You Are Not So Smart

Gordon Pennycook and his team at the University of Waterloo set out to discover if there was a spectrum of receptivity for a certain kind of humbug they call pseudo-profound bullshit – the kind that sounds deep and meaningful at first glance, but upon closer inspection means nothing at all. They wondered, is there a “type” of person who is more susceptible to that kind of language, and if so, what other things about personalities and thinking styles correlate with that tolerance and lack of skepticism, and why?

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Direct download: 092_-_Bullshit_rebroadcast.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 10:58am EST


In this rebroadcast of one of our most popular episodes we learn all about the strange phenomenon of learned helplessness and how it keeps people in bad jobs, poor health, terrible relationships, and awful circumstances despite how easy it might be to escape any one of those scenarios with just one more effort.


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Direct download: 091_-_Learned_Helplessness_rebroadcast.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 10:12pm EST

Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? For our guest in this episode, cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman, that's his day job.

Hoffman has developed a new theory of consciousness that, should it prove true, may rearrange our understanding of reality itself.

Listen as Hoffman talks about the bicameral mind, the umwelt, and the hard problem of consciousness in this mindbending episode about how we make sense of our world, our existence, and ourselves.

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Direct download: 090_-_Reality_-_Donald_Hoffman.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 7:26pm EST

Legendary science historian James Burke returns to explain his newest project, a Connections app that will allow anyone to "think connectively" about the webs of knowledge available on Wikipedia.

Burke predicted back in 1978 that we’d one day need better tools than just search alone if we were to avoid the pitfalls of siloed information and confirmation bias, and this month he launched a Kickstarter campaign to help create just such a tool - an app that searches connectivity and produces something Google and social media often don’t - surprises, anomalies, unexpected results, and connections, in the same style as his documentary series, books, and other projects.

In the interview, Burke shares his latest insights on change, technology, the future, social media, models of reality, and more.

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Direct download: 089_-_Connections_-_James_Burke.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 5:23pm EST

In this divisive and polarized era how do you bridge the political divide between left and right? You do you persuade the people on the other side to see things your way?


When we produce arguments, we do so from within our own moral framework and in the language of our moral values. Those values rest on top of a set of psychological tendencies influenced by our genetic predispositions and shaped by our cultural exposure that blind us to alternate viewpoints.

Because of this, we find it very difficult to construct an argument with the same facts, but framed in a different morality. Willer's work suggests that if we did that, we would find it a much more successful route to persuading people we usually think of as unreachable.

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Direct download: 088_-_Moral_Arguments.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 2:41pm EST

Jesse Walker is the author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, a book that explores the history of American conspiracy theories going all the way back to the first colonies.

Walker argues that conspiratorial thinking is not a feature of the fringe, but a fundamental way of looking at the world that is very much mainstream.

Listen as Walker explains why we love conspiracy theories, how they flourish, how they harm, and what they say about a culture.

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Direct download: 087_-_Paranoia.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 9:33pm EST



In this episode you’ll hear from the co-founder of Reddit, the moderators of Change My View, and the scientists studying how people argue on the internet as we explore what it takes to change people’s perspective and whether the future of our online lives is thicker filter bubbles or the whittling away of bad ideas.


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Direct download: 086_-_Change_My_View.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 1:56am EST




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Direct download: 085_-_Misremembering_-_Julia_Shaw_rebroadcast.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 7:55pm EST

Why do people cheat? Why are our online worlds often so toxic? What motivates us to "catch 'em all" in Pokemon, grinding away for hours to hatch eggs?

In this episode, psychologist Jamie Madigan, author of Getting Gamers, explains how by exploring the way people interact with video games we can better understand how brains interact with everything else.

Direct download: 084_-_Getting_Gamers_-_Jamie_Madigan.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 11:36am EST




Direct download: 083_-_Idiot_Brain_-_Dean_Burnett.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 11:03pm EST




Direct download: 082_-_Crowds_rebroadcast.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 3:45pm EST

In this episode, psychologist Per Espen Stoknes discusses his book: What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming.

Stoknes has developed a strategy for science communicators who find themselves confronted with climate change deniers who aren't swayed by facts and charts. His book presents a series of psychology-based steps designed to painlessly change people’s minds and avoid the common mistakes scientists tend to make when explaining climate change to laypeople.

Direct download: 081_-_Climate_Paradox.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 12:16am EST

Oddly enough, we don’t actually know very much about how to change people’s minds, not scientifically, that's why the work of the a group of LGBT activists in Los Angeles is offering something valuable to psychology and political science - uncharted scientific territory.

The Leadership Lab has been developing a technique for the last eight years that can change a person’s mind about a contentious social issue after a 20-minute conversation.

This episode is about that group's redemption after their reputation was threatened by a researcher who, in studying their persuasion technique, committed scientific fraud and forced the retraction of his paper. That research and the retraction got a lot of media attention in 2015, but the story didn't end there.

In the show, you will meet the scientists who uncovered that researcher's fraud and then decided to go ahead and start over, do the research themselves, and see if the technique actually worked.

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Direct download: 080_-_Deep_Canvassing.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 8:21pm EST

Common sense used to dictate that men and women should only come together for breakfast and dinner.

According to Victorian historian Kaythrn Hughes, people in the early 19th Century thought the outside world was dangerous and unclean and morally dubious and thus no place for a virtuous, fragile woman. The home was a paradise, while men went out into the world and got their hands dirty.

By the mid 1800s, women were leaving home to work in factories and much more, and if you believed in preserving the separate spheres, the concept that men and women should only cross paths at breakfast and dinner, then as we approached the 20th century, this created a lot of anxiety for you.


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Direct download: 079_-_Separate_Spheres.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 7:19pm EST

Hypothetical situations involving dragons, robots, spaceships, and vampires have all been used to prove and disprove arguments.

Statements about things that do not exist can still be true, and can be useful thinking tools for exploring philosophical, logical, sociological, and scientific concepts.

The problem is that sometimes those same arguments accidentally require those fictional concepts to be real in order to support their conclusions, and that’s when you commit the existential fallacy.

In this episode we explore the most logical logical fallacy of them all, the existential fallacy. No need to get out your pens and paper, we will do that for you, as we make sense of one the most break-breaking thinking mistakes we’ve ever discovered.

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Direct download: 078_-_The_Existential_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 12:36pm EST



In studies, when asked this question, more than 80 percent of people chose number two. Most people said it was more probably that Linda is a bank teller AND active in the feminist movement, but that's wrong. Can you tell why?

This thinking mistake is an example of the subject of this episode - the conjunction fallacy. Listen as three experts in logic and reasoning explain why people get this question wrong, why it is wrong, and how you can avoid committing the conjunction fallacy in other situations.

Direct download: 077_-_The_Conjunction_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 11:03am EST

If you traced back the ad hominem attack and the argument from authority to their shared source, you would find the genetic fallacy, a fallacy that appears when people trace things back to their sources.

We often overstate and overestimate just how much we can learn about a claim based on where that claim originated, and that's the crux of the genetic fallacy.

In this episode listen as three experts in logic and reasoning explain when we should and when we should not take the source of a statement into account when deciding if something is true or false.

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Direct download: 076_-_The_Genetic_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 1:45am EST

Sometimes you apply a double standard to the things you love, the things you believe, and the things crucial to your identity, and often you do so without realizing it.

Special pleading is all about searching for exemptions and excuses for why a standard, or a rule, or a description, or a definition does not apply to something that you hold dear.

It's also used to explain away how something extraordinary fails to stand up to scrutiny, or why there is a lack of evidence for a difficult-to-believe claim.

In this episode, listen as three experts in logic and reasoning dive deep into the odd thinking behind the special pleading fallacy.

Direct download: 075_-_Special_Pleading__Moving_The_Goalposts.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 12:56am EST

If you believe something is bad because it is...bad, or that something is good because, well, it's good, you probably wouldn't use that kind of reasoning in an argument, yet, sometimes, without realizing it, that's exactly what you do.

In this episode three experts in logic and rationality explain how circular reasoning leads us to "beg the question" when producing arguments and defending our ideas, beliefs, and behaviors.

Direct download: 074_-_Begging_The_Question.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 11:04pm EST

We don’t treat all of our beliefs equally.

For some, we see them as either true or false, correct or incorrect. For others, we see them as probabilities, chances, odds. In one world, certainty, in the other, uncertainty.

In this episode you will learn from two experts in reasoning how to apply a rule from the 1700s that makes it possible to see all of your beliefs as being in “grayscale,” as neither black nor white, neither 0 nor 100 percent, but always somewhere in between, as a shade of gray reflecting your confidence in just how wrong you might be...given the evidence at hand.

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Direct download: 073_-_Bayes_Theorem.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 12:39pm EST

In this episode, we explore why we are unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are.



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Direct download: 072_-_Dunning_Rebroadcast.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 12:37pm EST

Does the Bermuda Triangle seem quite as mysterious once you know that just about any triangle of that size drawn over the globe just about anywhere will contain as many, if not more, missing planes?

When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, when looking for something specific, you tend to notice patterns everywhere, which leads you to ask the question, "What are the odds?" Usually, the odds are actually pretty good.

Though some things in life seem too amazing to be coincidence, too odd to be random, too similar to be chance, given enough time (and enough events) randomness will begin to clump in places. You are born looking for clusters where chance events have built up like sand into dunes. Picking out clusters of coincidence is a predicable malfunction of a normal human mind, and it can lead to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

Direct download: 071_-_The_Texas_Sharpshooter_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 2:17pm EST




Direct download: 070_-_The_No_True_Scotsman_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 6:24pm EST




Direct download: 069_-_The_Black_and_White_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 4:37pm EST





Direct download: 068_-_The_Strawman_Fallacy_.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 3:33pm EST

If you have ever been in an argument, you've likely committed a logical fallacy, and if you know how logical fallacies work, you've likely committed the fallacy fallacy.

Listen as three experts in logic and arguing explain just what a formal argument really is, and how to spot, avoid, and defend against the one logical fallacy that is most likely to turn you into an internet blowhard.

Direct download: 067_-_The_Fallacy_Fallacy.mp3
Category:psychology -- posted at: 6:35pm EST