SIO527: The Science of Why We Ask Why, with Dr. Tania Lombrozo

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 527. I'm Thomas Smith and got a fun interview for you today. A moment, I'll be joined by Dr. Lombrozo, professor of psychology at Princeton University, affiliated with its philosophy department. If the most basic question in philosophy is why, Lombrosso's doing one better. She's asking why, why? Why we ask why. And I think it's just such a cool marriage of philosophy and psychology and so many implications for, wider epidemiology, which in my opinion is really apart in this country. Why do we need explanations for things? Why do we sometimes not need them for things. Kinds of explanations do we like and what kinds do we not like and when really interesting stuff. There's so much here, really excited to speak to her. Why don't we get on over to it? We'll just take our quick first break here. The show and stuff like this at patreon.com/seriouspod. Thank you so much to those who support the Show. Right, let's get on over to Dr. Tania Lombrozo. Tania Lombrozo, welcome on.

0:01:30 Tania: Thank you so much for having me.

0:01:32 Thomas: So much I want to ask you and so much to talk about, but first, can you just give us some of the basics and tell us who you are and what you do?

0:01:38 Tania: So I am a professor of psychology at Princeton University. Also affiliated with our Department of Philosophy here and our University Center for Human Values and our program in Cognitive Science. And that sort of encapsulates the areas I work in, which is really the boundary between philosophy and psychology. The topics that I've studied the most is the cognitive science of explanation. So our sort of human drive to seek explanations, what we consider to be a good explanation, what role that plays in our reasoning and our learning. A lot of that is described in my forthcoming book, Why We Ask Why, the science of exploration and the human drive to understand.

0:02:16 Thomas: Yeah. Really excited about that. I mean, I've always loved philosophy. I've thought about majoring in it, but didn't just dabbled in it uh I also have always thought like there's so much about especially in philosophy where you're like a lot of this should have just been an email or whatever you know this could have just been uh more psychology or irrelevant and so right when you said that the kind of the marriage of those two things sounds like fascinating to me where it's like getting maybe the best of both worlds because it really feels like there's such a lot to offer in both those fields that

0:02:42 Tania: I think you're right. I mean, it's interesting because if you look historically, these fields weren't clearly separated from each other, right? And psychology sort of emerged from philosophy the way that a lot of other scientific disciplines did. I think philosophy is much more relevant to many aspects of everyday life than a lot of people appreciate. And so I feel like one of the things I often try to do in my writing and as an is to try to convince people that it matters.

0:03:06 Thomas: Yeah. You especially now when a lot of billionaires in tech are potentially changing the world so much and I don't know how much they're thinking of a lot of these philosophical questions or if they are, how well they're doing it. Who knows? But, you know, one thing that caught my eye just from a which says why we're so compelled to explain some aspects of our social and physical environment, but not others. And I was just immediately wondering, what did you have in mind there? What some examples of things that people tend to need to explain and things that People don't?

0:03:33 Tania: That's a good point. And part of the reason I emphasize that in talking about this topic is because I think you get a lot of people appreciating human curiosity. And especially if you think about human toddlers, they it. And people will say they're curious about everything. The truth is we're actually extremely selective about what we're curious about. So now, you could have been asking yourself why your desk is rectangular or why it's exactly a particular time when you look at your clock or why you crossed your legs to the the right versus the left or why your chair has four legs, right? This unbounded set of things you could be wondering about. And the truth is that most of the time, most of us don't wonder about most of those things. So that's led to this puzzle that cognitive scientists have thought about, which is what are the things that spark our curiosity that lead us to ask a question like, why is that the case? And there is not a completely agreed upon answer, but I think we we have some really important pieces of that puzzle. So one of the things that seems to be the biggest predictor of whether or not somebody is going to be curious, at least in our own research, is whether or not they expect to learn something useful and new from answering that question. That also helps us understand why things like something being weird might prompt our curiosity, right? When something is weird, it suggests that in some ways it defied your expectations it's not what's normal it's not what you could already explain and so those kinds of weird novel uncertain surprising observations are the sorts of things that might be an indication that there's something new there for you to learn

0:05:04 Thomas: Boy, I have so many thoughts. For one, where I have kids and I think I read you have kids as well, right?

0:05:08 Tania: I have two daughters, they're 12 and 15.

0:05:11 Thomas: Okay. So you're way further along than I am in the process. Yeah. Well, that's part of my question because for one, I just realized right when I saw the name of your book, I had this sudden memory and thought of, well, sorry to reference Louis C .K., but since been canceled. But back in the day, he had a great bit where, you know, he was talking about his kids asking why and how he reaches this bedrock is really funny bit where he's like, you know, get to the point where you're just like, cause some things are, and some things aren't, you can't, something can't be and not be. It was always this funny bit. Cause it kind of was his kid taking him to the bedrock of, you epistemology know, kind of thing. And then I just had this thought when I saw the of your book that I have never once ever had that problem. Them. Like, know what it is, but I just realized like, I love when my kids ask why something like I could go for that all day. They don't do it enough. I wish they asked more about why

0:05:12 Tania: The toddler stage right

0:06:03 Thomas: Stuff happens. And I I DON'T, you know, a part of that is the comedy of being a way too tired parent. And I certainly get that obviously, but setting jokes aside, I love them when the kids ask questions. And my, understanding is that when we are, you you know, babies when we're just first forming our brains and all that. I is we're curious about everything. We're focused on everything and growing old in a way is sort of that process of just our focus getting smaller and smaller in away. Because like you said to your point earlier, there is too much to focus on. There's too much a question. We've got to, you know, make make a living and do whatever. And really we narrow our focus. And it's sort of sad in in a way. Now, is that conception correct at all? And does that relate to what you're talking about here?

0:06:44 Tania: It's largely correct and it definitely relates to what I'm talking about so I think what is right about what you're describing is that there does tend to be a narrowing and part of the form that that narrowing takes is a shift from exploration and curiosity that is not necessarily directed towards any immediate practical goal to having most of our attention and curiosity and attention towards things like doing well in our jobs and cooking dinner and not being late for our next meeting and all of those all of Those aspects of adulting right that occupy so much of adulthood. Should. One thing that I would sort of take issue with in the way you characterize is I wouldn't say even infants are interested in everything. I think even infants are going to be somewhat constrained or selective in what they're paying more attention to than others. So for example, we know that from their earliest moments, they might be really particularly interested in the faces that are close to them, right? So there's already going to be these mechanisms that come from human cognition or human cognitive architecture, yeah, that's going to direct us towards some aspects of the world over others. But I think you're entirely right that that does tend to narrow in some ways. In some ways that are good because it can make us efficient, right? Is important that somebody, you know, cook dinner and not be late to the next meeting and all of those boring aspects of adulting. But we also want the childlike curiosity and wonder that leads to amazing scientific advances.

0:07:42 Thomas: The firmware. Yeah, Are don't know if this is something you've looked into, but I'll be honest and maybe I'm going to be unloading my personal hobby horses on this episode. But I have noticed, speaking of noticing, that I'm the kind of person who notices things more than other people or average, or more than the people I'm working with. It's been something that has flustered me at times, especially, you know, as you can already tell, I work in audio and podcasts and frequently there'll just be some noise or some problem. And I'll be the only one who's like, hey, what is that? Why are we, what's that sound? What is happening? And there've been times where it's like pretty crazy that someone would be like, what? And then I'll should have noticed that it shouldn't have been me over the microphone and are there differences and and admittedly I have adhd so that could be uh all or most of it are there differences in how people are with that are there some people who just go around barely noticing anything and needing explanations for anything and some people who uh are more like me or even further than me where they need an explanation for everything going on

0:09:09 Tania: Yes. So I should say this is not something I've studied directly, but there is evidence for individual differences in the extent to which people are curious, in the extent to which they're attentive to different aspects of their environment, and the extent of which they seek explanations. So is definitely a real source of variation across people. I think it's also worth emphasizing that even within within a person, you will get a lot of variation in what sorts of things they're curious about or in what context they're curios about them, right? So even if on average one person might be more attentive or more curious than another one, it's still going to be the case that in certain domains, in certain contexts, it is probably the case the less curious person is more curious, right, so you can imagine something where you might be especially curious about your acoustic environment, right, but else might be really sensitive to sort of subtle nuances in color and lighting that perhaps are less alien to you?

0:09:58 Thomas: Sure yeah that makes sense there's a there's a whole world of things I'm probably not curious about that I don't even realize but um interesting you know I kind of want to maybe just ask you what was of kind the central question or central reason that inspired you to write this book why we ask why what's kind of that central that you know statement in your mind

0:10:15 Tania: A few parts of that answer. I think part of it is really the question that led me to study the topic in the first place, which was thinking about why it is that humans would be constructed to be so motivated to look for explanations. You know, there's other things where it's really obvious why they would have value for an organism. So it's vraiment valuable to be able to predict what's going to happen in your environment so that you can adapt to your actions accordingly, right? It's really valuable to be able to control aspects of your environment. So you can imagine that, for example, if you were going to build an intelligent AI system, you would probably want it to be able to do things like generate accurate predictions. It doesn't seem like humans, or at least my experience and most people's experience of being a human, doesn't seems like we're satisfied if we can merely predict. It seems like really want something further. And the further thing we want is an explanation. We want to understand. Me, part of the puzzle was what's going on there, right? Why we care so much about understanding? And how does that relate to these other more practical things we have to do to get around in the world, like anticipate what's gonna happen next and control our environment in various ways?

0:11:23 Thomas: Interesting so I don't know that I would have drawn that distinction so I'm like if I was thinking about I would Have thought yeah it's because then actually the first thing I did think was predictability. And this happens with a lot as well. I found that where others are okay as long as something is no longer an issue or something, I'm always like, no, I need to understand why that happened. Otherwise it could happen again. And I would have thought that's kind of one thing. But then when you said also understanding beyond predictability, I guess my question is, what is that space? Like, if you can perfectly predict something, what's the gulf there between whatever that is and what understanding it means?

0:11:47 Tania: That's right. Yeah. Let me give you a thought experiment. This is going to be a little science fiction -y.

0:12:06 Thomas: I love a thought experiment. Please.

0:12:09 Tania: Suppose gave you a black box that predicted whatever you wanted to perfectly, right? We can make it up. You want to know what the weather is going to be. It gives you an output. It tells you exactly what the weather is going to be. You want to whether or not your partner is going like gift A or gift B better. It'll tell you perfectly which one they're going to like better, right? So basically solves lots of problems that you might have that are your everyday problems about predicting aspects of your environment by giving you these perfect predictions. Would you be satisfied?

0:12:35 Thomas: I wouldn't. But actually, I think that's maybe cheating a little bit, because I think the question I'm interested in is, if I can predict something. Is there a difference between that and understanding it? So thought experiment is maybe cheating a little bit because that's almost the same as saying, well, what if my friend can predict it? It's like, well that's not what I'm asking. I'm asked if there's a difference between if I'm the box, you now, like is there a thought experiment that gets to that distinction? If I become the box and predicting it, is there something more there? I could certainly imagine there's probably things like that where a lot of quantum physics stuff that's endlessly obviously, fascinating in, people try to understand it, but it's to the point where you're like, well it just is, you those first experiments where it's like, well, we found that this, and I'm going to butcher this, but if it's this, this photon goes here 50 % of the time, then it goes to the other two places, 25 % of time each. And that's sort of bedrock where it's like, well, I guess we can predict where it is going to be with that of accuracy to where we know the kind of the percentages of where it will go, but do we really understand it? I guess maybe that's kind of an example. I don't know.

0:12:52 Tania: Yeah, Yeah, you're actually right, but I want to get us to the way I think you're right by pushing the thought experiment a little bit further. So, you let's now take take this predictive black box, and we're just going to say that that's a part of your brain, right?

0:13:48 Thomas: Right.

0:13:49 Tania: Like a way in which you're able to do this. It still seems to me like even if I had this ability to perfectly predict things, somehow I would like query myself and just get the right answer. That still seems like we're missing something. So let me say try I think is what we're mixing and how I think it actually is related to prediction. And I want to do this with an example that comes from a study that I did a few years ago with my colleague, Nye Vassell. We were trying to get at some of these differences between sort of like merely being able to predict a relationship and what's the extra thing that you get when you understand it. And so we brought participants into the lab. We basically taught them about a new correlation and we deliberately constructed these correlations so that it would not be obvious that there was sort of like a causal mechanism connecting them. So we had lots of versions of this, but my here's favorite one. So the cover story is that you are at a museum and been assigned to try to make sense of a bunch of data that's been collected about museum visitors. And in the data that you happen to have, you see that there's this quite strong correlation between whether or not somebody who was a museum patron visited the portrait gallery and whether or not they made an an optional donation as they exited the museum. And the direction of this correlation is such that people who visited the portrait gallery are significantly more likely to make an optional donation when they exit the museum, okay? So I could show you the data that corresponds to this, and it could be a really strong relationship. And that really strong relationship is going to allow you to predict pretty accurately whether another museum patron who comes to the museum is going make an option donation or not. So you can predict pretty well. But we designed these so that hopefully it's not obvious to you why those variables would be related to each other. What we did is that for half of our participants, we them the why, right? So we gave him a sort of causal explanation that would link those things. And for this particular one, what we do is that we shared with participants, evidence coming from actually real psychology studies, that when you are surrounded by faces, like eyes and watchful others, that makes you more concerned about your reputation and how people are thinking about you makes you feel all sort of watched, right? And when you are concerned about your reputation, when you're feeling watched, you're more likely to act in sort of pro -social ways or consistent with whatever sort of the good norms are in your community. So you might be more likely to make an optional donation. So for those participants, they now had a why that the outcome to the cause. Would this change their ability to make a prediction about whether or not the next museum visitor would make an option donation if they went to the portrait gallery. You're still just talking about the world where museum patrons come to the museum and they either do or they don't go to the portrait galley and they do or don't make an optional donation and that's the full world we're talking about, it doesn't seem like it matters too much if you have the explanation. But let's now imagine that we're going to generalize to a case you haven't observed before. So it turns out there's also a sculpture garden at this museum and it turns out the sculpture garden has highly realistic statues of people. You think that museum patrons who visit the sculpture garden are also more likely to make an optional donation as they exit the museum? What do you think?

0:16:55 Thomas: All right, I mean, you would think probably yes, but think yeah, if you didn't have that further understanding, then it's going to hard to make that connection.

0:17:03 Tania: Exactly. And so what we were going for in this study where we asked people to make all of these questions and predictions is that when constrained to the world in which you observed the original data there's not that much extra value to having an explanation or understanding beyond just the data itself. If there is a correlation or association, a predictive relationship, you can use that to navigate your environment. But the minute anything changes, the minute you want to generalize to a new case, the minute something changes about your environment, that's where the understanding really matters because the understanding is what gives you the guidance to know which kinds of relationships are still going to hold, which kinds of relationships aren't going to hold, and so on. So in a way, explanation and understanding do end up being all about prediction, but a kind of prediction, which is prediction that involves generalizing.

0:17:50 Thomas: Future prediction in a different environment. Yeah, yeah. Yeah totally. That makes sense because you could imagine without that knowledge you know you could pick some other feature of the portrait room or whatever it is and you might think that would be the thing that would do it but that would would be completely wrong. It's So interesting. So it is prediction, but just the sort ability to potentially predict going forward. I guess that's what us a generalized intelligent or whatever the term is.

0:18:16 Tania: Absolutely. That's right. That's a good way to think about it. It's about being able to make really flexible predictions to cases that we don't know we might encounter versus a very kind of constrained or limited form of prediction. And I do think that's why explaining and understanding is so central to being the successful species that we are.

0:18:34 Thomas: Yeah, what about when we don't need explanation? Is those kind situations or or things that don't require or don't seem to require explanation for as much. You studied that or what kinds of things those are?

0:18:47 Tania: Little bit. So I guess I have two parts to the answer. So one is, I mentioned already that one of the main things that drives people's drive for explanation is a sense of there possibly being useful learning, right? So if you don't think there's going to be useful learning you're going tobe less curious. The other case that we've looked at, which I think is an interesting case, is one where maybe your explanation seeking is not first and foremost about learning, but it's more about negotiating social relationships or showing respect. For example, imagine that I hypothetically ask my teenager to clean their room and they look at me and say with an eye roll, why is it so important that I clean my room? Right.

0:19:31 Thomas: And then in a moment of panic, you realize, oh my God, I've never answered this question for myself. I have no explanation. Sorry, maybe this is just me projecting. But oftentimes as a parent, it's kind of my favorite thing where they're like, wait, why do I have to do this? And I'm like, gosh, dang it. I have not. I have had no idea. I've ever thought about that.

0:19:37 Tania: Fair enough. That's right. That could be that we've all been cleaning our rooms for years and years for no good reason at all. Very plausible. Also, that's a case where it seems like that question of asking behavior is plausibly not really motivated by learning, right? It's kind of defiant. It's demand or require a further explanation might actually be seen as a lack of commitment or respect. So in our studies, what we contrasted was cases where somebody is given a new piece of information in either a scientific context or a religious context. Presented participants with vignettes that involve a character who receives a new piece of information for the first time. And it's either presented in a religious context or in a scientific context. So for example, one of our cases involved some claim about the Shroud of Turin. And we chose that because you can imagine it's sort of a religious claim about it being tied to jesus um you might imagine a scientific claim about sort of what its origins were and so on and the recipient of this new piece of information in the context of this vignette either sort accepts the claim without demanding further evidence or explanation they say you know I want more evidence or you know I want an explanation and the question is what inferences are our participants going to make about this character character based on the fact that they did or did not seek an explanation. What we find is that in general, when somebody seeks further evidence or seeks an explanation, that's associated with a lot of positive inferences. People tend to think the person is more concerned with the truth, is more trustworthy, and so on. If somebody seeks future evidence or explanation concerning a religious claim, our

0:20:40 Thomas: Can interesting yeah yep

0:21:36 Tania: Participants then judge that that person is less committed to religion, So in that context, the kind of questioning behavior, the explanation seeking behavior is actually seen as a signal that maybe they're not accepting something that they ought to accept on faith or ought to just accept at face value. And so that's a case where, but I think part of what's interesting there is it suggests that, you know, there's lots of ways in which whether we do or don't seek explanations is largely driven by curiosity and learning and these other things. But it's also going to be determined by the social consequences of seeking explanations or not, by

0:21:40 Thomas: Story of my life yeah yeah

0:22:12 Tania: The norms that we're surrounded with about what is or isn't appropriate to seek an explanation about and so forth.

0:22:18 Thomas: Totally I mean this is a skeptical audience and uh so I'm sure a lot of us can can relate to that that feeling of often asking why can make you the asshole in the room you one time when it'S really hard is when someone's giving me their um wooey advice about something you know like uh you know oh my you know my back hurts and then they're like well you got to take this uh you root that does what you know You know, it's like stuff like that, where it's really not cool to be like, why would that work? What are you talking about? You know? Like socially, we're just supposed to be, like, oh, yeah, no, I will try this weird thing that's definitely not medical science. Great. Totally. And yeah, I wish we could not do that. Is there a way? Have your studies indicated how we could NOT do that? Because it feels bad.

0:23:06 Tania: How I could not do that. No, sadly, no. But I'll just point out that I think there's always a tension between, on the one hand, we have these laudable goals to learn the most we possibly can. But those going to compete with other things. They're going to compete with social goals, like not annoying people around us, but also just pragmatic and practical goals, right? Learn about everything, so we're going to have to make decisions about where to focus our energy. And that's going to mean that a lot of the time, we're not getting further evidence. We're not seeking further explanations. We're sort of deciding that what we know is enough for now, right, given our local goals.

0:23:40 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah. Well, those studies are so fascinating. I love, how I you scientists do that. Really narrowing down like the, the variable that you're looking at there. And, let me make sure I understood that right. Was it the exact same like fact, the exact thing they were looking at, but it was just whether they were looking on it in a scientific context versus a religious one?

0:23:58 Tania: Did it a few different ways. And our original studies, we did try to choose these sort of cover stories like it was out out -of -body experiences in the Shroud of Turin, I think were the two cases we used. And the thought was we could have things be pretty much the same, right, but have it either kind of a religious context or a more scientific context. We also did studies where we looked at things that were more canonically scientific or religious. So for example, one case that we were interested in looking at is how do people respond to somebody questioning climate change, right? So that's a case where you might think in general, demanding more evidence or explanations might be perceived as consistent with the scientific worldview, being motivated by truth. But what if you have somebody who is really questioning something like scientific consensus? At that point, you might wonder, like, is this really just just being motivated buy buy scientific curiosity or something else? And at least what we found in our studies is people had a pretty positive attitude towards any kind of questioning and evidence seeking. So even when it was a client, you know, if you presented a vignette where somebody was really hearing for the first time about a claim related to climate change in that context,

0:25:02 Tania: People thought, yeah, asking for evidence, asking explanation makes a lot of sense. Don't know what we would find if we did a version where we said, you know, somebody who's grown up being exposed to lots of evidence already, right, and is continuing to demand more there that perhaps their judgments would change.

0:25:16 Thomas: The classic just asking questions guy is somebody everybody hates for a reason because because that's like it's also a sincerity to it. Like I think regardless of the topic and maybe I'm just speaking for myself, I think there's a huge difference between someone sincerely asking questions about something and versus somebody who you get the indication one way or the other is like, you what you're doing. You ever have the people, the debate bros that try to like Socratic method you and you're like, dude, I'm not I'm not in your class. Like just talk like a normal person. I don't want to do this, whatever this is. And often it feels to me like they think they are dispensing their wisdom to the world and they need to do so in the most annoying way possible. No, the difference between sincerely asking questions versus not, I think is huge um you know that what that made me think of is um you looked at all at um conspiracy theory when it comes to this kind of thing because on one hand that's what made me think of it when you obviously you're talking about you know people potentially questioning climate change or other scientific consensus sees consensus um on one end it feels like Like they want an explanation or they are trying to learn more about the world. But in practice, as someone who's dealt conspiracy theory, believing people more than the average person, I think, based on doing skeptical work, to me, it really doesn't feel like any genuine information seeking. And it feels more like wanting to have a feeling that you kind of know more than others or that you know what's really going on and other people don't. But it never doesn't generate more information because it's always like this nebulous thing where as as it's not the consensus, then it's correct. And it leads to a whole bunch of contradictory conclusions being totally fine. Anyway, that's a long winded way of saying, how do you think about that when it comes to conspiracy theory or have you?

0:27:07 Tania: It is something I've thought about. There is a lot of psychological research on conspiracy theory, but I would say as far as I know, not a lot that has directly tackled these dimensions of it. It. So what I'm going to say is a little bit speculative. This idea of doing your own research. I don't think I'd want to say that it is not motivated by wanting to learn or by wanting to come up with some sort of coherent picture of things. But I think it might be motivated by somewhat different criteria for what's going to make something a good process or a good outcome when you're engaged in that. One thing that you might want when you are you're doing your own research, is to have a sense of ownership or authenticity about where you end up with your view. I don't think that that's something that isn't valuable, but I think it's typically not the most valuable thing when it comes to coming up with a good science. If your only goal were to have an accurate scientific theory, then I think that sense of getting it yourself for authenticity or having come up with it yourself should be downweighted on other considerations like somebody's expertise, for example.

0:28:07 Thomas: In this day and age, maybe back in the year negative 2000. thousand yeah

0:28:11 Tania: Yeah, that's right. This is something which reflects our current division of what we sometimes refer to as division of cognitive labor. We live in a moment right now where there are huge differences in expertise, and I think we need to take those very seriously in our belief formation processes. Think you're right that there's something different and interesting going on in those cases, but I wouldn't sort of discount the role of something like learning or truth seeking. I would sort of consider that maybe the criteria that are being used for what counts success and for what your goal is, is a little different in those cases.

0:28:42 Thomas: That's fair yeah I think what bugs me the most about that and what's happening to I don't know our entire country and world is maybe maybe you're right maybe it's less about like not wanting or seeking the truth properly and more I feel all of society now or a lot of society I should say like a chunk of society has this feeling that that other people are idiots. Like, it's just like, there's no, like every, and especially people who have been in charge of anything are evil or idiots and just have no trust whatsoever in that. Cause like my thing is always, you why would you possibly think that this, that anyone, the scientists who have studied things like this for, for years and have whole, they have all schools and they all, you could probably tell us all about it. There's, there's, there're whole schools about it, there whole, you now, scientific journals, there all, There's a lot you scientists do. And it's just amazing to me to think like, yeah, but none of that. It's sort of the arrogance of that that me nuts. And maybe it's not so much about not seeking knowledge and more about like, I guess if you did have the belief or the feeling that other experts aren't experts and don't know anything, then I guess maybe you do have to take it into your own hands or something. But maybe that's a different problem, I suppose.

0:30:05 Tania: Well, let me tell you about some findings that I think are going to resonate with some of what you just said. So we did a line of research in my lab. This was led by Kara Mokhtar, who was in a PhD student, and this was his dissertation that had to do with how people respond to evidence of disagreement, right? So suppose that you have a particular view and you find out that 80 % of the US population disagrees with you about this. And there's all sorts of things that are, in fact, like this, right? Like whatever your view about abortion is, there's a majority of people in the U .S.

0:30:07 Thomas: Oh, please. Right. Yeah.

0:30:35 Tania: Probably disagree. Whatever your view is about God, probably a majority OF people disagree, right. For a lot of this is like a very common situation where we encounter disagreement at the sort of societal scale, or we already know it exists. And for a Lot of these cases, it seems like people's reaction isn't, gee, I ought to question my own belief formation mechanisms and rethink my view. It's just to ignore the disagreeing others. And so our question was, why are people doing that, right? What psychological mechanisms that basically allow them to just ignore, discount this evidence of disagreement? One of the most common strategies that you find people adopting in these cases in order to sort of persist in their beliefs despite disagreement is the one that you described. It's basically to discount other people's epistemic status relative to your own. So if I think that you are biased, if I thank you have less good evidence, if you're less less good at reasoning about the evidence. I am not going to take your opinion seriously. I'm going to discount it relative to my own, and I'm going to persist in my view despite disagreement. And that's the case that you're describing. We also find other sorts of strategies that people can adopt that allow them to persist and their beliefs despite disagreement, and one of the ones that I think is the most interesting is reverting to the idea that something is kind of a matter of opinion, that it's okay for us to disagree, that we're in a kind of shared reality where only one of us can be right. For some things, this seems like it might be a very reasonable conclusion, right? So if I think, you is the best artist and you think Monet is the Best Artist, we might kind of just agree to disagree and not think there's sort of like one single fact of the matter that we have to converge on. The fact that you disagree with me isn't going to change my own view. It turns out people hold of adopt the strategy more widely than you might expect. So, you Know, one place you might see it is with moral and religious beliefs. So, know, I think it's morally wrong to eat animals under most circumstances, and you disagree with me, somebody might discount my view because it's true for me, but not for them. Or views about whether or not, for example, there's an afterlife. Well, if you think that that's really unknowable, there is no way we could converge to a shared reality because we don't have access to the relevant evidence. You might think it is okay for us to disagree. I don't have to pay attention to your views because you don't have any better access to the evidence than I do. There's kind of no evidence. Even find this to some extent for scientific views. So for example, views about climate change, we had some of our participants who, when presented with evidence that a majority of the U .S. population disagreed with their view about climate changed, some of them would say, well, you know, that's a matter of opinion. That would be the basis for discounting disagreement.

0:32:58 Thomas: Agree to disagree. You can say that about everything, I guess.

0:33:00 Tania: That is right. That is right. I certainly don't think you should say it about everything, but also people people can say it about many things.

0:33:04 Thomas: Your You say I'm guilty. I say I agree to disagree, you know, just live and let live.

0:33:14 Tania: Say it's a very double -edged kind of sword because what we found in our data is on the one hand, if you have this kind of, it's -a -matter -of -opinion -agree -to -disagree attitude, you're more likely to say that you're willing to be friends with people who disagree with you. On the other hand, you are less likely to think that it's matter that can be decided by expertise, right? So I think it's really tricky to think about sort of like the pros and cons of these different attitudes and what the right attitude is to have towards various kinds of disagreement.

0:33:42 Thomas: Yeah that does feel very relevant to today as well, you

0:33:47 Tania: So I did the first chunk of the book, I really do talk a lot about the role of explanation and learning. And that relates to some of our conversation about curiosity. There's then a part where I'd say I'd zoom out a little bit to thinking about the rule of explanation more interpersonally in social social relationships. We've talked about that a little bit too, how, whether or not you explain and how you explain might have social consequences, not just consequences for learning and belief and so on. And then the final part of the book zooms out a little bits of thinking about the role of explanation in guiding our actions. Across those cases, you know, I talk about lots of different examples. There is a lot in there that has to do with childhood development and the role of explanation there. There's bits about science and religion and the relationship between them. Political examples. So we've covered a fair amount of ground.

0:34:29 Thomas: Haven't talked about, I don't think, about becoming a better consumer of explanations or producer of explanations, that part. You tell us there? I mean, as a result of, you know, you don't have to give away the whole book for free. I get it. People should buy Why We Ask Why, the Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand. We'll have a link, of course, in the show notes as well. But do you have some some things you can give us there in terms of better and worse explanations or explainers, I guess.

0:34:55 Tania: I think one of the things I would say that is worth attending to is that there are certain features of explanations that research suggests lead people to find those explanations more satisfying. So for example, we often but not always prefer explanations that are simpler. We often but not always refer explanations that have some jargon or sort of like evidence of expertise. Often, but not always prefer explanations that give us sort of the function or purpose of something rather than just telling us about sort of a causal process that led to it. And these are psychological preferences that in lots of cases make a lot of sense. You know, so for example, just to take the, the idea of like jargon or technical language, somebody gives you an explanation that involves jargon and technical language. That's often good evidence that they are experts and we ought to take them seriously. Um, but it's also really easy to see how this can go wrong, right?

0:35:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:35:43 Tania: Right? Not any explanation with jargon or technical language is going to be accurate. It's a cue to expertise that people can sort of hijack or exploit in various sorts of ways. And that turns out to be true for most of these cues to what makes something a satisfying explanation. So sometimes we prefer simpler explanations even when we shouldn't, and that leads us to the false conclusions. Sometimes we prefer purposive explanations even when we should and so on. And so I think one sort of general theme that you see through these examples and other examples in the book as well, is that on the one hand, all of these psychological preferences are like good heuristics or rules of thumb for what makes a good explanation, but they're all imperfect. And so I think part of being a good sort of critical consumer of explanations is just being attentive to the fact that we are at risk of being seduced by these features of explanations. They're not always reliable. And just getting into the habit of asking yourself whether or not you are finding an explanation to be satisfying or persuasive for a good reason. And a good reason in that context, I think, is a really, really good habit of mind, right? So

0:36:46 Tania: If somebody tells you a really satisfying explanation that's really simple, just sort of like beautifully elegant, it might be right. But there should also be a voice in your head saying, am I really just liking it because it's so simple and elegant? Or somebody tells you an explanation that sounds super authoritative because of the complicated words it uses and so on. Are good cues to authority and expertise, but you should ask whether or not they really are for that explanation in that context and maybe whether or not you have ways to verify that. And you shouldn't always take that just at face value because those cues can be misleading.

0:37:18 Thomas: That makes me think about like, also, where are we getting these heuristics? You know, it might seem like a dumb question, but I think a lot of our heuristics, just broadly to the average person for what makes a good explanation could be from like movies and crap. You know how much of it is like, well, there's that scene where the scientist who, by the way, is a disheveled angry white guy is like ah don't you see you idiots and then he draws on the white board and is like that's what it you know whatever it is like how much of our feeling of what a good explanation is or what it even looks like is based on bad things like bad you know hmm

0:37:55 Tania: That's a great question. I think it's not a dumb question at all. I think it's a really great question. So for some features of explanation evaluation, we have better answers than for others. So So for some of the studies that we've done in my lab, we basically find the same kinds of explanatory preferences in adults as we do in preschool -aged children.

0:38:16 Tania: And that's really interesting because it tells us that, you might need some kinds of experiences to develop those preferences. Certainly preschool-age children already have a lot of experience, but they haven't had formal schooling. They probably haven't seen that particular movie with a mad scientist yet, right? Right. That tells us that at least some of these probably reflect a more general feature of either our evolutionary history or just the kind of general statistical learning that happens even in the first few years of life. I don't think that's going to be true for everything. And one way that we can get a sense of that is by looking at cross-cultural differences. So there are some cases where researchers have documented what seem to be different preferences across cultures. And so, for example, one of them is that there tends to be a Western tendency to explain people's behavior more in terms of the characteristic of the person than the characteristics of the situation and their interaction with the situation.

0:39:10 Tania: So, you know, to give you sort of like a, I don't know, a dumb example, imagine when you're at a work meeting and sort of insists on something very forcefully and you say, why did they do that? And if you say, well, they're just stubborn, right, what you're doing is you're explaining that behavior by appeal to a characteristic of the person. But there's lots of other ways you could probably explain it. Maybe they were provoked in a particular way. It was a very particular interaction between their personality and what was going on in the stakes, right? Right, there's sort of lots of ways you could explain it. And so there's some evidence that people from East Asian and South Asian cultures might have more of a tendency to offer explanations that involve these interactions between the person and the situation rather than focusing so much on the sort of the traits of the person. That's not a, you know, like most cultural differences, this is not sort of a 0%, 100 % kind of difference, right? These are sort of like subtle tendencies that on average you find as differences. And of course, within each culture, you will, and across contexts, you'll find a lot of variation along this dimension. But the fact that you do find some systematic variation like this does suggest that lots of aspects of your environment are affecting your explanatory preferences and tendencies. And that's going to come from cultural norms, social norms, the movie you saw, all of those sorts of things.

0:40:03 Thomas: Why it made me think about so much yeah it seems like it's way better to be be the other to the form kind of um person who you instantly distill down to personal characteristics for stuff I know that's something that is a challenge I'm familiar with you know I feel like that's what is it we do that with other people uh lot more than ourselves or whatever where we like yeah that's

0:40:44 Tania: That's right. So this is known by a few names, but one of them is called the fundamental attribution error.

0:40:48 Thomas: That's why I'm trying to think of yeah hmm

0:40:50 Tania: So the phenomenon's a little bit contested. I mean, there's definitely a phenomenon there, but you see it more starkly when you present people with kind of artificial contexts that force them to choose between attributing something to a person or a situation. If you look at more open-ended explanations that people just offer in the course of everyday life and conversations, it's not always so clear -cut they fall into one of these categories.

0:41:25 Thomas: So funny is on a meta level, on the show, I'm often talking about studies and as the non-scientist, but somebody's, you familiar with how this goes. I'm always remembering like, oh, wait a minute. What does this actually mean in terms of the effect? Like the thing you just described where it's like, particular group of people might have more of a tendency to do a certain thing. What does that mean in terms of actual numbers and the size of the effect and all that? I feel like that's the kind of thing to get a little meta that our society as a whole kind of has fudged where we expect that it's going to be like study shows that X. And then that just means like 100 percent of the time, whatever the thing is, eating potatoes equals seeing better. Who knows? Whatever the thing ist, I feel like we as a society have come to expect that study shows X means that that thing is like 100%, you know? And when really it's like so often, for one, if it's being reported like that, it's probably a bullshit study or at least barely even in effect or not replicable. I have a lot of uh problems with how science gets reported on but for two even if it is real it's often such a small effect but people tend to take it on in their toolbox is like oh it turns out if if this then that you know and it's like is that another place where we've all gotten used to or some reason looking for a certain kind of explanation or a certain kind of fact about the world in that way where a story about the world, I guess, in that way where it's like, oh, turns out this study says, you this makes you taller. And then that means it always works and always happens where in reality, that's kind of what I was getting at before when, when you talked about the movie version of the explanation, I'm surprised by the thing you said that it, that it's, that rigid potentially from such an early age to later age. That's, this really interesting to me. Um, it just feels like that kind of thing where it's not really a good measure of how good an explanation is to go based on what we're all kind of used to, especially in a world where our explanations are failing us for a lot of things, you know, like our stories about the world are really failing us lately, at least in this country, you know, scientifically, you make healthy again, all that stuff. I wonder, have we gotten astray in terms of what we think are good explanations and how could we possibly get it back on track it's

0:43:47 Tania: Gosh, yes, that's very interesting.

0:43:48 Thomas: Too much there that

0:43:49 Tania: There's a lot in what you said. I mean, to say something about the first part, and you're probably familiar with this already, as are probably many of your listeners, but there's a lot of very influential classic work in psychology. A lot of it associated with Kahneman and Tversky that eventually led to like a Nobel Prize in economics for Kahnerman, suggesting that people aren't very good at some some basic statistical reasoning or statistical thinking, there's a lot of mistakes that people make. And a lot the mistakes have to do with failing to understand variability and noise very well in data. And I think that is related to what you're describing, which is that we don't like random noise. Why do we not like it? Because we can't explain it and therefore anticipate it or predict it or control it. So, you know, I think it's not an accident that that we tend to prefer and also sort of like distort information to have it fit into causal models that support explanations. And one consequence of that is that for most of us, that will mean throwing out the noise, throwing out The variability, that's the stuff that we're not explaining. Part of your question is probably the much more important one, which is how can we, how can We as individuals as a country, you know, as a species converge on better explanations,

0:44:59 Tania: Get to the right explanations. I wish I had an answer for that. I think what I can point to are some of the tensions and themes that actually I sort of come back to again and again in the book and that have come up in our conversation. So one is, I think there's often a tension between what we ought to do if our goals are purely about having the most accurate representation of the world and what it makes sense to do. If we have other goals like fitting into our social communities or signaling that we have particular values and so on. And so I think a lot of what we see going on right now politically involves these very complicated trade -offs and interactions between the fact that these different goals, you know, we don't just have the goal of being accurate.

0:45:40 Thomas: Or the way appealing to an algorithm that's gonna elevate what we're saying or not yeah

0:45:45 Tania: Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. Actually, I think that ties into what we were talking about before in terms of sort of expertise and jargon, right? I mean I think there's a way in which appealing to an algorithm is a way that, you people treat that as saying it's objective or it's accurate. To be clear, I don't think it's either of those things, but I think people tend to think of it in those terms, right? So if you can appeal to an algorithm that might give certain kinds of decisions a certain kind of legitimacy or make them perhaps seem objective

0:45:52 Thomas: Yeah oh apologies I meant that the social media algorithm is what I was talking about you'd be so the thing you're saying no so the you're staying needs to appeal to this of in the sky that none of us fully understand or whatever that's kind of controlling our lives a lot, you our explanations don't to that, and that, I mean, I guess it's ultimately what people want, I but I don't know. It's hard to know. It's going on in the algorithm, but with algorithmic content being so much of our media diets, you Know, that's a big part of it too. Like the kinds of explanations that are going to do do well in that are going to really be disproportionately appearing to people, I think.

0:46:13 Tania: Okay. Sorry. Sorry, I misunderstood you there. Yeah, yeah. Right, right.

0:46:46 Tania: Yeah. That's a really good point. And I think it also means means that insofar as we evolved, both biologically, culturally, and so on, to have certain kinds of strategies for figuring out which sorts of things we should trust and which we shouldn't, there's all sorts of ways in which our current social media environment changes those cues, right? Of history, for many humans, encountering the same piece of information multiple times in your environment is probably pretty good evidence that it reflects something that you ought to believe. Right now, there's all sorts of other reasons why you might encounter the same information, you know, pieces of information. So these sort of like changes in the relationship between the statistics of our environment and what the actual reality is are changing in ways that I think are really interesting psychologically because they They give us an opportunity to see how flexible human cognition is, right? So the plasticity of the human mind, but also really alarming because I think it means that there's ways in which our normal strategies for vigilance in terms of what we believe can be hijacked.

0:47:50 Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. This was so fascinating. Once again, the book is Why We Ask Why? The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand. Lombrozo, anything else that you want to tell my audience or anywhere you wantto send people in addition to the book?

0:48:04 Tania: Absolutely. So if people are interested in finding out more about my research or other things that I've written, my website, www .tanyalambrozo .com will point you to all sorts of things. And since that's hard to spell, you can also go to www.whyweaskwhy.com and also find things on there like my social media handles and so on.

0:48:22 Thomas: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time. All

0:48:24 Tania: Thank you for having me.