please raise your hand if you would
recognize truth if it was presented in
front of your own eyes so do you
consider yourself a rational person who
is able to see truth ok I’m seeing some
hands people are a little bit self
skeptical ok hopefully a lot of rational
people here but I’m going to put you to
the test ok ok now is show of hands if
you think the crowd in the picture on
the right is larger seems fairly easy
for you how many people think the crowd
on the left is larger okay that was
fairly easy you got it all right so it
seems like you are fairly rational
people and as most you recognize these
pictures were taken 8 years apart from
almost exactly the same angle at
President Barack Obama’s presidential
inauguration in 2009 and Donald Trump’s
inauguration just a few months ago and
as you can see from the crowds the
pictures here the crowd was much larger
at Barack Obama’s inauguration than
Donald Trump’s nevertheless Donald Trump
took to Twitter as he often does to
boast about the immense crowd he said
this might be one of the biggest it was
a massive turnout and the very next day
his press secretary Sean Spicer took
pictures of the crowd in his very first
press briefing on national TV and
pointed out that this was in fact the
largest audience to witness an
inauguration period both in person and
around the globe and so he was
presenting what Kellyanne Conway another
member of the Trump White House later
called an alternative fact so an
alternative fact here is the idea that
both facts are true the crowd for our
Trump is larger as is Obama’s crowd and
so even when presented with the
photographic evidence as well as
ridership numbers in DC on that day that
contradicted this she clung to this
notion of alternative facts and this
struck many people as eerily familiar
and many people pointed
to the similarities to George Orwell’s
famous book 1984 and within days the
sales for 1984 shot up by nine thousand
five hundred percent it became a
best-selling book for the first time in
decades and perhaps the most striking
parallel to me anyways was this quote
from Orwell the party told you to reject
the evidence of your own eyes and ears
it was their final and most essential
command and this was the essence of the
book which is that totally totalitarian
government was asking people to deny
their own eyes and ears and they were
rewriting facts and presenting
alternative reality to their citizens
now we’re trump voters or was Trump
perhaps denying the evidence presented
in front of his own eyes well they
actually did a study on this some
researchers in the United States
collected data from thirteen hundred and
eighty-eight American citizens and
showed them this picture with the same
simple question I asked you they asked
which crowd is larger looking at these
two pictures and like you people found
this remarkably easy as you can see
accuracy for almost everybody in the
study was close to a hundred percent
people could easily tell which crowd was
larger based on these two photos side by
side with one exception about 15 percent
of Donald Trump supporters seem to
reject the evidence presented to their
own eyes exactly what Orwell was talking
about they said that the picture on the
left was larger and these were not
labeled with Trump or Obama on them they
were just saying that that crowd looked
larger given the two photos and nothing
else I just want to say here that
liberals are not the only people to
believe lies there was an analysis done
recently of hyper-partisan websites
online and 40% of stories in
hyper-partisan conservative websites had
lies in them and liberals were sharing
stories with lies too almost 20% of the
stories that liberals were seeing on
these hyper-partisan web sites were lies
or had some lie in it I’m thankfully the
mainstream media which has been taking a
lot of flak lately was almost perfectly
accurate there was almost no lies in any
of these stories
were detectable this example about
American politics might sound trivial
but the implications are much bigger
than that and this is what to me is much
more troubling we are having debates
over basic facts about whether this
globe that we live on is warming we are
having basic facts about things like the
efficacy of vaccinations does it help
people does it cause autism when you’re
debating basic facts and this has led
Time magazine recently to ask is truth
dead if we’re going to debate things
that scientists have proven if people
are going to disagree with photographic
evidence presented in their eyes in
front of their own eyes have we lost
sense of truth are we all post
modernists as it were one of my favorite
quotes was by a US Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan who once said that
everyone is entitled to his own opinion
but not his own facts and that’s
critical because if we’re ever gonna
resolve any of these problems we have to
first start with a shared understanding
of what reality is and then if we accept
that the globe is warming we can debate
how we’re gonna solve that problem
there’s a lot of reasonable arguments
about different strategies but if we can
never agree on the fact to begin with we
have no basis for even discussing how to
solve it and that is led Stephen Colbert
comedian to note that it used to be that
everyone was entitled to their own
opinion but not their own facts but
facts don’t matter anymore
perception is everything and so what I’m
here to talk to you today about is how
our brain shape our perceptions of
reality and then maybe offer some
antidotes for resolving that problem
this is one of my favorite cartoons it’s
from The New Yorker this is a famous
perceptual illusion for some people they
see a duck other people see a rabbit and
these are two armies going to war over
whether or not they accept their duck
God or the rabbit God and this might
sound absurd people are laughing but
that recently happened how many people
see this dress as a white and gold by
show hands okay about half of you how
many people see it as black and blue I
see it as black and low I see people
looking each other like are you crazy
like what what’s going on here and
that’s exactly what happened when this
photograph was taken it went viral and
people got in yelling matches not only
at the wedding where this was originally
in Scotland but online people are
yelling at each other about how their
idiots and fools and can’t see reality
what’s obviously true I just led Ellen
to post this tweet which she said from
this day on the world will be divided
it’s two people the black and blue
people and no white and gold people and
essentially this is what happens when we
don’t agree on reality it divides us now
where is this coming from why are we so
divided on politics and on our
interpretations of reality and truth
there’s two good reasons for it the
first reason is that our biology is
different so there’s more and more
evidence emerging that liberals and
conservatives have different genetic
foundations that are biological parents
give us a certain genetic heritage that
shapes how we interact with other people
in the world what policies we find
acceptable in essence were predisposed
to believe certain things and this has
been followed up by recent research
looking at the structural differences in
the brains of liberals and conservatives
this work was done in England and they
also ran it with a couple of politicians
and they found that there are
differences in core structures in the
brain between liberals and conservatives
and so what this suggests is that our
brains are different
another factor the second factor is that
through evolution our brains were carved
to cooperate and coordinate as groups
every single culture on earth forms
coalition’s and groups and identifies
with groups and this was very successful
for out competing other groups and out
competing other species but it leads to
a massive intergroup conflict and so
even though it’s functional in the
savanna it is a disaster when it’s
applied to politics and so when we think
about how people are debating and seeing
the facts behind certain issues from
inauguration crowds to global warming to
vaccination these insights can help us
understand why people are seeing it
differently and maybe give us some
insights about how we can intervene so
if you’re like me the first thing you do
in the morning is you roll over I turn
on my phone and I check my favorite news
sites and what I’m doing there is that
I’m seeing different news different
facts to reach in my mind that are
probably different than my neighbour
because I select new sites that I enjoy
the other thing that happens
is that I checked my social media and if
you’re not aware of this now we are
living in echo chambers our social media
because of our likes and dislikes
becomes carefully curated and becomes a
reflection of our own values and so you
can go to The Wall Street Journal they
have this amazing website where you can
select many many political issues like
immigration and you can see what a
liberal and a conservative are seeing in
their social media feeds at the exact
same time at that moment and it is
shocking how people are being fed
different news sources and so how are we
gonna agree if we’re seeing radically
different interpretations of reality so
that’s already a massive problem but the
problem goes much deeper than that
our brains are misinterpreting and
processing information differently and
so we have these beautiful prefrontal
cortices and this is what differentiates
us from every other primate on earth
it’s what allows us to build beautiful
buildings like this to organize events
like this to cooperate to fly in
airplanes we have an enormous capacity
that’s given to us by our prefrontal
cortices but what they do when we’re
motivated is reason in ways that can be
detrimental so although I’m sure all of
you would agree that an educated
citizenry is key to helping people see
truth and learn how to distinguish fact
from fiction right well that’s wrong
there is a recent study that had people
solve a math problem and the solution
either led to the conclusion that gun
control was ineffective or that gun
control is effective and what happened
was that liberals were able to solve the
question pretty well but only if it
supported their belief system only if it
came to the conclusion that gun control
was effective when it wasn’t effective
they failed badly and this was true even
of people who were very skilled at math
when conservatives did it they found the
exact opposite effect and so what this
study shows is that math skills and
education and understanding might be
thought to bring us closer together but
in fact it can lead us further apart
when we’re motivated we reason in ways
that support our initial belief systems
and this is one way that politics really
does rot your brain uh-huh there’s also
good evidence that we remember things
differently so many people millions of
people continue to believe that there
were weapons
mass destruction in Iraq this was
considered the greatest intelligence
failure in history now
that led to a massive disaster hundreds
of thousands of people being injured and
displaced tens of thousands of people
dying hundreds of thousands of people
with psychological trauma to this day
that are being treated but that’s not
just a conservative problem there’s a
recent study by researchers who study
how false mentally memories get
implanted in people’s brains and what
they found is that conservatives are far
more likely to remember false memories
that were consistent with their beliefs
like the idea that George Bush was
meeting with a celebrity when Hurricane
Katrina was happening conservatives were
more likely to remember that Barack
Obama was meeting with the President of
Iran which didn’t happen they actually
remembered it as being true and so you
could see people on the left and right
are more likely to remember things that
comport with their beliefs to me the
most concerning thing is that it goes
even deeper there are some evidence that
our politics might even shape our
interpretations of basic facts and
reality so one of my favorite studies in
this area presented people with a video
of a protest and police were coming to
arrest protesters something that people
here probably care a lot about how these
how protesters are treated well in this
case they either told participants that
these were anti-abortion protesters or
not and what they found is that liberals
thought that the protesters were much
more violent when they were described as
anti-abortion protesters and
conservatives thought they were peaceful
and so these people are saying the exact
same video to their retina to their
perceptual system and drawing opposite
conclusions about what had happened here
you can think of how this might impact
how we all see the news even if we are
reading the same news watching the same
channels we’re interpreting it through
different lenses
now I’m gonna hopefully help you leave
on a hopeful note so imagine that you
could give people an antidote to help
them see clearly to open their eyes what
would you do I’m gonna give you three
piece of advice that might help the
first one is that you have to consider
the possibility that you’re wrong that
you’re miss perceiving reality as I’ve
pointed out continuously here everybody
thinks they’re seeing reality even when
we’re not this is known as naive realism
and so you first need to check your
facts to ensure that you’re correct
you’re not the one miss perceiving
things the second thing is that fact
checks do work and people can reason
effectively when they’re presented with
data but it doesn’t happen if they’re
presented with data from somebody they
don’t trust and so the erosion of trust
in the media is a huge problem because
it means that people aren’t gonna accept
the facts when they’re presented to them
from those sources so you have to
present it from a fact source that
people actually trust and third you need
to open people’s minds and what research
suggests is the best one of the best
ways to do that is to listen to
somebody’s perspective and affirm their
common humanity listening helps you
understand why they believe what they do
and potentially find a ground for
convincing them or correcting their
misinterpretations or maybe
understanding that they have an
alternative insight that you don’t have
and affirming them is key to making them
less defensive because if people are
defensive about their beliefs which we
know they are they can react and some
people have even called this the
backfire effect where you present people
with vaccination facts about how it’s
effective they sometimes can even double
down and harden their original beliefs
so you have to be very careful on how
you approach people when you try to
convince them of some truth now this was
just a first step for opening a dialogue
and trying to talk to people and try to
share a common sense of reality but it’s
a critical first step because if we’re
gonna solve major issues like climate
change vaccinations globalization save
our democracy you need to start by
having a common basis thank you very
much
[Applause] [Music]