Your Undivided Attention - The Invisible Influence of Language — with Lera Boroditsky

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

One of the oldest technologies we have is language. How do the words we use influence the way we think?The media can talk about immigrants scurrying across the border, versus immigrants crossing the border. Or we might hear about technology platforms censoring us, versus moderating content. If those word choices shift public opinion on immigration or technology by 25%, or even 2%, then we’ve been influenced in ways we can't even see. Which means that becoming aware of how words shape the way we think can help inoculate us from their undue influence. And further, consciously choosing or even designing the words we use can help us think in more complex ways – and address our most complex challenges.This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're grateful to have Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist who studies how language shapes thought. Lera is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, and the editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.Clarification: in the episode, Aza refers to Elizabeth Loftus' research on eyewitness testimony. He describes an experiment in which a car hit a stop sign, but the experiment actually used an example of two cars hitting each other.RECOMMENDED MEDIA How language shapes the way we thinkLera Boroditsky's 2018 TED talk about how the 7,000 languages spoken around the world shape the way we thinkMeasuring Effects of Metaphor in a Dynamic Opinion LandscapeBoroditsky and Paul H. Thibodeau's 2015 study about how the metaphors we use to talk about crime influence our opinions on how to address crime Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liabilityBoroditsky and Caitlin M. Fausey's 2010 study about how the language used to describe the 2004 Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" influence our views on culpabilityWhy are politicians getting 'schooled' and 'destroyed'?BBC article featuring the research of former Your Undivided Attention guest Guillaume Chaslot, which shows the verbs YouTube is most likely to include in titles of recommended videos — such as "obliterates" and "destroys"RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES Mind the (Perception) Gap: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/33-mind-the-perception-gapCan Your Reality Turn on a Word?: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/34-can-your-reality-turn-on-a-wordDown the Rabbit Hole by Design: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/4-down-the-rabbit-hole-by-design

Hey, everyone, it's Tristan. If you're new to your undivided attention, welcome. And if you're a long-time listener, welcome back. And just a quick note to say that our back catalog of this podcast goes back to 2019, but our episodes are really as relevant today as ever. So if you're interested in the causes of addiction, for example, go back to our conversation with Johann Hari. Or if you're curious about how technology can strengthen democracy,

we have a really great episode with Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tang. and if you want to hear about social media's big tobacco moment, go back to our recent interview with Facebook whistleblower Francis Hougain. So you can find those episodes and many more at humanetech.com slash podcast. And with that, here we go. The immigrants scurried across the border. Or I could say that another way. The immigrants crossed the border.

But notice that when I use the word scurry, I'm conjuring the thought of vermin or insects without actually saying that. And if that shifts public opinion on immigration by 25% or even 2%, then I've changed your opinion in a way that you can't even see. Which also means that becoming aware

of how words shape the way that we think can help anoculate us from their undue influence. And further, consciously choosing the words that we use can help us think in the complex ways that we need by helping us practice systems thinking or enabling us to act on the drivers of climate change. I'm Tristan Harris. And I'm Azaraskin.

And this is your individed attention, the podcast from the Center for Humane Technology. Today on the show, we're grateful to have Lara Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist who studies how the languages we speak shape the way that we think. Lara is an associate professor of cognitive science, at UC San Diego, and her research combines methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology.

Lara Borditsky, welcome to your undivided attention. It's a real pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I would love our listeners to really understand your work, because I can just say from the ground up, you know, a lot of our time on this podcast and in our public work is about examining how social media constructs our reality, the way that we see the world, the way we think of events, the way we think of what's happening, how it selects certain things for our attention and not others. And so in thinking about what does it mean to have a humane social media environment that is giving us a more accurate and less distorted view of reality, we wanted to hopefully

explore some ways in which language is a piece of that process. And would you mind telling, I'll listen to a little bit about your background. You were born in Belarus, English as your fourth language. Could you talk a little bit about how you got interested in and how language creates thought? Well, I was a very argumentative kid, and I would love to argue with people about big questions, like about truth and justice and freedom and things like that. And I started noticing how many of those discussions really hinged on the way someone

would use a word like freedom or justice, and you could use it one way in one sentence and a different way in another sentence, and it bothered me so much. I just thought, oh, man, like we could really answer these big questions if we just really got to the bottom of what these words really mean. And so that was one of the things that drew me to being interested in language and trying to understand truly the meanings of words. And, of course, as you study language in a scientific way,

you move further and further from the idea that words really have set meanings. Instead, you discover that words have shared jointly created, constantly shifting meanings that mean different things in different contexts. So I went into the topic with the idea that I was going to answer these big philosophical questions that were bugging me by looking at language. And what I came away understanding a lot more is just how much language is used to create the reality that we experience and how much language is a living dynamic thing that we all co-create together.

What I'm hearing you say is that language in some sense is a kind of psychotechnology. It's a tool that we can use to change the apparatus by which we see and understand the world. Which is sort of funny because often we just think of language as a thing. We don't think about its sources or its effect on us. I'm thinking about other psychotechnologies. There's pharmacological psychotechnologies like caffeine or cannabis that changes the lens by which you view of the world. There's embodied technologies like yoga and music and breathing. They're mental ones like numeracy and literacy, mindfulness, technological ones like neurofeedback

and transcranial stimulation. And then we have language. What I'm hearing you say is by choosing or being aware of the language we're using, it can fundamentally alter what we view as true. I certainly think of language as a technology. It's a very old technology. And one thing that's maybe a little bit different between language and the other things that you mentioned is how universal of an experience it is. So if you grow up in a particular cultural community, you might play music or you might not play music, right?

You might participate in certain drug rituals. You might not participate in those rituals. But if you're going to be a useful member of that community, the chances of you acquiring the language, of that community and linguistic practices of that community are very close to 100%. And then you're acquiring without realizing also all of the ideas that have been built into that language by thousands of years of humans before you. And a lot of those ideas are really smart, fabulous things. We inherit so much free knowledge from our ancestors through the language without even realizing

it. But it also comes with habits of thought and kind of trenches for your mind to train. travel, since it sounds like we're having a nerdy conversation, I can use this phrase, I think of language and culture is reducing cognitive entropy, right? When you're participating in a particular linguistic or cultural community, you're being guided into thinking in particular ways, and those could be wonderful, smart ways that you never would have come up with on your own or have been really, really hard to come up with on your own. But at the same time, there are so many other ways to do it and you're unaware of those ways because you're kind of stuck in these little trenches

that your language has made for you. Yeah. I just realized we didn't ask you, could you define the Sephir-Worff hypothesis? Sure. In general, there's an idea that the languages that we speak shape the way that we think. So of course, we know languages have different sounds and they have different words, but they also have different structures and they require their speakers. to include some information and not other information or to package information in particular ways. Some languages may make some ideas really easy and compact to express and other ideas may be harder to express.

And so the general idea is that whatever structures your language has create habits of thought. So the habits of the language become the habits of thought. And people have many different interpretations of what the entailments of that hypothesis are, but generally it's that from the habits of language, you should be able to predict at least some of the habits of thought. Not that language, of course, is the only input into cognition.

There are many, many other inputs, but it is one of the contributors to our patterns of thinking. One thing that we can't do is look within a language group and look, for example, at the kinds of metaphors that people use to talk about social problems or give people metaphors to use to talk about crime or immigration. So let me give you an example from our work.

We looked at metaphors for crime. So sometimes we talk about crime as if it's a virus. And we say crime is a virus infecting our cities or plaguing the neighborhood, things like that, right? Other times we talk about it as a beast or an attacker. So you could say crime is lurking in all the neighborhoods. Crime is a beast attacking the city and so on. And these metaphors invite different ways of reasoning about what you should do about crime.

So if you're talking about something as a wild beast that's attacking, you're more likely to think of solutions that would capture and contain the beast, right? So we give people a paragraph about increasing crime statistics in a fictional city. And the two paragraphs differ literally by just one word. We say either crime is a beast attacking the city or crime is a virus. And after that, everything else that they hear is exactly the same. So if we tell people crime is a beast attacking the city of Addison and then we give them a bunch of crime statistics, they're, and we ask them what should Addison do, they're more likely to come up with enforcement and punishment options and say things like we should increase the police force, we should make harsher prison sentences, we should send out more patrols, things like that.

Whereas if you say it's a virus, people are more likely to think about it as if it were a literal virus. And then they say, well, we need to diagnose and treat the problem and we need to inoculate the population and make sure everyone is healthy. And so they start saying things that are more reform-oriented, like, well, maybe there should be more after-school programs so that people have something to do after they get out of school. And maybe we need to address poverty and improve education and improve all of these other systems that are making people vulnerable to this disease of crime. Right. And the thing that's remarkable to me about what we see in these studies is how, big of a difference a single metaphor can make. The difference that we can get as a result of this is sometimes as big as the difference in opinion between Democrats and Republicans on the same question. And we tend to think of, you know, a topic like crime is this very politicized topic

where Republicans and Democrats are very different in their opinion. But just by changing this frame of getting people to think of it as a virus or getting people to think of it as a beast, We can get as big of a shift in opinion. And what's even further interesting to me is that people don't realize they're being influenced by the metaphor, right? So if we ask them, what was most influential in your thinking about this and your reasoning? Why did you give the suggestions that you gave? Almost everyone will go back and say, well, look at these numbers that you gave me, these rising crime statistics, right? We all want to think that we're making these very rational decisions that are based on facts and numbers.

Almost no one ever says, well, this metaphor is the thing that didn't change my mind. And to me, that points out this very common experience that we have. We think that we're being rational. We think we're making decisions based on facts and numbers. But in fact, there are these other vehicles, these Trojan horses, that guide our thinking in particular ways and a sly metaphor can lead you into a particular reasoning path without you're realizing it.

I think this is brilliant. And it sort of shows how language can slip in below the belt of the mind. You're not even aware of the frame that your mind is being pre-led down a path to come to a conclusion. Sometimes I think we focus a lot of attention in the text space, on fact checking, when in fact what I think we really need is frame checking. And I can imagine, you know, how when you select some text on your computer and you can hit a command and you bring up a dictionary, we sort of need that, but for frames, so like a frame

thoris. So you like bring it up and you see all the different frames, which groups use those frames. Instead of just knowing like check your source, you want to check your word source, like where did that language originally come from? I'm also thinking about, you know, I think, to quote one of your papers, it appears that abstract thinking is built on representations of more experience-based domains and not necessarily on the physical experience itself, which makes me think of Elizabeth Loftus' work on eyewitness testimony

where you show a witness a car hitting, say, a stop sign, and you ask them to recall that event, and if you say the car tap the stop sign, was their glass, they'll say no. And if you say if the car crashed into the stop sign, was their glass, they'll say, yes, even though they saw the exact same thing. It was the language that changed their memory.

And one of the things that really struck me from your work was your description of passive versus active voice, really changing morality judgments and punishment judgments. And I'd love for you to walk through that example. Sure. So in English, we can talk about accidents as if things happened, right? So you can say the glass broke, or you could say he broke the glass for the same event. In English, it sounds a little bit evasive if you say the glass broke or the toast burned or the necklace unfastened.

It sounds like, you know, the sort of things that little kids say or politicians say when they're trying to elude responsibility. But it turns out that this matters a lot. And I want to go back to the example you started with of Elizabeth Loftus's work on eyewitness testimony, because we really believe, we can believe our eyes and we can trust our memories. And we even have this phrase in English, let's go to the tape, right? So if you can go and review the video of the event, then you'll know exactly what happened. And so we wanted to really push on this idea of what does it mean to go to the tape. And so at the time when we were doing this research, we needed a famous accident or a famous event

that could be described two different ways. And at the time, the most famous event like that was the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. So Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. And the last dance move, he reached across her body, and one of her breasts was partially revealed for 9.16th of a second on national television. and this created a huge uproar. People were so incensed that it quickly became the most Tebowed event of all time. And the FCC attempted to find CBS $550,000 for this.

And so we knew that all of our participants in the study would have seen the event already, and we could show them the video of the event again. And we thought, okay, well, we can give two different descriptions of this event. So we say, okay, they were performing in the Super Bowl halftime show, and in the final dance move one group here's he unfastened a snap

the other group here is a snap unfastened right so we just change whether it's agentive or not agentive and then we ask how much is Justin to Burr-Lake to blame and how much of the $550,000 should he have to pay what we discovered

is even if people could look at the video themselves right in the moment right they could go to the tape they were still incredibly influenced by the way the event was described. So people who heard he unfastened the snap wanted to charge him 53% more than people who heard the snap unfastened, right, even though they were watching exactly the same video. And they blamed him more if they heard the agenda version. So to me, that really pushes on this idea, again, of how much we believe we're

perceiving reality the way that it is and how much of what we're making, judgments on we think is based in a rational, clear perception of physical reality as opposed to how much of it is constructed by all of the ideas that we have surrounding whatever it is that we see. And those ideas, of course, come not just from our own minds, but from the minds of other people through language, through cultural practices, and so on. Yeah. Ultimately, I think what you're bringing up is we built our society, a liberal democratic society, on the authority of human feelings and human choices, because we think that choices and beliefs and perceptions arise inside out from inside the human, you know, pouring outward into society as a judgment, as a perception,

in the court of public opinion. And what you're pointing to is that, depending on how much this ends up being true, the degree to which the word choices and the language that we use to describe reality has a determining effect on whether we think someone's to blame or not, or whether we should take this route or not, or whether we should punish someone with this penalty or this penalty, if that is located in the word choices that we use, in the language layer, in the psychotechnology layer, then we don't really live in a democracy. We live in a colonization of those psychotechnologies that are in an arms race to control our perception of reality. And I think about contemporary examples of saying someone consumed horsywormer versus saying someone consumed Ivermectin.

This is conjugating the feeling I would like someone to have and the judgment. If I'm saying you eat horseywormmer, I want you to judge that person. If I say you took ivermectin because it was prescribed you by a doctor, you might have a more positive view towards it. If I say, oh, you're going to buy a pre-owned car, you would feel positively towards buying a pre-owned car. But if I say you're buying a used car, well, who wants a used car? You know, just because we can influence each other's thinking through language and through other ways of communicating, that's not necessarily a terrible thing, right? It's also a wonderful thing. I would hope that my thinking could be influenced by other people, that I don't have to be limited by only the things that my own mind can produce. We benefit tremendously from that. And you can see just how quickly human thinking, culturally evolves over time. So language is a technology like any technology

that has good applications and bad applications, and it's a matter of realizing the power of it to harness it for the things that you want to happen. Our technology, let's say social media, because of its business model, points us at some kinds of language and not at other kinds of language. So an example being that for every,

every moral, emotional word that you add to a tweet, it gets, I think, 20% more retweets. And so there's a kind of pre-conjugation that Twitter then does on entire society's minds. So it's this kind of frame war that's happening. And I'm curious, if you are to sort of redesign language to be more humane, like, so we can be better to ourselves, like, how might you do that?

I think we're constantly in that project, right? So people are constantly redesigning language when it doesn't suit them, right? So a lot of the efforts around the world right now to change language related to gender are an example of that, where people might feel I'm stuck in this language that has two genders and I have to pick one or the other obligatorily and that doesn't fit the way that I think about myself or other people. And I feel trapped in it. They're trying to change that. Some people feel the opposite way.

They feel, okay, I'm stuck in this language that has these two genders, but then there's so many things that we say only in the male form and not in the female form, so I want to add more gender marking. So in France, for example, they just approved a bunch of new feminine forms of professions as official French words, whereas in other languages they're trying to take gender out. so as to not introduce gender bias when you're talking about people. So these are all fascinating conversations, and it's all people advocating for a language that suits the way that they perceive their reality better, right?

And it's a normal age-old function of language that is that it changes as our culture changes, as our circumstance change, as our thinking change. and there's always some kind of struggle or compromise or give and take a conversation in communities that where language is changing because there are always some people who want it to stay the same and there are some people who feel like it could improve and so I wouldn't take it upon myself to be the grand emperor of language change and design a language just for me I think it's really nice that there is a conversation and a back and forth, and you can have lots of input into what language should represent for people.

I guess going back to this picture that I painted earlier, I'd like to push on that a little bit more. I think one of the things that is sort of a truism about what it means to be living in the 21st century with our pulling back the curtain of how our own mind works. You know, a lion can't study how all lions minds work and build fMRI machines and then put lions and fMRI machines to understand more about how lions think. We have a unique level of intelligence and complexity of intelligence that we can build tools and then use those tools to actually study ourselves, to do science, to then really uncover facts about how our own minds work. we have this unique ability to actually literally decode fundamental structures and build optimization functions like that if I said it this way in this context, it would work better.

I could be aware that if I say the immigrants are scurrying across the border, without even saying that they're vermin or that you should not treat them as human or I want you to hate them, just by invoking the verb scurry. I'm actually controlling the political and policy outcome. If I'm only swaying it by one or two percent, then maybe I'm not really, it's not as consequential. If it ends up swaying it by more than 50 percent or something like that, then we might start to say, okay, if the language choices that we make through this uncovering process, I mean, we're seeing it everywhere, we're seeing, you know, is technology surveilling us? Is it spying on us? Or is it just personalizing things? I mean, to make that example concrete when I go into Google Maps and I type in only the first three letters of a place that I've been to before, first three numbers of an address I've been to before, and it auto-complete. where I want to go. Was it spying on me or surveilling me to do that thing? I would certainly use that word if I don't want you to think about Google personalizing or storing my information

in a positive way. If I want you to like the fact that it's giving us this benefit, I would use a word like personalized. Is it censoring our speech? Well, I would want to use a word like censor if I want you to be very suspicious of the technology platform's motives. I just wanted to give a few examples. I mean, even one I saw on Twitter is the FDA is restricting treatments for monoclonal antibodies, which is like for people who don't know, I guess, a powerful treatment for COVID. And they're actually banning that treatment. I think it's in Florida. The way that that was framed on right-wing Twitter is that the FDA wants Republicans to die because it wants to take away this treatment. It would be no works and is so effective. On left-wing Twitter,

they're highlighting the fact that monoclonal antibodies don't work really well for Omicron. And so they're simply trying to conserve a treatment that works for the cases that it works. And I'm just curious how you see that as you're one of the researchers who is actually pulling back the curtain and helping us decode more and more of the predictable ways that our minds will respond to things. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly fascinating to watch. Certainly trying to frame things in those ways is not new. You can find strong examples of different frames being contested in Shakespeare, you know, and lots and lots of historical texts. people are exactly playing with the framing, the amplification of frames, and the rate at which

one can discover what is a most incendiary frame, for example, maybe shifting now. But I think what's really important from our understanding of how reasoning works and how framing affects reasoning is that it's almost impossible to engage with someone in a productive discussion if you engage inside that frame that they have created. So you're certainly not going to win an argument if you accept the frames of the opposition. You need to first make the frame apparent and then you need to move away to another frame.

So to give you an example of this kind of restructuring, so if you're thinking about getting your slice of the pie than someone else, you know, there's only so much pie to go around. It's a zero-sum game. If I get pie, that means someone else doesn't get pie. If you get pie, that means I get less pie. Instead, all boats rise at the rising tide, right?

And that is a frame that they're just completely incompatible, right? You can't have an all-boats rise with the rising tide mentality and way of reasoning through economic growth, for example, and also have a fixed pie metaphor in your mind. and so acknowledging what frames people have being able to see what the implications of those frames are and then also being able to talk about why those frames are either incomplete or incompatible with some of the information that you have so any frame that you could choose is a very incomplete description of the situation right so there's no such thing as a perfect or accurate frame But when we find these disagreements, when we find these conflicts of frames, that it gives us an opportunity to understand in what ways both frames are deficient.

In what ways does each frame focus us on some elements of the situation but not others? What are the things that one frame makes obvious that the other frame obscures and vice versa? So I know it's super frustrating to feel like there's all this incredibly misleading framing and information happening, but all of those miscommunications and all of those moments are also opportunities to examine what is it that those frames are capturing, what is it that they're hiding, and those are opportunities to understand those issues better and to arrive at hopefully a more rich and nuanced understanding of any issue. Yeah, to me, I think the degree to which that optimization, that knowledge about how to use these frames has increased in the last few years, and especially I think social media creates implicitly a feedback loop, because people are testing things. They try using this verb versus that verb. They notice they get 100 more likes if they use that word than this word.

And our colleague, Guillaume Chaslow, who's a YouTube recommendations engineer we had in the show, actually did an analysis of the top 10 verbs that appeared in YouTube titles. and the verbs that were most successful were hates, obliterates, destroys. You know, these are essentially the conjugations of language. You know, Ben Shapiro destroys social justice worry. Russell Brand, obliterates CDC. These are the kinds of titles that we're increasingly living in. And what I was excited to be able to bring through your research and everything that you're doing, an awareness for our listeners about,

what does it mean to inoculate ourselves from these frames? How does it mean to have a shim, like a heads-up display, for how our minds are being conjugated to see reality and hopefully engender a little bit more humility about how we might be seeing things. Humility is extremely important here because none of us have a perfect understanding of COVID, none of us have a perfect understanding

of the economy, none of us have a perfect understanding of all of the implications of immigration. And by none of us, I really mean none of us. There's not a single expert in the world that has complete knowledge on any of these complex societal issues, right? But maybe more generally, I want to return to this idea of naive realism that we all believe that we see the world the way that it really is, that ultimately we are perceiving reality, right?

So George Carlin had this joke, he said, have you ever noticed how when you're driving on the highway, anyone driving faster than you as a maniac and anyone driving slower than you as an idiot, as if each one of us has figured out exactly the perfect speed to drive in any given situation and then everyone else is wrong. And so when you enter into disagreements, you can keep in mind that all of the people that you talk to are also believing that they are experiencing reality as it is.

If you have the patience to go through why it is that they believe what they believe, you might also learn some things. So we're going to take a quick interlude here, and Aiza and I are going to pull out some of the humane technology themes of Lara's research, and then we'll go back to the interview. Just want to ever talk to you about interlingua? I don't remember. It's a language, so there's Esperanto created to, actually, interestingly enough, was created to try to fight fascism under the idea. that if we all spoke one language, we wouldn't break up into sort of like nationalism.

It didn't work, but the language that came after that was interlingua, and it was a little bit more logically created. And so words that appear in it can only appear if it's in three inter-European languages, that it's a cognate that's shared among three inter-European languages. And what's fascinating to me about this language is they taught it to Swedish college kids for one year. And after one year of studying interlingua, the college kids could read a Russian newspaper, a Spanish newspaper, a Portuguese newspaper, a German newspaper, an English newspaper. And so I don't actually think of interlingua as a language. I think of it as a technology, a bootloader that if you learn this one thing, it makes it really easy to learn many other things, because its representations are just so good. I mean, that's the thing that makes it, I mean, empowering is the notion of leverage, right? What is a tool, but the fact that I leverage, I put in less, but I can get.

way more out of it. And so what I hear you say within your lingua, and I don't know the details, but it's a lever that I learn a little bit, but when I pull the little bit that I learn, I get on the other side this measured optimization of unlocking many other languages because you're just statistically, I guess, finding the areas of the most common overlap. And in the same way, you know, like there's these examples where you use AI to develop a new material or you develop a new staircase or new building structure. And you let the AI try to solve a constraint satisfaction problem. And it comes up with a totally different design that no human would ever come up with. But it actually is more aerodynamic or is more efficient or is more sustainable or whatever

because it's just solving that problem. And I think that when I think about our, you know, there is a problem, a meta problem, which is the complexity mismatch between the level of complexity of, say, what do we do about climate change or inequality or immigration? And then the languages that we have to speak about it or try to converse about it. And you could, I'm not a techno-utopian here. I'm not saying there's this magical solution for these massive problems. But there are, I think, better tools, just like Intralinguate isn't saying,

I'm going to unleash perfect communication with everyone in the world. It's just saying, I'm going to give you a lot of leverage that statistically will unlock more of the other languages. And I really wonder how we could bake into our language, the ability to do systems thinking and complex dynamics, such that our language is helping us out as opposed to hindering us. I thought it was really profound what Lera was saying. about choosing your frame.

Is crime a virus or is it a beast? Choosing one of these two frames will keep you from choosing the other one and there'll be solutions you find with one that you don't find with the other. And that's happening all the time at the level of these incredibly abstract, hyper-object problems like climate change.

Where we pick it up, like how we talk about it, means we might be blocking ourselves from finding the very solutions we need. There's sort of a design prompt I want to give to our listeners, which is how might we change language, use language, craft language, to help ourselves see the nature of exponential curves. So I'll just throw out a couple that I think are sort of funny. One would be every time you use exponential, say in an essay,

every time you use it, you have to double the length of it. So the first time you use it, you have to say exponential. The second time you say exponential, you have to say exponential, exponential, exponential. The third time you have to say exponential, exponential, and you'll just very quickly see, that it goes. Or maybe you have to say it twice as loudly and then four times as loudly. I don't think these are realistic, but I want to put that in people's minds. How might we change the way we speak so that we can be better in contact with the realities we face? Totally.

And so the project of human technology is this complexity gap. How do we design these strap-on extensions of the human mind, the human cognition, our emotional-related capacities? How do we sort of put on this brain implant extension of ourselves? that gives us more empathy and access to other people that helps us make better sense of the world, clearer sense of the world, and help us make wiser choices. So what can you do?

Well, instead of just checking your news sources, you can check your framing sources. You know, how are the words and the frames that are being presented to you influencing your views and opinion? So, I mean, we can't not use frames, and I think noticing that automatically creates a kind of humility about all the ways we could be perceiving the world.

And I think that makes me hopeful, because then I feel less politically polarized. I'm much more able to be curious about what are other ways people might be seeing the situation that I'm not seeing. And that's why we thought Lara's work was so important. Are there other examples that come to mind that you've seen through your research

where peacemaking and the ability to synthesize and better listen and understand to each other have emerged? Asking questions. So when you hear someone say something that you disagree with or you find surprising or puzzling rather than jumping to tell them that they're wrong or try to convince them. Think of questions that you could ask them. Why do they think that? And how does that work? And just try to understand as much about their worldview as possible. I don't spend a lot of time discussing politics with people. I'm much more interested in what

other people have to say, not because I want to take on their opinions, but because I'm just really interested in how they think. And once you've gotten to hear a lot and they also feel heard, you might be in a much better place to start to see where you agree and where you disagree and what is the structure that needs to be aligned between the two of you. I really hear this refrain of humility that the world that you perceive is not the world that is to not get mad, but to get curious. And in that frame of humility, I'm really curious, Lara, Like, doing the work that you do, it must change your own lens. It must change your own relationship to your mind and your perception of the world.

And I'm curious, is there a time that your behavior is different because of your work or that you've changed how you act, behave, or feel because of your work? No, I'm exactly the same, stubborn, impetuous person that I've ever been. been before. I think part of that is the human condition. But I think it makes me a lot more curious. Every time I learn something new that blows my mind, it makes me think that the world is so much bigger and richer and more fascinating than I could ever have imagined, and it makes me excited for all the things that I don't know. But it's a, it comes to the job. If your job is to ask questions and then to measure the answer, you have a measurement of just how often you're

wrong in your prediction. So I get told by my own work that I'm wrong constantly. So I have that humility experience just built into my livelihood. And so if you have the ability to measure just how often the things that you think might be true are that your predictions are completely wrong. Your two ways to respond are either to be dejected and think, oh, we'll never figure this out or to be excited because the world just continues to be more and more fascinating and complicated. So I choose the latter. My favorite experience in research is when you make an experiment to test a simple hypothesis and you're like, well, if it's A, then this should happen.

If it's B, then this should happen, and you collect the data. And it's neither A nor B, it's C, and you never even thought of C. That is my favorite experience, where the world just became larger. All of a sudden, you're living in a more interesting intellectual world, and now you've really learned something, and then your job is to go and try to understand how that could have happened. Lara Boreditsky is an associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego, an editor-in-chief of Frontiers and Cultural Psychology.

She's been named one of the 25 visionaries changing the world by the Utney Reader, and her research has been featured in outlets including the New York Times, The Economist, and Scientific American. Lara was born in Belarus and speaks four languages. Your indivated attention is produced by the San Diego, Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization working to catalyze a humane future. Our executive producer is Stephanie Lepp. Our senior producer is Julia Scott. Engineering on this episode by Jeff Sudakin. Dan Kedmi is our editor at large, original music and sound design by

Ryan and Hayes Holiday, and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. You can find show notes, transcripts, and much more at humanetech.com. A very special thanks goes to our generous lead supporters, including the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Evolve Foundation, among many others. And if you made it all the way here, let me just give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.