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You can go to kittedkitted shop and use the code Smart50Smart50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out Middle of the show. On January 7, 2026 United States federal agents shot and killed Renee good. And on January 24, 2026 United States federal agents shot and killed Alex Preddy. These shootings took place during protests over the conduct of immigration agents and the people who died. They were protesters. Each incident, each shooting, each killing was recorded on video by bystanders. And those videos spread all across the Internet, social media, everywhere. People shared those videos online, those recordings of federal agents shooting and killing Renee Goode, and then a few weeks later, the videos of the shooting and killing of Alex Preddy. And each time afterward, online and off, people began to disagree about what they saw in those videos, the truth of them. Politicians made statements about those videos, and in those statements they disagreed about what they saw. I watched those videos and to me, those shootings looked unjustified. They looked like murders. So like many people, I was initially shocked when I read comments and saw commentary in which people disagreed with what I thought I was seeing with my own eyes, what seemed indisputable. I was shocked and astounded, even though I was aware of the fact that psychology has been researching this very phenomenon for the better part of a century. There's a lot of research, a lot of evidence, pointing to the fact that we can see the very same thing differently, see different things. To put it very simply, we don't passively receive reality, we actively construct it. Your subjective experience when you watch a video, when you observe anything, is assembled along a pipeline of brain activity across many brain regions, like an assembly line of cognition. And at the end of that assembly line, what you see can be different from what another person is seeing in the moment and especially in memory. It's still shocking, though. It's astounding. But the evidence is clear. If two People have two different political ideologies, two different groups with which they identify different attitudes, different experiences, different expectations, different models of prediction, different factors that differently affect their attention. Second by second, all of those things will alter what they perceive to the point that two people can watch the exact same video and they will see in quotation marks, see, that is, they will perceive two different realities. My name is David McCraney. This is the you are not so Smart podcast. This is episode 333. And it's being recorded in February of 2026. And right now, when I was seeing the aftermath of these videos, I noticed that many people online and off were wondering about this very thing. And not just with these videos, but many other videos as well. And with news stories and just facts in general. It's not uncommon right now to see people commenting about what's going on politically in the United States and ask, are the people who are seeing this differently, are they just in another reality? Like, how can they be looking at the exact same thing I'm looking at with their eyes and not see what I see? And I wanted to reach out to an expert on this very thing to help explain why this happens, what we know about it, and what we can do about it if we're interested in preserving democracy or having a moderately functional legal system. Because there's a strong exasperation bubbling up, an absolute confusion over how can two groups of people see the exact same video evidence yet not agree on what they are seeing. But in psychology, this is a well known phenomenon and it's the subject of one of the most famous studies in all of psychology. So I reached out to Dr. J. Van Bavel at NYU and asked if he'd come on the show to help.
