You Are Not So Smart

What is misinformation? How does it differ from disinformation or just plain ‘ole propaganda? How do we protect ourselves from people with nefarious intentions using all of these things to affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior? That’s what we discuss in this episode with Matthew Facciani, social scientist and author of Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How it Spreads, and What We Can Do About It.

Matthew Facciani's Website

The Misguided Podcast

Misguided

Kitted Shop

The Story of Kitted

How Minds Change

David McRaney's BlueSky

David McRaney’s Twitter

YANSS Twitter

Show Notes

Newsletter

Patreon

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Tim Harford of the podcast Cautionary Tales sits down with David McRaney to hear a story from David's book, How Minds Change, about how (and why) a prominent conspiracy theorist realized he was wrong.

Charlie Veitch was certain that 9/11 was an inside job. The attack on the World Trade Center wasn’t the work of Al-Qaeda, but an elaborate conspiracy. He became a darling of so-called “9/11 truthers” until he actually visited Ground Zero to meet architects, engineers and the relatives of the dead.

The trip changed his mind. His fellow “truthers” did not take Charlie’s conversion well.

Kitted

Previous Episodes

How Minds Change

Cautionary Tales

Tim Harford

David McRaney’s Twitter

David McRaney’s BlueSky

YANSS Twitter

YANSS Facebook

Newsletter

Patreon

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Communications professor Heather Barnes teaches us how to use what she learned teaching at Second City, managing the Museum of Science and Industry, and taking classes at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science to truly engage with difficult people through the power of positive rants.

Kitted

Previous Episodes

How Minds Change

Heather Barnes

Improv@Work

Second City

The Center for Enlightened Disagreement

Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science

David McRaney’s Twitter

David McRaney’s BlueSky

YANSS Twitter

YANSS Facebook

Newsletter

Patreon

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There are more possible chess moves than atoms in the universe, and chess champion Jennifer Shahade tells us how we can borrow from the best chess players' decision-tree approach to avoid considering every possible option and instead "think sideways" to consider the best choices on the board.

Previous Episodes

How Minds Change

Jennifer Shahade’s Website

Thinking Sideways

Does chess need intelligence?

David McRaney’s Twitter

David McRaney's BlueSky

YANSS Twitter

YANSS Facebook

Newsletter

Patreon

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Northwestern University just launched the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement, a real-world institution devoted to "research-backed approaches to cultivating open-mindedness, identifying one’s own cognitive biases, working collaboratively with others despite disagreement and more."

In this episode, David McRaney details his time as a resident of the Center, teaching students how to ask questions that activate a person's introspection, and then follow up with questions that evoke a person's motivated reasoning, then keep going until the other side articulates things they may have never considered before, and, in so doing, reveal the deeper motivations and values generating disagreement.

You'll learn about this and all the other modules of the Center's pilot program. You'll also learn about a new game they are designing to improve scientific literacy of news consumers and news creators.

Previous Episodes

How Minds Change

The Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement

Brad Zakarin

Eli Finkel

Nour Kteily

Medill School for Journalism

Patti Wolter

The Center for Public Deliberation

The Listen First Coalition

Better Together America

Heather Barnes

Martin Carcasson

Point Taken

The Visual Thinking Lab

Steven Franconeri

Joshua Greene’s Website

Tango

Tango Quiz Game Research

Love Factually Website

Joshua Hudson

Protein Research

NYT Protein Deep Dive

Tylenol Metastudy

The Garage

Monica Guzman

Braver Angels

Jacqui Banaszynski

David McRaney’s Twitter

David McRaney's BlueSky

YANSS Twitter

YANSS Facebook

Newsletter

Patreon

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.