24-year-old Tomi Lahren, dubbed “white power Barbie,” has developed a following on the far right for criticizing minorities and feminists. She once compared Black Lives Matter to the Ku Klux Klan and called out feminists, saying, “real women don’t wake up and skip work to march for abortions.” Earlier this year, Lahren lost her job as host of The Blaze’s “Tomi” after she admitted to being pro-choice. Now she may be in more trouble with conservatives after saying she benefits from Obamacare.
On Saturday, Lahren had a debate with talk-show host Chelsea Handler at Politicon, a nonpartisan political convention in Pasadena, California. During the discussion, Lahren went on a 10-minute rant against Obamacare, so Handler asked how she gets coverage. “OK, so do you have a health care plan or no?” Handler asked. “Well, luckily I’m 24, so I am still on my parents’,” Lahren replied. After hearing Lahren’s hypocrisy, the crowd then erupted into laughter and groans. “Stop, stop. She’s being honest,” Handler said in Lahren’s defense. When asked which aspects of Obamacare she does like, Lahren replied, “Staying on your parents’ health insurance.”
Fast forward to 10 minutes in to see the exchange:
Tomi: *spends 10 mins arguing against Obamacare* Tomi: Well actually I’m 24 so I’m still on my parents’ healthcare https://t.co/44Nz9TTfGm
Before the passage of Obamacare, young people were thrown off their parents’ health insurance plans when they turned 19 unless they were enrolled in school. Under Obamacare, insurers must allow young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance plans until the age of 26. Although Obamacare has never gained bipartisan support, this part of the bill has remained popular with Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike.
When was the last time you paid attention to your commute? And I don’t mean a couple of feet in front of you, at the car merging into your lane without a blinker. I mean really paid attention to the route you take.
Did you see the landmarks in the distance that make up the city skyline? Did you drive right past the grocery store you promised to stop by at the corner of this Peachtree Street or that Peachtree Street, a struggle Atlanta locals know well?
“Oops! Force of habit,” you might say to yourself as you miss your turn and begin to think about when and where you can turn around.
Relying on familiarity can either facilitate or impede daily navigation. As a researcher studying memory and navigation, I aim to understand how the brain supports spatial navigation and what happens if the cognitive mechanisms for choosing the best route home begin to decline, such as during stress or with aging.
Humans are creatures of habit – at least that’s what people tell themselves when wary of trying something new. But what if a new route is faster or safer than the one you usually take? Would you try it?
Research from my team suggests that people balance between exploration and habit – that is, trying something new or sticking with the familiar – when deciding what route to take. Which navigation strategy someone chooses depends not only on their spatial abilities but on their network of brain regions that support navigation.
Spatial navigation refers to the cognitive ability that helps you travel from one location to another. It may sound simple, but it requires using cognitive functions such as memory, attention, decision-making and assessing potential rewards – never mind the ability to simply perceive the environment itself.
For example, you might retrieve an episodic memory about a specific event: remembering a detour you took a week ago to drop a package off at the post office, including the traffic and weather that day.
You might also retrieve a semantic memory that’s more factual and knowledge-based: remembering how many blocks away the post office is from the park and the turns you need to make to get there.
Together, these kinds of memory inform your spatial memory, which allows you to retrieve location information. This could be where buildings are in relation to each other or where objects are situated in your house. Spatial memories help form your cognitive map, which is essential for getting around in the world.
Often, these different ways of remembering interact, and you can use one type of memory to inform the other. For example, you’ve become accustomed to your commute to work and know it’s relatively short (semantic memory), but over the past three days you’ve been arriving late due to heavy traffic (episodic memory), so you choose to take a different route next time.
Research from my team has found that disagreements in your brain over possible routes can happen. Different types of memory can come up with different solutions for what route you can take, and this conflict is a big factor in how hard your brain needs to work when navigating an environment.
Responding to new and familiar memories
Habits stem from what researchers call stimulus-response memories. These include the knee-jerk reaction you might have to familiar landmarks – when you perceive these places, your brain signals you to make a turn along your commute without needing to consciously think about it.
Habits are rigid, but they can also be beneficial: By taking care of the navigation for you, habit frees up your brain to have a conversation with someone or plan what to make for dinner when you get home.
When navigating less familiar routes or environments, where habit doesn’t kick in automatically, you rely on brain regions such as the hippocampus to call on detailed memories from recent experiences to help guide the way.
But let’s say you’re shopping at a new grocery store where most things are where you expect them to be, even though you’ve never been in this particular store before. What happens when your brain experiences both something new and something familiar about an environment?
Researchers have shown that when something about an environment is familiar and aligns with your prior experiences, the prefrontal regions of your brain – those responsible for executive functions such as decision-making – become more active. They can bypass or even inhibit your hippocampus’s ability to form new memories about specific events.
In other words, your brain can weave information about a new experience into your database of existing knowledge, rather than storing it as completely new information with little relation to the past. This process may help fast-track your understanding about new experiences.
Updating cognitive maps
Researchers know that cognitive maps of the environment depend on the hippocampus and its database of memories about specific events. However, I and other researchers argue these maps can also function as a schema – a collection of memories made up of associations between environmental details. You can add new information to these collections and use it to infer new relationships.
Say a new pedestrian bridge is built between the park and the post office. Your brain can more easily weave this new route information into your existing memories compared with learning a new environment from scratch. Similarly, if you just moved to a new town and know very little about the spatial layout, you might rely on your past experiences of towns to infer where something is.
Using neuroimaging techniques as well as virtual reality programs designed to test a participant’s ability to navigate different routes, my team found that there is likely an interdependent relationship between the brain areas that store memories of specific events and areas that store related information across memories when planning to navigate less familiar places.
New routes are more difficult to follow when they differ from your prior experiences. Thus, a stronger schema helps integrate your knowledge of the spatial relationships between locations and landmarks (such as the distance between the post office and the park) with more general knowledge (such as prior route difficulty). This all informs how you choose to navigate.
Navigating daily life
These memory principles help explain why inconsistencies with your previous experiences can make it so difficult to navigate many aspects of daily life.
Imagine you woke up tomorrow and the GPS on your smartphone was no longer available. How will you plan your route to get to your destination?
You might be used to navigating north from your home to the grocery store – but have you ever tried to navigate to that grocery story from a different location? It’s much harder!
Relating new information to your prior experiences may help strengthen your schema and make navigation easier. And understanding what processes the brain needs to go through to solve these navigation problems can help you understand why getting around can be challenging.
Chances are, you think you do. It’s ubiquitous and iconic. How could you not know it?
But when tested, it turns out very few people can remember all the features of the logo. One study of 85 people found that only about half could pick the correct logo out of a lineup of similar ones. And only one person could correctly draw it.
This isn’t an isolated example. A classic study from 1979 found that people similarly couldn’t draw a penny accurately or pick out a correctly drawn penny from incorrect ones.
People aren’t just bad at remembering things they see all the time, but also in actually knowing how they work. In a 2006 study, many people made significant errors when drawing a bicycle, like putting the chain around the front wheel as well as the back wheel. More than just a forgotten detail, putting the chain around both wheels shows a deeper misunderstanding of how a bicycle works. A bicycle with a chain around both wheels wouldn’t be able to turn.
It turns out people’s knowledge of how the world works is often fragmented and sketchy at best. They systematically overestimate their understanding of everyday devices and natural phenomena. People will tend to give themselves high ratings on how well they understand something, such as how bicycles or zippers work. But when they’re asked to actually explain the mechanics of these objects, their ratings of their understanding typically drop.
Just like how your knowledge of the world around you is imperfect, your knowledge about your own knowledge – also called metaknowledge – is often flawed. My field of cognitive science has been uncovering various gaps in human metaknowledge for decades.
If people are systematically overconfident about how well they understand things, why don’t they notice when they don’t understand something? And what can people do to better recognize the limits of their own knowledge?
Why you think you know more than you do
Researchers have identified several factors behind people’s overconfidence in their knowledge.
One is that people confuse environmental support with understanding: The information is out in the world but not actually in your head. With a bicycle or a zipper, all of the parts are visible to you, and you may confuse this transparency for an internal understanding of how they work. But until you go to use that knowledge by attempting to explain how they work, you may not recognize that you don’t understand how those parts interact.
A second factor is confusing different levels of analysis. People can often describe how something works at a very high level. You know that the engine of a car makes the car go, and the brakes slow and stop the vehicle. But confidence in your high-level understanding of the car may bias you to think you also have a good grasp of the finer details, like how the engine pistons and brake pads work.
Additionally, people can be blind to the ways their knowledge shapes their own perception. In one study, researchers had participants tap out the tune to a popular song. On average, the tappers thought listeners would be able to identify the song about 50% of the time. But when listeners had to identify the tapped song, they actually could identify it only 2.5% of the time. The tappers didn’t realize how much their knowledge was making identifying the song seem easy to them.
This disconnect has consequences beyond whether someone else can understand your Morse code version of a song. When teaching people, whether in formal classroom settings or through casual mentorship, you can sometimes have an expert blind spot: the inability to recognize the difficulties beginners face when learning something you have expertise in.
Building expertise often involves internalizing knowledge to the point where it becomes invisible to you. You draw on knowledge you don’t realize you have, making it hard to relate to learners who lack this knowledge – and, of course, hard for learners to relate to your teaching. You might have experienced this when you’ve gotten partway through explaining something, only to realize you’ve been using jargon you forgot isn’t common knowledge and lost your listener.
How to address metaknowledge failures
Your metaknowledge can fail in two directions: You can think you know more than you do, and you can be blind to how much you’re relying on knowledge you do have. Each calls for a different response to correct it.
When you’re overconfident in your knowledge, the remedy is using that knowledge. You’ll quickly realize how much you actually understand and dial down your confidence. Challenging yourself to actually try to walk through how something works is a great exercise in intellectual humility – that is, recognizing that you may be wrong – and can keep you from getting out over your skis.
Building a greater appreciation for what you know is more difficult. You can’t simply unlearn what you’ve internalized. But what this challenge shows is that, to some extent, knowing a subject and knowing how to teach it are two separate skills. Some experts are great teachers, but not simply by virtue of being experts. Recognizing that you have to approach teaching with humility, and that your expertise doesn’t automatically make you a skilled teacher, can go a long way toward making you a better teacher and mentor.
These aren’t easy and quick fixes to failures of metaknowledge. Both require ongoing intellectual humility and a willingness to distrust your own confidence. But acknowledging the fallibility of your own metaknowledge is a good place to start.
Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s remarks, she feels the rumblings of anxiety rising in her mind and body. Psychology research suggests that Gigi feels anxious because she interpreted her boss’s remarks as something threatening that perhaps she can’t handle.
Just as Gigi starts frantically looking online for new jobs, she spies the “employee of the month” plaque on her desk from last year. She thinks to herself that maybe she can get back to her old form. She has changed her initial view of the situation (need to run away from a threat) to a new one (let’s rise to the challenge), causing her anxiety to subside. Psychologists call this process reappraisal.
Studies show that reappraising emotional situations is a powerful way to change how you feel. When you find the silver linings in bad situations or give others and yourself the benefit of the doubt, it can help you feel better.
I’m a psychology researcher who’s interested in how people change their emotions. Gigi may feel a little less anxious in the moment, but does she truly believe that she can make up the work on time and regain her former glory? My colleagues and I set out to investigate whether it’s possible to start the process of reappraisal without going all the way through with it. Are people getting the full benefit from trying to think differently about their emotions?
Reappraisal has multiple steps
When my colleague Kateri McRae and I first started thinking about what it means to fully reappraise emotional experiences, we were struck by something we saw in the emotion regulation research. Almost all of the studies treated reappraisal as a one-step process. Researchers would ask participants to “reappraise this to make yourself feel better” and then measure the effects.
Intentionally finding a new way to think about how you’re feeling can help you start changing your emotions. Maskot via Getty Images
When you want to change how you’re feeling, you first generate a reappraisal. You bend and stretch your mind to come up with some alternative way to look at the situation. For Gigi, seeing the employee of the month plaque helped. She could have also thought of her boss’s previous compliments or how it felt to get projects done early.
After you generate a reappraisal, it might seem like you’re done, but you’re not. That alternative interpretation is fragile and must compete with your original take that’s driving your emotion. Somehow you need to strengthen that reappraisal so it can stick.
We call this implementation – when you focus and elaborate on that reappraisal to really change your mind about the situation. For Gigi, she may continue to think about all the ways that she can be a great employee so that it lodges firmly in her mind and makes her anxiety truly disappear.
We tested this idea in a study. We showed 89 undergraduate participants images of negative situations and asked them to first just generate a reappraisal of the image that could help them feel better about it. For example, they might see a picture of a frail man in a hospital bed and tell themselves that the man is getting good treatment and will be better soon. Then, we showed them the image again and asked them to focus and elaborate in their mind on their reappraisal.
So we experimentally showed that people reappraise their feelings in two steps. So what? That’s probably what everyone does naturally, anyway, right?
This was the next question we sought to answer. We conducted a study with 52 undergraduate participants like the earlier one, but with a twist. This time, after participants generated a reappraisal, we gave them a choice to continue the reappraisal process by implementing it or to stop the process by distracting themselves.
Participants chose to continue reappraising their emotions only about half the time. Even though reappraisal made participants feel better about the emotional images, there were still many times when they stopped the process prematurely and did not enjoy its full benefits.
These studies showing the benefits of fully following through on emotional reappraisals are lab experiments, but they have implications for how people try to help themselves feel better in real life.
First, it’s hard to intentionally change how you think about something, and people tend to dislike continuing to do hard things. Indeed, in our choice study, people opted to give up on reappraising when they weren’t feeling its benefits early on. Knowing this human tendency might give you the best chance of continuing reappraisal even when it doesn’t feel like it’s working or is hard.
Second, people often get reappraisals from others, and it’s tempting to think that hearing a new perspective is all you need. Indeed, we have unpublished data that shows that participants feel pretty good when receiving a reappraisal from someone else about their own situation. But other people cannot change your mind for you. You must do that yourself if you want to truly feel better.
Next time you’re in an unpleasant situation like Gigi’s, don’t just cursorily think that you can rise to the challenge. Really think through the situation and let your new perspective become your only one.
.svg){kind=link}