Fighting With Mirages of Each Other with Adam Mastroianni

• The metaphor we often use on Your Undivided Attention for social media-fueled misperception is that of a Funhouse mirror — social media reflects distorted versions of us. We see beauty-filtered versions of our own tribe, and grotesque versions of other tribes. Research like that of Adam Mastroianni's shines a laser in the Funhouse, enabling us to see its contours and how it distorts our view of reality.

• What's powerful about misperception as an indicator is that it can be measured objectively. It can be hard to accurately measure people’s beliefs about polarized issues, like abortion and guns, but more straightforward to measure people's misperceptions about other peoples beliefs about those issues. 

• Two threads emerge from Adam Mastroianni's research: first, people worldwide believe morality has been on the decline, although there's been no evidence of that. Second, people believe the past was much more conservative and the present is much more liberal than is actually the case.

• Naive realism is the idea that we see the world as it actually is. In fact, we all perceive the world through our personal experiences, biases, hopes, and fears. Or as Adam puts it, we see the world through the virtual reality goggles of our eyeballs. 

• The pre/trans fallacy is a phenomenon whereby two views might seem the same, but be very different. For example, one person holding an anti-vaccine view may believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant chips in humans, while another person holding an anti-vax view is simply aware of the risks that vaccines pose to children and the immuno-compromised. Both views 'look' the same, but are formed by different belief systems.

• Our misperceptions of each other have major social and political implications. Misperceptions drive hyper-polarization, and result in policies that don't represent the actual majority. 

• ‍Technology could be designed in order to help alleviate misperception. For example, humane social media might involve 'double confirmation' — whereby our interlocutors would confirm that we understand their views correctly as a prerequisite for engaging in dialogue.

Widespread Misperceptions of Long-term Attitude Change 

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2107260119   

Adam Mastroianni's research paper showing how stereotypes of the past lead people to misperceive attitude change, and how these misperceptions can lend legitimacy to policies that people may not actually prefer

‍

Experimental History

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/  

Adam's blog, where he shares original data and thinks through ideas

‍

Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32412-y 

Academic study showing that Americans are living in what researchers called a “false social reality” with respect to misperceptions about climate views