How can we stop fooling ourselves into seeing only what we want to see?

Robert MacCoun is a Stanford Law Professor, a Social Psychologist and the Coauthor of THIRD MILLENNIUM THINKING: CREATING SENSE IN A WORLD OF NONSENSE.

Based on a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, the book explores how to use scientists’ tricks of the trade to make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems in age of uncertainty and overwhelming information.

In the book, a physicist, a psychologist, and a philosopher introduce readers to the tools and frameworks that scientists have developed to keep from fooling themselves. On this podcast, we talk with Rob about when society stopped agreeing on how to have a healthy public discourse, and how to build trust among seeming adversaries to start to reignite those healthy conversations. We dig in to confirmation bias, scientific optimism and the importance of healthy skepticism. We talk about research, public policy, and how we keep eroding our own credibility with almost every single statement that we make. The goal of today’s conversation is to find ways to get better at staying open-minded. Because unless we can find a way back to the practice of disagreeing without losing sight of the goal of finding common ground…in light of the high likelihood of another pandemic (and the ongoing need for open discourse on public policies that affect us all) we might just be doomed.

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