329 - Point Taken - Steven Franconeri

You can go to kitted, K-I-T-T-E-D dot shop and use the code SMART50, S-M-A-R-T five zero at checkout, and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 329. A lot of people's opinions on very important topics are just what their friends think or what their gut says. And they've never really been forced to think it through and reason it out. And when you do that, you realize that a lot of your opinions on really important issues that you were previously really sure about don't make any sense. And you're more open and feeling humility and ready to talk it out with other people. That is the voice of Stephen Frankenaria, and he is explaining the powerful insights offered by a game he and his team at Northwestern University created, and they created it for having, for facilitating, for instantiating better disagreements, better debates, better conversations, and better dialogues about just about anything, but especially about the sort of topics that often lead to bickering and yelling and thus become the sort of things you simply avoid talking about with friends and family or things that become the stuff that leads to interactions that end with someone leaving their holiday dinner cold and uneaten as you drive home to the airport seething with anger and despair. The name of the game is Point Taken and it's a game you can play right now. It's available to download to take to your holiday get-together. It's available at pointtaken.social. And Dr. Frank Aneri is going to tell us all about it in this episode after we discuss the science that led to its creation. And that science is surprisingly based on studying how visual systems and thinking systems and language systems all work together. as separate but interactive networks of cognition. That is what Dr. Frankendary studies. Here he is explaining all that. I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, and I study visual thinking. I study visual thinking in information displays, typically. So I think a lot about good charts, data storytelling, good slides in PowerPoint presentations. So a lot of my work is trying to take the power of the visual system and lay information out in a rectangle somehow so you can use that power and avoid limitations on the human verbal system because that gets bottlenecked by reasoning capacity and memory really quickly. So yeah, Frank Neri is a cognitive scientist who has done incredible work at his visual thinking laboratory at Northwestern, which is a team of researchers who explore how to best leverage the visual system, which is the largest single system in your brain to help people think, remember, and communicate more efficiently. And that work led to his desire to study how people with different perspectives can work together. And that work led to research that found that arguments tend to grow toxic and turn into fights when a series of predictable and avoidable behaviors reframe the discussion into something more akin to a sport with two opposing sides. Once that happens, we stop solving a shared problem. We stop pursuing a common goal. We stop trying to sort out what is and is not true. And we instead think in terms of winners and losers. One side right, one side wrong. And once that happens, whatever we were talking about before that, oftentimes unconsciously gets reframed and more or less forgotten. as each person's priorities now shift to settling the score. With all that understood, Frankenary and his team developed a game you can play that bypasses all of that and often results in people agreeing about things they thought they disagreed about. And they've researched it. They've tested this. They've even gone out to bars and offered it to people and had them play it and just really put it out there. And we're going to talk all about that in this episode. I want to mention, though, before we start, that I met Dr. Frank Neri earlier this year at a conference of experts devoted to coming up with better ways to teach people how to have better disagreements. That conference was held at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University, where the directors Eli Finkel and Nora Kattali gathered a bunch of people to get the center going and help plan out what they'd be doing there. Eli's already been a guest on this show, and so has Josh Green, who is one of the people who attended that conference. And we will talk more about the center and the projects that people presented in many upcoming episodes as all the other guests come on the show to talk about what they're doing. This episode, that guest is Dr. Stephen Frankenary. And my first question for Steve was about trying to make sense of how language systems and visual systems interact in our brains when we attempt to communicate with the brains of others. Help me understand this just from your areas of expertise. It feels like, what do you mean visual systems, language systems? Like I'm just trying to tell you what I'm thinking and feeling and I'm using these words to do that. it's just a big old brain. It has ideas, thoughts, feelings, notions, and then they come out of my mouth hole and they go over there. Then you hear that. And then now you got them in your head. What are some major things that might be surprising about how we transmit information back and forth and try to express ourselves visually versus through language alone? When we're trying to interact with language, the amount of information that you can store at one moment is really limited. And you can have a conversation with somebody, If I ask you, what did I say three minutes ago? What did I say 30 seconds ago? I gave you a list of four things. Can you repeat them all back? The magic number for that is around three, like three sort of bullet points worth of information at a time. So if we're trying to discuss a tough topic, mitigate a disagreement, or just have a dialogue about something, then verbal interactions are just insanely limited. You can't remember that much. And if you can't remember that much, good luck coordinating information. You said three things. I said four things. Now we've got to find out the places where your opinion differs from mine and my opinion difference differs from yours. And where's the common ground? Good luck. That's really, really tough. So a lot of the work that I've done in the past is taking limited cognitive systems like that and try to shove the problem over to the visual system. Your visual system is half the neurons in your head. You got 80 billion neurons and about 35 billion of them are dedicated to visual processing. It's basically the whole back half of your head. You got a little bump in the back of your head. That's where your visual system starts. You got a little pixels and edges version of the world. And then it creeps along the sides of your head above your ears. And that's where you recognize people, places, and things. And then from that bump in the back of your head around to the top of your head, you got another system that processes visual space in a way that lets you reach out and grab things and navigate the world. So if you can lay information out in a rectangle, that might be a PowerPoint slide, it might be a diagram, it might be a 3D visualization of a molecule, it might be a pivot table in Excel, you are cooking with a much more powerful brain system. there's a lot of writing in the world of linguistics and cognitive science about how why how did language appear what why did it evolve well how did this become a thing that human beings do why is it so complex compared to other primate stuff it seems like there's a lot of people that fall in the camp of it's for cooperation and coordination it's for reaching shared goals, whether or not any of that is, is, will turn out to be true. Whether we are able to do the science, it seems like something we would all assume. Why would it suck so bad for like, like, it seems like that would be a, there's something there that makes me go, but why Steve, what are your thoughts here? I love this question. It sucks so bad because the problem is just insanely hard. Language is just insanely hard. The visual system is really powerful, but the sorts of analyses that it does are a little more primitive. The visual system is really good at finding where information is in space, finding it again, like, oh, there's that object that I left in that drawer. Where is it? It's there. But it's not good at putting together complex information in novel ways. If I show you a diagram, you can immediately, let's say it's a chemical molecule, you can immediately tell what kinds of shapes are there, what kinds of colors are there. But if you want to appreciate the structure of that molecule, oh, the red atoms are typically to the outside of the blue ones, or there's four of those types of structures, you have to snap to a more verbal style of processing. You have to focus on small subset of that molecule at a time or smaller subsets of any diagram at a time and talk to yourself. Language allows you to produce more complicated summaries of information, pairing up nouns and verbs. And the visual system can't do that. So most visual displays actually also require language. They coordinate between the massive storage and accessibility of the visual and the ability of the verbal system to coordinate that information in novel ways. That coordination is the hard part. That coordination is the thing that AI has taken a while to solve. We have for a long time had AI models, basic machine learning, finding correlations that can do the lower level, solve lower level problems more quickly. But it wasn't until recently that we had large language models that could pair together more complex ideas and produce arbitrary sentences. That's taken a long time. And interestingly, those systems actually run into the same systems that our brains do. It is just an intrinsically complex problem. For large language models, if you've heard of the context window problem or hallucinations, that's what happens when you try to shove too much information into ChatGPT. It's the same thing that happens in our brain where we start to remember the wrong facts or tie information together in the wrong way. We confuse the old and the new and what we learned about this problem versus that problem. And it's an identical problem that AI runs into. So in summary, it's just an intrinsically difficult problem. And that's why language isn't more powerful in the brain. If I could go back in time, I would totally switch majors to cognitive linguistics. I've never been more obsessed with anything. I can't get enough of it. And if we had almost all the famous philosophers in front of us, we could just go like, yeah, here's the answer to that. And it turns out, oh, yeah, you were wondering, like, what is that? Here you go. Because so much of it is just getting lost in language loops. And they just identified this in cognitive linguistics. Like, you weren't even asking the right question. You just thought you were because you were tangled up in word stuff. And Wittgenstein kind of like got there early and he was like, what is the definition of a game? And like, then you list all these different games and you're like, none of those seem very similar to me. What's what's what is the underlying essence of gamehood that you use the word game to describe? And then he gets very excited and cackles and walks away when he like ha ha see there are no games And those limits on language by the way those limits on language are some of the reasons why vision often fails So you talk a lot about on the show of let say the invisible gorilla And one of the reasons why we need visual attention is to provide a more curated input to a limited language system. I deal a lot with charts, right, on PowerPoint. And when you look at a chart, you look at it and you say, I can see all of the values at once. I see the biggest bar and the smallest bar in that bar chart. But if you actually wanted to pick out trends from that chart, comparisons from that chart, so that you could say, hey, revenue last year is higher than it is this year, or the experimental condition is higher than the control condition, you actually have to visually isolate just those couple of bars or just a couple of points in the scatter plot in order to provide a smaller data set for that limited language system to be able to process. that's the reason why there's a whole literature and I teach in this on data storytelling you think you see a chart and you think you get everything but in order to understand the data in the chart and link it to an argument, language has got to get involved so you can't just show all of the data there's a million possible patterns that language could access and you've got to tightly curate it down to just a couple of values at a time A lot of the way that we reason and look at the world is driven by these under the hood brain systems that we really don't understand. And when we're challenged to say why an eagle is more of a bird than an ostrich, we have to sit there and really think it through. And it's really hard. And to link that to what we're doing in the game, a lot of people's opinions on very important topics are just what their friends think or what their gut says. And they've never really been forced to think it through and reason it out. And when you do that, you realize that a lot of your opinions on really important issues that you were previously really sure about don't make any sense. And you're more open and feeling humility and ready to talk it out with other people. more with dr steve frankenery including a deep dive into the game he created to help people disagree well to avoid dead-end arguments and outright fights over difficult topics a game you can play right now all that after this commercial break okay that thing i said i would talk about in the middle of the show it's not quite the middle of the show but here's the thing so curiosity is this unusually common trait of people who listen to this podcast you may have noticed that about yourself and if you're the kind of person who wants to understand how minds work and sometimes don't work, which is clearly who you are because you listen to the show, you are probably super interested in critical thinking. If you are the kind of person who is right now listening to this podcast, then you might also be curious to find out about the higher order thinking skills course that I am co-presenting at the Executive Thinking Academy. The Executive Thinking Academy. It's about executive thinking. like the executive centers of your brain, but also executive thinking too, if that's what you want to do with it. It's a four week course to level up your strategic, creative, critical, and executive thinking skills. But it's a bit different because first it's not a passive exercise in watching a video and then filling out some multiple choice questions. Instead, you will be actively participating in hands-on activities using templates and frameworks that you can use well beyond the course itself. It's a genuinely interactive experience that will help you to think in new ways. You also get the full set of kitted thinking tools with more than 200 beautifully designed physical cards in these fancy magnetic boxes that you can use to plan and facilitate workshops, elevate brainstorming sessions, supercharge strategy planning, and much more. These cards, they have digital versions, they have QR codes on them, they have a whole thing that you can use on a website to make them cool. The course is incredible, and it shows you a bunch of ways to use those cards at your workplace or anywhere else. And you'll have the option to learn collaboratively with a small group of like-minded peers so that you're holding each other accountable and encouraging each other to push your thinking boundaries. Plus, you won't just get access to this one course. You get 12 months of membership to the Executive Thinking Academy itself. And that includes webinars in Q&A sessions with global thought leaders, with authors, with academics. It's a whole lot of stuff. And you get 50% off if you use the code SMART50 at checkout when you visit kitted.shop. Half off, SMART50, kitted.shop. If you are curious to learn more and to join me for next month's higher order thinking skills course, head over there right now, click on the link in the show notes and lock in your place. And now we return to our program. Welcome back to the You're Not So Smart podcast. My name is David McRaney and what follows is my interview with cognitive scientist, Dr. Stephen Frankenary. Before we get rolling with that, though, I want to briefly describe the game we're about to discuss, the one that he and his lab at Northwestern created. We don't really describe it in detail. We just describe the science behind it and why it works. And this game, Point Taken, that's the name of the game, involves writing on pieces of paper. And at first, you pick a topic for which you and the other player disagrees. and if you're in teams, it's two teams that disagree and you work together as teams. And it could be a topic like, the question would be something like, should the United States abolish the electoral college and elect a president by popular vote? People who say yes, then write their reasons for saying yes on little octagon tiles. People who say no, write their reasons for saying no on separate little octagons. and then each side places their tiles around the big octagon in the middle with the original question written on it. Then each side writes rebuttals to the reasons already on the game board. Rebuttals, which start with the word but and blah, blah, blah, rebuttal. The rebuttal tiles go down next to the reasons tiles. And after that, both sides work to quote unquote, win the game. And the way you win is by closing all of the threads. And you close a thread by placing a thumbs up emoji, it's a little token, on the tiles you agree are good rebuttals. Or you place scale emojis on rebuttals that indicate different priorities are in play. You can also place tokens for, we should fact check this, or one for, this is a difference of personal taste. and once all of the threads are closed, you win. Here's the thing though, most of the time people discover they actually agree more than they disagree. It's just a whole bunch of thumbs up emojis everywhere. And even better, while placing these tiles, there's an option to end the game early and win through a revision of the original question. For instance, if the original question was, should governments build nuclear power plants? and somewhere in attempting to close the threads, both sides agree that they'd actually be okay with nuclear power plants in the desert. You can revise the question to read, should governments build nuclear power plants in the desert? And you both on both sides say, well, yeah, that's okay with me. Well, then the game ends and you both win. Now we will go into the interview and I want to reiterate, if you just want to go ahead and download this thing and play it or take it with you to wherever you're going for the holidays. It's at pointtaken.social. Okay, all of your expertise and your passion for this, you're like, why not do something about it? And I got to experience this. I got to play this game that you've created. You collaborated with other people to create it, But you got this game that I was so skeptical of at first and was like, oh, I got to do stuff. And then I is probably the thing I've talked about most after the the conference we were at, because we actually did have a good conversation with this damn thing. And we didn't have to lean on A.I. or anything else not to poo poo on people who are going from that direction with it. we actually took out pieces of paper and got on a table and discussed the topic. And all of us benefited from the discussion in a way that I felt like I wish I'd had this conversation months ago. And we just happened to be talking about self-driving cars of all things and our different opinions on it. So let me just lob that way up in the air and say, what is this game point taken? And why did this become a thing you wanted to spend your time doing? This became a thing I wanted to spend my time doing kind of involuntarily. Dude, I was literally up at two in the morning, worried about disagreements and division. I was really, very worried with what I saw around me. Everybody I knew had some old friend, neighbor, family member that they just could not carry on a conversation with without wanting to punch each other. And I knew that there was psychology research where we know the rules for having better disagreements. And I couldn't be a bystander. And so I wanted to create a game that would bake in all those rules that was actually kind of fun, that would allow people to learn it in a few minutes and play a game within a half an hour. We know how to have better disagreements. We know how to keep anger at bay. We know how to not fight. There are people that study this. There's people that work in negotiation, in mediation. Any couples or family therapist will tell you how to do this. If you have a disagreement with somebody else, then you need to turn it from a debate to a dialogue. We all know what that debate feeling feels like. You get in a room with Uncle Dan, who has an opposite color political hat, and you want to convince them that what they're thinking is wrong. And you start using persuasion on them and you start using reasons. And immediately the temperature starts notching up. And then you're not actually listening to what they're saying. you are preparing your next response to the thing that they said a minute ago, and they're not listening to you. So we have both emotional problems, and then we also have cognitive problems where we're not actually paying attention to what the other person says. And in a normal conversation, there's a method for getting around this. So this is what you'd learn in a negotiation seminar or a couples therapy session. And that is if you want to have a dialogue with somebody else instead of a debate, You need to turn it from a fight to a collaboration. The way to do that is treat them like you'd want to be treated. What would you want? What do you want when you get into that argument with Uncle Dan? You want to feel, first of all, respected. As soon as you get a nasty comment, of course you'd believe that. You get an eye roll, a smirk, the slightest little micro expression. You're done. You're in sports mode. You're in battle mode. You want to defeat them. You're not actually there to collaborate. So you want to be respected. And the way to do that is to set things up as a collaboration. So when you're having that discussion live verbally, then you want to make sure that you model that collaborative spirit, that you say, I'm not here to persuade you. You're not here to persuade me. I just want us to understand how two people who live on the same planet could live on completely different planets. Isn't that interesting? That's the frame that you need to go in with. The second thing that everybody wants and they don't get is to be listened to. Uncle Dan is not actually listening to your reasons. Part of that is cognitive, right? You can remember all of each other reasons That really hard to do verbally But another part is that your brain is just focused on winning You in sports mode And in order to get the other person to listen to you, the trick that everybody needs to use is model that. Treat them like that for 10 minutes, like you'd want to be treated. And then they kind of look like a jerk if they don't do the same for you. So what you learn when you do therapy is you let the other person talk and you listen intently and you ask clarifying questions, you show that respect for the other person. And then the magic phrase, the magic thing to do is summarize what they said back to you better than they said it. And then say, did I get everything? If you do this, you're going to solve the majority of battles in your life. If you do this systematically, right? Like you've been in this world, you know, these techniques really work. They really do. I've seen the therapy version of it too. And I'm like, yeah, this, I can't believe they're actually, they did the science on it on top of the practice of it. And then all of it converges to, well, it works. Please continue. I don't mean to interrupt. Yeah. So, okay. So if everybody just did this, we'd be in good shape. Why aren't people doing this? Why are they getting into battle mode? Well, number one, that's what's modeled in the media. If I go to my favorite video streaming platform right now, I'm going to be served up debates, angry combat sports, because that's what I click on. Apparently I want to see. Ben Shapiro, you know, humiliates 20 liberal teens or, you know, Rachel Maddow eviscerates, you know, 20 whatever, MAGA something. All of those videos across media and social media are really, they really model angry combat sports. It's not discussions. It's a combat sport. And so we get used to that. All right. Let's say that we convince people not to do that. Let's say we convince people to be respectful and listen to each other and have more of a dialogue. It's really, really hard. It's hard for me. I've been trained to do this. And it's really difficult when you hear something that you know isn't true and you want to pop in and give a response and the anger level moves up. It takes an insane amount of emotional energy to tamp that down to a point where it's really helpful to have a third party in the room. And this is why people go to couples therapy or they have a mediator and a negotiation. So in the end, it's going to be really hard to teach people to do this. So instead, we tried to bake in those rules into a game that just makes it easy. It's just natural that that sort of thing is going to happen. This is incredible. The idea that you could do it with a game blows my mind. I feel you. I've written all sorts of stuff about this. And all it takes, I just took my dad to the doctor yesterday. and he has found the YouTube videos about the comet that might be an alien spacecraft. And I felt myself wanting to jump ahead in the conversation real fast and say like, look, I'm not an astrophysicist, but it's off-gassing. And it took a tremendous amount of effort not to immediately jump at, well, those aren't the facts of the matter. You must have watched a YouTube video from an unreliable source. and I knew, I knew very much knew better because what he's going to hear is, oh, you think I'm too stupid to tell the difference between a reliable source and unreliable source? That's all we would have talked about after I brought that to his attention. I wish I had your game in my pocket because I could have used that right there in the waiting room. Instead, I patiently listened and we ran it out as best we could in the waiting room. Before we get in the game directly, this is something that you brought up when we were talking in uh at on campus and i loved it so much the idea that you've got your unique perspective obviously we're visualizing it now and then going back across the language uh back and forth i love the idea of i'm visualizing it and you're visualizing it this is sort of like a another take on the the blind the elephant thing the blind elephant thing but the you've got your unique perspective i've got my unique perspective And instead of me trying to like convince you, look at my perspective and use it, forget yours. If we combine the two, naturally we'll have a more dimensional map of the thing. And if we're looking at a box, like your side and my side, we get, and you describe yours and I describe mine. We combine them and guess what? We can see the whole, almost the whole box. I suddenly, we were discussing this, like I was thinking in terms of like LIDAR, but you talked about triangulation. And I would love to hear you describe it from that, because that did seem to be a way to pull back from getting too far out there in the weeds. But let me just sum up. Tell me a little bit more about triangulation in terms of combining perspectives. When you're trying to combine your perspective with somebody else to settle that disagreement, it's really hard to do verbally. Let's take your disagreement with your relative about asteroids. What was it? It was that the asteroid is coming or that it's a certain kind? And there's a large conspiratorial community forming around the fact that because it's getting a little faster on its way here, which is because of off gassing as it gets hot, that it's possibly an alien spacecraft headed to Earth. So there's a lot that you two agree on there. You agree that asteroids exist. You agree that I'm guessing that it's possible that alien spacecraft exist. I'm assuming that you both agree that if it were an alien spacecraft, that would be cause for concern. So the way to resolve that disagreement would be to carefully listen and then point out all the places first where you agree and then keep those all in your head. That's a massively difficult cognitive task. And then point out the places where you might disagree. Okay, so we agree on 80% of this, but I feel like the places where we disagree are maybe just the reliability of the sourcing and whether this particular type of light streak is impossible to produce with an asteroid as opposed to a spacecraft. So you need to be able to triangulate the information that is common between you and then what you believe that's different and then what he believes that's different. So that's really hard to do cognitively. The way we do this in the game is that we leverage the power of the visual system. We lay out that argument not in words, but on a game board in space. So imagine you find an octopus, you have a pet octopus, and it wants to come out of the tank. And you lay it down on the table, the head's in the middle, and the arms are sprayed out in the table. It's very comfortable. And we are going to lay out your argument in writing by putting sticky notes on that octopus. Don't worry, it really, it loves this. It's really into it. So you take the question that you are debating and let's take, is the impending asteroid actually an alien spacecraft? And you write it on a sticky note and you gently place it on the octopus's head. And then you're going to each write down, let's say, your two best reasons for why you think that's either true or false. So you are going to write down two sticky notes where you're going to say it is unlikely because there haven't been any alien sightings before. And the trail that came off of it is producible by an asteroid. You're going to write that on two sticky notes and you're going to stick it on the upper left and lower left arms of that octopus. And then your relative is going to place two other reasons. You know, my sources are reliable and that particular kind of light trail could not have been produced by an asteroid. They're going to stick it on the upper right and lower right arms of the octopus. What this does is it allows us to beat those verbal limitations in our brain. We cannot remember more than about three things, let alone the three things that I want to say and the four things that you want to say. This allows them to pin them there in space and they're there. And now we can take our time. In the game, what we do then is you are going to write a little response to your relative's last reason. but this scientific paper shows that that particular type of light trail can be produced by asteroids something like that and they're going to write responses to yours and you are going to be silently writing responses back and forth just extending these discussion threads along the arms of the octopus moving from the head outward over time and this allows us to have a much more calm and clear discussion. It's more clear and more cognitively powerful because we are getting past the limitations on verbal memory and verbal coordination. Everything's just laid out there on the table in writing. And it is also going to force you two to listen to each other because you can't write a response unless you've read the other person's reasoning. And when you're doing all this, it's also going to be a lot more clear because when you write, you take a moment to actually curate what you're going to say. I don't know about you, but when I get in a verbal debate, I just spit out whatever comes out next. And whatever I spit out is going to be bad because I wasn't actually listening to what you were saying. I was thinking about something else at the same time. So this allows clear and calm and slow thinking and writing something down as a commitment. Writing is hard, right? Writing takes time. Writing is like homework. And if you're going to write something, you're going to do it right. One of the things I was most surprised about when people started playing this game is they'd be rearing to go. They were ready to write down their reasons and they would grab that sticky note and their pen and they would stop and they would think and they would write something and then they'd cross it out and crumple it up and then grab another sticky note and write something else because they've been given the time to actually think through what am I trying to say? And they know that it's going to get critiqued in a couple minutes. So they're pre-censoring themselves with all of the, to prevent themselves from using some of the lazier reflexive reasoning that we all use and I use as well when we're in a fast-paced emotional setting. How, what was the process of putting it from idea to actual thing and how did it develop the actual physical format that it's in? And then you did, you researched it and I I want to know a little bit more about how did that go when you researched it? What did you get from it and testing it out in the world? Open floor for all that stuff. The original idea for the game came from a technique that's used by philosophers and lawyers and critical thinking nerds. It's called argument mapping. When they want to really rigorously outline an argument and also put it in a visual format so that other people could understand the structure, they will make a hierarchy where at the top of the hierarchy is their main claim. you know, should we forgive student loans? Something like, or we should forgive student loans. And then under that, they'll give a bunch of reasons for it. Oh, in this economy, we people need all the help they can get. And oh, those loans are predatory in the first place. And then underneath those, they'll list reasons for those reasons. How do you know that they're predatory? What is your source? In this economy, tell me about the economy. What is the average size of the loans? So they'll create this, you can imagine a visual, it looks like an org chart, like a top-down hierarchy, and they have these rules for making sure that your reasoning is really rigorous. We wanted to take, and by the way, doing this, this is something that law students often do in preparation for the LSAT, is one of the most IQ-boosting activities that any human can undergo. They run studies on this, and when you take a semester-long class where you practice using this technique, your critical thinking ability as measured by something like a, imagine a verbal SAT or verbal ACT test goes up as much as college. The effect size is college. It's just one class on this. It's crazy because it really helps you stop and think what it is that you're trying to say. And that's really hard to do in written prose. Even if you're just writing, think about written prose. There's so many ways you could order those sentences. You wind up being redundant. It's really hard to coordinate verbal thinking when you're writing a long document. It takes a lot of time and training. These maps extract the soul of that argument, the core structure of that argument, and lay it out in a way where it's a lot more concise. It's just the critical information, and it's laid out visually. So we wanted to steal the critical thinking benefits of that technique, but we knew that the more the vertical hierarchy, the organizational chart, maybe would look unfamiliar and odd to people. And we wanted it to be as sprayed out in visual space as possible. So we came up with this octopus metaphor where the octopus's head is in the middle and the arms are sprayed outward, which allows you to optimally use the power of your 2D visual system to pin ideas to the upper left, to the lower right of space. And that allows better coordination between the visual system and the verbal system. It I done this and it was and I a super nerd for the things you describing And I spent years hanging out with people who have spent their entire lives studying this kind of stuff I thought I was like, I was like, sure, argument. But then when I actually played the game, I was like, no, this is like absolutely a crazy way to take all of that and use it in a way I would never have imagined. And then I was like, but sure, I get it. And then I didn't get it. I had all these ridiculous assumptions because once we were actually doing it, I was like, well, what do you know? This is actually working on me right now, live. I'm actually going, huh, I'd never really thought about it that way. Because we were discussing self-driving cars and whether or not that's a good thing. Plain and simple, just straight up. We tried to pick the most neutral topic we could think of. And it turned out it was as neutral as we thought it was. Some people in our game, like that's going to destroy jobs. That's going to ruin this industry and that. It's going to downstream affect. And we realized we all had some position on that, actually. And I had things inside me that could have been articulated three years ago. But it didn't happen until I played this game. And it was coming out of me. I wasn't borrowing it from the other people in the room. I could have thought about this more deeply and had not until I played the damn game. and then not only did I do that the other people did that and so all of us surprisingly thought about this more deeply than we ever had and it was inside us the whole time we could have done this whenever we wanted to but didn't do it and now we're all sitting there looking at all that together and a completely new thing is happening when those all interact in the game space and then we walk away from what just happened with something that couldn't have happened without the game that's pretty amazing. I think the game part is really important. When you get into an angry disagreement with someone else and it feels like a debate, you're in a game already. You pick sides, you got your swords out and you are fighting to win. And you're never going to be able to have a respectful conversation where you actually listen to each other. So we wanted to take the game aspect and jujitsu it and flip it on its head by putting you more on the same team to get you to be collaborators to win together. So the whole point of the game, you literally have to sign a little mini contract when you first sign up, when you first start the game is, Hey, you two have different opinions and you're both same kind people. And wouldn't it be interesting to assemble this little diagram that unpacks how two people that live on the same planet could actually live on different planets. That's weird. Let's, let's solve this together. Let's go on a quest to find out how we reason differently. And we put you into collaboration mode where you're collaborating on one game board together. And that turns out to be critically important because instead of just saying stop competing, we say compete together. We literally have a point system in later stages of the game where if you help each other out, we have a little game card called the devil's advocate, right? Rewrite one of those little sticky notes for the other person and make it better. and you get points as a team. Rearrange the board together and you get points as a team. And if you reach level four, then you get, you know, gold status as a team. We try to incentivize that team spirit as much as we can. You've done some research on this and you watch people play it. What is it like out there in the real world for this? What seems to be the feedback? And what seems to be like, now you've done it, the game is out there. How do you feel about how it's working? How do people who play it feel about how it's working and how do you see this possibly being applied elsewhere? I'll give you informal and formal results from the game. Informally, I've run maybe 200 tests of this. We started out by saying, hey, come to the local microbrewery. We're going to buy you pizza and beer. Come play. And I've run this with undergraduate students. I've run it with MBA students. I've run it with nonprofits. I've run it with companies. I've wanted to get the biggest diversity of types of people and problems as possible. And over and over and over again, what we find is that, first of all, it's shockingly calm. People can talk about really tough topics. When we give people topics, there's everything from the innocuous is a hot dog a sandwich down to the middle of our topic sheet, which is going to be things like is cryptocurrency good or bad or AI self-driving cars. But at the bottom of the sheet, we have some really, really challenging topics. We have immigration, we have asylum, we have student loan forgiveness, we have trans athletes. To this day, I have still not seen a pair of people play this game with even those really tough topics and get upset. I've seen insanely calm conversations. Now, to be fair, we're doing this mostly in a more liberal bubble. And although we've tried to find people that have more diverging opinions, who knows what will happen, but I've been shocked at how calm the conversations have been. When people play, they almost always realize that they had cartooned the other person's position and the other person did not believe what they thought they believed. And they had realized that their own position is a cartoon and that they hadn't thought it fully through until forced to play this exercise. The other thing that people notice is by the end of the game, You actually have to mark these little threads in the discussion on whether you agree or disagree on a particular thread. And people find out that they actually agree with the other person 70, 80 percent of the argument. It's just one fact. It's just one prioritization that's different. What often happens, it will take a topic like student loans, right? Everybody thinks that some schools should be free and some schools should be paid for. Kindergarten should be free and med schools should not. And there's just an issue of where that line should be. What about community college? And then there's also an issue about fairness of maybe some people got their loans forgiven while other people paid them back. And that's the real disagreement. It's just where's the line? And then how much do you value fairness? It's not that the other person is a cartoon villain twirling their mustache who is either insane or evil. There's something more nuanced in between. And people realize that. For the actual evidence from our lab study, we ran a smaller lab study. We're still running the bigger one. But even from the smaller one, we brought people in and we assigned them either to talk about a particularly tough topic, either in a control condition where they just talk or by playing the game. and what we found is that people leave the game with two big impressions. Number one, they realize that they need to learn more. They realize that their opinion was not as informed as they thought and they leave with more intellectual humility, the term that you talk about on this show a lot. And those are hard needles to move. That's really tough to get people to change there. For the other person, they're much more likely to want to have a discussion like this again. And they feel warmer towards people with opposite beliefs, which is a big deal. People feel very chilly towards people with opposite beliefs these days. And they'd be much more likely to befriend that person. And these are not tiny effects. These are like worth getting out of bed effects. These are like, you know, in a row of 10 people, where on the right side, you got the Dalai llama. And on the left side, you got the, you know, your uncle Dan, who is now never going to change. This is like the effects are equivalent to moving from the mean being person number five to being person number seven in that list. Like these are, these are decent size effects. The single biggest effect that we see is you get to understand your own mind better. This is a massive effect where you learn that you didn't understand your own position as well as you think you did. And you're thinking twice about your own thinking. That was my experience. Everything you described happened to me but the part that i run around proselytizing is like i didn't even know what i actually thought about this as much as i was supposed to be like an advocate for this that actually gets up and tells people about it i was right there like i've been telling people what i think about this for ages and i didn't even know what i thought about it until i played steve's game the same thing happens to me it's like a humility machine when you're normally having debates, your armor is up and your goal is to defeat. But when we set this up as a cooperative endeavor to find out how two people think differently, it transports you to, it's like, it's like, it's really a game in the sense of a video game or a movie where a narrator comes on and says, in a world where, you know, you have a firm opinion, let's actually explore how you, why you could think differently from somebody else. And it puts you into this environment where those defenses drop and you're able to just dispassionately work out your reasoning with somebody else who's gently pushing you, not in a competitive way. And it allows those defenses to drop in a way that lets you recognize and grow your own humility. Your website for Point Taken has all sorts of stuff on here, but I was going to ask you directly, like, this sounds really cool. And is it this locked up in academia or can people actually try this out right now? This is not locked up at all. Go check out pointtaken.social. Go pop to the team page and see all the wonderful people that set up that beautiful website and have done a lot of the testing. And anybody in the world can download a PDF, print it out, cut it out, and play the paper version of the game. Or we also have online play up. And that's also free. You go, you fill out a little form with your email, you get an account, and you can play your Uncle Dan in Arizona five minutes from now, if you like. That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about and a little bit more, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there inside your podcast player. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmcraney.com and there's links to all of that in the show notes as well. on that website you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts who are featured in the book you can read a sample chapter download a discussion guide sign up for the newsletter read reviews and hire me to come give a lecture wherever you are at and i'll give you workshops on how to change people's minds and how minds change for all the past episodes of this podcast go to spotify apple podcasts amazon music audible or you're not so smart.com follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue Sky and everything else at David McCraney. Follow the show at NotSmartBlog. We're also on Facebook slash YouAreNotSoSmart. And if you'd like to support this one-person operation, like really keep it going, because I don't have any editors, staff, nothing. It's just me. Go to Patreon.com slash YouAreNotSoSmart. Pitch in at any amount, and it will help a whole lot. 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