16 Surprising Psychology Truths - Gurwinder Bhogal

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance if the need for illusion is high. And so, if you really need to believe something, no matter how absurd it is, if you have the intelligence, you can make yourself believe it through your own arguments. And that's the danger of, of intelligent people, is that they can convince themselves of stupid arguments. (wind blows)

Gwinder Bogle, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Chris. Nice to be here.

Dude, you're crushing it at the moment. That audience capture, uh, article that you wrote on Substack has gone absolutely everywhere. When someone posts something that's one of my friends' work in a group chat, b- but I don't post it, there's this weird sense of, uh, like ownership or jealousy. I'm like, "No, that's my friend. That's..."

(laughs)

"No, that's supposed to be me that's posting that." But dude, I'm so happy to see how everything's blowing up for you at the moment.

Thanks, man. Yeah, it's appreciated. I think a lot of it's probably due to you as well, like spreading word about me, you know, so thanks for that. It's, uh...

That's part of the Bogle cult. Uh, but so-

(laughs)

... for people that aren't familiar with these episodes, you do these huge mega threads on Twitter. You talk about cognitive biases, human nature, psychological effects, group think, all this stuff. Uh, I fall in love with them and then we go through them today. I've got some, I actually brought some from home. I've got some that I've made already, uh, so I'll bring some of mine into it as well. We just need-

Awesome.

... to go through them and we'll break some down. So the first one, and this is my favorite one from your most recent mega thread, which will be linked in the show notes below. "Gwinder's Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim and half-remembered hearsay before deciding that this two-minute old makeshift opinion will be their hill to die on."

Yeah, so I think the last time I was on, uh, this show, we talked about how social media has made, uh, opinions more important than deeds, and people are judged by their opinions. And I think one of the sort of side effects of that is that now everybody feels the need to have an opinion on everything. But obviously the problem with this is that, you know, people can't really, um, do the research to actually back up all the opinions that they have. And so what do they do? Uh, they just make shit up, you know? (laughs) And I've seen this on social media since I joined Twitter in 2014. I've seen this happen with regular occurrence, with regular consistency, and it's kind of... I think it's something that really is just, it comes naturally to people to feel the need to opine on subjects, because it makes them feel connected and it makes them feel like they're part of the conversation. And it also, obviously, because of the opinion economy, it's something that people feel the need to do in order to bolster their own status. And so people just end up just talking and, um, you know, it, it, it's, it's remarkable how often this happens. It happens with pretty much everything. I mean, if you look at, for instance, uh, let's take a, a subject like fracking, for instance. Um, most people have probably read like one or two articles on fracking, right? Maybe from the BBC or from New York Times, right? (laughs) And suddenly everybody becomes an expert on fracking. You know, it's just after reading one article on fracking, everybody has a strong opinion on this, you know, "Oh yeah, it's great, you know, for the, uh, energy effici- efficiency," or, "It's really bad for the environment." And none of these people really know what they're talking about, you know? And I think this is one of the dangerous things about this, is that the need to have an opinion sort of compels people to take a stance on things that they don't know anything about. And what that does is it just pollutes the sort of conversation, it pollutes the national conversation or the global conversation, (coughs) excuse me, it pollutes the global conversation with garbage basically, you know, people just, ill thought out, um, opinions, things that people don't really, um, understand. They're just sort of talking. And I think-