process. I think, you know, the, the question of the next decade say is, is, is, is, is what the Democratic Party does is how it structures itself and how it, how it mobilizes people, how it draws people into its coalition. And you know how then it uses any power that it gains to change the rules of the game in such a way that what we've seen in the past few years can't happen again.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, absolutely. That makes complete sense. Well, Samuel, I really really enjoyed this conversation. I again really do encourage people to go read your piece and check out the book as well if they wish. But thank you so much for joining us. I really, really appreciate it.

[Samuel Bagg]

Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me on. And I should say the book costs a fortune right now. There should be a paperback edition coming out pretty soon that affordable. But right now that's not available for pre order yet. So if you do want to, if you're interested and you want a copy of the book, please do feel free to send me an email. And that's just my name at Gmail. So thanks a lot.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really, really does help us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next time.