February 13, 2017
Interview with David McRaney, author of the book You Are Now Less Dumb
Mike Carruthers:
The psychology behind how we relate to each other is fascinating. For instance there’s something called the illusion of asymmetric insight.
David McRaney:
And the illusion of asymmetric insight is the belief that I am an iceberg and that you only see the very top of the iceberg coming out of the water. But you tend to believe that everyone else in your life you can see what’s beneath the water.
David McRaney, author of the book You Are Now Less Dumb…
And you have this deep insight into others – so that’s what the asymmetric insight is all about. I can see into you but you can’t see into me. And we tend to think the same thing about our political beliefs. If you’re one side of the aisle or the other you tend to believe that – well the other side just doesn’t understand us and how deep we are, how nuance we are, how complicated we are. But you believe you understand everything about the other group and you can see right through them.
You’ll notice that when you have a political argument with someone you almost never convince the other person to come over to your side.
Because as you drudge up things from Google and you start presenting like; what about this, what about this, what about this? All you’re really doing is causing the other party to dig in and believe even more strongly than they did when you began that conversation. It’s not a good technique if you’re trying to pull somebody around to your way of looking at things.
So what does work?
First of all you need to – if you’re going to try to present a message make it as simple as possible. Do not present mountains of data that will not help your cause. And really don’t expect 1 argument to make a difference it takes many exposures to truth to get people to move over from their belief
