EverydaySpy Podcast - The Dirty Truth About Polls The News Doesn't Want to Admit

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

To see the world, you must look through something - eyes, windows, glasses, screens. And while what we see seems real, we never stop to think that someone else could be looking at the same thing but seeing it very differently. In this episode, Andrew and Jihi discuss the way your brain interprets information differently than those around you. And how you can change the lens your using to view the world... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. I'm super excited to have you back again, GE, for us to talk about our next installment of Team Spy. I feel like our last conversation was just yesterday, and I'm still amped about it after watching recent events, but we've got to focus on something new. We're focusing on today. What are we talking about today? Today we wanted to talk about cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions. I feel like we've been throwing the word cognitive out a lot. We talked about logical fallacies being a cognitive block. So I hope that when we talk about cognitive distortions, we don't start to confuse people. What is a cognitive distortion? A cognitive distortion is a way that our mind

convinces us of something that isn't true. There are inaccurate thoughts that usually reinforce negative thinking or emotions. You sound a little bit like an encyclopedia. I'm not going to lie. So how is that different from a bias? So a bias has to do with the way that you filter information that's coming in. A distortion is internal. So a distortion is a kind of filter that you see life through, basically. So like a bias is something that's wired into us. It's almost like an error in code if we were a computer.

But a distortion is more like an error. on the screen that we're using to watch the video. It's like a filter. Like if you put a filter on an Instagram or a filter when you're making a video with your GoPro, it basically like changes the warmth or the saturation. So basically everything you see, you see through that filter. But it could still be true information, whereas the cognitive bias is actually our flaw in our logic. Right.

So when you have a distortion and you hear a piece of evidence, then it's being shaped by the distortion. Right. Okay. So let's talk about a few examples. Well, actually, before we talk about examples, I want to talk about when we first discovered cognitive distortions, because you've been on here and you've told us before about the challenges that you have with anxiety. And I feel like the first time that you and I really learned about distortions was when we started deep diving into your anxiety. Do you remember that? Yes. And what we discovered is that distortions are coming to all people. Everybody has a cognitive distortion. To put it in your terms, everybody has a filter that they use to look at the world.

And that filter, those distortions, are built up over time, similar to a bias. But the difference is that our biases are something that we can see happening right away. We know right away when we're suffering from in-group bias. We know when we're susceptible to optimism bias. But a distortion is something we don't see right away. We only see it when we look back. over our life. Right.

In hindsight. And that's exactly how we started to kind of dig into your distortions when we were attacking your anxiety. And it's what we've done to dig into my distortions over time too, because like we said, everybody is susceptible to distortions. And distortions make a big corner part of the training that we give people in Optink. And I think it's one of those kind of eye-opening studies that we offer folks to really understand how our mind works.

Because if you understand that you have distortions, what, the reason that's important to me is because it means other people have distortions. And once you acknowledge that everybody has a distortion, you start to realize the informational advantage, the tangible tactical advantage that comes from understanding yours and looking for the distortions in others. I'm going way off track from where you wanted to go with this. I apologize. So let's just jump into a few examples that come to your mind. So a couple of really common examples. The first one is a filter. where basically your mind magnifies all the negative things and filters out all the positive

things. So as you go through life, negative and positive things happen to you. But when you have a filter, when a filtering cognitive distortion, all you focus on is the negative. So as an example, if I were to wear my, if I were to buy a new pair of pants and go walk around on the street and a new pair of pants, and I were to have like seven people come up and say, hey, dude, I like your pants. I would feel good until I met the one person who said, oh, did you for real buy those pants? And then right away, I would basically discount all seven compliments and I would focus exclusively on that one person who questioned my decision because that would be a filtering distortion, right? I would focus on the negative feedback. Right. And if you didn't have that distortion,

you might either question that person and be like, oh, why don't you like my pants? Or you might just write them off and be like, eh, well, the last seven people liked my pants. So no big deal. I feel like this reminds me of when my mom was cooking when we were growing up. She used to cook and I remember when my mom was a bad cook. Mom, if you're listening, I'm sorry. I know that there's baggage here between us. But my mom used to be a bad cook. And it was because she was working all the time.

And as she has kind of progressed in her career up through the ranks to become CEO on her own, my mom's a great cook now, right? I think once the kids left the house and she actually had time to focus on cooking correctly, she became a really spectacular cook. And I will never forget sitting around the table one day my mother, she made steak. And she used a fish seasoning, like a dill-based seasoning on the steak. And we sat there and my dad took a bite of the steak and told my mom it was great. And my two sisters both took a bite of the steak and looked at my mom and said,

Mom, the steak is great. And then I took a bite of the steak and I said, Mom, it tastes like fish. and she was hurt. I mean, it really hurt your feelings. And it's interesting to me because what happens in that situation was that my dad and my sisters obviously were protecting my mom's feelings. And then I was the one that kind of spoke truth to power. But if I would have been able to not do that, then we would have had a consistent unified voice

that told my mom, the steak is good. Whether it was good or not, it was just my opinion. that it tasted like fish, but here we saw what happens when that filtering bias takes over. Dad made mom feel good. My sisters made mom feel good. I'm the one that said it tasted like fish, and which one opinion did my mother focus on? Mine, and it really hurt her feelings. So I'm very sorry for hurting your feelings that day, Mom.

But that was your filtering distortion. Not my responsibility. What are some other distortions that are out there? So another one we see all the time is all our. nothing thinking, otherwise known as black and white thinking. Basically, we're a person. Everything is either good or bad. You're a failure or a success. There's no shades of gray in the middle. There's no steps along the way of, I'm getting better. You're either good or you're bad. Where do you see that play out? I think, you know, I think you see a lot of times with parenting,

honestly, where parenting is a journey, right? And every parent knows this. It's a journey. And there's ups and downs and your kids learn when they want to learn. Sometimes they learn things you want to. Sometimes they don't. But at the end of the day, you might look back and be, you know, you might have the most wonderful day with your kids. And then at the end of the day, bedtime temper tantrum. Bedtime temper tantrum. And you're like, I am the worst parent. You know, and part of that is filtering also, right, that we just talked about where one negative thing happens and you're focused on it. But another part of that is that, you know, because your kid can't read a book at three years old, doesn't mean that you're a bad parent. Like, it's a journey. Another, another example that we have talked about

is being business owners. Oh, man, that's exactly where my brain was. I was totally thinking about how that feels like being a business owner, because being a business owner also feels like being a parent. It's like, here's this little baby that just needs me and I can't get away from it. And even if I could, I don't know that I'd want to get away from it. But yeah, with business especially, I feel like every decision is this all or nothing decision where you're like, okay, I'm ethical or I'm not ethical. I understand or I don't understand. I'm a terrible marketer. Wow, I'm a really good marketer.

Like it's this really hard filter to get through because you are constantly all of one or none of one. And there's never that journey to use your phrase, right, the journey between the two sides of those two extremes. So is there a specific cognitive distortion that you want to dig into today? So the one I really wanted to talk about today is one that I also think you'll see, I think we've all been seeing it actually over this past year if my Facebook feed is in the indication. It's emotional reasoning. It's the filters, right? So you assume that your negative emotions reflect the way that things really are.

Well, it's not just your negative emotions, right? Like this is, I think this is a great subject. Because emotional reasoning is basically, the distortion that allows us to filter incoming information through whatever predominant feeling we have at the time. Correct. So if we are feeling something good, when that information comes through, that filter, we associate the good feelings with the information and vice versa, if we feel bad, if we feel scared,

if we feel betrayed or if we feel alone, right? That's emotional reasoning, correct? We reason the information through the emotion we're feeling. Right. But then we forget that feelings are not facts and that we have to objectively look at facts and look at evidence because, again, feelings are not facts. What we feel is not reality. That's interesting. Yeah.

Feelings are not facts, I think, is a fantastic little mnemonic that we can use to remember things. So where my mind goes, and you can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I feel like this is so relevant right now because of the election season. Yes. We just had, in real time, we just had the Republican National Convention end. Just last week or a week and a half ago, we had the Democratic National Convention end. And both of those conventions, when you watched them play out on TV, I am feeling like it was just a giant exercise in emotional reasoning. You put up these dynamic emotional speakers to speak to a crowd, to speak to an audience, to instill an emotion, and then community. communicate information through that emotion almost intentionally to trigger that emotional reasoning.

Right, because those types of conventions, when people have rallies, when people have conventions, it's a kind of marketing. And what does marketing love to use? It loves to use emotions because emotions stick. If they had those types of conventions and rallies and all they did was spout out statistics and facts, would you remember any of that stuff? You probably wouldn't. I mean, the average person what is probably just going to listen to it as a drone in the background and then turn it off. But when they appeal to your emotions, that sticks with you. That really resonates. And then if you have the cognitive distortion of emotional reasoning, suddenly those emotions

you're feeling become real. They become how things really are. If you're really angry about something that a speaker talked about, then suddenly you're angry about that. That is the way things are, regardless of what the truth is. regardless of what evidence shows. And you associate that information with the feeling of anger. So when you hear that information again, you will feel angry again.

Right. It's the same reason why when we smell familiar, smells from our childhood, it brings us peace and comfort and soothing. Only it's kind of a different variety. Now it's information based instead of based in our olfactory. Right. Now, how do we see this kind of play out day to day outside of the national conventions, outside of what we see in a rally? I think when it comes to politics in particular, the elections in particular, I think right now we see it a lot in polls and polling.

Polling is a fantastic place because here we see polls this year, especially in question, like they've never been in question before. And I find that interesting because you and I both know that polling is fundamentally flawed. I remember when we were at the agency, I remember sitting down in an undisclosed office. with a person I cannot disclose, where we just talked about the problem with polling. We talked about how President George Bush, George W. Bush, was actually a strong advocate against polls because he was very knowledgeable about the problem with polls. And just for anyone who's not aware, some of the immediate things that jump to my mind when I think about the problems with polls. So first, polls target people.

So they're targeting a geographic region. They're targeting an age demographic. They're targeting a location. So even when they're being designed and set up as a professional poll, they're still targeted. And then even when they're executed, the response rate for a poll is like 6%. So that means if they're trying to hit 100 people in a certain zip code, right, six out of every 100 people are actually going to respond to the poll. And what kind of statistical relevance is that?

If you're any kind of mathematician, you know that it's not statistically relevant to have six out of 100 people, say something, especially not when they're, they're targeted. You target a blue neighborhood, you target a red neighborhood, you target a wealthy neighborhood, you target a poor neighborhood, whatever it might be, if you only get six people to respond out of every hundred, that's a very low response rate. And then the last thing about polls that makes them something that we never trusted is that they're perpetually underfunded and extremely expensive to execute. A good, hearty poll with the kind of response rates that make them statistically relevant that are actually fair and unbiased require so much.

much money that they're very difficult to pull off. So states can't pull them off, counties can't pull them off, and even many nonprofits out there can't pull them off. It's only a handful of places that really understand how to execute and can successfully execute a poll that way. And I think if you know all of this information about polls, so you know the caveats behind polling, you know how it works, you understand the standard deviations, you know, if you know all of these things about each specific poll that you're looking at, then that's fine because you're taking it with a grain of salt. But the way that polling numbers are presented to the public, they're presented as the way it is, as facts, as representative. And then oftentimes they are presented in a way with emotion,

with that have emotions linked to it that are trying to trigger emotions. Yeah. Look at how much of the country is displeased with our current president. Look at the number of, you know, false instances of X, Y, Z, or here's a number of people who want to see a new president, and here's a number of people who don't want to see a new president, and, you know, whatever it might be, there's always an emotional piece to the way the poll is presented. Now, we're talking about professional polls, right? And what I find interesting is there's, there's kind of like, like to every government, there's a shadow government in the conspiracy theorist world. There's always a secondary poll. And I feel like that secondary poll is not a poll that people think about often. You know the

pole I'm talking about? I believe it's called a horse race pole. Yes, the horse race pole. Can you give us an idea of what the horse race pole is? I believe horse race polls are informal polls. Yeah, they're informal polls that basically run parallel of a formal poll. So as an example, right, let's say that you were to ask 10 people at the table who they're going to vote for. Okay? And at this particular table, you're 10 friends, five of them say they're going to vote for Donald Trump. Five of them say they're going to vote for Joe Biden. Okay, great. That's your, technically, that's your formal poll. Now, if you go and you ask the same 10 people, okay, guys, so now we know who you're going to vote for. But who do you think's going to win? Now all of a sudden you've got seven people who say one person's

going to win, and three people say that the other person's going to win. So the horse race poll here is not a poll based on their individual action, right? When they were put in a place where they had to take action, who do you want to win, they say one person. But when you ask them an emotional question, when you ask them who do you think will win, all of a sudden anger and hope and doubt and distrust, all of those emotions start to take over, and they answer differently.

And that's what we're seeing right now too. We're seeing horse race poles pop up all over the place if you know to look for them, because that horse race pole is essentially the pole that proved to be true in 2016. And it's the poll that everyone's so afraid of seeing play out again in 2020. What if the official polls say so-and-so is going to win and so-and-so is going to lose, and then at the end it's the opposite way around?

And I think the danger there with these types of polls that play on emotional reasoning is that it can keep people from going out and voting and being heard. If somebody feels like their vote isn't going to count, or if somebody feels like the opponent that they don't want to win is going to win anyways, then they won't even try. They won't even try because they'll just feel overwhelmed and hopeless. And they'll think that the situation is actually hopeless when in reality it's not. In reality, nobody knows how it's going to turn out.

Yeah, because polling in the great secret behind polling is that it's not supposed to be telling us the future. It's not like going to a fortune teller. It's actually supposed to be a mathematical representation of probability. So in a poll, anything is possible. The numbers are just telling you a probability. There is a 54% probability that so-and-so will win, but that also means there's a 46% probability that this other person will win. That's the magic of polls.

They're probabilities. They're not telling you anything with certainty. Right. So then any time that you feel a strong, emotion towards something, that should always be a trigger for you to call out that emotion and try to identify if you're doing emotional reasoning. Because emotional reasoning may sound rational and accurate, but it's not. It's emotional.

And you have to remember that. So the key is to call it out. I'm feeling angry. I'm feeling hopeless. I'm feeling really excited. and then identify why. What is the objective evidence that you're using to back that feeling up? Because remember, feelings are not facts.

And if you're not objectively looking at the facts and the evidence, then what you're doing is emotional reasoning. And similarly, whenever you're dealing with someone who you suspect is demonstrating signs of emotional reasoning, for example, you bring up a piece of information and immediately changes their mood, recognize that that person is acting in an emotional way. They're not a bad person. They're not a flawed person. They haven't been tricked or duped.

It's just that they're looking at the world through a lens that's naturally wired into their minds. That is emotional reasoning. That's not something to be hostile about. That's just something that we're all learning to kind of deal with. And it's especially preyed upon during the election season. Right. All right.

Awesome. Yeah. So I love this conversation. I love the way that these team spies are going when it comes to talking about the elections, how to master information, how to take control, and how to kind of rise above all the noise that we're hearing all the time. So today, our conversation about cognitive distortions, specifically about emotional reasoning, we talked about all or nothing thinking, or black or white thinking.

We talked about the filtering effect. These are all cognitive distortions that are actively going on in our mind. People who suffer from anxiety are especially prone to these distortions because it's hard for us to just rule them out when your natural wiring is one that kind of leans towards one of these cognitive distortions. So there's tons of them out there. You can find them if you look them up online. Opthink goes into our course opt think goes into some of the most common and most detrimental cognitive distortions that people suffer from. But overall, I would say that while we continue to engage information during this election season and during everyday life, the thing you

want to do is be aware of the distortion, be aware that feeling is not fact. Correct. And that you always have the ability to learn more information that can offset and change your own filter. I agree. And that, I suppose, is everyday espionage. Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn.

If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at EverydaySpy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations. And join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.