How Identity Literally Changes What You See (with Samuel Bagg)

0:04Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments, and they get early access to our interview series two, like this episode. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. Oh, this week, I'm speaking to Samuel Bagg, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. A little while ago, Samuel published an article, I think he calls it a blog post, a write-up, an essay, whatever, which really, really stuck with me.

0:55The title was, The Problem is Epistemic, The Solution is Not. Essentially, the epistemic problem being that we have a lot of people in the United States, the UK, Europe, around the world, wherever, who believe a lot of stuff that frankly does not reflect reality and end up doing stuff, which is based upon that. You know, the January 6th riots, because people genuinely believe the US election was being stolen, various COVID stuff, anti-vax, all of that sort of thing. and that's an epistemic problem right they they don't have the knowledge that is accurately reflecting reality so a lot of people and i think myself included as a journalist because this is literally my job thinks that well if we give people more knowledge if we give people more access to this then they are going to come to the same conclusions as us and then that's going to be better because we can all be an informed society and we can participate more fruitfully in a democracy in a democratic process all of that well you know that's not true according to samuel in his write-up and all of this research he points to is that at the end of the day social identity plays such a big part in what we believe now i'm sure you've already thought of that before I'm sure you already know intuitively.

2:28Well, of course, people believe what they sort of want based on who they are and their identity and all of that sort of thing. Yes, I feel like we all intuitively know that, but Samuel has articulated it in a really clear, robust and scientifically supported way that I think everybody should listen to. And I absolutely think you should go read his piece as well, which I'll put in the show notes. But rather than that, I'll let us just get straight to it. And here is my conversation with Samuel.

3:04All right, Samuel, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So as we were just saying before I started recording, there is a lot to get into here. It's honestly kind of hard to know where to enter. And so I'll try to do it in the most logical way. possible, let me just read out two very short sections from your piece. The first is, democracy is collapsing around us in large part for epistemic reasons, because so many people have become so profoundly detached from reality. And then the second part is, more than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.

3:58So could you start us there? Like what is a social identity and why is it that that is so important for what people believe? Yeah, great. So a social identity is anything, any group that we feel that we belong to and that we identify with. So often when people are thinking about this, the most obvious salient ones people think about in politics have to do with categories like race or gender. And those are social identities. You can feel yourself to be a member of one of those groups or an ethnicity or a religion, something like that. But there are also many other types of social identities. And I should say also, So there are many different types of ways that one can identify as a, you know, as a black person or a Jewish person or a woman or what have you.

4:54But there's also many other types of affiliations and identities that one can have that aren't so easily categorizable into those externally observable categories, right? So it might have to do with the region that you're in or the occupation or the profession or the hobbies, but it can also just have something to do. you might not even be able to put a finger on exactly what it is. It's just people like me are like this, right? So in the psychological experiments that started getting people to think about this in terms of social identity, in fact, the identities are basically fake. They're just invented on the spot for the purposes of the psychological experiment.

5:34Like if people, okay, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team, and then they'll have people answer questions about whether they believe information that's coming from somebody else on the blue team. And even though they've just sort of received that identity five minutes ago, they already trust people from the blue team more than the red team. So it doesn't have to, so these identities can be basically anything. As long as you have a genuine kind of affiliation for it, you identify with that group, it can shape the way that you perceive the world. I mean, it's not just that it can shape, it inevitably shapes the way that you perceive the world, the way that you process information, retain information, things like that.

6:20So yeah, I guess I just to put that point on it, the psychological and social psychology evidence is pretty overwhelming. Yeah, so we never just have one identity. We always have lots and lots and lots of different identities, but they have different, you know, they overlap. They take on different importance, different salience at different times. But, you know, the identities that we do have and the ones that we find salient in a particular moment, at a particular context, they very profoundly shape a lot of our cognition, ranging from literally what do we see, right? What do we perceive? What do we hear?

7:03Even if, you know, if you and I have different identities, we might see the same thing and literally perceive different things about it, notice different things about it. And then of course, all the way from that through what arguments do we find convincing? What pieces of evidence stick out to us? What do we believe when we hear it? All of that stuff. So our social identities are going to shape every bit of that process from beginning to end. And so that's why it matters so much for what people believe for what you can call the epistemic dimension of politics. Epistemic just means, you know, about knowledge, right?

7:39So what do we think we know? What do we perceive? What do we believe? Right? Those are all epistemic questions. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a really good way to put it. I was going to ask this a little bit later, but I'll bring it up now since you touched on it, your post, which will be linked in the show notes, of course, so people can go and then sort of click through the references. I've been doing that myself where you'll have a paragraph that says all of the, or a lot of the research points towards everything you just said, that our identities are maybe warping. You didn't use the word warp.

8:15I'll use the word warp. Heavily influencing what we're literally perceiving. And then you link to various studies and I've been going through those and they're really, really interesting. For a moment, can you just drill down a little bit more on what some of those studies were? You mentioned a red and blue team example. What's some of the evidence that is pointing to social identities really heavily influencing how we even come to obtain knowledge? Yeah, so I'll admit that it's been a few years since I read some of these studies myself. This is based on research I've been doing for a while. Um, so I, so I apologize if I get some of the details wrong, but, but here's, here's a sort of example of the kind of thing that, that, that, um, political psychologists, social psychologists are doing to, to, uh, get a grip on what's, what's happening.

9:04Um, you might have somebody read certain news, uh, you know, either real or fake pieces of, of, of news, right. As part of the study. and then you know later on in the study you'll be asked like what what to summarize like what did that thing what did that news you know what did that news bulletin say you might also be asked you know do you trust this news source right and what they'll do is they'll manipulate between different treatments you know between different groups who receive the treatment you know various details, right? So in some news treatments, there will be a queue. There might be an American flag behind it, for instance.

9:47And in others, there might be, you know, like it's on a website that, you know, has Patriot in the name or something like that, right? And there's another, you know, for other participants, they'll use a different sort of, you know, branding, basically, that links it with a different sort of identity group, right? And so depending on whether you think the news source is coming from somebody from a sort of identity group that you affiliate with, that is going to color not just whether you trust it, but also literally what you remember from it and all sorts of other things that you perceive about it.

10:22So that's one way to do it. That's usually called a survey experiment where it's basically just a survey, but they're manipulating different, randomly assigning people to different treatment groups and drawing conclusions from that. Then this, of course, this is linked to much deeper mechanisms. And there's also neuroscience, neuroimaging work that is exploring the foundations for this sort of psychological mechanism that is exploring which brain regions are activated when you're reading certain kinds of text or processing certain kinds of images. and that's going to vary depending on which identities you hold and also, you know, which identities are kind of queued up at the time.

11:09So yeah, I do encourage people to go read these studies and take a look for themselves because, you know, this is, I'm not the author of these studies. I'm processing, I'm using them. I've developed an understanding over many years, you know, engaging with them of the sort of big picture and that's what I'm trying to contribute here but but uh you know the in terms of the details of the studies themselves uh that's no that's well that's for them that's better yeah yeah yeah that's for them yeah thanks yeah absolutely so of course you you are providing this overview and you're you are interpreting them interpreting the results after these many years of your own study and your own work and all these different results in a very multi-disciplinary manner as well so i definitely recommend people go and read them if they wish, which is kind of a meta layer of irony, of course, because part of your essay discusses that people could go and review all this evidence, but they might still come to a different conclusion because of their social identities.

12:10It's very much... We're trying to talk about a problem while also being in it. And of course, I have my own social identities. You, of course, have your own as well. but I think about a third of the way through your essay you start to bring up the idea of institutions right you know that we have journalism and some government agencies maybe less so now in the United States some lawyers etc how are they impacted by people's social identities and more probably more importantly how does that end up with people you know where we are now with January 6th and that sort of thing. Some of the examples you give at the top, how do institutions play into this?

12:54Yeah. So I think there's two interesting questions there. So maybe I'll start on the first. And if I don't get to the second, please remind me. But no space of human life cognition is free of this influence. And that's one of the things that we just have to learn to grapple with and get over. But it doesn't mean there's no hope for reaching truth or at least closer to the truth. It doesn't mean that there's no hope for coming to some sort of consensus on things. What it means is that we have to take the emphasis off any individual reasoner's ability to approach or approximate that on their own.

13:39And so some of these institutions that you're mentioning are institutions that are designed, And not necessarily intentionally designed this way, but have evolved over the years in such a way as to minimize the impact of individual biases. There's procedures for when those individual biases inevitably come into the picture. You have an editor at a newspaper. You have a masthead. You have a copy editor. You have a second editor who may come in and say, I think you might be wrong there. these sorts of checks. Sure. And also, there's a kind of structure that if somebody points out later on, oh, you got that detail wrong, there's a structure of incorporating that feedback and saying, oh, yeah, I guess we did get that detail.

14:33There's a structure for we're going to go back, maybe we'll make a correction, or maybe we'll just do it differently next time. right um there there's there's norms it's not just the sort of institutional oh there's an editor there's a there's a fact checker there's a copy editor it's also a set of norms that well when we're corrected in this way that's important to us and not just because after the fact we'll make a correction but because we want to get it right in the first instance so that we don't face that sort of sanction right there's that's one of the things that's missing in a lot of sort of alternative news organizations that don't take that sort of feedback seriously.

15:12It's not like they're not getting that feedback. They clearly are. They're being fact-checked. They're being told they get this fact wrong. They got this wrong. The thing that sort of disciplines ordinary news organizations in a way that I think it doesn't discipline these alternative news sources is that they're not responsive to that sort of feedback, right? Every news organization, every journalist, every news organization is going to get things wrong. That's inherent in the news cycle and in the process. I mean, even journalism is a fast-paced compared to what I do and academia. It's much more fast-paced.

15:49So there's going to be more errors there. But even at the slow pace of scholarship of science, there are still errors that get into the system. The question is whether you're responsive to the kinds of corrections that you get from within that system. And so it's really not, for me, it's less about the sort of individual institution of the editor versus the writer and more about the whole structure of journalism as a practice where people, you know, if the New York Times stopped responding to corrections, stopped responding to, you know, feedback that it was getting things wrong and it didn't care about that sort of feedback, then it would lose respect within the kind of journalism profession.

16:27And the same is true of, you know, scholarly institutions, scientific institutions, right? It would lose respect and it would lose, ultimately it lose influence and it would lose power, right? So what's going on is not just that there are alternative news organizations that individually don't care about these norms. It's about that there's a whole ecosystem that can support an alternative set of norms whereby this sort of correction doesn't matter. It doesn't count for them because there's whole swaths of types of people who could be doing that correction that don't, whose opinions don't count, basically.

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21:49And then I think the second part was, how does social identity play into those institutions? As in, as you point out, and I think everyone knows, a lot of people don't trust the media. or a lot of people don't trust government agencies to the point where now the health secretary in the United States is someone who is basically anti-vaccine. It's like completely flipped. How does social identity play into that? Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important to say it's not that people don't trust media. They don't trust certain media. They trust other media instead, right? Everybody's trusting somebody and they're getting their news from somewhere.

22:30It's going to be a media, some sort of media source, even if it's not a traditional media source, right? So the question is not whether we trust, you know, these established institutions or whether we trust some institutions. We all have to trust something in order to have any information about the world. We can't know, you know, 99.9 % of what we want to know about the world just through direct observation ourselves. We have to trust some sort of input. So it's important to say, and you know, this is important. They don't trust government agencies. Well, yeah, they don't trust the old version of the government agencies.

23:04Well, now I don't trust what comes out of DHS or HHS, right? Because I think I have good reason not to trust the recommendations that are coming from RFK, right? But so it's not just a case of, well, some people don't trust the government. Well, yeah, it depends who's there. Depends which media sources you're talking about. But, you know, of course, I think my internal perception is that I have good reason to do that, right? But you asked about social identity. And of course, the point is that a lot of what we understand to be our reasons to have trust in certain institutions, and not others, comes down to social identity.

23:48So it's not, I don't want to say that it's all social identity. There is something there. There's, you know, there is reasoning processes. There are reasons. But it isn't just like a logically solved problem, right? It's not just that, you know, if you and I, you know, disagree about something, and if we just had long enough to present evidence to each other, and, you know, we could just talk in the most rational way possible, that, you know, eventually we would just have to come to an agreement. about who is right, because there is just a logically correct answer. You know, in most cases, that's just not going to be the case because what we perceive to be our kind of reasoning capacity is fundamentally a social capacity.

24:35So there's a socially mediated part of it. Our social identity is part of how we process and, you know, access and debate and evaluate information that we're getting. So part of why some people don't trust, let's say, legacy traditional media has to do with the fact that people in their identity group that they trust as sort of signal givers for people like me, they've gotten the signal one way or another that people like me don't trust that media source, right? People like me don't trust that government agency, right? And so, you know, in your mind, that is going to feel like, oh, I don't trust this media source because they're X, Y, and Z, because they're corrupt, because they've done this, right?

25:25You're not going to say, oh, I don't trust that media source because people like me don't trust that media source, right? That's not how it's experienced internally. But the point of the sort of psychological studies is that, is what's going on, at least partially. And it's there in the background, even if there's also other stuff going on. So that's going to shape which of those arguments we find convincing about should I trust this media source or not. Does that answer the question? Yeah, absolutely. Even if they're not aware of it and they certainly can't articulate it, that is what the evidence shows is happening when it comes to when people choose to trust certain institutions and not.

26:03How do you apply this concept to the concrete example of the shooting of good, right? You have many people, including myself, who believe the ICE agent did not act in self-defense, was not in imminent danger, in part, or I would say mostly, because we have these very extraordinary videos of the scene. You know, there's one from one angle, one from another, and then the third one, there were the three videos that came out when I did my piece saying DHS is lying, And then I think the day after, we got the first person perspective from Jonathan Ross, the agent who shot good. And then that just, I feel like, further supported my conclusions.

26:52And I think many, many other people who watch those videos as well. But that same time, you have the vice president coming out. You have others as well going onto social media and saying, look, this video proves our. hypothesis, which is the complete opposite of what the conclusion I've come to. And I think there was even a tweet from someone on the right saying, look, it doesn't matter what evidence is out there. The left is always going to believe their own version of events. I was like, that's literally the conclusion I've come to about you. So it's a really, really horrible case for a million different reasons.

27:32But I was thinking about your writing when those tweets went out. So I'm just wondering, how do you apply this frame of thinking and this concept to that shooting where people are coming to completely different conclusions, despite everybody seeing the same videos? Referring to these underlying social identities is probably the only way you're going to come up with a sensical explanation for what's going on, right? So it's a good sort of case study of the phenomenon that we're talking about, right? which is that there isn't just one thing that those videos show objectively, right? All we have is the things that we perceive.

28:14And our perception is before we can access it, before we can evaluate it, before we can draw information from it, even the very act of our perception is colored by the prior commitments that we have, including social identities, right? And so, I mean, that doesn't mean we can't have conversations about, well, this detail shows this and this, you know, it looks like the wheels are turned this way. And like, I think that obviously we have to have those conversations. And, you know, there are maybe some people who are not committed in one way or another and can be influenced by this sort of thing.