 Now, Steve has been doing this work for a while looking at the nature of conspiracy theories and how they're operating, and he mentioned a couple of the psychological mechanisms that are operating. One is kind of related to the confirmation bias, when you're only looking at the evidence that supports what you want to believe, seeing what you expect to see, seeing what you want to see, in a sense. And when it comes to climate change denial, climate change deniers actually only cite the evidence that doesn't support the fact that the climate is changing due to human involvement and so on. Paying attention to that one thermometer, not ignoring the other. All the billions of thermometers out there, you're just focusing on the one that supports the evidence that you're looking for, and kind of picturing it in a two by two table, you're only focusing on the positive, positive cell. And that's the confirmation bias in a sense, cherry picking the evidence that you're looking for. This is related to a really nice paper by Hastor from Cantrell. What they did, this is back in 1954, what they did was they essentially interviewed fans of a football team. So there was a football game, football match that was happening, and you have fans watching exactly the same football game, right? And you ask people about their perceptions of dirty play during this football game, and each team reported that the other team was playing more dirty than their own. And so, yeah, they're watching exactly the same game, but they have completely different perceptions of what actually happened. And you can imagine this. This is just at the level of a single game, people looking at exactly the same thing. And this is also related to this idea of availability in a sense. So you're only exposing yourself to a certain type of information, right? So when you're reading about climate change, the news that you get is always based on a subset of news in some respects, right? So people who read Facebook are only exposed to information from their friends on Facebook, very like-minded individuals. And in fact, things like Facebook and Google only show you the things that you like, and therefore probably agree with, which is going to buy Steve even further. Exactly. As Steve was talking about, our news is being shaped now that the information that we get on the web is being more and more encapsulated. So when you do a Google search, it's catered to you in a sense. So the information that it pops up is not the information that I would get when I do the same search, which is fairly strange, the same as Facebook and everything else. So we're in a sense suffering from what's called false consensus, right? So you have this perception that other people think the same way that you do. Now we asked a really nice question at the beginning of this episode, beginning of the course rather, in the about you section. So we asked people whether they've had anything strange happen to them that science can't really explain. So we asked people that question and half of the people in the course, tens of thousands of people said yes. Also, tens of thousands of people said no. So roughly 50-50, we had a nice split between the two. So half the people said yes, something weird has happened to me that science can't explain and half the people said nope, nothing like that has happened to me. Now that's interesting in and of itself, but the very next question we asked people to guess what percentage of the class agrees with them, right? So what percentage of the class also said yes or also said no. Now what we did was we compared the results. So of the people who said yes, that something weird has happened to them, they estimated that 69% of people agreed with them. And the opposite is true. If the people who said no, nothing weird has ever happened to me, they said that 64% of people agreed with them, right? So this is massive, this is a, I didn't expect actually the false consensus effect to be so big in this case, but it's huge. So people literally think that people agree with them, right? So they think that by virtue of being exposed to the same sort of information that other people have the same sort of life experiences and other people around the world think the same way that they do. And scale that up, so the influence of the media, the information you expose yourself to, the more narrow that you, the more narrowly you focus on where you get your information, the more and more you're going to be reinforced and think that people agree with you, more and more people think the same way as I do. And it's almost like an availability cascade, it just keeps going and going. That's exactly right. So in terms of narrowness, if all you're doing, so, and this is kind of the nature of conspiracy theories, right? I'm, if I'm a climate change denier, it's very unlikely that I'm reading the scientific evidence for and against climate change, right? I'm focused on these, this one small bit of evidence. I surround myself with like-minded people who also cite the same sort of evidence and it just keeps building and propagating exactly as you said. And the anti-establishment bias is operating as well. So if the government or an official body releases some information and says here, here are the data, this is what's happening in the case. Well, that's not just ignored. It's taken as evidence that the opposite is happening. So if the authority, if the official body says one thing, then it's probably actually the opposite thing that's going on. So it's going to be really difficult to change your mind, probably unless you have some help. So unless somebody is helping you through the six leads to find out whether you are focusing on particular information, falling prey to the confirmation bias, it's going to be really difficult to change your mind and get out of that sort of thinking. This is related to two other biases that are somewhat related. When we're dealing with issues in the media, one is called the, it must be in the middle heuristic in a sense. I mean, you can imagine what's happening here. So someone presents one thing, someone presents something that's the opposite. And the person who's listening casually just goes, well, there's a bit of truth in both sides. It must be somewhere in the middle, maybe, right? But in a lot of cases, it's not somewhere in the middle, right? If I say that on one hand the UFO was big, on the other hand, it was small, well, it must be medium sized, right? Might not be true at all. And a lot of people would argue in the case of climate change, that's exactly what's happening. So you say that the vast majority of the scientists around the world, 99.9% of scientists think that something is happening due to humans, that's changing the climate. On the other hand, when you're covering this sort of thing in the media, you bring on a climate change denier and the casual listener would say, oh well, must be happening, maybe, maybe not, somewhere in the middle. And that's related to a second bias called, it must be fair to both sides, right? So the media is trying to be fair and balanced and so they include both. And so you can see how these two kind of go hand in hand. If you're being fair to both sides, then you feature both and thinking about it in terms of availability, then you're giving both of these things equal weight and people think that they're much more common than they are. So we've tried to apply everything we've learned so far in the course to three specific examples in this episode. We looked at facilitated communication, expertise in forensic science and conspiracy theories, especially about climate change. But those are just three that we picked, mostly because we're actually interested in them. But I hope that people can see that the mechanisms that are operating here, the tools they now have could be applied to any, any other area, anything, their pet project that they're particularly interested in. You can use the six leads, you can have a lot, you can try and disentangle what's operating in really specific cases. So gay marriage, whether to put fluoride in the water or not. Vegetarianism, gun laws, absolutely. Anything that you can think of. People have the tools, right? Go out and conquer. Figure out, take a very specific example like these. Take gay marriage, take anything, asylum seekers, you name it, all of these very relevant topics that are happening in their lives, something that's important to them and apply everything that we've been teaching them to these particular areas and you'll see it. They will absolutely see what's happening in each of these cases.