YANSS 333 - Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel

Summary

Podcast Summary: "You Are Not So Smart"

Episode 333: Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel
Date: February 16, 2026
Host: David McRaney
Guest: Dr. Jay Van Bavel, Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at NYU

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Episode Overview

This episode digs deep into how our identities, group allegiances, and pre-existing beliefs fundamentally shape what we perceive—especially when the stakes are high. In light of recent, highly controversial videos depicting fatal incidents involving federal agents and protesters, host David McRaney explores with Dr. Jay Van Bavel the roots of “selective perception,” referencing the classic “They Saw a Game” study and connecting that foundational research to our polarized, algorithmically-driven modern context.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trigger: Recent Events & The Perception Gap

• Host’s Personal Reaction: McRaney shares shock at seeing people interpret the same viral protest videos in radically different ways, even when the videos seem clear-cut to him.
  [03:40]

  “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.” — David McRaney

• Core Theme: How is it possible for groups to see the same evidence yet “live in another reality”? And what does this mean for democracy and justice systems?
  [04:30]

2. Introduction to Motivated Perception

• Perception Is Constructed: Unlike passive recording, perception is “assembled along a pipeline,” influenced by attention, identity, experience, and expectation, leading to different subjective realities even with the same stimuli.
  [04:10 & 07:00]

• Motivated Perception vs. Motivated Reasoning: Not just after-the-fact rationalization—our basic perception itself is colored by unconscious motivations, goals, and loyalties before reasoning even begins.
  [07:00-08:40]

3. The Classic Study: "They Saw a Game"

• Background: The 1951 Dartmouth vs. Princeton football game became infamous for its violence. Afterward, each school’s newspaper blamed the other for excessive aggression, reflecting radically different interpretations of the same event.
  [13:24-16:00]

• The Study: Professors Hastorf (Dartmouth) and Cantril (Princeton) had students from each school either recall or watch film of the game—both groups maintained starkly divergent accounts, even when watching the same footage.
  [16:00-17:00]

  “Having the video and watching it doesn’t solve anything. ...There is no such thing as a game ‘existing out there in its own right which people merely observe’... everything is happening in the brain and getting filtered in different ways.” — Jay Van Bavel [16:55]

4. How the Brain Creates Subjective Reality

• Neuroscience Breakdown:

  • Sensory input is heavily filtered and edited even before it reaches conscious awareness.
  • Visual attention is directed to different aspects based on group identity and expectations.
  • The brain’s interpretation process is not like a camera, but more like a highly subjective, unconscious film editor.
    [18:30-20:03]

  “By the time we’re kind of consciously aware of it, it’s almost like a video that’s been heavily edited.” — Jay Van Bavel [19:55]

5. Social Identity Directs Attention & Perception

• Attention as a Filter: What we identify with (e.g., support for police vs. suspicion) literally directs our eyes—and thus what information is processed and remembered.
  [21:11-23:38]

  “Our identification, the extent to which we care about a group or trust and respect them and feel connected to them, shapes our eye movements, which shapes the information that is sent to our brain.” — Jay Van Bavel [22:35]

• Example: In studies with police encounter videos, people’s identification influences which figures/events they pay attention to—and their judgments about responsibility.

6. Inattentional Blindness & Subjective Narratives

• Invisible Gorilla Analogy: Even obvious details (like a person in a gorilla suit) can be missed if our attention is elsewhere—so too with real-life news videos.
  [25:00]

  • Even if two people reach similar conclusions about an event, they likely base them on attention to different details, reinforcing that shared conclusions don’t mean shared perceptions.

7. The Attention Economy & Social Media

• Scale of the Problem:

  • Social media algorithms are built to capture attention—resulting in average users “doomscrolling” for years of their lives.
  • The majority of political content is created by a highly vocal, extreme minority, skewing perceived consensus and normality.
  • Most people remain silent, leaving nuanced and moderate perspectives invisible.

  “3% of people post like 90% of the content about politics. ...These are the people at the most extreme ends.” — Jay Van Bavel [29:06]

• Consequences: We’re consuming an “information diet” profoundly tilted toward the extremes, further hardening group divides and shaping what we expect and thus perceive.

8. Evolutionary & Social Roots of the Perception Gap

• Evolutionary Imperative: Our brains evolved to fit into groups—agreement and shared reality were prerequisites for survival.
  [32:31]

  “We are the ancestors of generation after generation... of people who fit in. And part of fitting in is agreeing with people, interpreting things the same way, and defending your group.” — Jay Van Bavel [33:10]

• Modern Group Pressures: In today’s segmented society, speaking against your group carries heavy social costs, reinforcing motivated interpretations.

9. Is This New? Or Ancient?

• Old Roots, New Amplifiers: While group-influenced perception is ancient, today’s polarization and algorithmic amplification dramatically intensify its impact.
  [35:19]

  “We have these evolutionarily ancient brains... then you drop them in a modern environment where there’s extreme levels... and a technological environment that is amplifying the most extreme voices.” — Jay Van Bavel [36:10]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Video Evidence and Subjectivity:

  “We think if there’s video evidence we can solve the problems... But in these cases where people are really passionate, it’s really connected to a core sense of their identity. They filter it in very different ways.” — Jay Van Bavel [06:55]

• On Selective Attention:

  “What you pay attention to is what you experience. ...That’s what creates your experiences and your memories.” — Dr. Catherine Devaney, cited by McRaney [26:57]

• On the Cost of Polarization:

  “If you were told you had 10 years to live because you had cancer, would you opt into just doom scrolling through it all? ...There’s like levels of existential crisis here, right?” — Jay Van Bavel [29:00]

• On Social/Community Pressures:

  “If you stand up and say something... and your friend group, your community, is going to see that as sacrilege, then you get socially ostracized... The motives and incentives of their environment really influence what people say they believe.” — Jay Van Bavel [33:55]

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Important Timestamps

• 03:30-05:00 | Host’s context, motivation for episode
• 06:04-07:15 | Dr. Van Bavel introduces how group identity drives perception
• 13:24-17:00 | Detailed discussion of the “They Saw a Game” study
• 18:30-20:03 | How the brain filters perception
• 21:11-23:38 | How group allegiances direct visual attention
• 25:00-26:51 | Inattentional blindness and subjective narratives
• 28:04-29:41 | Social media’s attention economy and the rise of extremes
• 32:31-34:51 | Evolutionary and social explanations for motivated perception
• 35:19-37:49 | Are today’s divides new or just old patterns amplified?

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Takeaways — Why This Matters

• Objective reality isn’t perceived objectively: Even when presented with the same “raw” evidence, people’s identities and allegiances shape what they notice, remember, and believe.
• Social and evolutionary dynamics drive group perceptions: Agreeing with (or at least not challenging) your group is deeply rooted in human psychology, making groupthink a powerful force.
• Social media amplifies the extremes: The most polarized voices dominate the narrative, biasing what we see and believe about the “other side.”
• Awareness is crucial: Recognizing these biases in ourselves and others is essential for building empathy, preserving democracy, and seeking a more functional, shared reality.

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This episode is a perceptive, accessible look at a troubling reality of modern life: not only do we disagree on values and priorities, we often don’t even see the same facts. Dr. Jay Van Bavel’s insights reveal how ancient social psychology, neuroscience, and today’s media ecosystem intersect to create our fractured world.

Transcript

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[C]

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.

[D]

Us understand all this.

[E]

My name is Jay Van Bavel. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University and the director of the center for Conflict and Cooperation. And I am, I guess my core research interest is how groups and identities change the way we think about the world.

[C]

My first question for Dr. Bavel, seeing.

[D]

That he's an expert on this very.

[C]

Thing, was what did it feel like for him when he noticed how people were watching the same thing but not seeing the same thing?

[E]

Yeah, I mean, I saw the video probably the first time it flashed through my social media feed, and I knew instantly that this was gonna be one of those they saw game moments.

[C]

They saw a game.

[D]

That's the name of the very famous psychology study.

[C]

We'll talk all about that later on in the show.

[E]

And I actually have a substack, the power of us substack. And we had, you know, we rewrote a piece about how this is going to be very challenging for people to come to some sense of shared reality. And I think that challenges our intuitions because we think if there's video evidence we can solve the problems, it will be right in front of us. We can anchor on what we're all seeing with our own eyes. And then it should be easy to figure out what exactly happened. And this is like obviously how the legal system operates and people seem to have an understanding of this, but in these cases where people are really passionate about it, it's really connected to a core sense of their identity. They filter it in very different ways, Very different ways.

[C]

Because there are several psychological filtering mechanisms that we use when we're looking at anything. You're probably aware of a lot of these things, you've heard about it, we've talked about them before. But one of the things we haven't really covered is motivated perception. And that is seeing, hearing, just taking in information from the senses with a goal in mind, often an unconscious goal, a motivation you may not be aware motivates you. And that happens early on, before reasoning even begins, before memories are encoded. What I'm saying is, yes, we are motivated reasoners. We do a lot of motivated reasoning, which is taking the supposed facts at our disposal, information we gathered through a confirmation bias and through biased assimilation and other filtering mechanisms, and using them to support justifications and rationalizations in pursuit of desired conclusions and interpretations. But before all of that, our very perception is influenced by unconscious goals and motivations, which means before you experience subjective.

[D]

Reality, before you experience the result of.

[C]

Perceiving things through seeing them and hearing them and so on, that reality has already been shaped by previous cognitive processes, biased processes. And what are those processes? How do they work? Why do we do this?

[D]

That's what we're going to talk about.

[C]

In this episode with Dr. J. Van Bavel right after this break.

[D]

Starting with one of the most famous.

[C]

Studies in psychology, a study that has produced hundreds of follow up studies into how and why we tend to see what we expect to see and why it is so important to pay attention to who and what affects those expectations in yourself and and others. All of that after this.

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[C]

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[D]

Welcome back to the youe're not so Smart podcast.

[C]

I'm David McCraney, and what follows is my interview with psychologist Dr. J. Van Bavel.

[D]

Okay, this famous study, if you could 1954 study. It was called they Saw a Game, A Case Study. The game they saw was Dartmouth versus Princeton. And it was a whole thing.

[C]

Help us understand what even was this study and what was it about?

[E]

Okay, so this is one of my favorite studies in the history of social psychology. It's based on a football game that happened almost exactly 75 years ago on Princeton's campus. And at the time, Princeton. I'll set the, I'll set the context. Princeton, I think, was undefeated and, you know, one of the best teams in the country. They also had like the all American quarterback, this guy named Kazmier, I think he was on Time magazine and he was playing his last game. So you got the best team in the country, one of the most prestigious universities in the world with the like famous, you know, nationally famous now all star, all American quarterback. And they played Dartmouth also, you know, an Ivy League rival, a rivalry that dated back a long, long time. And Dartmouth comes to town and Dartmouth is not as good of a football team at this particular moment. And the game unfolds and it gets incredibly violent. In fact, it gets so violent that Kazmier, the star gets, I think, carted off the game because he gets injured. I forget if they broke his leg or something. But really, really awful game. And it just escalated in foul after foul. And we know football is normally violent, but apparently this game was quite an exception. And so Princeton ends up winning the game. If I recall, Kazmier won the Heisman Trophy. So in Some sense All Ls, all is well that ends well. But what happened immediately after the game is almost more interesting is that it was covered in the Princeton newspaper and the Dartmouth newspaper in radically different ways. So in the Princeton newspaper, they talked about how Dartmouth was, you know, brutal and violent and disgusting. And in the Dartmouth newspaper, they covered it as if Princeton had, like, instigated all the violence and conflict and marred the game with it. And so these two professors, Albert Hastorf, who was at Dartmouth at the time, and Hadley Cantrell, who was at Princeton, they ran two studies, and one study is they just had people who had been at the game write down what they remembered had happened. When they looked at them, they had 122 students, and they claimed that the other team had started the rough play, and only two believed that their own team had initiated it. Overwhelming evidence of bias. Right? They see the same thing. They have radically different memories. Okay? Of course, memory could be, you know, distorted for all kinds of reasons. So they did what we are doing right now, showing people the video. You know, when you screw, when you log into, like, the. Your. Your favorite or most trusted, you know, five o' clock news or news website or social media influencer, you're seeing the video and then you can decide. So they did that exact Same same thing 75 years ago. They had a video and they played it to a separate set of participants, and they thought, okay, the video's right in front of them. Their eyes are watching it. And they came to the exact same problem, which is that they had radically different interpretations of what they were seeing in front of them. Princeton students thought Dartmouth committed about 10 fouls in the game, and Dartmouth students only thought the Dartmouth team committed about four fouls in the game. So again, having the video and watching it doesn't solve anything. They had a pretty radical conclusion for that time, I think, which was there is no such thing as a game, quote unquote, existing out there in its own right, which people merely observe. They basically said that everything is happening in the brain and getting filtered in different ways, and there's nothing really objective to anchor on. And so that's why we come to these very different interpretations of reality.

[D]

First of all, just to lay it out and correct me if I'm wrong here, they these different brains, each brain is generating its own subjective reality. You have all these people watching the game. There's this assumption, though, that there's an objective reality out there. All these people had different memories, so they experienced it differently, they remembered it differently. So the assumption is, I'm going to show you the film, and now we'll all come back into congruence. We'll all sync back up again. Because here's the thing, you may have experienced it differently, you may have remembered it differently, but here we're going to all watch it together again. But then in the room, they saw it differently. And that's the part that just freaks me out. Even now, even after having looked at stuff like this forever and ever and ever, they didn't update, they didn't correct. They didn't go, oh, yeah, okay, well, now that I see it, I can see okay. Yeah, it's more like that than it was the other way. That's not what happened. For the. For the most part, they re saw it differently. What does this even suggest about what's going on when it comes to perception leading to some sort of cognition leading down the line to all the other things that happen to beliefs, attitudes, reasonings, and behavior and all the other stuff? Like at what point in that process is the difference taking place and what's affecting that difference?

[E]

Yeah, so this is something we obviously can't tell from this study, but there have been many, many studies looking at how our brain processes information. So when you see something, initially the image hits your eye, it is sent to the very back of your brain, which is your visual system. And then it starts being sent forward through two streams. It goes through the bottom part of the brain, which is determining what you're seeing, and the top part of the brain, which is determining where it's happening. And then those are all kind of put together to create a perception. So when we get the subjective sense that we're seeing something, it's something that's already been heavily filtered and processed through all these different systems of our brain. It's not just going right from our eyes into our conscious awareness. The great example of this in Neuropsych is people who have blind sight. So you can show them an image and they don't even think they're seeing it, but their body can act as if they're seeing it. They'll. They'll have people who think they're blind, and they'll have them walk down a hallway with a bunch of obstacles in the way. And the person who thinks they can't see the obstacles will carefully be navigating around all the obstacles. And so what that means is our conscious perception of what we see is disconnected in the brain from what our visual system is actually encoding. And so that is, I think, where you're getting a lot of this disconnect on these things is the, the visual system started to take in information, but then it's getting processed and filtered and interpreted in ways by the time we're kind of consciously aware of it, it's almost like a video that's been heavily edited.

[D]

If I'm hearing you correctly, this isn't a camera. This isn't. It isn't just going in my eye holes into my brain screen. And I'm looking at the brain screen like it's a whole lot of brain stuff is happening before I have the subjective experience of having seen a thing. And that would be true across the board. Having tasted thing, having heard a thing, having felt an emotion. There's a lot of stuff happening before it gets to whatever awareness I have of it. The thing though is I can understand if people were under different lighting conditions or they were had a better seat or there was like it wasn't as noisy over here, or this person had a.

[C]

Something weird to eat.

[D]

There's all sorts of things I could imagine affecting something, but they're seeing like.

[C]

What are the facts of the matter.

[D]

In front of them differently. It suggests there's something social at play, that there's this. This group has an allegiance to this team, this group and this university.

[C]

This group has an allegiance to this.

[D]

Team and this university. How could that be affecting my raw perception of something? Like, I'm asking this question not of this study, but of all the work we've done since the study that this study sort of helped kick off.

[E]

Let me layer on an additional variable that helps even make further sense of how people get to these different beliefs based on seeing the same thing. So the second thing is anything you're watching is actually quite complex. So when you were watching a video of a football game, your visual attention where your eyes look actually can be looking at the quarterback or the defensive player who comes in and tackles the quarterback, or the receivers down the field or the offensive line. You can be looking at all these different things when you're watching the game. And it turns out that who you are shapes where you look. There's been research with police videos where police get into like kind of a scuffle or a violent conflict with a suspect, which is very much what you're seeing. You know, that's going in these national news stories right now. When people look at these videos, there's a lot going on and it turns out that people are shifting their attention to different places. So other research has found. This is by Yell Grote, who is a former PhD student at NYU. She ran these studies where she showed people these police videos with police scuffles with suspects. And. And then she measured how much you identify with the police. And it turns out that if you're strongly identify with the police, you look at different parts of the video than if you don't Identify with the police, and then this shapes what you see, and this shapes who you think is responsible when there's violent conflict. And so our identification, the extent to which we care about a group or trust and respect them and feel connected to them, shapes our eye movements, which shapes the information that is sent to our brain and then processed. And that leads us to very different conclusions. And so that is another layer of the problem, is in addition to our brains doing this interpretation, our brains come with desires and expectations based on our identities, and they determine where we're even looking in the first place. And so if you are somebody who actually really respects the police, you're going to be looking to see if the suspect does something that's inappropriate. If you don't trust the police, you're watching them and looking to see if they do anything that, like, triggers or escalates the violence. And so that's something we also bring to these videos that we're looking at different places. And that's something. Again, people are not aware of these things in part because they're happening very quickly. A lot of times they might even be happening unconsciously. We're not aware of how we're processing the information, let alone about how we're biasing our attention in the game or in the police video.

[D]

Okay. It doesn't ever go away. That feeling you get right about here.

[C]

Where you're like, oh, man, it's a.

[D]

Really freaky experience to accept this. Two things come to mind to me. Naive realism or. And just awareness in general. All these people in that original study, for the most part, weren't aware that this was happening. They felt that what they were experiencing and seeing was the truth. And not just the truth, reality, objective reality. It's very difficult to accept that what you're experiencing isn't the raw, unfiltered truth of things.

[E]

I was giving a talk at University of Southern California a couple weeks ago, and I was in another professor's office and we were talking about these videos and we were recounting the details of the videos. And I had even seen the New York Times thing where they show you every single camera angle and they kind of narrate it all. And I thought, okay, that's as like rigorous as you can get. But when I got into this professor's office, we kind of even had the semi general, same conclusion about what happened. But he was talking about different people in the video that were involved in triggering different things that I hadn't even seen before. And it was again, because I wasn't paying visual attention to them, even in any of the recaps that I had seen, or the slow motions or the breakdown. So even there, we were having the same problem. And again, it reminded me of the famous studies on inattentional blind blindness, like the invisible gorilla studies were famously, where they asked people to watch a video of a bunch of people passing around basketball. And you're asked to track, count the number of times the people pass the basketball, and then they have this person in a gorilla suit walk through slow motion in the video and kind of dance in the middle of all the people playing passing the basketball. And most people look at that video and don't even notice. They don't even see the person in the gorilla suit, even though they walked through literally the middle of the video and danced around and obviously looked like they don't belong. And again, it's like when your attention is locked in on that basketball moving around, you're missing something that literally is walking through the middle of your attentional field. So that same thing is happening here. And I literally had this experience talking with somebody in their office, like, two weeks ago about this exact same video.

[C]

That's so fascinating to me because the.

[D]

You drew the same conclusion. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing here is you. You both had a similar opinion.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

But you were drawing the conclusion looking at the same video, but you weren't drawing it from the same details of the video.

[C]

Yes.

[E]

Yeah, yeah. We came to a conclusion about who was responsible. You know, we thought the woman was wrongly shot. Be transparent about it. And she. We didn't feel like she was driving to hit the officer who shot her three times, but we had different interpretations of why that was and who triggered it. And he was talking about the other ICE officers who had come up to her side. I forget exactly what he was saying, but I hadn't even paid attention to them or their role. But he really had paid a lot of attention to them and thought they were really instrumental in triggering her to drive away. So even then, even when we somewhat agree, we can be filtering it in different ways and paying attention to different things.

[D]

I had a neuroscientist tell me not Too long ago, Dr. Catherine Devaney, the way she saw it was the world.

[C]

Is what you pay attention to, what you attend to.

[D]

So there's so much emphasis on that in Eastern philosophies and Eastern spirituality stuff where they. It's all about noticing what you're attending to and then dialing in how you're going to Attend to things going forward and how that's going to affect your subjective reality. They say in the, that original paper, the Dartmouth Princeton paper, Hastorf and Cantrell there, they, they wrote that. I'm paraphrasing what the people saw. Saw, which was influenced by their priors and their expectations and everything. That's what they noticed from all the things that were, as they wrote, emanating from the field. And then what they saw was what they attended to. And what they attended to created the experiences that they had, including emotional ones. And that gave rise to different experiences and then different memories down the line. And it all comes back to that attention thing. It's a, it is astonishing to learn about the human mind and the brain that's generating it as we assume that who you are from moment to moment and what you experience in subjectively has so much to do with what you are or are not attending to from moment to moment.

[E]

I'm going to zoom out to my other research that I study. As you know, I do a lot of research on how this unfolds on social media. The attention economy, it all operates on capturing our attention. You just like went very Buddhist about like who we are as our attention. I thought that was a brilliant quote. Okay, so now what's happening on social media is first of all, the algorithms and the platforms are designed to keep you attending as long as possible. Average person is scrolling through 300 news feed a day on social media. That's the height of the Statue of Liberty. Average person's on, you know, doom scrolling for two and a half hours a day. For young people, by the way, it's five hours a day on average.

[C]

Five hours a day.

[E]

Yeah. So. So five hours a day. Now imagine these young people and I have kids. By the time they die, assuming they live the average life expectancy, that means they spent 10 years, no, 10 years of their life doom scrolling on social media. So that is who we are becoming for you and I, who probably scroll like the average of people, our generation would be about five years of our life were spent doom scrolling for young people. It's 10 years.

[D]

I'm typing this.

[E]

So when you talk about this being an existential issue, this is as existential as it gets. You know, if you had, we're told you had 10 years to live because you had cancer, would you opt into just doom scrolling through it all? Okay, so to freak. That's like we're gonna really zoom out. There's like levels of existential crisis here, right? We don't Share reality. People in power are telling us what to believe. And now, and now we're, this is like who this is like so core to who we are because we're doing this. Okay, now the next layer of existential crisis in this attention economy. This is what I my new research is on. We've been tracking who posts about these issues, about politics, about how to interpret these videos. Well, it turns out 3% of people post like 90% of the content about politics. And now we're studying who those people are. We're measuring them in the lab and in studies. These are the people at the most extreme ends. People who are extreme about any issue are the ones who are posting the most. And they're posting really kind of extreme views of things that this is evil or virtuous. And so the people driving the conversation for those 10 years of your life as you're scrolling through and you're being told what to believe when you watch a video or what to believe when something happens in the news, you're being put pushed to believe by the people with the most extreme slanted views alive. And so that is the news feed you're reading. When you're reading people's interpretations online, you're not reading the bell curve. Most of the people live in the middle of that bell curve. They're invisible. They're not posting, they're doom scrolling unfortunately. But they're not weighing in because guess what, they have complex or nuanced views or ambivalent. So those people aren't weighing in. So we're not seeing all the nuance. We're just seeing from the people with the most extreme interpretation. And that's shaping what we think and what we expect to see. So that is also a problem. That's our, that's. We talk about diet. You know, do you have a healthy diet? It's going to affect your well being and your body shape and your longevity. This is our information diet for 10 years of our life, for three, for the statue of Liberty of newsfeed each day day. That's what we're, that's what we're eating.

[D]

It so astonishes me that you can have something as heinous as a person being what appeared to me to be murdered.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

And then for, for people to interpret that differently, being like their, their reasoning arrives at that conclusion because there's something that is motivating them to want to reach that conclusion. How can our social concerns or our allegiances or our in groups, for a lot of the people that are seeing this video differently than other people. They aren't a senator, they aren't going to political rallies. They very barely interact with their political life in any way, except just through the feeling that they are or are not one side or the other. Yet that affects their perception, memory, experience, and how they talk about it with other people. How can that even be true is what I'm trying to say.

[E]

There's two ways in which this can be true, that we're biased in this way. One is evolutionary. So the oldest, the most ultimate explanation for this is we evolved in small groups. We had to fit in. If we didn't fit in, we were kicked out of the group and we died. And we did not pass on our genes. So we are the ancestors of generation after generation after generation after generation after generation of people who fit in. And part of fitting in is agreeing with people, is feeling a compulsion deep down to interpret things the same way and to get along in various ways and to defend your group against the group across the river that might come across and kill you all. So you need to be a good group member for your own survival in that sense, or a predator comes, you need to work together instantly and cooperate. And so that's our evolutionary trait that sets humans apart from any other primate, any other species. That's why we can go to the moon and stuff, because we can cooperate, work together in groups. So, so this part that we're talking about being problematic is also part of our genetic DNA as a species. That is our key to our success too. So I think that we have to understand that it's like a double sided sword. It has some good things and some bad things and they cut different ways. So I think that's the deepest route. And then the other route is just the proximal motivations. If you stand up and say something, even if you might be open to interpreting the video a different way, if you stand up and say that publicly on social media and your friend group in the community that you live in is going to see that as sacrilege. Then you get socially ostracized from your community. And that might be a community of people that your kids hang out with, that you hang out with. It might be people at work. And we're very segregated as a society based on whether you live in small towns or big cities, whether you work at a university or you work in construction. And so the people around you, on average, share your political beliefs and identities. And if you speak out publicly in ways that challenge that, it could be really devastating for Your quality of life. So you have to understand the social and community pressures, group pressures that people face and the motives and incentives of their environment to really understand why they believe things and certainly why they say they believe things.

[D]

There's a sense that this is fresh, that our political ideologies have now become forward facing identities that have this much impact on us.

[C]

Is that fresh?

[D]

Is that new? Is that something that's of the era or has this always been how it's been like, like since there's been people and since we've had politics where you could identify yourself as in one political group or another. Like, is that. How new is this actually? How severe is this by comparison?

[E]

So, so the aspect in which our identity shape our impressions and perceptions I think is really old. You know, they saw a game was from 1951 when that study was run, that game happened happening then. I'm sure it was happening 75 years before that. I was sure it was happening 75,000 years before that. But politics. So what happens is the other aspect of identity is these tendencies that we have as humans to think a certain way and act a certain way in groups get amplified when the groups are in more extreme conflict. And so what's happened over the last 45 years is Americans have become more and more and more polarized. They hate each other more and more and more. And I think social media is just like. It's unclear how much it's fueling that, but certainly it reveals it and expresses it in extreme ways. And so what's happening is there's more and more pressure and people around you to encourage you to interpret something a different way than somebody who's part of a different group and to have complete disdain if another set of people interpret it differently. And so I think that's the. We have these evolutionarily ancient brains that have kind of incentivized and structured and carved by evolution to do this. But then you drop them in a modern environment where a. There's extreme levels by any measure that we have the most extreme levels of polarization that political scientists have ever measured in the US and in a technological environment that is amplifying the most extreme voices and that are feeding us a news feed of those. And so you take all of those things and put them into a bowl and swirl them up and this is what you get. So that's. There's some parts of it that are really old and some parts of it that are really new. But unfortunately it's the combination of those old things and those new things together that are not good for us. Well, you, you start to understand how it went in other societies that spilled over into violence, sectarian conflict, religious conflict. You know, we start. It's hard, it was hard for me up until recently to understand the section psychology of people that lead to all of these things happening, authoritarian regimes. And now I can see it and feel it happening in real time. And I'm like, oh wow. That's how you get to those extreme things in history that seem like they're behind us, it's never going to happen again. And you're like, oh wow. This is how it happens in various ways.

[C]

Foreign.

[D]

Thank you very much to J. Van Babel.

[C]

His book on things like this is titled the Power of Us. For links to that and everything else that we talked about, head to you are not so smart.com or check the show notes right there inside your podcast player. The title of my book on things like like this is how Minds Change. Details about that are in the links and Also [e-mail] you can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Bluesky and all that kind of stuff.

[D]

At symbol David McCreeney follow this showtsmartblog.

[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[C]

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[D]

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[F]

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