5 min summary of: The Story of Stories | Hidden Brain | 16 March 2021
For other podcast summaries, search 'podcast summaries' in any podcast apps. Or if you're on Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/5-min-summaries Original episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-story-of-stories/id1028908750?i=1000513125002 Key ideas: How explaining something is pleasurable, viewing uncertainty as a positive & the issue of distorting facts with stories. 1 quote: "In the presence of feeling a lack of control, we sometimes seek to impose control by seeing patterns where none exist." Idea 1 @ 1 minute : How much we like an explanation should have nothing to do with how good it is. A good explanation gives us pleasure. And when we can't come up with a good explanation, we feel dissatisfied. Something of the human mind yearns to make sense of the world. Some researchers think the sense-making drive is a basic human impulse, no different than thirst or hunger. But the potential risk of this is, because we enjoy finding explanations, we seek them, even if there isn't any there. At the same time, some explanations are more pleasurable than others, often they feel like they fit better, so they're more enjoyable to contemplate. And if we are drawn to explanations, in part because we derive pleasure from them, it's quite likely that from time to time we're going to draw the more pleasurable conclusion rather than the more accurate one. Idea 2 @ 26mins: Uncertainty can be both negative, and a positive. We often find uncertainty as a negative thing. However, we should view uncertainty as an opportunity for us to learn something. That there's something that's worth paying attention to to better understand. Idea 3 @ 42mins: The ease in which we construct stories can often distract us from the underlying facts. There was a really influential model of jury decision making called the story model. Where, the idea is that jurors, when hearing the evidence presented to them in the testimonies, are trying to construct a story of what happened. And the way people decide whether they're going to convict or not is by evaluating which of the different stories being told by the parties is better, and not always the underlying facts. This can lead to some problematic consequences. One of them is that if you change the order in which people hear testimony. Such that it makes it easier or harder to construct the story that's consistent with the prosecution, for example, that will affect how likely it is that participants think that that story is the right one. In other words, both the defense and the prosecution, could be presenting the same facts, but one of them is constructing the story of the facts better than the other one. We're more likely to believe the side that presents the better story. And in this case, what makes it a better story is just the fact that it was presented in the right temporal order in which the events unfolded so that it was easier to construct that story in your mind, even though it's the same facts. 1 question: Can you think of something that you tried to find an explanation for where none existed or where it was wrong? Other topics: Simple vs complex explanations, and how we can better see the bigger picture. How we often don't understand things as well as we thought. The importance of intentionally explaining and understanding the opposing side.