The Exchanges

Q What a crazy story. What got you interested in studying and learning about identity?

A Long story short, with the violin, I was very optimistic about potentially becoming a concert violinist, but then when I was 15, a sudden hand injury kind of ended my dreams overnight, and I was forced to reckon with the fact that I was no longer going to be able to do this thing that since the time I was six had essentially defined my life. And in that moment, what was so shocking to me in being told, you know, you can no longer play the violin is that I, I knew that there was going to be a grief associated with not being able to play the violin, but I did not expect to mourn the loss of myself at this more fundamental level, because I hadn't realized, I mean, I was 15 at the time, Shane, right, so I had not put all the pieces together, I had not realized consciously just how tethered my identity was to the violin, and so in losing it, kind of had this oh crap moment, like, oh my gosh, this is a much bigger deal than I even thought, and so That was the kind of lived part of my experience that led me to first think about identity. And then I ended up, um, becoming a cognitive scientist. So in losing the violin, I had to figure out, okay, what comes next? And I read a bunch of books and I became fascinated by the human mind and all it was capable of and all there was to marvel at. And in my role as a cognitive scientist, where I studied the human mind, identity just comes up ove…

AI assessment note: “That was the kind of lived part of my experience that led me to first think about identity.”

Q it's like, I don't know, three p.m. in the afternoon. And it strikes me that eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. So where I'm going with this is, is it almost better to set rules? My rule is I only eat healthy food. And then all of a sudden you've changed it from a willpower question into, I just need to follow this rule that I've set for myself.

A I think both are going to tax willpower. I think even that subtle framing of, like, I don't eat unhealthy foods, like, if you're near the chocolate cake, you're still gonna feel the pull of the chocolate cake. No semantic shift is gonna be that powerful to eliminate the willpower issues. I know Angela Duckworth focuses a lot on this. So that we don't have to employ willpower, we should really focus on the way that we design our lives and the choice architecture of our lives. What this means in practice is To the extent that you can control your environment, you just make things unavailable to you and you make other things really readily accessible and available to you. So the, the canonical example of this is cafes where they try to encourage healthy eating. They put all the junk food at the bottom and they're in opaque containers. And then they put the healthy food, like the fruits and vegetables and, and healthy snacks on full display, um, at eye level. So it's the things you're more likely to grab. And those little nudges are actually quite effective and they don't require as much Willpower. Because you've just architected your environment accordingly. And so that's what I would recommend in situations like that. And then the other thing we know, Shane, about motivation is that we don't have stable amounts of motivation over the course of goal pursuit. This is some research …

AI assessment note: “No semantic shift is gonna be that powerful to eliminate the willpower issues.”

Q of hit on a little bit the risks of wrapping yourself with an instrument or I think that transfers to something like a profession. And if we're no longer able to do it, then, then it can cause sort of an identity crisis. Can that also be a plus? So I guess the sort of meta question is, how can we use our identity to help us accomplish our goals?

A There are absolutely pros and pluses to anchoring ourselves to what we do. It also gives us a clear sense of a future that we can imagine, right? The future might look kind of blurry and amorphous, and when you identify as, you know, having a certain profession, you can at least project what you think the next five years can look like. And so, There's definitely benefits to anchoring yourself in identity. And that's why I don't want us to do away with that concept altogether. What I'm proposing is having multifaceted identities. So you have multiple layers of abstraction when it comes to where you derive meaning and how you define yourself. And so at one level, you can absolutely say, okay, I'm a lawyer, I'm a doctor, a stay at home mom, I'm a tech worker. And then you can have deeper layers of identity that can be your safe landing, you know, almost like a parachute. When, when life throws you a change that you can fall back on so that when that thing maybe is threatened for whatever reason, I mean, maybe you, you get into an accident and you don't have the same abilities that you had before. You get a, a chronic illness that prevents you from doing those things. You don't feel that your entire self-worth has been stripped away in the process. That is destabilizing in a way that I think is counterproductive. And I'm always trying to be a pragmatist about things and figure out,…

AI assessment note: “There are absolutely pros and pluses to anchoring ourselves to what we do.”

Q love that. Thank you. I want to switch gears just a little bit to something you said when you were in the White House that has fascinated me, which is you said debunking a myth often does little more than reinforce it. So if that's true, what can we do instead? What role does a story play and what role do facts play when it comes to changing people's minds?

A It's a very particular claim, which is that when you are myth busting, you tend to say what is not true, right? So you say, it is not the case that blah, right? You try to correct the record, right? Disabuse people of the, of this existing belief. But what they find in research is that very quickly after you say, read the public service announcement, or you listen to the commercial, people forget whether there was a not or not in that sentence. And so what happens is you've actually just strengthened the neural connection between, okay, let's say in this case we're trying to convince people not to boil their water because that won't get rid of lead. Um, it'll actually make the problem worse. So we say, like, you know, is not true that boiling your water is going to lead to better water safety, okay? They might forget the not. And so now I've just, in my brain, strengthened the relationship between boiling water and the term water safety. And so that's where we have to be careful, and so what research has found is that we should actually just make more affirmative statements that are correct. So in order to have safe water, you should use a water filter, and you should install it in this particular way, and you should, you know, you, you try to go on the road with the, the things people should do, and that way you're only strengthening the neural connection between the two relev…

AI assessment note: “what research has found is that we should actually just make more affirmative statements”

Q As you're saying that, it's like we can identify our identity with a skill. We can do it with a habit. We can do it with something larger like Democrat or Republican. We can do it with something still larger like American or Canadian or European. And we can do it from what to why, which sort of makes me wonder, what is identity?

A It's a deeply complicated philosophical question that people have been pondering for basically as long as we've been around. The way that I approach it actually is about expanding people's sense of self, because I think what happens, especially as we get older, is that we lock into an understanding of who we are, who we think we are. And it's often not Totally accurate, and it's certainly not comprehensive. I mean, our sense of identity is formulated based on the quite random events that have occurred in our lives and the various ways in which we've been pressure tested or pushed or challenged, and we didn't choose that path, right, to reveal to us the maximum number of data points about ourselves. We were just living life and going through it and seeing what happened, and so I think because We have a first person perspective on our minds. We sometimes believe that we have a very good understanding of who we are. And then what happens in the face of a change is it reveals to us all that remained hidden from view, right? All that existed that maybe didn't have a reason to be expressed before then, or the various ways in which we're more resilient, or the greater number of skills that we have, or the coping mechanisms that we have at our disposal. And When I think about identity, I think we benefit from having more expansive identities and, and identities that feel more malleable…

AI assessment note: “our sense of identity is formulated based on the quite random events”

Q opinion on the economy. I just need strong convictions. These are unique areas where there's no objective wrong or right. Only subjective questions, and since we can't be proven wrong, we tend to feel like every opinion is equally valid. The question then becomes, how do we have discussions about something that we've made part of our identity, and what does this mean for us individually and as a country?

A Facts and science and evidence don't surface as much as they should in some of our debates, and it's because when we look at how it is that people form their attitudes and beliefs about the world, they're not simply basing it on What the data says. They're basing it on their tribal membership, on their identity membership. So if you identify with a particular political party or particular community group, there's this feeling of allegiance that can supersede our rational minds, right? So we hear leaders saying certain things, and we implicitly buy into what they're saying because they lead this group that we feel convictions about. One downside of the group identity label is that it can make us less scrupulous, and it can make us Less critically minded in ways that we otherwise would be, right? If we were reasoning through every situation for ourselves, we would probably take a closer eye to certain conclusions that are drawn. One thing that's so important for us as humans is to have the humility to change our minds and to have the humility to update our point of view and our opinions about things. And if you feel too strong tribal membership, it can impede you from updating your point of view, because in that moment, You're not just asking yourself, do I believe in that X virus is real? What you're really asking is, do I belong to X group or not? Because if I don't believe tha…

AI assessment note: “One downside of the group identity label is that it can make us less scrupulous”

Q As you were saying that, it sort of relates to identity, right? Because now my identity is I don't trust government institutions, and once you have that, it's like, how do we change that? So it comes back to Really the fundamental question of, like, how do we change our identity when we want to or for the positive?

A Yeah, and I think, you know, what that example in Flint shows is that even something as simple as the messenger, I mean, when your door is knocked on and it's someone that you see at church on Sundays and they're telling you that they believe in a document that was created by the government, that is a step forward, right? You are getting that person, at least in the context of this fact sheet, believe in something that the federal government has shared with you. I don't want to discount that as also being meaningful progress. So one thing I wanted to share in the context of everyday conversations we have with people, right, so that proverbial, like, Thanksgiving dinner where you're sitting down, and there's an uncle there, and you disagree with them, and in the past, you've just kind of given up and been like, this is not worth it. There is research in psychology which shows how we can make more progress in those situations, and this is known in the research as motivational interviewing or deep canvassing, and they use this in the context of You know, political campaigns and trying to see if people can make progress on convincing people to change their minds on important political or social issues. Um, so there's a couple key features of motivational interviewing that are good to consider here. So one is the same way that I talked in the context of moral reframing is you don't …

AI assessment note: “research in psychology which shows how we can make more progress in those situations”

Q Sounds like a step forward. Let's say I have a goal to run a marathon next year, and I'm not currently a runner. How can I use identity as a means to accomplish that goal?

A There is some research showing that you do want to frame your goals in terms of do behaviors versus don't behaviors, so you would kind of acknowledge this before. It's much more easy to measure progress when we're engaging in proactive decisions or proactive behaviors rather than the abstinence of things. You say, okay, I want to be a runner. I'm going to start by running half a mile every day. That's going to be easier to track than I'm, I'm not going to sit on my couch for as long. Right? It's like, that's a really hard thing to measure and also just doesn't feel as inspiring or motivating. When it comes to identity, I actually think that we talked a lot about wiggle room in identity and thinking of our identities as slightly more malleable and trying not to have a purity complex about it, and I think that applies to goal setting as well. So we can, especially at the outset of goal setting, be wildly ambitious about what it is that we want to accomplish, and we can have that purity complex where if we don't Abide by the rules, let's say, of our first week or our second week, we just fall off the wagon because we think, okay, well, we already kind of screwed this up, so what's the point? And that can be really counterproductive. And so there is research showing that when we introduce what are known as emergency reserves into our goal setting, basically get out of jail free car…

AI assessment note: “thinking of our identities as slightly more malleable and trying not to have a purity complex”

Q almost how we see ourselves. And it's really fascinating to me because one of the quirks with this is that we instantly tend to reject other people's ideas, even if they're correct, because it belongs to somebody that we don't like or some other group than we're in. What can we do for ourselves to open our mind and actually think in those moments instead of just responding without reasoning?

A Yeah, I mean, I think you're articulating this, this massive challenge, and there's another concept in psychology that I think is a really useful aid here, and it's more on how we communicate messages. So there's this concept called moral reframing. What we find is that grounding our arguments in moral terms that affirm rather than threaten the moral views of those we disagree with is far more effective at helping them Change their viewpoints. So for example, there was this one study showing, look, if you want to convince conservatives to care more about the environment, you might appeal to values that you know conservatives tend to hold. So for example, patriotism, right? Like you might say, being pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life, right? This is, this is the language that they use in this study. It is patriotic to conserve this beautiful country's natural resources. So it's still aligned with facts, but you're Grounding it in whatever values that group has. And what that allows for is it allows for people to both stay consistent and true to their underlying beliefs about the world and the things they hold close to them, while also being willing to entertain a new way of thinking. And I think that's such a powerful instrument because it's a mechanism by which you can get people to open their minds up without them feeling like they're …

AI assessment note: “it's more on how we communicate messages. So there's this concept called moral reframing.”