Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Time 0:18:42
Social Identity & Trust
- Trust in institutions is heavily influenced by social identity.
- People perceive their reasons for trusting certain institutions as logical, but social identity plays a significant role.
- Disagreements can’t always be resolved through rational debate, as reasoning capacity is fundamentally social.
- Social identity mediates how we process, access, debate, and evaluate information. Transcript: Samuel Bagg But you asked about social identity. 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. So it’s not, I don’t want to say that it’s all social identity. There is something there. There is reasoning processes. There are reasons. But it isn’t just like a logically solved right? It’s not just that, you know, if, if, if you and I, you know, uh, disagree about something and if we just had long enough to present evidence to each other and, you know, we, we could just Talk in the, in the most rational way possible that, you know, eventually we would, we would, 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.
Time 0:22:58
Social Identities and Perception
- Underlying social identities provide a sensical explanation for differing interpretations.
- There isn’t one objective interpretation of events; perception is key.
- Perception is colored by prior commitments, including social identities.
- Our social identities influence what we perceive before we can evaluate or draw information from it. Transcript: Samuel Bagg 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. And our perception is before we can access it, before we can evaluate it, before we can draw
Time 0:26:14
Perspective and Perception
- Everyone has a perspective that colors their perception of the world.
- People underestimate how much their perspective influences their perception.
- Individual attempts to eliminate bias often fail.
- Collective institutions can help correct for biases, but they are not perfect.
- Institutions with a homogenous perspective will still miss certain errors.
- Use the example of a male and white institution of science. Transcript: Samuel Bagg Everybody has a perspective. And everybody tends to underestimate the degree to which that perspective colors the way that they perceive the world. So I think it’s important to always remind ourselves of that. And I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate that, you know, just by, oh, let’s just be aware of the bias, and then we can sort of mitigate it. Those kinds of attempts at individualizing the problem are, I think, always going to fail. And so what we have are these collective institutions that do it for us. And even they, of course, fail sometimes, often right? Like, if you have an institution that is supposed to do this, but all the participants in that institution share a certain set of, a certain kind of perspective, then it’s, you know, Maybe it will iron out certain kinds of errors, but it’s going to miss others, right? So, an institution of science, for instance, that is, you know, all male and all white, it’s going to iron out lots of errors, right? That don’t have anything to do with those identity investments. It’s going to make progress as science. But it’s also going to miss certain other things. It’s also going to miss certain