169 - Tamar Kushnir: The Power of Imagination

0:00Welcome back to the Stanford Psychology Podcast. I'm Adani, and for this week's episode, I had a wonderful conversation with Tamar Kushner. Tamar is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. She completed her PhD and graduate training in psychology and statistics at UC Berkeley with Alison Gopnik, and has since conducted over two decades of research in many areas, including causal learning, social cognition, free will, moral cognition, self-control, and imagination, among other things. We couldn't get to all of those topics today, but I think her key interests in the developing mind and learning and conceptual change at large did come through, and I hope you enjoy all the fun and engaging insights Tamar shared with us.

0:49Without further ado, here's our conversation.

1:16Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today, Tamar. I'm really excited to talk to you. Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. Our listeners have already heard a little bit about you in the intro and all the interesting things you study. And there are many things you explore in your research, but one of them is imagination. And I feel like pretty much every person has some level of experience with imagining things and being creative in their thinking. But maybe one question I would love to start with is a very basic one. Does everyone have imagination? What is it? What does it do for us?

1:44If you can just tell us a bit about that. Yes, everyone has an imagination. I think of imagination as the cognitive capacities that we use to think about anything that's not in the here and now. So that could be thinking about the past. That could be planning for the future. That could be coming up with intuitive theories to explain cause and effect in the world. That could be creating counterfactuals, thinking about ways things could have been as opposed to the way things were and all of the functions that we need on a daily basis to be able to think about ourselves, who we are, what our identities are, where we fit in, what we care about, all of the things that we used to think about other minds, other people's beliefs, emotions, experiences, and about the social world.

2:34So we use our imaginations all the time to do all of these different things. It seems like a really, really comprehensive and all-encompassing ability almost, it touches so many different aspects of people's experience. And so one of the things people might be wondering, and I'm also wondering, how do we actually differentiate it from just thinking and reasoning writ large, right? Can you basically have thinking and reasoning without actively using imagination or are they intertwined? How does that work? Yeah, I honestly, I don't think so because the more I think about it, at least on the definition that I use and that many of us who do research in this area use, it isn't It's differentiable in that clean sense from thinking and reasoning.

3:17It's a component of our thinking and reasoning. So some component of our thinking and reasoning is about the here and now. It's direct perception and engaging with the evidence that's right in front of us and with the facts on the ground and all of these things. But in order to make sense and make meaning out of the things that we see and hear and experience, we are interpreting at all times. And anytime you are generating new ideas in the service of interpreting and meaning making, you're using your imagination. So rather than separate it, think of it as constantly interacting with other aspects of cognition.

3:53Fascinating. So it sounds like imagination is something that largely just happens in people's minds, right? So if you look at a person who's just going about their day, maybe you can have a sense that they're currently up in their imagination or like daydreaming or something like that. But it feels like it's hard to tangibly measure. And a lot of your work that you do is, well, you empirically study imagination, right? And so how do we actually do that? How do we measure it? And yeah, how does that actually work? Well, I should say a lot of people empirically study imagination more directly than I do.

4:23I've mostly spent my research career focused on social cognition and sort of indirectly ended up studying the way imagination facilitates or gets implicated in social cognitive inference. I've spent some of my career studying causal reasoning. And again, there's another area where our imaginations play a big role in our formation of intuitive theories and explanations and making sense out of cause and effect. So the question is, how do we measure it? I think maybe the answer is, in psychology in general, if you said this is a first-year graduate student or an undergraduate comes into my office and says, how do I do psychology research?

5:03I'll go with a quote maybe from my colleague Mike Tomasello. He says, we have big ideas and we design very little experiments. And so with anything where you want to make something empirically tractable, where you want to study it using the methods of behavioral science or psychological science, developmental science, however, even neuroscience, you need to take a little piece of something that you can study specifically. So examples when it comes to imagination, for example, you could study children's pretend play as a behavior that emerges out of their imaginations. You could study causal inference as a behavior that emerges or counterfactual reasoning.

5:46You could study even something like emotion and the relationship between imagination and emotion. So different researchers who have been interested in these sort of subtopics, I think are all studying the human imagination and they're looking at it from different perspectives and creating more domain-specific, smaller problems to work on. So mine in my lab has been imagination and social cognition. So to give you an example, I think that a lot of times when we're trying to interpret another person, what they're doing, one of the things we have to figure out is were they doing it intentionally or by happenstance, right?

6:27So if someone's doing something intentionally, that tells you a lot about, let's say, their motivations or their desires, maybe their, and maybe something even about their beliefs. How do you know whether someone's doing something intentionally? Well, if there was nothing else they could have done, it's very hard to tell that they had intent. But if you know they had a choice to do something else, then all of a sudden you're like, huh, well, he could have done this other thing, but he did this. And so that seems deliberate. That seems like it's on purpose. Right. So how do you know what they could have done?

6:57Well, that's just counterfactual reasoning. You think about all of the other options that person had here. You know, he went to the store. He could have gone to work. He could have stayed home. He could have all of these other things. The more other options they have, the more it seems like the thing he did was really what he meant to do. Right. So we've looked at that, for example, how children reason about intent in something like moral judgment or sociality or anything like that. How do you know that someone was kind on purpose, considerate on purpose? Well, you look at all the options they had and you show that they could have done any of a number of other things, but they chose to do this.

7:31And that is just that's a very simple use of your imagination to just represent a counterfactual. right that's really interesting so you just mentioned it's a simple use of our imagination at the same time as i'm listening to this you know there are conditionals in there and it feels like an elaborate thought process and it doesn't feel trivial in a sense it feels really impressive that people do this pretty rapidly right in fact even infants do it yeah yes i was gonna ask you within the second year of life you see beautiful examples in the work of amanda woodward and Jessica Somerville and the work of Brandon Wu and in Gergay and Sheber's work.

8:08You get lots and lots of, I know I'm supposed to list all these people's names in institutions so your students can look them up later, but you'll be putting them in the notes or something. But there are lots of, if you're interested in intentional action, understanding and infancy and the relationship between that and the ability to represent alternative possibilities, I think you see those examples everywhere. In the paper that you read and that I think you based this discussion on, I tried to give a few of those examples just to say that even from early in life, as early as we can represent alternative possibilities to the current reality, even if the only alternative that infants are representing is a normative one, it's like what usually happens or what they usually see.

8:49It's not a big sense of imagining alternatives, but it's like I know, for example, that normally people press buttons with their hands. So if I see someone press a button with their head, I think, wow, well, they could have done this normal thing, but they did this other thing instead. They must have meant to do it. They must be trying to show me something maybe even about the right way to do it or anything like that. So, you know, 15-month-olds can make that inference. and as we get older and we get more experience we can come up with even more things a person could have done so these are the kinds of things that we look at in our lab you can study imagination in all sorts of ways but just sort of the ability to imagine possible human actions and the relationship between that and how we make meaning and make sense of our social world is kind of the thing that we've looked at a lot right yeah so the review paper you mentioned imagination and social cognition and childhood.

9:40I'll make sure to link in our episode description so people can go read all about it. But maybe actually one of the things you just touched on, which can maybe feel like attention. So a lot of us as non-researchers or even as researchers, we interact with children in various settings, right? Whether it's as a parent or as an uncle, or maybe as a sibling or as a teacher, it doesn't really matter. And I think most people who have interacted with children before have a sense that in many ways, children's thinking is not quite the same as adults, there's stuff developing. But what you're saying is that part of the findings we see in this literature, what I'm hearing is children and even infants do really impressive things in the realm of imagination, but also otherwise that feel quite sophisticated.

10:21And so I'm wondering if you can tell us just a little bit about what kinds of aspects of imagination are developing, if any, and what that means. And then we can also talk a bit about other people's takes on how sophisticated children's imagination actually is. But yeah. Yeah. So I guess step away from social cognition for a minute and just think about there are views on what kind of imagination children has. And you alluded to this. I may just go into that, you know, that tension, because I think that is actually an interesting one to think about. And you sent me this question in advance, so I got a chance to think about it, is that on one hand, children, as you said, when we interact with them, we really see how interesting and generative their ideas are, how funny they sometimes seem to us, how unrealistic.

11:11And we also have, you know, full literatures on children's pretend play, their imaginary friends, their ability to make imaginary worlds, to live in fantasy, in their own fantasy lives, to believe in things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, right? There's lots of examples of, and to be incredibly creative in a way that I think sometimes we, when we see children, we think, wow, you know, no adult could have done that, could have made that inductive leap. Like that just seems so four-year-old-ish to do because kids say the darndest things and all that stuff. So kids can, sometimes they seem very, like very fantastical thinkers, very creative thinkers.

11:46On the other hand, children are also often seen as very pragmatic and reality-based. And there are prominent views, which I really love, by Paul Harris, you mentioned at Harvard, by Andrew Stolman, Occidental, that children are actually, their imaginations are smaller than ours, more limited. One of the reasons why those views are out there is because what you see is children are kind of, especially very young children, let's say, before and in the early years of formal schooling, but ages two, three, all the way up to, you know, nine or ten, which is the ages that these changes in imagination have been documented recently, is that you see that young children are very reality-bound, very rule-governed.

12:31They do things, for example, like deny the possibility of things that are highly improbable or rare. They deny, in our studies, kind of similar to that, they deny the possibility of violating rules, norms, and morals. And as children get older, they start to become, it looks as if they become more flexible in their use of imagination to expand the sets of possibilities that they can consider. So on one hand, very fantastical, and on the other hand, very reality-bound, and maybe even, as Paul Harris says, very pedestrian. And so what's going on? What's going on with that? So here's my answer at the moment, take or leave.

13:16If you look just specifically at the relationship between imagination and knowledge, and in fact, you can look at this in the literature on creativity as well. There is a positive relationship between imagination and knowledge. The more we know, the more we can flexibly recombine the ideas and the thoughts that we have in new ways to create and make new things. So knowledge and skill makes us more creative. So like an artist who has more skill can make more art, right? A scientist who has more skill can generate more ideas for experiments. And, you know, and children, if you think about the development as just learning change and changes in experience, it stands to reason that adults should be more imaginative than kids because imagination is related to knowledge.

14:08And the more we know, the more we can do with our imaginations. On the other hand, let's think about the environments that children and adults find themselves in instead. And adults find themselves in an environment where they have to go to work, they have to take care of people, they have their to-do list, they have to make sure they feed themselves and probably a few other people as well. They have to make meals. They have to plan. They have to think about the immediate future most of the time with maybe a checklist in their heads. And where is there time in that environment for you to daydream, to mind wander, to just think your own thoughts, to generate new ideas, to be creative?

14:48You're using your imagination all the time, but you're using this very prescribed way. Ideally, and I recognize that not all children have this ideal, but ideally children have much more free time to explore the inner workings of their mind, as well as the world around them, to play and to be creative. So children are given more time to use their imaginations in whatever way they see fit. Adults are given less time and they have to use their imagination in very prescribed ways. I think that's where you see the biggest difference. And that's where you start to say, oh, childhood is this time of imagination and creativity and fantasy and all of these things.

15:31What this means is that if you put adults in that environment, like the environment of childhood, the environment of play and exploration and unlimited amounts of free time, you'll get so much more out of them than you would out of children that is what artists entrepreneurs inventors scientists any sort of creatives that you know that's what they strive for is to give themselves that kind of time to play and explore that's how they get their best ideas backed up empirically, right? We need time. It makes a lot of sense. I actually haven't thought about it that way in terms of there being, I guess, practical constraints and what people have to deal with in their lives, leaving not as much time as they would need, perhaps, to engage in imagination in the ways that they would.

16:27And once they do have the time, then it actually comes out and you do see the creativity one of the things this is kind of a tangent but one of the things i was just wondering is because you mentioned there are certain constraints on imagination it sounds like we don't just imagine anything and the more you know sort of imagine the knowledge tied together i wonder if this is actually a good example of this but you know there are a lot of like superhero stories especially in like american culture and these i guess in one way don't seem to defy our expectations that much like they're still kind of within the realm of like imaginable things But at the same time, I feel like if we think of some of the greatest works of fiction or art that were created by people throughout history, they often feel pretty otherworldly.

17:10Maybe like Lord of the Rings or something. I don't know if that's like a controversial take. But are some of those things that people think of as otherworldly still operating within those constraints? Or how does that make sense? I mean, this is almost a question about aesthetics, not about imagination. Right? Like we have, when we engage with art or when we engage with media or even when we engage with science or humanist knowledge, there's a relationship between the thing that's been created and the person who's engaging with it, whoever that audience is. and that's a whole other field of study I think of why we find certain things certain things that stretch our imaginations in particular ways that maybe not in other ways why we find those things appealing how there might be individual differences in what we find engaging and it's aesthetically pleasing there's probably a balance because even in the stories you know the x-men or the or the lord of the rings or whatever superhero marvel world you like a lot of the reason why we enjoy those things is because they balance the violations of possibility of this world with some of the normal things that we love about this world, like human relationships and emotion, adventure, hero's journeys, you know, these sorts of like mythic quests, all this stuff.

18:28So there are tropes in there that we latch onto as well. When children, I mean, even, again, even in studies of infants, one of the things we know is that from Amy Stahl and Lisa Fuygensen, for example, is a really good example of this. Violations of physical possibility make infants attend more and explore more of the objects that are doing the violating. So why is that interesting to infants? Well, first of all, they know how it's supposed to work. They are surprised by how it did work. And then that leads them to engage and seek more information. So I'm not going to say, let's take that as a model for aesthetics.

19:04I'm not going to go that far. But it's just an interesting way it's an interesting line of thought to follow if you're a person who likes to sit and mind wander on these things how much of what we enjoy about the imaginative worlds that have been created for us by others has to do with what we expect and what we're surprised by and what we're interested in finding out more about jordan wiley at cornell has really interesting work on our tendency to be drawn to immoral characters, to bad actors, to villains. And actually, we don't actually know if children have that same fascination, but it seems like adults have this fascination with the villain, the immoral guy.

19:43So part of that might be, well, you know how a person is supposed to act, and these people are acting in these non-normative ways or immoral ways. And so that's an interesting, that's an expectation violation. Let's take a look at that. Let's learn about that person. I want to know what makes them tick. Why would they possibly, there's something there that needs, that begs us to make meaning and to explain. So those things engage our imaginations. And it's a very big tangent, but you are, I think you are talking about the relationship, the sort of the social aspect of imagination and even the social aspect of creativity.

20:17I teach a class on the psychology of imagination and we just did our unit on creativity. And one of the things that I try to help students see in that class is how much of what we think of as creative is an interpersonal relationship between us as the audiences for that and the work itself which is why it's so subjective yeah i can see that oh there were so many interesting things in there one thing i would love to touch on since we've already been using terms like daydreaming and like mind wandering and I think pretty much every person listening to this can relate to the idea that sometimes you go into your imagination and you kind of leave the world in a sense, like it's almost like an escape.

21:00And so one of the things I wanted to ask you about is at least in terms of anecdotal experiences, sometimes we use imagination for escapism and sometimes we use it to actually help us think through what's happening in our lives, right? To solve a particular problem or maybe to think about what will happen in the future, as you've mentioned. I was wondering if that is a real distinction that you see playing out in your studies too, or in other studies you know of, or if this kind of empirical work tells us anything about that at all. I do think we tend to study these things separately and in that dichotomy that you've just described.

21:32So people who are studying mind wandering or studying dreaming or studying rumination, even, you know, the negative, we want to talk about that a little bit too, the negative side of an active imagination. you know what our imaginations are doing when we're not doing anything and then there's people who study planning and problem solving and reasoning and all these things and they're studying what our imagination does when we are actually in pursuit of a goal let's say so i think definitely you can see it that way and that's a useful distinction to make but on the other hand it might be fun to think about i tend to be a generalist about cognition anyway it might be fun to think about the commonalities and also the relationships between those two.

22:12For example, an old study by Yuka Munakata, who is now at UC Davis, I think when she did the study, she was still at CU Boulder, shows that children who have more free time also have better executive function. So right away, you see this possibility for theorizing a connection between the things we do with our minds when we're just wondering and daydreaming and just thinking our thoughts or fantasy lives or whatever, and our ability to make effective decisions and to plan and to reason. It's crazy, right? So then what is that connection? I have not an answer to that question. I'm just saying like, that's a question, right?

22:49That I think is really interesting. There have been others who have argued that certainly Alison Gopnik, who was my mentor and role model in this business, have argued that that free time to just be in your mind and generate new ideas, recombine things, make stuff up, whatever it is, is actually helping us form real theories about the real world and helping us learn, helping us become better causal learners, for example, and make sense of the things that matter. So I think that the two, it's interesting to study them separately. It's also interesting to think about the connections. Yeah. Right.

23:28Yeah. So one takeaway people could have here is like, engaging in our imagination actually has a range of benefits and it helps us become better in a range of ways, as you just mentioned. So is that something like, should we be encouraging people to engage in imagination more? Is that something they can get better at? Yeah, I do think that I think, yes, yes, I think we need all of us, even if we're not creatives for a living, would benefit for our own well being from unstructured time. And even a little bit of boredom, there's some good literature on boredom. to just allow our minds to rest from the doing and just be.

24:10That can be very scary for some people, very anxiety provoking, and that's its own. We can talk about that as well. But if that doesn't feel scary for you, and that feels like something that would actually bring you some peace, setting aside a few minutes every day to do absolutely nothing and to just be in your mind, not listening to anything, not going anywhere, not driving anywhere. Or maybe you do this while you're driving. I'm driving all the time. My mind wandered. But just to make a practice of it, of daydreaming and mind wandering every day, I think that would be great. And that is, by the way, I think that's distinct from a mindfulness practice or a meditation practice or any of these other things that might be adaptive and useful for our well-being.

24:52I don't think of those as the same, right? I'm not asking you to listen to your breathing for five minutes. I'm actually asking you to do absolutely nothing. Well, what good would that do? I don't know. I mean, what good does sleep do? We do every night, we close our eyes for hopefully seven to eight hours and beautiful research on sleep, especially on naps and how that affects our memory and our learning, our ability to function during the day cognitively. And I think rest for the mind in other ways is also really important. And I think it is important precisely because it allows our imaginations to do things that are sort of not specifically goal oriented.

25:29Yeah. Maybe just to dive into this a little more, I'm curious. So you mentioned this notion of unstructured time, which I think is really cool and actually a really helpful thing to make more room for. I try to do it. It's hard, right? But I think whenever I do do it, it feels not just beneficial in a, you know, self-interested kind of way, but it kind of puts me at ease and all of those things that you mentioned in a really great way. And what I'm getting from this is partly that this feels distinct from this very, I don't know, activity oriented way of using your imagination and so forth. I'm curious, I'm not sure if this question makes sense, but do you have favorite ways of using your imagination?

26:06So you mentioned research involves a lot of it. Yeah. Or how does that show up for you? Yeah. I mean, I have both scientific and artistic pursuits and I have some physical pursuits. I mean, anyone who knows me knows I do three things. Well, I used to do four things, but now my kids are grown. So not so much mothering anymore. I do science, I run, and I make music. That's all I do, basically, when my imagination is functioning in ways. And then I sit around and do absolutely nothing and watch trashy television shows and eat a lot of food. So yeah, those are my favorite things. It's probably not a surprise to anybody who knows me or even sort of knows me.

26:49right and it sounds like what we could be taking away from this is that there is no particular set of activities that people need to be doing right there are many different ways of engaging and we all have our own things that we love to do with our minds our imaginations it's a healthy part of being a human being is to live your life and do those things not just work all the time yeah actually connected to this i feel like another thing that probably people have come across before we talked a little bit about you know social aspects of all this too and we also talked about constraints right like how imagination is constrained in a variety of ways and in a very practical sense one way in which imagination can be constrained is like other people might tell you to think about things in a particular way or the counterpart to this is sometimes we hear people say things like, you know, dream big, don't let others like crush your spirit, like go for big things, don't let others rub you of that spirit.