Phil Fernbach
speaker
299 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 20 Oct
Phil Fernbach’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
I think we are much more commonly engaged in this argumentation or advocacy when we're talking about things like political issues. We very rarely engage in this kind of mechanistic or explanatory kind of discussion. But it turns out that the mechanistic or explanatory mode leads to a little more open-mindedness.
It gets people to be a little less certain about their positions because it reveals the complexity of issues. And this has been demonstrated to some extent in our work where we simply ask people, how do you feel about these issues afterwards? But I think even more interestingly and meaningfully, there's a great paper by El-Nakori Hun and Grossman a few years ago
And they asked people on different sides of the political divide to have political discussions. And then they measured different things about the discussion, like how well it went and how open-minded people seemed to be and how much they were listening to the other side and those kinds of things.
And what they found is that the discussions were more productive when people engaged in this more explanatory kind of discussion.
It does. They move to the middle a little bit. The challenge with that is that people get defensive as well. So if you challenge people with their understanding, they might actually double down and say, no, I know what I'm talking about. Because people naturally tend to be a little bit defensive. So the way to actually implement such an intervention can be
a little bit challenging in its details because, again, human beings are not simple. They're complex. So if you reveal people's lack of understanding to them, it may have the effect of making them a little bit more humble or more moderate, but it could also make them double down on their position a little bit.
The key is to be curious. about the other side's position. So if you start from a perspective of the other side is not as smart as me, is not as ethical or moral as me, they're bad, they're stupid, then you're not going to be likely to have a very productive discussion. If you start instead with the perspective of the person that I'm talking to is as smart as me,
and as moral as me, then you become curious. Why is it that they maintain a strong position that's so different from yours when it seems like the right answer is just so obvious to you? And then when you become curious, and if both sides are mutually curious, and they want to understand what is behind the other side's position, then you can have a more productive discussion.
And I think what you will find is that when you engage jointly in this explanatory kind of discussion, it's more of a collaboration than it is an argument. And that collaboration is going to reveal, likely, that both sides don't know as much as they thought they did at the beginning. That's going to be the most common outcome.
I agree with that 100% because we all have beliefs that are incorrect, and we all have beliefs that we have much more strength and conviction in than we should. And conspiracies are a bizarre sort of extreme example of this, but they're part and parcel of the same kind of mechanisms that lead to all of our beliefs.
Yes. So there's been a lot of research in the psychology literature on overconfidence. People tend to be overconfident in a lot of different ways. The reason for overconfidence is what's called confirmation bias. That is, we're preferentially disposed to find evidence for the position that we start with, the one that we want.
Some of the work that I've done is looking at another reason that we're overconfident. It's not just because we tend to preferentially weight the evidence for our positions, but also that we tend to neglect all of the unknown information. And that's part and parcel of all of the themes that we've been talking about today, that the world just seems simpler than it is.
If the world seems simpler and we're confronted with an issue, then we're going to tend not to think about all of the stuff that we don't know. we're going to tend to think about the stuff that we do know. And if we thought about all the stuff that we don't know, it would make us more moderate in our positions because, wow, there's a lot more to know about this.
What we find is that when people search the internet for financial information, they become overconfident in their knowledge. And not only do they become overconfident in their knowledge, but that leads to downstream behaviors like taking on more risk.
This has been a really fun conversation, Shankar. Thank you so much.
I was sitting on an aisle and I will never forget the way that it felt to try to sit still. It was impossible. I couldn't stop moving. The strength of the emotions was so intense. I really stood out and I felt like people were avoiding eye contact with me. They weren't really sure what to do with me. And partway through the flight,
this man came up to me I was sitting on the aisle on the right side of the plane so he came up to me and he crouched down next to me on my left side and he was so gentle he made direct eye contact with me and he spoke softly and slowly and he was really sincere and
And he said, I know you don't know me and I don't know what's going on for you, but I want you to know that if you need anything, I'm here. And I said, thank you. I never ended up going to him during that flight, but knowing he saw me. You know, I felt like I was in this cavern of just like untenable emotion and that I was deeply, deeply alone.
And, you know, having lost a brother, we were so close in age. We grew up just one year in school apart. And knowing that I was on a plane with somebody that could see me and that knew that I needed something even if I didn't know what it was, even if they didn't know what it was, was an incredibly powerful experience. I will forever be grateful for him. It was a really powerful moment for me.
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