New Information vs Comfort Zone — Which Conversation Do You Want?
by Péter Isztin — Co-founder at Ixy Labs
Ixy Labs produces articles, videos and a podcast investigating the future of private life, and is an independent offshoot of the Ixy app.
Our private lives are filled with important discussions — but do we know what kind of conversation we’re having?
We use conversations to attain a number of goals: to acquire information, to signal attention, to keep and cultivate our friendships and other relationships. Conversations are, of course, everywhere, but the most important conversations happen in what we consider our private sphere.
As humans, we have a sense that what we discuss in private and public, and even more importantly how we discuss it, should be different in those two spheres.
As Ixy Labs is primarily concerned with conversations in the private sphere, I will concentrate on that, but keep in mind, the public and private spheres often overlap. Sometimes we discuss the same things in public and private, albeit we do it differently.
Me, Myself and Tech
As technology is becoming absolute, and more of our actions get filtered through technology, it is also natural to ask what to expect from it when it comes to conversation and the already fraught boundaries between private and public.
In particular, unlike in face to face interactions, in online interactions even the socially very adept of us can’t rely on traditional non-verbal cues. Instead online interactions have their own cues, but these are often noisy. We might therefore not know whether a topic, thought or sentence is “safe” for the conversation. Therefore it is especially important to think systematically about conversations in our times.
I like to think that conversation is about goals, choices and actions, so we first need to talk about these.
The Goal, Full Stop
We often think of conversations as being about exchange of information. We provide information our partners do not know about, and vice versa. But as I have indicated above, we engage in conversations for other reasons as well: for instance, when having a conversation with a close friend, partner or family member what we often seek is comfort.
And there is always a tradeoff between comfort and information.
Before we go further examining this tradeoff, we need to talk about how, when and why we gather new information…
As an economist, when I see a person naturally deciding between (1) asking for or sharing information versus (2) building on what is already known to both speakers, I conclude that information gathering is indeed a choice. We gather information when the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs!
Gathering information, of course has what we might call “physical” costs (e.g. we spend time and physical resources to search for information). But occasionally it also has a psychological cost: we do not always welcome new information; in other words, truth often hurts and we decide ignorance is bliss. This doesn’t mean we never seek the truth, very often we do. But what determines whether we will seek the truth or turn into comforting (potential) lies?
The Personal and the Political
Obviously, we will seek the truth if our personal benefit from it exceeds its psychological cost. What kind of predictions can we derive from this simple assumption in the realm of personal conversations?
Perhaps we should expect more truthful conversations when people seek advice before potentially life-changing decisions: in such cases we benefit a lot from learning the truth. For example, should I get married to the person I love? Should I enrol in a higher education program? Should I get a new job? But even in these areas, we have strong incentives for comfort and to self-deceive! Especially when it comes to romantic partners or how well we expect ourselves to do in a given area or a given job. When the stakes are high, they are also high for our egos and that could mean not less but more comfort-seeking and self-deception. Still, high stakes do provide some motivation for truth-seeking. But when we combine low stakes in outcome with high stakes in ego, we can probably expect little effort to seek the truth.
And that’s where we arrive at politics, religion and other societal topics. These are, or so they seem, high stakes areas, at least from society’s point of view, but what about the individual’s level? If many people change their political beliefs for the better (whatever that might be) society benefits, but if only I change my persuasion, I don’t derive much benefit from it.
On the other hand we are often attached to our political beliefs: they are often part of our identity. Discussions that threaten them threaten our ego. Therefore, in politics we often tend to free-ride and demand confirmation of our pre-existing views instead of seeking the truth.
A good case study illustrating the difference between the incentives faced in private choice and those faced in public choice is the Brexit referendum. It is a well-known story that people in the UK started googling “What is the EU?” just after the referendum. This might be surprising and perhaps come off as embarrassing for most people, but for an economist, there is nothing surprising in it. When people vote, it is not rational for them to look at all the information needed for a mature decision. Why should I learn the relevant facts when my individual vote counts so little? But once my fellow citizens decided the matter, I better find out what to expect from it!
So private conversations about politics and other topics which are about society at large are too often either about mutual confirmation, or, if one party confronts the other with a different opinion, take a hostile turn.
If you don’t confirm their priors, people might take offence… And, unless you are a provocateur, you wouldn’t want that. So you try to keep the conversation comfortable.
Can We “Have it All”?
But wouldn’t it be better, on a social level, to actually have more “uncomfortable” conversations, conversations in which we are unafraid to tell what we regard as the truth? If so, how can we achieve that?
Before we answer that question, consider also the following question: Taking all of the above as given, what can or should we expect from advances in technology, and in particular, advances in artificial intelligence, when it comes to private interactions? Suppose we manage to create an app that aims to make people’s conversations more comfortable. What would most people want from such an app? Do they want it to steer their conversations toward ‘safe’ topics (away from, politics, religion, etc.)? Or do they want to make their risky conversations safer? If it is the latter, how will these future conversations look like?
Per the law of demand, if the cost (or price) of something falls, people will consume/buy more of it. It is likewise the case with risky communication. As the cost of choosing risky topics decreases, people will optimally choose to have conversations about riskier topics. Paradoxically, it could also mean more conflict. But remember, we may in fact welcome more conflict as long as conflicts do not lead to breakdown of personal relationships. We could, in other words, get more “peaceful” conflicts.
Making the Truth Cool Again
People love to be liked by others. On social media we often post stuff not because we wish to convey new information to our friends but rather to earn approval from them.
(And remember that people often want confirmation, not truth.)
So, too often, our desire to be liked means sharing information that our friends already know and which merely confirm their priors and/or signal our agreement with them.
What if, instead of trying to earn social rewards by signalling agreement, we earn it through signalling a willingness for honest discussion?
What if we learned to reward each other for sharing new information with us: telling us something we don’t know but probably should? What if, to put it differently, truth-seeking were really cool?
Sure, the world of social media seems very far from such an ideal but we can move a few steps closer to it by, for one thing, making honest discussions less of a source of anxiety and more of a source of fun.
So you ask, how to do it? Where to start?
Well, perhaps, and here I refer to the next topics that I plan to write about, maybe we should start thinking more systematically about the following topics: the “like economy” of social media and our “like policy”, and, perhaps more surprisingly, about religion (whether theism or a more secular belief), and how we are all more “religious” than we are willing to admit.
In the meantime, you can steer yourself in a more truth-seeking direction by reminding yourself every time you want to post something in social media: will my post tell anything new to my friends? Will it invite broad discussion? If the answer is no, once in a while you should decide not to push the “send” button.
At the same time, you may also suggest to your friends to make the same changes in their posting habits... Slowly, step by step, we could then start building more learning-oriented platforms for our conversations.
