Speaker 1: Hello everyone. This is Seth the audio producer for Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind. And there's just a quick note
Speaker 1: before we start. Myself, Robert, and Joe. We are still
Speaker 1: recording in isolation because it is the summer of and well,
Speaker 1: this episode, we had a bit of a problem with
Speaker 1: Robert's microphone. It was a one time thing. It shouldn't
Speaker 1: happen again in the future, but for this episode, it's
Speaker 1: going to sound a little bit like Joe is kind
Speaker 1: of talking to a tv VCR combo and like a
Speaker 1: bunker somewhere. But well, I guess that's technically kind of
Speaker 1: what we're actually doing. But anyway, anyway, point is this
Speaker 1: is a one time incident. Uh, it's all still very understandable,
Speaker 1: very easy to listen to in this episode of cleaned
Speaker 1: it up as best I can, and next time it'll
Speaker 1: sound just like normal, we promise. Thanks, enjoy the show.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind Production. If I
Speaker 1: heart radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. In
Speaker 1: Today we're gonna be talking about mostly focusing on a
Speaker 1: classic psychology paper about an effect in uh in the
Speaker 1: kind of social cognitive bias known as the spotlight effect.
Speaker 1: But to get into this subject, I wanted to start
Speaker 1: off by thinking about something that a lot of people
Speaker 1: have found themselves doing in the past few months. Of
Speaker 1: people who maybe this wasn't part of your job very
Speaker 1: much recently, but now you spend a significant portion of
Speaker 1: your day in web video meetings, staring at little boxes
Speaker 1: of your co workers faces on a computer screen, or
Speaker 1: maybe just staring at your own face a lot. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, in fact, right now is Joe and I
Speaker 1: are recording this. We are using a Zoom call. We
Speaker 1: are using a Zoom conference to communicate with each other,
Speaker 1: and then we're using some other programs and what not
Speaker 1: to to actually record it. But yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: people haven't. You may be using something different. You might
Speaker 1: be using what there's like Google meet, Microsoft meeting, like
Speaker 1: Facebook flop. I mean they're like a million of them, right,
Speaker 1: I mean this is an optagram. Yeah, it's a growth
Speaker 1: industry figuring out and it makes sense. Right. We need
Speaker 1: to still be able to connect with each other, We
Speaker 1: still need to have meaningful meetings and all of those
Speaker 1: less meaningful meetings, and in order to keep the gears
Speaker 1: of business grinding away. Right. Yeah. And one of the
Speaker 1: strange things I've noticed, and I've read other people noticing
Speaker 1: the exact same thing, is that you might expect that
Speaker 1: being able to do a meeting from your home over
Speaker 1: the internet would be maybe less exhausting than a meeting
Speaker 1: in person, But somehow I have not found it to
Speaker 1: be the case. I found that, like, video chats can
Speaker 1: be just intensely draining, like after where they're over, you
Speaker 1: feel like you've been lifting weights or something. Uh. And
Speaker 1: part of what's going on here I found very much
Speaker 1: embodied in the spirit of an article that I saw
Speaker 1: link to. It's it's just a Medium post. And I
Speaker 1: want to be very clear that I'm not passing judgment
Speaker 1: on the author here, that nothing wrong with with this person,
Speaker 1: but the title of it just gave me chills. And
Speaker 1: the title of this medium post was how to fake
Speaker 1: eye contact during video chats and why it's important. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: this this was this is interesting. This was what a
Speaker 1: medium article by Alexa Curtis, And they made three key
Speaker 1: suggestions here. The first one is to use a webcam
Speaker 1: even if no one else is okay. The second is
Speaker 1: trick yourself into looking at the camera instead of at
Speaker 1: the screen impossible, and then tape your prompts, your notes
Speaker 1: whatever to your monitor as much as possible instead of
Speaker 1: having to refer to like a notepad something. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: suggestion is like, make a little fake face to go
Speaker 1: around the webcam box so that you're looking into the
Speaker 1: camera instead of at the screen. But I just don't
Speaker 1: think it's like if your face is played back on
Speaker 1: the screen unless you are able to turn your face
Speaker 1: off for yourself. You just you're not going to be
Speaker 1: able to help it, are you. Yeah. I actually, before
Speaker 1: I read this, I kind of thought because I'd catch
Speaker 1: myself doing this. Um. Now, now I should say that
Speaker 1: I am lucky and that I do not have to
Speaker 1: set through just hours and hours of meetings today and zoom.
Speaker 1: I have friends who are definitely stuck in that boat,
Speaker 1: and they seem exhausted by it. We use zoom in
Speaker 1: these recordings, but for the most part, we're not actually
Speaker 1: engaging in the video part of it. We we have
Speaker 1: other stuff, we have notes, stuff that we're looking at
Speaker 1: when we're recording. But I have found this to be
Speaker 1: the case with my my Dungeons and Dragons group, which
Speaker 1: used to meet in person, but now it's forced to
Speaker 1: meet via zoom and we have this, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's like a two or three hour zoom called you know,
Speaker 1: like a three hour zoom called it would do once
Speaker 1: a week to do Dengon and Dragons. And for some reason,
Speaker 1: I've been noticing that I've just I felt kind of
Speaker 1: worn out by it towards the end of of the night,
Speaker 1: um in ways that I wasn't worn out previously meeting
Speaker 1: in person, Like I just kind of felt zapped by it,
Speaker 1: like if if we were battling something at the end,
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of going through the motions. I'm just
Speaker 1: not feeling it anymore at that point. Yeah, exact same experience.
Speaker 1: I've done social stuff via video calls. I've also been
Speaker 1: doing a D and D campaign, my my first ever
Speaker 1: by the way, thank you over over zoom, and it's
Speaker 1: been a lot of fun. But yes, it is. It
Speaker 1: is kind of exhausting to just participate in the in
Speaker 1: the eyeball Tennis of of the different video faces on
Speaker 1: the screen. Something about it hooks its claws into your
Speaker 1: brain and just pulls and stretches and kind of needs
Speaker 1: your brain like a ball of dough. Yeah, now, fortunately,
Speaker 1: I don't know how your campaign is going, but with ours,
Speaker 1: were also using a couple other resources. We're using a
Speaker 1: discord forum, and we're using role twenty to pull up
Speaker 1: maps and such. So maybe maybe we should upgrade our
Speaker 1: technology we're looking into. But but basically we have some
Speaker 1: other things to captivate our eyes during this this process.
Speaker 1: I guess one of the things about a straight up
Speaker 1: like business zoom meeting is a lot of times you're
Speaker 1: just stuck in those Brady bunch um cubes, right, You're
Speaker 1: just you're just stuck with all these little screen pictures
Speaker 1: of people and uh and some sometimes you have it
Speaker 1: set to where one will take dominance over the others,
Speaker 1: but you may just be looking at a wall of
Speaker 1: people's faces, and then you're thinking about again this point
Speaker 1: of should I be making eye contact with everybody? Should
Speaker 1: I be focusing on trying to be the most presentable,
Speaker 1: you know, the most professional looking, Like when they look
Speaker 1: at my little box, it's like watching a TV broadcast
Speaker 1: and I'm making direct eye contact with them. Maybe, but
Speaker 1: because I have a little sticky smiley face that I've
Speaker 1: put out at the top of my computer by the camera.
Speaker 1: There are multiple ways in which this type of interaction
Speaker 1: is not normal. I mean, of course, it's not normal
Speaker 1: to be interfacing through technology at all. Of course, it's
Speaker 1: kind of strange that you're not looking at the person
Speaker 1: but you're looking at the screen, so the eye contact
Speaker 1: is off. I understand that that point in the article.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it is not normal to
Speaker 1: be able to see yourself while you're talking to people.
Speaker 1: I can imagine if you know you were always talking
Speaker 1: to people with a mirror in your hand that was
Speaker 1: reflecting your face. Yeah, people would rightfully think you were insane.
Speaker 1: That was how like self obsessed you were that you
Speaker 1: go or I don't know, or afraid of Gordon's that
Speaker 1: you always had to have a mirror in your hand.
Speaker 1: And yet that's the reality we find ourselves there. And
Speaker 1: I know this is this is not just like our
Speaker 1: particular reaction to this. This is something that that I've
Speaker 1: read about in multiple popular articles and also not just
Speaker 1: an obscure scientific articles. Like there was an article I
Speaker 1: came across in I think of his Business Insider that
Speaker 1: is called like why you can't stop steering at yourself
Speaker 1: in zoom calls. Yes, this was by Shia Fetter. Titled
Speaker 1: a cyber Psychologist explains why you can't stop steering yourself
Speaker 1: on zoom calls and everyone else is probably doing the same, um,
Speaker 1: which I I have caught myself doing this sometimes during
Speaker 1: Dunus and dragons, sometimes during work calls, where you know
Speaker 1: you want to check in, you want to see how
Speaker 1: you were presenting to the rest of the world. But
Speaker 1: then it's often easy to sort of, you know, to
Speaker 1: to to. You're looking at these wall of faces, and
Speaker 1: then you decide to maximize your own, and you're like,
Speaker 1: all right, let's see, how's the light hitting me, what's
Speaker 1: my hair doing right now? How presented my smiling weird?
Speaker 1: Like smiling weird? Do I look do I look engaged?
Speaker 1: Or do I look as bored as I feel? You know? Um?
Speaker 1: And so that's what this article gets into a little
Speaker 1: of that year. So um. The article discusses some key
Speaker 1: points made by cyber psychologist Andrew Franklin. So the first
Speaker 1: one is that in general, adolescents tend to suffer for
Speaker 1: from the imaginary audience delusion, the idea that people in
Speaker 1: the surroundings are really paying attention to every move they make,
Speaker 1: and this often follows us into adulthood as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this I think is pretty close to or perhaps
Speaker 1: even just another name for the main issue we're going
Speaker 1: to be focusing on today and otherwise known as the
Speaker 1: spotlight effect. Now, one thing about this, this point about adolescents.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is of course terrifying to think about,
Speaker 1: given the nature of social media, which is pretty much
Speaker 1: predicated on this sort of celebrity aspiring notion of a
Speaker 1: constant audience and uh and in one tends to drift
Speaker 1: to extremes and reaction to that, right, this feeling that
Speaker 1: every word I put on the Internet, or every video,
Speaker 1: every whatever is vitally important and will be viewed by
Speaker 1: potentially everyone in the world. Yes, you're not just constantly
Speaker 1: on view you are constantly being reviewed, is the perception. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, obviously that's it's gonna from person person and
Speaker 1: there some people are gonna use social media in a
Speaker 1: way that hasn't far more limited scope only close friends
Speaker 1: or maybe even family, maybe just one person can see
Speaker 1: you know. But but but yeah, it does make me
Speaker 1: wonder and this would have to be a you know,
Speaker 1: a discussion for another time, like just what what what
Speaker 1: is happening when this um spotlight effect, This imaginary audience
Speaker 1: delusion is playing uh into our use of social media. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but also so this psychology professor Andrew Franklin also makes
Speaker 1: the point that like it's not just an illusion that
Speaker 1: like video chats are actually exhausting. Yeah, Yeah, to make
Speaker 1: the point that video chats are more stressful than in
Speaker 1: person meetings, and a big part of that is just
Speaker 1: everything is more distracted, more fragmented, and we have muted
Speaker 1: or severely lessened nonverbal communicative skills. So you think of
Speaker 1: a lot of this is kind of an overstatement of
Speaker 1: the obvious, but you can do far less with your
Speaker 1: body language, not only your overt body language like talking
Speaker 1: with your hands and waving down people the other side
Speaker 1: of the table, but in terms of just having a
Speaker 1: bodily awareness of what everyone is doing and how they
Speaker 1: are sort of reacting to what's going on, and if
Speaker 1: someone else is about to speak or needs to speak. Yes,
Speaker 1: And it's actually hard to tell who's looking at who,
Speaker 1: Like you can assume if there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: Brady bunch boxes that people are probably looking if they're
Speaker 1: not looking at themselves, they're probably looking at the person
Speaker 1: who's currently talking. But maybe not. You can't tell. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and it's also weird to think, like, I guess
Speaker 1: maybe some of you out there had more of like
Speaker 1: a you know, rules of order kind of a upbringing
Speaker 1: or or you know, you had some more training and Okay,
Speaker 1: this is how, this is how a business meeting goes,
Speaker 1: this is how a work meeting operates. But I feel
Speaker 1: for my part, a lot of it's just kind of
Speaker 1: you just learn it. You go just sort of figure
Speaker 1: out what is the culture of this group and this meeting,
Speaker 1: and and how am I supposed to fit in? And
Speaker 1: then to a certain extent, it feels like we've had
Speaker 1: to relearn all of that or augment our understanding of
Speaker 1: that based on the limitations of the technology. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think that's totally right, And and I would I would
Speaker 1: emphasize yet again that not all digital socialization skills are
Speaker 1: are interchangeable or transferable to one another. So you might
Speaker 1: have been well acclimatized to the social skills one needs
Speaker 1: in order to interact through a different type of mediated
Speaker 1: social media like like Facebook or Twitter or something like that,
Speaker 1: and still not really have any skills for how to
Speaker 1: interact via a video chat. It's just like a different
Speaker 1: set of skills, a different set of things to get
Speaker 1: used to. Yeah, it's a different talking stick entirely now now.
Speaker 1: Franklin also drives something that given the strain of keeping
Speaker 1: up with everyone's tiny boxes and concern over how you
Speaker 1: yourself look in your box, you might easily find yourself
Speaker 1: just looking at yourself, staring into the digital mirror and
Speaker 1: fixating on how you appear to friends, co workers, and
Speaker 1: bosses and and Franklin maintains that this means you're likely overwhelmed.
Speaker 1: I perceive games which which I totally get. Again, even
Speaker 1: with the low stakes confines of dungeons and dragons. You know,
Speaker 1: nothing huge is on the line here. But by the
Speaker 1: end of the of the session again, I often find
Speaker 1: myself kind of zapped in ways that I never felt
Speaker 1: before within person gaming. And even though we're staring into
Speaker 1: that digital reflection of our own face, Franklin stresses that
Speaker 1: people are ultimately not fixating on you like you think
Speaker 1: they are. They are not setting there watching you and
Speaker 1: you know, dissecting everything about your appearance and in your
Speaker 1: background and what your face is doing in any any
Speaker 1: given sect. Yeah, No, they're probably much more likely fixating
Speaker 1: on themselves the same way you are fixating on yourself.
Speaker 1: Um uh. And so this brings us back to the
Speaker 1: cognitive bias that we're gonna be focusing on in today's episode,
Speaker 1: also known as the spotlight effect. And this effect is
Speaker 1: very interesting because, on one hand, I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the simplest psychological phenomena we've ever talked about on
Speaker 1: the show. It's actually very simple to observe. It's very
Speaker 1: straightforward in a way. But it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where if you really internalize it, it's implications could be
Speaker 1: kind of life changing. Yeah, it's one of these things
Speaker 1: that doesn't I wouldn't say that it really like changes
Speaker 1: in the nature of your reality, but it brings certain
Speaker 1: aspects of it into maybe sharper focus. You might realize, Oh, well, okay,
Speaker 1: that explains some of the things I feel when I
Speaker 1: am in a meeting or you know, just walking around
Speaker 1: u uh, you know, in a public space, or or
Speaker 1: whatever the case may be. Um, I do feel like
Speaker 1: it does it does? It does feel like a revelation
Speaker 1: of it in its own way. Yeah. So the main
Speaker 1: paper that I wanted to focus on today was published
Speaker 1: in the year two thousand in the Journal of Personality
Speaker 1: and Social Psychology by Thomas Gilovich of Victoria who Staid
Speaker 1: Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky, and it's called the spot effect
Speaker 1: in Social Judgment and ecocentric bias and Estimates of the
Speaker 1: salience of one zone actions and appearance. You can pretty
Speaker 1: easily find a full PDF of this online if you
Speaker 1: want to read it. And this is a highly cited paper.
Speaker 1: It has been referred to many many times in the
Speaker 1: years since as a kind of seminal work on this
Speaker 1: on this social cognitive bias. So the authors begin with
Speaker 1: some anecdotal observations, and these observations are that for both
Speaker 1: good and ill, it often seems like stuff you expect
Speaker 1: other people to notice and recall about you really goes unnoticed. Uh.
Speaker 1: And also on the good side, that might be like
Speaker 1: something smart that you said in a discussion group. You're
Speaker 1: like really pleased with yourself that like, oh, I had
Speaker 1: that really good insight or I made that really funny joke,
Speaker 1: and then it turns out later that nobody else seems
Speaker 1: to recall that you said anything. Or perhaps this often
Speaker 1: actually happens in athletic contexts where people will make a
Speaker 1: really good shot in a basketball game or something, and
Speaker 1: they will expect people to remember that they did that.
Speaker 1: But then maybe it turns out that nobody really noticed.
Speaker 1: It just kind of was one of the goals in
Speaker 1: a game in which many goals were scored. And as
Speaker 1: frustrating as this can be, it can also kind of
Speaker 1: be a relief that it works the other way to
Speaker 1: People often don't seem to have noticed when you make
Speaker 1: what feels like a really obvious mistake faux paw on
Speaker 1: a first meeting, or when you misspeak and what feels
Speaker 1: like an embarrassing way, or that time you had spinach
Speaker 1: in your teeth, like you obsess over that and you're
Speaker 1: afraid it's going to completely ruin your reputation, that everybody's
Speaker 1: gonna remember you for that thing forever. But a lot
Speaker 1: of times it seems like maybe nobody even noticed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the dual nature of this particular revelation, I think ultimately
Speaker 1: it is positive because yeah, and maybe it means you're
Speaker 1: not as important as you thought you're. Maybe you're not
Speaker 1: it's a it's a it's explosive personality as you thought
Speaker 1: you were. But on the other hand, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe the stakes are a little bit lower every time
Speaker 1: you hope in your mouth. Yeah. Yeah, that's the hypothesis
Speaker 1: at the heart of this paper, that these anecdotal observations
Speaker 1: are indicative of a real trend that can be measured
Speaker 1: that in general, humans have an egocentric bias that causes
Speaker 1: us to believe that our actions and our appearance are
Speaker 1: much more salient and notable to other people than they
Speaker 1: really are. Quote. People tend to believe that more people
Speaker 1: take a note of their actions and appearance than is
Speaker 1: actually the case. We dubbed this putative phenomenon the spotlight effect.
Speaker 1: People tend to believe that the social spotlight shines more
Speaker 1: brightly on them than it really does. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: insightful and I think we can all match this up
Speaker 1: pretty easily, first of all with our own experiences, but
Speaker 1: also with some of the ideas that we've discussed on
Speaker 1: the show before. Uh specifically, first of all, there's the
Speaker 1: self narrative aspect of our inner thoughts, you know, through
Speaker 1: the inner workings of consciousness, were constantly weaving together a
Speaker 1: store about who we are and how we fit into
Speaker 1: the world. It's a little movie, and we're the main character,
Speaker 1: so of course we're the most important person in that story. Right,
Speaker 1: you're trying to link together a series of what are
Speaker 1: in fact sort of random events into a cohesive narrative
Speaker 1: with the logic to it. Right. And then through theory
Speaker 1: of mind, we're constantly running simulations about the mental states
Speaker 1: of other people, specific people, people in general, known people,
Speaker 1: unknown people, sort of hypothetical people, uh and uh. And
Speaker 1: of course one of the key aspects of any of
Speaker 1: these simulations is, you know, how do they relate to me,
Speaker 1: how do they think about me? What are their intentions
Speaker 1: towards me? And that makes sense, right, There's an inherently
Speaker 1: self centered quality to this sort of thinking, because it
Speaker 1: all comes down to individual survival. We tend to air
Speaker 1: on the side of seeing tigers in the grass when
Speaker 1: there are none, which is better of the two possible
Speaker 1: gambles here, But it also means going through life perpetually
Speaker 1: imagining how the tiger sees you. Yeah, and so this
Speaker 1: is in some ways the exact social equivalent of the
Speaker 1: agency detection overdrive, where you, you know, over interpret a
Speaker 1: crack of a twig as a tiger in the grass. Here,
Speaker 1: you over interpret any little thing that that you think
Speaker 1: maybe going wrong in a social interaction as something that
Speaker 1: people will notice and remember and judge you for. So
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a quick break and then when
Speaker 1: we come back we can get a little bit further
Speaker 1: into this study. Thank alright, we're back. Okay. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about the study from the year two thousand by
Speaker 1: Gilovich and co authors who are putting forth this this
Speaker 1: putative phenomenon that at the time they called the spotlight effect,
Speaker 1: the idea that we overestimate the salience of our appearance
Speaker 1: and our behavior to other people. And the authors here
Speaker 1: note several lines of previous research that helped point to
Speaker 1: this conclusion. One of them is, first of all, this
Speaker 1: may not be surprising at all, but people do tend
Speaker 1: to have egocentric biases that you can measure quite easily
Speaker 1: in in in tests. These are biases that overstate the
Speaker 1: importance of the self. Just one example the site is
Speaker 1: a paper by Ross and Sickly published in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine called ego centric Biases and Availability and Attribution, and
Speaker 1: it showed it showed this in the realm of what's
Speaker 1: called responsibility allocation, Who did, how much and how important
Speaker 1: was what they did? So there are several different ways
Speaker 1: you can test for this. Uh maybe in discussion groups,
Speaker 1: maybe in household chores, maybe in basketball teams. Uh quote
Speaker 1: one zone, contributions to a joint product are more readily available.
Speaker 1: That is, more frequently and easily recalled. Individuals accepted more
Speaker 1: responsibility for a group product than other participants attributed to them.
Speaker 1: So the easy way of thinking about this is, oh,
Speaker 1: our team one, because I scored that goal. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: found this particularly telling. The authors now that that research
Speaker 1: indicates that when individuals undertake complex social interactions, they alternate
Speaker 1: between the roles of speaker or actor and listener or observer,
Speaker 1: but much of their attention is ultimately going to be
Speaker 1: directed in many cases at planning and executing their own responses.
Speaker 1: And I think we can relate to this. Uh. You
Speaker 1: know when when those times when you haven't quite zoned
Speaker 1: out on a meeting, like you're not just or or
Speaker 1: a conversation and you're not just you know, out here
Speaker 1: thinking about Star Wars in the back of your head. No,
Speaker 1: you're focusing instead on the thing that you're getting ready
Speaker 1: to say, your interjection into the conversation, the joke that
Speaker 1: you are intending to make when you get the talking
Speaker 1: stick um, and uh, you know, because ultimately that's often
Speaker 1: a part of any kind of like three way or
Speaker 1: or or larger conversation is when when is it going
Speaker 1: to be my turn? And how am I going to
Speaker 1: make the most out of my my time speaking. I
Speaker 1: believe there's actually a name for this exact defect. It's
Speaker 1: a different thing that's been stun I mean, obviously it's
Speaker 1: very related to the stuff we're talking about, but I
Speaker 1: think it's called the next in line effect, where you
Speaker 1: can measure that people have less recall of if you
Speaker 1: if you like, sit people in a circle and go
Speaker 1: around the circle asking them to speak, people have less
Speaker 1: recall of the person who spoke right before them than
Speaker 1: they do of everybody else, because you know, when the
Speaker 1: person right before you was talking, you're planning what you're
Speaker 1: gonna say. And and it means that when one thinks
Speaker 1: back on a meeting, so you're in this meeting, you
Speaker 1: have this period of time where you're you're applying most
Speaker 1: of your cognitive efforts towards preparing for your own words,
Speaker 1: and then when you think back on it, you're more
Speaker 1: likely to remember the thing that you were focused on
Speaker 1: at the time. You know your own words, your own contribution, um,
Speaker 1: because that's where that's where you were spending the mental resources.
Speaker 1: The exception to this, however, would be if one's could
Speaker 1: contribution required a little effort, like instead of plotting to
Speaker 1: interject something that will make everyone laugh or pursuing some
Speaker 1: specific strategic aim in the meeting, what if it was
Speaker 1: just the part of the meeting where every week your
Speaker 1: boss says, hey, Roy, what are the numbers? Just read
Speaker 1: us the numbers real quick, and then you read the
Speaker 1: numbers something that's you know, quick and normal like that. Now,
Speaker 1: the exception of this they mentioned would be passive observers,
Speaker 1: people who are in the meeting but are not planning
Speaker 1: to have the talking stick at any point, don't have
Speaker 1: any kind of active role in the meeting, or if
Speaker 1: they do, maybe it is just reading off the stats
Speaker 1: and they don't have a larger role to play, so
Speaker 1: they might well focus more on other people in the meeting.
Speaker 1: They are they are going to be the ones that
Speaker 1: are going to be more likely to notice what you
Speaker 1: say or do. That that totally makes sense to me, Um,
Speaker 1: I think I have much better recall of meetings where
Speaker 1: I am not expected to speak. That being said, and
Speaker 1: this is this is me, not the authors here, But
Speaker 1: I suspect that the passive observers are also far more
Speaker 1: likely to be thinking about star wars or what they're
Speaker 1: they needed by a grocery school later the supernatural biker movies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or here's a big one. We didn't even get into this,
Speaker 1: but via the zoom call, uh it one has a
Speaker 1: tremendous ability to just simply go to other websites during
Speaker 1: the call and still look basically attentive, right, because you'd
Speaker 1: just be looking at the screen either way. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: your excuse, folks, Digital hookie. Has anybody tried just putting
Speaker 1: up like a face like I know you can insertain
Speaker 1: backgrounds on these video calls, putting up a background that
Speaker 1: has a photo of them in it so it looks
Speaker 1: like they're sitting there. I bet somebody has somebody out
Speaker 1: there has got a little bit forward and figured out
Speaker 1: a way to make it happen. It would be It
Speaker 1: would be kind of the equivalent of I didn't Helmer
Speaker 1: Simpson have some glasses at one point that made him
Speaker 1: look like he was awake? Yes, it's when he's in
Speaker 1: he's on a jury and he's expected to be paying attention,
Speaker 1: but he is sleeping, right, that's right, I remember that
Speaker 1: wide awake glasses and one of the other jurors narcs
Speaker 1: on him. But yeah, so so anyway, the effect here,
Speaker 1: I think is pretty straightforward. If an action stands out
Speaker 1: in your own mind for whatever reason, you're going to
Speaker 1: end up thinking it was more important in some objective
Speaker 1: sense than it actually was. And so, in other words,
Speaker 1: if people overestimate the relevance of their own actions in
Speaker 1: an objective sense, wouldn't they also overestimate how relevant their
Speaker 1: actions are subjectively to other people? Yeah? Yeah. The authors
Speaker 1: also point out in many cases it might not matter
Speaker 1: it maybe quote overlook when joint endeavors do not require
Speaker 1: explicit allocations of responsibility. But obviously sometimes this is not
Speaker 1: the case. Yeah. It particularly makes me think of a
Speaker 1: frequent trope you see in films, the villainous meetings, when
Speaker 1: you have villains around a table generally having a meeting,
Speaker 1: having this sort of you know, dark, more antagonistic version
Speaker 1: of our regular real life business meetings. Uh, the meetings
Speaker 1: of Specter. The early James Bond Yes or Blowfeld would
Speaker 1: have the have the command consoled like electrocute somebody's chair, yeah,
Speaker 1: or another favorite of mine, or the meetings you see
Speaker 1: the Imperial meetings in like Star Wars and New Hope,
Speaker 1: or we're also in Rogue one. We we have the
Speaker 1: likes of Darth Vader and Grand Moth Tarken or or
Speaker 1: Orson Critic. You know, they're they're they're all objectively, they're
Speaker 1: they're all talking about, okay, we need to get the
Speaker 1: Death Star up and running. But these are all highly
Speaker 1: egotistical and self focused individuals, and they all seen each
Speaker 1: pretty focused on their own key role in everything, and
Speaker 1: they're certainly not about like elevating the project itself above
Speaker 1: personal ambition. Yeah. Yeah, they're clearly like trying to stick
Speaker 1: up for their own branch. It's like, you know, dangerous
Speaker 1: to your starfleet command or not to my battle station. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: A few more previously observed. A psychological phenomenon that the
Speaker 1: authors call attention to is is potentially backing up the
Speaker 1: idea of a spotlight effect. Another one is what's known
Speaker 1: as naive realism. The right quote. Naive realism refers to
Speaker 1: the common tendency to assume that one's perception of an
Speaker 1: object or event is an accurate reflection of its objective properties,
Speaker 1: not a subjective interpretation or construle. In other words, look,
Speaker 1: it happened just like I saw it. It's the tendency
Speaker 1: to believe that your perception is unbiased and accurate, even
Speaker 1: though you might readily attribute, you know, mistakes and biases
Speaker 1: to other people's perceptions. Yeah, and this is all tied
Speaker 1: up in the philosophy of perception. Um. So when we're
Speaker 1: talking about naive realism also known as direct realism, that
Speaker 1: stands in opposition to indirect or representational realism. So direct
Speaker 1: or naive realism holds that we perceive things in the
Speaker 1: world directly and without the then the mediation of any impression, idea,
Speaker 1: or representation. And I think we can generally agree, especially
Speaker 1: on this show, that this is not the true nature
Speaker 1: of how a human process is reality. Know, the things
Speaker 1: you see are are based on the external world, but
Speaker 1: it's not an unbiased direct representation of the external world, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's there's a weight to things, you know. It's
Speaker 1: like if you know, if yesterday somebody slapped me with
Speaker 1: the fish, today I see a fish and and like
Speaker 1: that the nature of my perception is going to be
Speaker 1: augmented by that previous experience. Now, indirect realism adheres to
Speaker 1: the idea that material objects do have mind independent existence,
Speaker 1: but but not that our visual perception is unmediated or
Speaker 1: that these objects necessarily possess all of the features that
Speaker 1: we perceived them to have. Like a quick example of
Speaker 1: that would be, obviously, we look at our beloved pets,
Speaker 1: and we may, you know, we may perceive them to
Speaker 1: have various nuances that they simply do not have, and
Speaker 1: you know, as pet owners, were generally okay with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. And I think indirect realism,
Speaker 1: I don't know, to me, that is the model of
Speaker 1: the world that makes the most sense. Like I would
Speaker 1: not say I'm an idealist, I believe the external world
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. I don't go for that. But obviously, our
Speaker 1: our ideas about what is motivating our dog or something
Speaker 1: might be more us than actually coming from the dog. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, there's also phenomenalism, which generally rejects the mind
Speaker 1: independent existence of material logics, but accepts un mediated visual
Speaker 1: perception and the possession of of perceived features. So other
Speaker 1: things are not things as much as they are bundles
Speaker 1: of sense data, which is a weird way to to
Speaker 1: behold your path. After Yeah, let's getting almost into kind
Speaker 1: of George Berkeley and kind of territory that that I
Speaker 1: don't think I can fully go for, but that it
Speaker 1: ultimately doesn't really play into what we're talking about here. Again,
Speaker 1: we're talking about direct realism or our naive realism versus
Speaker 1: indirect or representational realism. Right, And I think we do
Speaker 1: have a tendency to really underappreciate how much our perceptions
Speaker 1: are affected by the kinds of mistakes and distortions that
Speaker 1: we readily attribute to other people. And so the authors
Speaker 1: of the two thousand paper, right, that quote applied to
Speaker 1: the spotlight effect. This implies that it might be easy
Speaker 1: to confuse how salient something is to oneself with how
Speaker 1: salient it is to others, precisely because our own behavior
Speaker 1: stands out in our own minds, it can be hard
Speaker 1: to discern how well or even whether it is picked
Speaker 1: up by others. Absolutely, we may be attending the same
Speaker 1: meeting or Zoom conference call, but we are not all
Speaker 1: attending the same meeting or Zoom conference call, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. We we all have different perceptions of
Speaker 1: it based on our own biases, our own histories, our
Speaker 1: own pervasive thoughts or you know, cognitive model of the
Speaker 1: task at hand and our role in it. I mean,
Speaker 1: our our subjective understanding of the meeting is going to
Speaker 1: different person to person exactly. So leading into the next
Speaker 1: thing here that the authors point out is as possibly
Speaker 1: pointing to a spotlight effect. This is something that has
Speaker 1: been documented known as this self as target bias. Quick example,
Speaker 1: so you're in a classroom, the teacher gives a pop
Speaker 1: quiz about last night's reading, and Johnny interprets this quiz
Speaker 1: as an attack on him personally because he believes that
Speaker 1: the teacher must believe that he didn't do the reading.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think even the best of us
Speaker 1: sometimes we fall prey to thinking like this something that
Speaker 1: is a a general sort of action applied to everyone.
Speaker 1: We think, why are they doing this to me? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially if you have a light up, like a build up,
Speaker 1: build up of anticipation about a given you know, meeting
Speaker 1: or or social scenario. Yeah. And so the author's right
Speaker 1: quote like naive realism, then the self is target bias
Speaker 1: reflects a confusion between what is available to oneself and
Speaker 1: what is likely to be available to and hence guide
Speaker 1: the actions of others. So again, Johnny might think, well,
Speaker 1: the teacher knows I didn't do the reading, and that's
Speaker 1: why she's giving the test today, or she's giving the
Speaker 1: pop quiz today. But the teacher doesn't know that. It's
Speaker 1: just you know, that's what he knows. And then finally,
Speaker 1: the author's point out that these previously documented eco centric
Speaker 1: biases are very similar to the kind of egocentrism that
Speaker 1: Jean Pierge observed pervading the cognition of young children early
Speaker 1: in their development. One of the more important parts of
Speaker 1: growing up, in fact, is shedding some of that ecocentrism.
Speaker 1: But it turns out we don't shed it all. It
Speaker 1: still appears in adults, simply in diminished form. It's certainly
Speaker 1: more diminished in some people than it is in us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, so it's young children. I mean, people with
Speaker 1: with kids will probably recognize this, often seem not to
Speaker 1: grasp that other people have a different perspective than they do.
Speaker 1: This happens when you're very young, and gradually, as you
Speaker 1: get older, you get more, you get more consistent about
Speaker 1: being able to accurately sort of model the minds of
Speaker 1: others understand that they have different desires, different perspectives than
Speaker 1: you do. And adults, of course by the time of adulthood,
Speaker 1: usually recognize this gap rationally, but still might have a
Speaker 1: hard time sort of calibrateing to predict it accurately. Now,
Speaker 1: the authors of this paper here say that what is
Speaker 1: the method that that we use to calibrate this this prediction.
Speaker 1: They say that it's probably based on anchoring and adjustment. Now,
Speaker 1: I was reading some follow up work by Gilovich about
Speaker 1: the the anchoring and adjustment controversy. Very brief refresher on anchoring.
Speaker 1: We've done an episode about this in the past. So,
Speaker 1: like when you're trying to come up with an answer
Speaker 1: to a question like how much is this car worth?
Speaker 1: Or what do people think of the speech I just made?
Speaker 1: You don't necessarily reason toward an answer from a neutral
Speaker 1: starting point. We often tend to be influenced by sort
Speaker 1: of like data points or hypothetical answers that we can
Speaker 1: kind of hang a hat on to begin with, Which
Speaker 1: might be one reason that you've got a good, you know,
Speaker 1: price written on the on the windshield of a car,
Speaker 1: even if that's not the price you would actually end
Speaker 1: up paying Now this was the Now, the anchoring and
Speaker 1: adjustment model was what the authors were working with. The
Speaker 1: I'm that's the idea that we often think by starting
Speaker 1: with an anchor and then we just adjust our estimate
Speaker 1: up or down from the anchor. I was reading some
Speaker 1: follow up work by Gilovich about the adjustment controversy, like,
Speaker 1: is this really the way we think? Is this really
Speaker 1: how we get to our anchor biased answers? Is it
Speaker 1: based on this adjustment process? Apparently that idea has come
Speaker 1: under some criticism in the past few decades, and there
Speaker 1: are arguments about how to best understand what's happening in
Speaker 1: people's heads when they fall for the anchoring bias. We're
Speaker 1: not going to get into the weeds of that argument here.
Speaker 1: You can check out our full episode on the anchoring
Speaker 1: bias for more depth. Um, but whatever the role of
Speaker 1: an adjustment mechanism in the brain, the anchoring effect does
Speaker 1: actually appear in many scenarios, and the authors in this
Speaker 1: paper are saying that the the anchoring effect manifests in
Speaker 1: how we imagine the opinions of other people about us.
Speaker 1: Because our our anchor, our starting point is how we
Speaker 1: feel about ourselves. The stuff we notice about ourselves, and
Speaker 1: then we kind of reason from there to what other
Speaker 1: people's opinions would be. Well, that makes sense again, coming
Speaker 1: back to the idea that we're using theory of mind
Speaker 1: to ultimately create simulations about the mind states of everyone
Speaker 1: in our lives from you know, from the person we're
Speaker 1: closest with, two people that are just you know, like
Speaker 1: supervisors or complete strangers, and uh and and all of
Speaker 1: that is constructed with ourselves at the middle, like our
Speaker 1: model of ourselfs um it is ultimately the like the
Speaker 1: I guess you would say that the support structure on
Speaker 1: which this entire network is built, Right, It's kind of
Speaker 1: like you can't build any bridges two ideas of other
Speaker 1: minds without starting from the foundation of your own. And
Speaker 1: that foundation of your own is going to come with
Speaker 1: a lot of baggage of like knowledge about yourself that
Speaker 1: other people don't have, and high levels of concern about
Speaker 1: your personal attributes that other people might not share, probably
Speaker 1: don't share. And that's everybody We should need to drive
Speaker 1: that home. Like we're not just talking thing about like
Speaker 1: say like like stereotypically egocentric person you know, or someone
Speaker 1: who has like like very obvious, uh, and pronounced personality
Speaker 1: flaws or anything like that, or dealing with with various
Speaker 1: mental health concerns or anything of that nature. But ultimately
Speaker 1: this naive perception is also self perception as well. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So I guess here we get to the actual empirical
Speaker 1: part of this research, like how would you study this?
Speaker 1: How would you look for empirical evidence of a spotlight effect?
Speaker 1: And there are a number of studies that are covered
Speaker 1: in this paper. I'm going to discuss them in sequence
Speaker 1: and very broad strokes. Uh so, what let me guess
Speaker 1: you know, what's going to be our our our key
Speaker 1: um implement in this study. Is it going to be
Speaker 1: like a god helmet that it stands my brain? Is
Speaker 1: it going to be uh, you know, some other kind
Speaker 1: of like high tech device that I'm cooking my nervous
Speaker 1: system up to. You're extremely close. Now we get into
Speaker 1: the cybernetics of a Barry Manilow T shirt. So the
Speaker 1: question is something maybe a lot of you have wondered before.
Speaker 1: People usually notice what's on your T shirt? Or do
Speaker 1: they just not even care? It's a great question. I know,
Speaker 1: when I wear a T shirt, I'm I I have
Speaker 1: certainly caught myself, especially at least in retrospect, thinking way
Speaker 1: too much about how others will perceive this shirt design. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what it's saying about me and my interest what
Speaker 1: is it broadcasting to the world, And it would be
Speaker 1: a But at the same time, I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: always very interested in what other people's shirts say, to
Speaker 1: the point that I sometimes feel self conscious about trying
Speaker 1: to understand what someone shirt is because I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't want to be looking like caught staring at somebody's
Speaker 1: T shirt. I think you probably notice certain kinds of
Speaker 1: shirts more than others. Like you might pick up on
Speaker 1: cues that like, oh, this is a band T shirt,
Speaker 1: and I'm usually kind of interested in band t shirts,
Speaker 1: and when we see what this is, But like other things,
Speaker 1: if it's a i'd imagine like a football team or something,
Speaker 1: you might not even take notice. That's true. I guess
Speaker 1: the shirts I'm usually interested in our I guess, you know,
Speaker 1: to a certain extent, band shirts, but if it has
Speaker 1: any kind of like monster type thing, oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: I definitely want to know what's going on. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's our brains, that's just our brains being our brains.
Speaker 1: Uh so so extremely simple set up for the study
Speaker 1: Its dead simple. You get a group of participants to
Speaker 1: gather in a room, and you have them basically in
Speaker 1: there like filling out questionnaires for an experiment that is
Speaker 1: supposedly about memory. And then another participant joins that group late,
Speaker 1: but before they go into the room, you require them
Speaker 1: to put on a Barry Manilow T shirt. Then, after
Speaker 1: they've been in the room for a very brief time,
Speaker 1: you say, actually, uh, this group has already gotten started,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna hold you back for for another session.
Speaker 1: And then you have the Barry Manilow interloper leave the room,
Speaker 1: and then you ask everybody. Okay, you ask the interloper,
Speaker 1: the Berry Manilow T shirt wearer, how many people in
Speaker 1: the room do you think noticed that you were wearing
Speaker 1: a Berry Manlow T shirt? And then you ask the
Speaker 1: people who were in the room if they noticed who
Speaker 1: was on the T shirt? Right, You're just very simple
Speaker 1: comparing the person's expectation of how many people noticed too
Speaker 1: how many people actually noticed. And true to prediction, the
Speaker 1: students who wore the T shirt tended to wildly overestimate
Speaker 1: how many people in the room would notice and be
Speaker 1: able to identify their Manilow T shirt. Generally, the Manilow
Speaker 1: interloper guests that about half of the other students on
Speaker 1: average would be able to identify their T shirt, and
Speaker 1: in reality only about twenty five percent of the observers
Speaker 1: could do it. So in their minds, the people wearing
Speaker 1: this potentially conspicuous piece of clothing mentally doubled the percentage
Speaker 1: of people who they thought would notice it. Real quick, Joe,
Speaker 1: when need the study you were looking at here? Did
Speaker 1: you get to see this Manelo T shirt? No? I didn't.
Speaker 1: That's my big question because I'm currently looking at various
Speaker 1: very Manilow T shirts in UM managed search here, and
Speaker 1: they do they do run the gamut here. We have
Speaker 1: some we have some very forgettable Manilow shirts, but we
Speaker 1: have some real singers here. Yeah. Well I think so.
Speaker 1: I could be wrong, but I think what it was
Speaker 1: was it was just like a picture of his face. Okay,
Speaker 1: well even then, like it's a it's a noticeable face.
Speaker 1: I mean that that was That's part of the whole
Speaker 1: business proposal here. But there were also control groups for
Speaker 1: this study. They in the control groups, this was an
Speaker 1: interesting calibration. The control groups were not in the room,
Speaker 1: but instead they watched the entire scene play out on
Speaker 1: a video recording, and then they were asked to estimate
Speaker 1: the number of observers who would notice the T shirt,
Speaker 1: and the control groups guessed much closer to the real
Speaker 1: number of people who would actually notice it, and they
Speaker 1: did not overestimate to the extent that the person wearing
Speaker 1: the shirt did. And this was taken as evidence that
Speaker 1: quote the targets inflated estimates are not simply the result
Speaker 1: of misguided general theories about observers powers of observation. In
Speaker 1: other words, the relevant variable is I am the person
Speaker 1: wearing it. Well, that makes sense. Again, we are the
Speaker 1: we are the central character in our own narrative. Okay,
Speaker 1: second study in this paper, so uh. It's worth noting
Speaker 1: that the majority of the students that they interviewed in
Speaker 1: the first study reported, in fact that wearing a very
Speaker 1: Manilow T shirt was considered embarrassing, that Barry Manilow was
Speaker 1: considered kind of corny and uncool. And it doesn't make
Speaker 1: me wonder has Barry Manilow come full circle yet? Has
Speaker 1: he become cool again? I don't know. Some of these
Speaker 1: shirts I was just looking at look pretty cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that was part of the design of the
Speaker 1: first study was that this is a figure that not
Speaker 1: everybody but a lot of people wearing the shirt. Would
Speaker 1: you know, it's not just like any face. It's somebody
Speaker 1: who a lot of students would probably feel kind of
Speaker 1: embarrassed to be wearing a shirt of. But the question is, like,
Speaker 1: does this phenomenon hold for T shirts that would not
Speaker 1: be embarrassing? That would just be a picture of anybody,
Speaker 1: maybe anybody that the student liked. So the second study
Speaker 1: tested for the spotlight effect with reference to non embarrassing
Speaker 1: personal details. It replicated the design of the first study,
Speaker 1: but it allowed students to choose a T shirt featuring
Speaker 1: a person that they liked and viewed as not embarrassing.
Speaker 1: So it might be a T shirt of like Bob
Speaker 1: Marley or Jerry Seinfeld or something. Wait, was Jerry Seinfeld? Really?
Speaker 1: Was that? Was he specifically mentioned? And yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was one of them. How is that Jerry Seinfeld shirt
Speaker 1: not embarrassing? I don't know. Some people didn't think it was.
Speaker 1: You know, times changed, this was what you're two thousands
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, I get the Bob Marley shirt.
Speaker 1: I think remains that remains cool, But I just have
Speaker 1: questions about the Gears Science Felt shirt. Maybe this is
Speaker 1: again just tells more, says some more about my interest
Speaker 1: versus other people's interests. But maybe I am uncool for
Speaker 1: not wearing them. No, no, no, you're very cool, Robert.
Speaker 1: But again there was a huge mismatch right between even
Speaker 1: when you're wearing a shirt that's not conspicuously embarrassed, saying
Speaker 1: to a number of students, people just predicted that observers
Speaker 1: would notice who was on their shirt a lot more
Speaker 1: than the observers actually did. It just makes me think
Speaker 1: of of of myself or anyone you know. You've got
Speaker 1: that new shirt and you're like, is today today? It
Speaker 1: is today the day that I wear this, uh, this
Speaker 1: new shirt going unleashed, this bad boy on an unsuspecting world.
Speaker 1: Is the world ready? And yeah, the thing is, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're ready, and yeah they'll be fine. Calson like don't
Speaker 1: rended to worry about um Yeah, so so okay, But
Speaker 1: that's appearance, that's just clothing items. What about for behavior?
Speaker 1: Can we look for examples of this in behavior? So
Speaker 1: the third study tested for whether the spotlight effect exists
Speaker 1: not just for clothing, but for specifically stuff people say
Speaker 1: in a group setting. Quote. In particular, we sought to
Speaker 1: investigate whether people tend to believe that their positive and
Speaker 1: negative actions stand out to others more than they actually do.
Speaker 1: And this was tested with stage to discussion groups. So
Speaker 1: they would have a discussion group meeting and then they
Speaker 1: would ask people afterwards to rate other participants on both
Speaker 1: positive and negative dimensions of their contributions. So you'd rate
Speaker 1: all the people you just had a group with, and
Speaker 1: you'd say, how much did participant X due to advance
Speaker 1: the discussion. That'd be a positive mark, and then negative
Speaker 1: things would be like how many speech errors did participant
Speaker 1: X make? Or how likely was participants to offend someone?
Speaker 1: And participants also rated, of course, what they thought others
Speaker 1: would think of them. You know, then they turned it
Speaker 1: on themselves and they found the same thing. The study
Speaker 1: indicated that we tend to overestimate the salience of our
Speaker 1: behavior to others in both positive and negative ways. So
Speaker 1: it's not just like a self serving bias or self
Speaker 1: critical bias. It's just we tend to assume people are
Speaker 1: paying way more attention and noticing way more about the
Speaker 1: stuff we do, both good and bad, which makes me
Speaker 1: think of like the hell Raiser Ta line, it's like
Speaker 1: angels to some devils to others. But really maybe you
Speaker 1: think am I an angel or a devil? And in
Speaker 1: fact you're just kind of a gray blur that someone
Speaker 1: does not recall in any way, just an antiagu Now,
Speaker 1: an important thing that's worth pointing out here is that
Speaker 1: people's self ratings on this discussion group thing, we're not
Speaker 1: entirely divorced from reality. To the contrary, the study found
Speaker 1: that these ratings were in some ways based in reality.
Speaker 1: People who rated themselves as doing more to advance the
Speaker 1: discussion we're also on average rated by others as doing
Speaker 1: more to advance the discussion. And people who rated themselves
Speaker 1: as more likely to have said something that offended someone
Speaker 1: were in fact more likely to have said something that
Speaker 1: offended someone. But it's the size of these effects, both
Speaker 1: positive and negative, that was exaggerated when people were thinking
Speaker 1: about themselves so in self evaluation and insightful comment that
Speaker 1: might have actually been an insightful comment to you, it
Speaker 1: feels like, wow, that was earth shaking, I really changed
Speaker 1: the game, or a faux paw that other people might notice,
Speaker 1: but you know, doesn't really stand out to them all
Speaker 1: that much. It might become reputation ruining, this terror, this obsession. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. Um, and again I wonder I can't help
Speaker 1: think about social media and when you have systems that
Speaker 1: are set up so that comments that are insightful may
Speaker 1: seem more earth shaking because they are being you know,
Speaker 1: re shared or retweeted or or lighthearted, etcetera. And then
Speaker 1: and then likewise there is the negative reaction to the
Speaker 1: things as well, And of course those tend to be
Speaker 1: the extremes that we we we hear about in a
Speaker 1: in a digital setting. Yeah, but even then, I think
Speaker 1: the reality is that, like most people are not paying
Speaker 1: attention to you and won't remember anything you did, right, right,
Speaker 1: it's just humbling in a kind of nice way. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: a couple more studies real quick. One of them is
Speaker 1: in the fourth one. This recreated the early T shirt scenario,
Speaker 1: but then ask participants questions to probe how they came
Speaker 1: up with their estimates. This is how the authors were
Speaker 1: trying to test whether or not it was an anchoring
Speaker 1: and adjustment mental process that people were using to to
Speaker 1: get to their mistaken assumptions about other people's views of them,
Speaker 1: and uh so their model Again, this could be it
Speaker 1: could turn out that this is not the best way
Speaker 1: to model the thinking going on here. But what they
Speaker 1: thought at the time was that people start with their
Speaker 1: own rich and powerful sense of how they appear to others.
Speaker 1: They realize correctly that other people are not paying as
Speaker 1: much attention to them as they pay to themselves, so
Speaker 1: they may be adjust down from their own experience to
Speaker 1: a hypothetical other observer, but they don't adjust enough. So
Speaker 1: you know, how important was what I just did? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: to me, it was a ten, but I know other
Speaker 1: people probably aren't going to rate it at ten, so
Speaker 1: I'll say it's a nine to them, but in reality
Speaker 1: was maybe like a yeah or a four. And then
Speaker 1: the last of the last of the studies, the fifth one.
Speaker 1: This one I think established something that's very important that
Speaker 1: we can come back to in a minute. This tested habituation.
Speaker 1: If people are allowed a period to get used to
Speaker 1: wearing the unfamiliar very Manilow T shirt, will they feel
Speaker 1: less self conscious about others noticing it? And the answer
Speaker 1: is yes. If you wear the T shirt for a
Speaker 1: while before going in front of other people, you will
Speaker 1: tend to imagine that fewer of them took notice of
Speaker 1: it than if you just put it on and then
Speaker 1: go in. But of course, in these scenarios, absolutely nothing
Speaker 1: has changed for the observers. The only thing that has
Speaker 1: changed is you. The more that you're more used to
Speaker 1: the shirt yourself, you're less conscious of it, so you
Speaker 1: imagine less consciousness among others. So in this game, like
Speaker 1: if if I don't know if anyone has ever had
Speaker 1: this experience being you know, somebody who wears a well
Speaker 1: worn but offensive T shirt an inappropriate setting, um, like
Speaker 1: you know, they're used to it, they're used to the
Speaker 1: potentially profane statement that is on it. But everyone else, man,
Speaker 1: it might not be ready for Yes, I think this
Speaker 1: is actually a various tute observation and it will come
Speaker 1: back to something I want to get at right at
Speaker 1: the end, here, should we take another break, and then
Speaker 1: when we come back we can discuss some of the
Speaker 1: implications of this research. Let's do it. We'll be right back,
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you. All right, we're back. We're continuing
Speaker 1: our discussion here of of the spotlight effect and uh
Speaker 1: and of course the various key shirt experiments, Uh that
Speaker 1: relate to that explanation. Yeah, So I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about some commentary on and and implications from the spotlight effect.
Speaker 1: To whatever extent this is a real effect, it does
Speaker 1: appear like it still stands. I mean, I would be
Speaker 1: interested to see some more recent research replicating this, but
Speaker 1: but it looks pretty solid to me. One of the
Speaker 1: things that the lead author of the study we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, Gilovich, Uh, he's noted in another source he
Speaker 1: actually had an article a about the spotlight effect for
Speaker 1: the Encyclopedia of Social Psychology edited by Baumeister and Voes.
Speaker 1: And in that article, Gilovich notes that research indicates the
Speaker 1: quote people of all ages are prone to the spotlight effect,
Speaker 1: but it appears to be particularly pronounced among adolescents and
Speaker 1: young adults. So as you get older, the spotlight effect
Speaker 1: seems to work less powerfully on your brain. What would
Speaker 1: explain this, Well, one answer might be experienced. Right in
Speaker 1: over time, you just learn through experience that people pay
Speaker 1: less attention to you and notice less about you than
Speaker 1: you expect them to. And it's possible this does play
Speaker 1: some role. Maybe you get conditioned, you kind of learn
Speaker 1: how things work in life, and you experience less of
Speaker 1: this cognitive bias. But Gilovich identifies a different reason, and
Speaker 1: that reason is that social motivation is stronger when you're younger.
Speaker 1: Younger people show a heightened consciousness of and concerned for
Speaker 1: their standing within social groups quote. But having a heightened
Speaker 1: concern with one's social standing means, by its very nature,
Speaker 1: that one is vulnerable to having an excessive concern with
Speaker 1: one standing and hence is likely to overestimate the extent
Speaker 1: to which one is the target of others thoughts and attention.
Speaker 1: So I'd say to take away from this maybe a
Speaker 1: special message to like younger and like teenage listeners, like
Speaker 1: other people really probably are noticing less about you and
Speaker 1: thinking less about you than you think they are, as
Speaker 1: shocking as that may be to hear. Another thing that
Speaker 1: that's related to this idea that the authors mentioned in
Speaker 1: their in their discussion section on their paper is the
Speaker 1: way that the spotlight effect relates to something that's known
Speaker 1: as the illusion of transparency. So the illusion of transparency
Speaker 1: is the belief that your internal states are more observable
Speaker 1: to others than they actually are. We often assume that
Speaker 1: our unspoken thoughts and our feelings can be sort of
Speaker 1: sniffed out and discerned by people around us. But that's
Speaker 1: usually not true, not not to the extent that we
Speaker 1: think it is. And there are examples of this from
Speaker 1: empirical research. For example, if you stage a mock negotiation
Speaker 1: where people are trying to, you know, negotiate to get
Speaker 1: to a certain price on something, people tend to imagine
Speaker 1: that they have given away more information about what they're
Speaker 1: trying to get than they actually have. Another variation is
Speaker 1: that studies show that a lot of times people imagine
Speaker 1: that other people can tell when they are lying, but
Speaker 1: in reality, people can't actually tell when people are lying,
Speaker 1: or at least I mean, some people maybe can tell
Speaker 1: some of the time, but most of the time, other
Speaker 1: people cannot tell if you're lying, cannot spot your lies
Speaker 1: with nearly as much accuracy as you think they can
Speaker 1: do with that information what you will, I really don't.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's like, it's a great point because
Speaker 1: first of all, we all lie, like lying is is
Speaker 1: is part of our communication. Sweet you know we're gonna
Speaker 1: individuals are gonna engage in it to varying degrees, but
Speaker 1: you know, it is important to have that tool in
Speaker 1: your toolbox. You know, if someone shows you a picture
Speaker 1: of a baby and and uh and and and you're
Speaker 1: expected to comment upon it, it is generally in your
Speaker 1: best interest to lie if you think that baby is ugly, right,
Speaker 1: or or at least find some way to uh that
Speaker 1: is not just comedic adherence to truth. Right, You can
Speaker 1: you can find something nice to say that isn't necessarily untrue. Right.
Speaker 1: And yet at the same time, lying can be, or
Speaker 1: at least certainly feel like a high risk act, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, no one wants to be caught in a
Speaker 1: lie um, even if the stakes are ultimately kind of low.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess maybe even more so at times
Speaker 1: if the stakes are low, because why are you lying
Speaker 1: about that? Well, like, why didn't you say you didn't
Speaker 1: like this picture of my baby? Or I don't know
Speaker 1: me say, I can't think of a specific example, but okay,
Speaker 1: here's a potential example where if someone says, hey, if
Speaker 1: you're seeing guy hard too, and you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty good, and and maybe the thing is you
Speaker 1: haven't seen it, you have no interest in saying maybe
Speaker 1: you think that the whole concept sounds kind of stupid,
Speaker 1: but you want to be polite about it, and you
Speaker 1: also don't want to be You don't want to the
Speaker 1: plot to have to be explained to you now you
Speaker 1: know you didn't see it in the theater. You also
Speaker 1: don't want to hear your friend Ron surprise it for you.
Speaker 1: But then if they're like, oh, yeah, what was your
Speaker 1: favorite part? Well, crap. Now this has become a much
Speaker 1: stickier situation because I'm lying about having seen Guy Hard too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But people tend to assume that, like that fact that
Speaker 1: they're lying about having seen die Hard Too is somehow
Speaker 1: leaking out of them in an observable way. And in
Speaker 1: some cases it might be like some people do have
Speaker 1: big tells when they're lying, but generally that information is
Speaker 1: not leaking out as much as people imagine it is.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if this is compounded to a certain
Speaker 1: extent by the lying we observe in media lying, that is,
Speaker 1: the are exposed via conflicting relevant media like here's a
Speaker 1: here's one scene of politicians saying one thing, and here's another.
Speaker 1: Here's the another bit of footage that shows that they're lying,
Speaker 1: or more often overt lying by a fictional character, which,
Speaker 1: of course is is played up for dramatic effect and
Speaker 1: is also an artificial situation, you know, and that we
Speaker 1: know they are lying to another care Oh yeah. But
Speaker 1: it's also like there is there's a stock type of
Speaker 1: hero in like detective fiction and all that, the person
Speaker 1: who can just magically tell when other people are lying
Speaker 1: and that that skill. No, but then there's a wonderful
Speaker 1: character in the recent Watchman series on HBO looking Glass, Yes,
Speaker 1: played by the great Tim Blake Nelson. I mean the
Speaker 1: character has the tower, not not Nelson himself, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: And we love characters like that, right, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a really fun power to try to see realized in fiction.
Speaker 1: But uh, just lies or not disease need to sniff
Speaker 1: out as I mean to to really detectualize in reality.
Speaker 1: What you have to try to do is like trap
Speaker 1: people in contradictions and stuff like ask a bunch of
Speaker 1: follow up questions. It doesn't just leak out of your
Speaker 1: face that yes I'm telling a lie and you can
Speaker 1: smell it absolutely. And you know, I also think about
Speaker 1: this in terms of religious upbringing. Um, I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, but the growing up in the sort of
Speaker 1: pen optagonical teachings of of a Protestant Church. There was
Speaker 1: always this idea that God and and also the devil
Speaker 1: and perhaps other entities like lesser angels and demons what
Speaker 1: have you were privy to your inner thoughts, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole idea that it wasn't just what you said
Speaker 1: and did that made you sinful, it was also what
Speaker 1: you were thinking about doing, or considering doing, or just
Speaker 1: entertaining the mental images of doing. So there was this
Speaker 1: ingrained notion that your private thoughts are not private at all,
Speaker 1: at least not so far as supernatural entities are concerned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, And I guess it is possible that this
Speaker 1: could have a conditioning effect to make you assume that general,
Speaker 1: your private thoughts are not private. Maybe they're observable not
Speaker 1: just two supernatural entities, but to other regular entities that
Speaker 1: you interact with every day. Yeah, because I definitely remember
Speaker 1: at times, certainly when I was younger, sort of freaking
Speaker 1: out at times about just the idea of other humans
Speaker 1: being privated in my thoughts, you know, an idea that
Speaker 1: was probably also compounded by science fiction that is just
Speaker 1: lousy with psychics, right, um, and also these not quite
Speaker 1: psychics but just really insightful TV. So with the Hannibal lecters,
Speaker 1: basically they like, look at you and tell your whole
Speaker 1: life story. Yeah. But but then again, as we've discussed
Speaker 1: on the show before, this is this sort of fear
Speaker 1: is not entirely unfounded given the potential trajectory of some
Speaker 1: of our technology. That's true, but that's technology. I mean,
Speaker 1: normally people are not doing like AI, you know, learning
Speaker 1: on data sets about your social media use or whatever.
Speaker 1: There was one more example given about the illusion of
Speaker 1: transparency that I really liked, which was that, uh, people
Speaker 1: overestimated the extent to which observers could tell whether the
Speaker 1: drink they were drinking was pleasant or nasty tasting, even
Speaker 1: though they were supposed to use a neutral facial expression.
Speaker 1: So you give people drinks this one, this one tastes good,
Speaker 1: this one tastes disgusting, and you tell them they have
Speaker 1: to maintain a neutrol facial expression while they drink them.
Speaker 1: People assumed, oh, yeah, people can just read it on
Speaker 1: my face that you know that that was a nasty one.
Speaker 1: But it turns out people can't read all that. Well.
Speaker 1: Good to know when you have your next inner party
Speaker 1: um in the year, hopefully it's gonna be the next
Speaker 1: thing after a competitive eating right now, So right now
Speaker 1: it's the people who wolfed down like thirty white castles
Speaker 1: or whatever. The next thing is how many nasty drinks
Speaker 1: can you drink? I can see it becoming a big hit. Okay,
Speaker 1: one last thing. So the authors of this two thousand
Speaker 1: paper ask a question, when is the spotlight effect most
Speaker 1: pronounced and when is it least pronounced? There'll be such
Speaker 1: a thing as like a reverse spotlight effect, a sort
Speaker 1: of mental cloak of invisibility where other people are noticing
Speaker 1: you more than you think they are, And the authors think, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is probably possible. They claim that this would probably
Speaker 1: correlate with the subject's own consciousness of their appearance or behavior.
Speaker 1: So obviously, the more conscious you are of your own
Speaker 1: appearance and behavior, the more conscious of it you imagine
Speaker 1: other people are, and probably vice versa. If you're less
Speaker 1: conscious of yourself, you're imagining other people are less conscious
Speaker 1: of you. And so for this reason, it might be
Speaker 1: correlated somewhat to the novelty of what you're doing or wearing,
Speaker 1: or what you look like or how you sound. So
Speaker 1: remember in the fifth study in in that paper, uh,
Speaker 1: the spotlight effect was less pronounced for people who had
Speaker 1: some time to get used to wearing a potentially embarrassing,
Speaker 1: conspicuous T shirt. So it's highly possible that we are
Speaker 1: most likely to manifest the spotlight effect when we're doing
Speaker 1: something new or unusual. Well, that's interesting. It kind of
Speaker 1: ties back to what we're talking about earlier, about when
Speaker 1: you're about to say something in a meeting and you're
Speaker 1: putting a lot of cognitive effort into preparing for that
Speaker 1: and preparing to do something that you don't normally do. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: takes more effort, it takes up more space in your brain.
Speaker 1: It's more salient to you, and you assume it's more
Speaker 1: salient to other people. So it's possible. This isn't proven yet,
Speaker 1: but it's possible that the inverse effect, where we would
Speaker 1: underestimate how much other people are noticing our appearance and behavior,
Speaker 1: it's possible this happens when we are least conscious, meaning
Speaker 1: during highly familiar, routine or automatic behaviors. There's actually an
Speaker 1: example that has been studied here, uh and the example
Speaker 1: and I thought this was interesting. So people underestimate the
Speaker 1: extent to which other people notice their cologne or perfume,
Speaker 1: so you cover yourself in a fragrance, you become accustomed
Speaker 1: to that fragrance and you stop noticing it, right Olfactory
Speaker 1: desensitization sets in. You no longer smell it yourself, so
Speaker 1: it basically disappears for you. But other people smell it
Speaker 1: even if you don't expect them to. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we all have had that experience with with someone
Speaker 1: who has just outrageously powerful per fume, you know, like
Speaker 1: sometimes the extent that it announces their presence. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes people just lather up. And this makes me wonder
Speaker 1: about whether the spotlight effect is especially salient for appearance, because,
Speaker 1: of course, we normally can't really see ourselves when we're
Speaker 1: going about our lives. If we're in a regular business
Speaker 1: meeting talking, we can't see our face. We might be
Speaker 1: able to see our bodies if we look down at it.
Speaker 1: We're probably not looking down, probably looking up at the room.
Speaker 1: But we're also frequently suddenly reminded of our appearance when
Speaker 1: we walk in front of a mirror or log into
Speaker 1: a web meeting or something. So it might be the
Speaker 1: sort of perfect mix of obliviousness in your regular behaviors
Speaker 1: and then the sudden shocking reminders of oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: look like this to external people, and that kind of
Speaker 1: keeps you on your toes. Like what if after putting
Speaker 1: on some cologne you could suddenly smell it intensely again
Speaker 1: every hour or so. Yeah, I mean that's theme. You
Speaker 1: put it like that, it almost sounds like it would
Speaker 1: be helpful. But I don't feel like our experiences with
Speaker 1: our own footage in a zoom call or what have you,
Speaker 1: is necessarily helpful. It really feels like built in egocentric feedback, yeah,
Speaker 1: because there's too much of it. It's just constantly there.
Speaker 1: So anyway, if we assume that the spotlight effect is real,
Speaker 1: it is a something that's generally true about people might
Speaker 1: not be true to the same extent for everyone. But
Speaker 1: if this effect is correctly observed, what would the implications
Speaker 1: for our lives be. Well, Gilovich has actually gotten kind
Speaker 1: of kind of sweet about this, so he notes that,
Speaker 1: you know, there's studies that show that later in life,
Speaker 1: most people report that their major regrets about their lives
Speaker 1: concern things that they failed to do rather than things
Speaker 1: that they did. It's not the same for everybody, but
Speaker 1: that is a much more common framing and you've probably
Speaker 1: read about this before. This is widely observed. So many
Speaker 1: of the things that people want to do, but never do,
Speaker 1: they hold back from them out of a sense of
Speaker 1: self consciousness or anxiety about how people are going to
Speaker 1: perceive us, you know, for doing these things. So one
Speaker 1: easy example might be that you failed to ever take
Speaker 1: up playing a musical instrument because you fear that other
Speaker 1: people will judge you as unskilled at playing it, especially
Speaker 1: at first. And so the research on the spotlight effects
Speaker 1: suggests that we are were very likely to be overestimating,
Speaker 1: perhaps even grossly overestimating, how much people would even notice
Speaker 1: whatever it is that we're afraid of doing. And the
Speaker 1: authors of the study right quote. The lesson of this
Speaker 1: research then, is that we might all have fewer regrets
Speaker 1: if we properly understood how much attention or inattention our
Speaker 1: actions actually draw from others. Yeah, that is. It is
Speaker 1: kind of a sweet twist on it. You know. It's
Speaker 1: like saying, look, go go for it, go through you
Speaker 1: live your dream, because nobody's really going to pay that
Speaker 1: much attention even when it falls flat. Dance like nobody's watching,
Speaker 1: because probably nobody is watching, or if they are watching
Speaker 1: they might not even remember. I mean, it's just like
Speaker 1: you're you're probably way over concerned about possible minor faux
Speaker 1: pause or looking weird or awkward. Yeah, like they're probably
Speaker 1: even if they're they're watching you and they're thinking about it,
Speaker 1: they're probably thinking, oh, man, do I look like that
Speaker 1: when I danced by myself? What do I look like
Speaker 1: when I danced by myself? This? Uh uh, this reminds me.
Speaker 1: That's talking about situations where you realize that it may
Speaker 1: be perceived as as weird by other people, were embarrassing
Speaker 1: by people. So obviously I've mentioned Star Wars like three
Speaker 1: times so far. I'm mostly tracked in the house here
Speaker 1: and me and my son are super in Star Wars.
Speaker 1: He has a couple of lightsabers, and he'll he'll often
Speaker 1: ask me to go out to have a lightsaber battle
Speaker 1: with him, which is something we have to do outside
Speaker 1: because otherwise we would destroy things in the house, and
Speaker 1: we have to do it in the front yard because
Speaker 1: the mosquitoes are too bad in the back yard. Um,
Speaker 1: so we'll have this fight in the front yard. People
Speaker 1: driving by we'll be able to see it, which generally
Speaker 1: I imagine they'll say oh, well, there's a dad having
Speaker 1: a lightsaber battle with with his son. That's great, the
Speaker 1: sweetest thing you'll see all day. But occasionally my son,
Speaker 1: who's much he gets so into this. Occasionally he'll have
Speaker 1: to run over to the side of the house to
Speaker 1: like fight a pretend droid or something, which leaves me
Speaker 1: in the front yard apparently by myself fighting pretend droids.
Speaker 1: And I realized when that happens, people may drive by
Speaker 1: and think that I have lost my mind, um, which
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'm I'm okay with I'm ultimately okay.
Speaker 1: I don't think you got anything to worry about. Man.
Speaker 1: That's that that that's gonna be the ray of sunshine
Speaker 1: in the in the day of so many people driving by. Seriously,
Speaker 1: if I was driving by and I saw uh, and
Speaker 1: I saw some people having a lightsaber duel in their
Speaker 1: front yard, I would be like, that's you know, there's hope,
Speaker 1: a new hope. Yeah. Maybe maybe that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: I'm giving people hope that they they're like, I didn't
Speaker 1: realize I could do that as a grown up, that
Speaker 1: I could just uh get a lightsaber and uh and
Speaker 1: start having pretend battles in my front yard. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it. That's gonna make this quarantine situation a lot easier.
Speaker 1: Along the same lines, I am extremely in favor of
Speaker 1: adults climbing trees. There's this bizarre idea that adults shouldn't
Speaker 1: climb trees. Climbing trees is for children. Why adults should
Speaker 1: climb trees all the time? I love a good climbing tree.
Speaker 1: It's a good skill to have. I see people in
Speaker 1: movies having to do it all the time to escape,
Speaker 1: like you know, robot and monsters and whynot. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: go for it. Yeah, those like those Boston Dynamics dog
Speaker 1: robots are coming for you. Where are you gonna go?
Speaker 1: You got to get a joke, like suddenly you've got
Speaker 1: to climb a tree and you haven't been practicing for
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty years. Good luck? And then what if
Speaker 1: you have to fight it with a lifesaver. Also, you've
Speaker 1: got to keep those skills war you know, these are
Speaker 1: the skills one needs to survive in the waste land. Alright, Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go ahead and close it out there. I
Speaker 1: think we have there's a lot of material in here
Speaker 1: for everyone to think about, and we of course, await
Speaker 1: listener responses to this, how how do you perceive the
Speaker 1: spotlight effect in your own life or in the lives
Speaker 1: of others? Has this forced you to to rethink anything
Speaker 1: going on in the world around you, or how you
Speaker 1: indeed engage in your daily or weekly U conference digital
Speaker 1: conference calls for the book. In the meantime, if you
Speaker 1: would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, including that when we mentioned anchor in
Speaker 1: the Mind dealing with anchoring, you can find those wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts. I will say this, you can
Speaker 1: certainly find our our I heart radio list by going
Speaker 1: to stuff Toble your Mind dot com. And if you
Speaker 1: go there, you'll see a little part of the page
Speaker 1: and says show links. There is a store link there,
Speaker 1: and if you go there you will find T shirts
Speaker 1: that are bringing it around. And some of them are cool. Uh,
Speaker 1: some of them I would personally be embarrassed to wear.
Speaker 1: You'll have to look at them and trying to decide
Speaker 1: which which design is great. But we charge every listener
Speaker 1: to buy one cool T shirt and one extremely embarrassing
Speaker 1: T shirt. Yes, well we have both there, so go
Speaker 1: check them out if you so desire Um. I don't know.
Speaker 1: None of them have very manolol on the front though,
Speaker 1: so you need to do a separate image search to
Speaker 1: see what I'm talking about there. Huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producers Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hi, you can
Speaker 1: email us at contact that Stuff to Blow your Mind
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