Alex Edmonds

is how tailored is the evidence for my particular situation?

So if going barefoot is generally good, but there's studies finding that going barefoot is bad if you've got a history of ankle weakness because that's when ankle strength is particularly important because you're not wearing shoes that could be supportive, I might pay more attention to that.

And it might be that going barefoot is good if in conjunction with a lot of other things, if you're doing certain things with your diet, if you're doing particular types of plyometric training.

And so I want to look at beyond the headline study.

We like to believe the headlines going barefoot is good or it's bad, but it's often good or bad in conjunction with other types of behavior.

and for certain types of people, and therefore that would allow me to focus on particular studies that matter for my particular situation with the other behaviors that I'm doing alongside going barefoot.

Yes.

This is known as a bias called familiarity bias, where if something is familiar to you, if it's a recommendation given by one person who you're friends with, that might outweigh all of the other negative recommendations by lots of other people.

For example, after an earthquake, people are much more likely to buy earthquake insurance, even though

scientifically after an earthquake the the plate tectonics are now resolved it's less likely that there'll be an earthquake in the near future so when something is particularly salient or familiar this has an outsized effect on our decisions so it may well be that a friend says hey i breastfed my child and my child is doing well well it could be that your child would have done well otherwise it could be that you were doing lots of other things

to help your child, such as always being present, like reading to your child and so on.

But if it is a particular example that we want to be true, we will believe it and we will isolate this particular case and generalize and extrapolate from it.

Yeah.

So these biases, they're often really ingrained with us.

They're quite difficult to fight.

So they go back to confirmation bias, which we led this chat with.

This is the idea that we don't like evidence that contradicts our viewpoint.

This is so deeply ingrained in us.

And this has been evidence in the following way.

So if you take people, you give them a statement that they know that, you know, they agree with.