Too obsessed with Taylor Swift? Could be a coping mechanism

While researching “Cultish,” her book on “the language of cults from Scientology to SoulCycle,” the writer Amanda Montell I kept finding studies on cognitive biases, or common errors in thinking. Montell couldn't help but notice that cognitive biases explained more than why some people became bigots: they also explained many of his “own daily decisions in the information age” and the “seemingly confusing” behavior of other people in his life.

Montell's new book, “The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality(Simon & Schuster), is their attempt to help people notice and name how their minds make them miserable and then hopefully learn to avoid the pitfalls.

Montell spoke with The Times about the unique challenges of social media, what Taylor Swift has to do with the author's mother and more. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)

Psychologists, economists, and other social scientists have been researching cognitive biases for decades, but you argue that understanding them is now more important than ever. Why is that?

Cognitive biases, such as sunk cost fallacy either recent illusion, are these innate psychological shortcuts we've always taken to make enough sense of the world to survive. These behaviors have been observed and documented for over 100 years. But they can explain again many of the irrationalities that are a direct product of the digital age. While the democratization of information has been incredible and a net positive for society, our minds, our amygdalas, have not caught up with the culture we have created.

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These psychological shortcuts that we once took to process a much more limited amount of information from the physical world are now being applied to more abstract information (some of which is true, some of which is not) and causing us to have truly miserable reactions. So we feel a kind of nebulous feeling of boredom, of languor, of panic, of fear for the future. We're using these old shortcuts that were once very useful in a new context where they're becoming a bit obsolete. Cognitive biases can really explain a lot of the nonsense we are exposed to in society today.

In each chapter, he analyzes a different behavior (sometimes cultural, sometimes personal) through the lens of a cognitive bias. The first chapter is about Taylor Swift fans, but it's also about your mom. How do you explain the cognitive bias specific to that chapter, the halo effect, both? They are fast And your own family dynamics?

Amanda Montell.

(Kaitlyn Mikayla)

The halo effect describes our inclination to admire something about a person and then conclude that they must be perfect overall. This bias arises from the ways we used to identify role models in our communities for survival purposes, but now we are applying the halo effect to modern parasocial relationships, i.e. celebrities, in a way that is having serious harmful consequences. .

I came across this pretty fascinating investigation reflecting how the rise of Stan's cult actually correlates in interesting ways with parent-child attachment. If we don't experience enough “positive stressors” from our parental figures and communities in real life, we often seek out those things in online spaces and virtual spaces, and that can really set us up for major side effects, from narcissistic tendencies to poor body image to criminality.

The relationship between the surrogate “mother” (i.e. the female pop star) and our attachments to our real mothers is something I was really interested in exploring. I speak from my personal experience involving those ideas and my own mother and I finally came to the notion that my mother was a real person and we were able to overcome that with empathy and communication. That goes both ways, but the fact that so many fans perceive celebrities like Taylor Swift as sort of surrogate mothers is setting everyone up for psychological failure because the mode of communication is one-sided. The surrogate “mother” could never fulfill her wishes or live up to her standards, nor could she humanize herself as a mother would.

In another chapter, you delve into the world of manifestation gurus and argue that their rise can be explained by “proportionality bias.” What is that and how does it work?

Proportionality bias describes our propensity to assume that a big event or even a big feeling must have had a big cause. For us it just makes proportional sense of cause and effect to assume that, “Oh, a massive, devastating pandemic broke out, which couldn't have been the result of a bunch of random little minor tragedies all adding up to this big pandemic.” one, on the other hand, the government must have designed it on purpose.”

Manifestation is another cause-and-effect misattribution, only with a more positive spin: If I got a promotion, it's because I put a dollar sign on my vision board. But in this time of mass isolation, where we feel incredibly out of control and lacking agency in our future, many online protest gurus have taken massive advantage of our proportionality bias by communicating this very absolutist idea that you can actually control your results and improve your circumstances. with your mind as long as you sign up for my $25 a month course.

One of the main features of the information age, as you call it, is social media. How does social media hijack the wiring of our minds, and how can recognizing cognitive biases help us?

I can talk about this in a personal context. My day job for many years was working in the beauty industry. I thought: “I'm a mole and they won't be able to catch me,” and surely the joke was on me because with just a couple of years in the beauty industry I felt that someone else's blonde only turned me into a brunette. -Hey.

Then I left the beauty industry to write and thought, “Oh, thank God I've freed myself from the purgatory of social comparison.” And again, the joke was on me because now I was comparing myself to other writers, nonfiction authors who are my age and had my same haircut. That was really devastating and caused me a lot of psychological turmoil. In the book, I offer some solutions to combat that. zero sum bias That makes you fall into a spiral.

That is the false perception that someone else's gain means your loss. And there was a time when another person's access to food and mates would actually mean a deficit, but that's not true in our modern economy. There is actually a way to generate more wealth no matter what area of ​​life you are talking about, but it is innate in our species that we experience “win-win denial.”

Especially in times of sociopolitical turbulence, we feel that if the government is helping one group, surely another group must be suffering. There is fascinating investigation which reflects that when we feel culturally disconnected, people resist immigration more because they begin to feel that scarcity mentality.

You know, when I launch this book, you start to feel a little more competitive than you normally would, so I'm really going back to the ideas of zero-sum bias and the denial of mutual benefit. It is a continuous process.

(Maggie Chiang / For The Times)

Does knowing and naming these ideas help you combat them?

I will never be able to stop my instincts from telling me about zero-sum bias or confirmation bias, but I will say that being aware of them has been very comforting. Even when another person's behavior seems truly inexplicable or evil, I can point out, “Oh, that's just an overconfidence bias at play” in the same way I noticed an overconfidence bias in my own behavior. Or: “That's a zero-sum bias, that's the illusion of recency.” It just feels good to have an excuse not to dismiss your fellow humans as defective.

But I have also come across many studies that had these practical tidbits of wisdom. One I keep coming back to is additive solutions versus subtractive solutions. I came across this really fascinating study about the tendency to solve problems by adding more variables to the equation even when a much simpler solution would involve removing one or two things. He study It was a spatial puzzle with colored blocks and the vast majority of participants opted for the much more cumbersome additive solution rather than subtraction, because subtraction is not the way our minds are oriented.

It reminded me of a relationship that wasn't serving me. During our miserable times, I thought what would help us would be to add a vacation or replace our furniture or some totally over-the-top additive solution, when the much better way to address the problem would be to remove something, split it up, potentially.

I have applied this framework to even minor problems. I was looking at my junk drawer and my first impulse was: I need to go to the Container Store and get some really cute drawer organizers. But the much simpler and more effective solution would be to throw that garbage away.

Angela Chen is a journalist. She finds her job at angelachen.org.

Shelf Help is a new wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books, all with the goal of learning how to live a fuller life. Do you want to introduce us? Email [email protected].