March 19, 2024 • 42 mins
In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of authenticity. What is it? Why do we place such value on it? They discuss authenticity in terms of psychology, art, music, religion and more… (part 1 of 3)
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Mayant, and I am Joe McCormick.
And today we're going to be kicking off a series
on a concept that I have been thinking about a
lot lately. That is the idea of authenticity. I've been
thinking about doing an episode on this sort of off
and on for I think several years now. Authenticity is
(00:36):
really interesting to me because it is one of those
concepts that is extremely important. It's highly relevant to our lives.
We probably think about it every single day, and at
the same time, it is sort of vaguely defined. We
don't often stop to think about what it really means,
or to analyze how we evaluated, or what our criteria
(00:58):
of authenticity are and so forth. And I think that's
kind of a shame, because our judgments about personal authenticity
play into all kinds of things, into how we relate
to friends, acquaintances, and co workers, whether we trust political candidates,
how we make business decisions, how we understand and evaluate
(01:18):
music and poetry and other works of art and entertainment.
It's threaded all through our lives.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It even comes down to basic decisions that you wouldn't
even think of as getting into the core of authenticity.
I think everybody has at least one I don't know,
T shirt or other kind of garment and their wardrobe,
and you may find yourself wondering some days, is this
the day I wear this? Can I pull this off?
And and to some extent, you may be wondering about authenticity,
(01:45):
like can I wear this and be authentic? Or are
people going to see through me and they're going to
question whether I actually support that band, or whether whether
this is the appropriate color scheme for me? And so forth?
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Is this T shirt really me today?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Exactly? Yeah? And as we'll get into like that answer
may change day to day, Like you know, we're we're
not necessarily the same person day to day, and what
is authentic one day may not be authentic the next.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Right before we started recording, I was thinking about how
authenticity is even often prescribed as a remedy for when
people are having difficulty with social relations or social interactions,
like when somebody's like, I'm having trouble making friends or
I'm having trouble with dating. What am I doing wrong?
What's the first thing people usually say to them, just
(02:34):
be yourself. That is advice there. Essentially that means be authentic.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Though it's a paradox, right, because at the same time,
there's no other way to hijack your own authenticity than
by overthinking your authenticity. Yeah, or at least that can
be the case. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
So, so you know, we invoke this concept all the time,
We make judgments about it all the time. These judgments
are highly relevant to our lives, but often we'd be
I think if you press most people on what does
it really mean, they'd probably have to think about it
for a bit before they could come up with an answer.
So I'm interested in exploring this question. What is authenticity
(03:13):
and a person in a statement in a work of art.
It seems to have some overlap with honesty, but is
not the same thing as honesty. In fact, I think
quite famously, there are people in the real world, and
like fictional characters you can think of, who are known
not to be honest, but are still widely considered authentic
(03:36):
in some way, like tricksters and liars and rascals who
are not thought to be reliable truth tellers, yet they're
also not thought to be personally fake. You know a
lot of like lovable scoundrels in movies. Han Solo is
a character who like lies all the time, but he
is you would probably judge him as authentic.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, yeah, he's true to himself and that's one of
the things we admire about him, Like, you know, he
shoots from the hip.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
And what we might have a hard time coming up
with a clear and all cases appropriate definition of authenticity,
we definitely know what it is in opposition to its antonym, right,
the opposite of an authentic person is a person who
is fake. I think we all have this idea in
our mind of a fake person and we know them
(04:23):
when we meet them.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah. Yeah, but even this is this is the course
difficult to figure out as well, because there's so many
different versions of quote unquote fakeness in an individual, Like like,
what is the context is? Is it like a social situation?
I think that tends to be a situation where a
lack of authenticity is considered more of a red flag,
(04:48):
as opposed to say, like a customer service environment, where
you know, there's there's a lot of back and forth
there as well, and there is some nuance as well.
You can certainly come off too fake in a cut
customer service situation. But there is like a level of
like I am putting on the public face, I'm not
being one hundred percent myself because I am also representing
(05:09):
this company or whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, there are some jobs
that just require you to act a certain way regardless
of what you're feeling inside.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, it's also interesting to think about. Yeah, this whole
idea of like an authentic person versus a fake person,
like someone who lies all the time, Because if someone
lies all the time, then they tell the truth in
a manner of speaking. You know. It's it's kind of
like that old Knight Knights and Knaves logic puzzle that
was that was popularized by the two gates scene in
Jim Henson's Labyrinth, which Sarah ultimately solves via answerer laundering.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Right, So one of the gatekeepers always tells the truth
and the other always lies, and with that you can
like solve the logic puzzle.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Right because since they're both absolutees, you can you can
compare their answers and eventually get yourself to the absolute
truth of the scenario.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
So the dog at that gate that lies all the time,
you would probably not think of as a fake person
as someone who's inauthentic. The way one of the dogs
at the gates I think would actually be fake would
be if they like cultivated an outward facing persona as
a truth teller, but then secretly told lies sometimes, you know,
like if one of the dogs at the gates actually
(06:19):
broke their own rules about lying and telling the.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Truth, right, because then they would be inconsistent, which is
which is ultimately I guess what we're we're getting at
when it comes to, like the fear of someone in
a social scenario being fake is that they will they
will break a seeming track record, like they'll you know, oh,
they seemed like they were so authentic and they were
my friend, but then they weren't my friend. Whereas if
(06:42):
they were if they hated you the whole time, but
they perfectly kept up the front of being your friend
for say years or the course of your entire lifetime,
then they're essentially your friend, right, Yeah, Like if the
if the fake is perfect, it becomes the truth.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
That's a really good point, and I think I think
in reality that would correspond with some philosophical ideas of
authenticity we'll get into in just a second. So for
a direct definition of authenticity in persons, and of course
you know that term gets applied to other types of
things as well, and we'll discuss that in a minute.
But in persons, I was looking I was looking at
(07:19):
a paper by Erica R. Bailey and Aaron Levy that
I'm either going to discuss later in this episode or
probably possibly in part two of this series. But in
that paper, the authors define an authentic person as quote
someone whose behavior is genuine and reflects their true inner
qualities and feelings. And I think this definition does get
(07:41):
at a large part of what people mean with this word. Usually,
authenticity has something to do with your outward behavior accurately
reflecting your true inner feelings and your true inner character.
So in short, authenticity is when the outside matches the inside,
or when something is in fact what it seems to be,
(08:02):
or when someone is in fact who they claim to be.
But while that's I think pretty straightforward to understand, it
still leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, I mean, for starters, of course, we can never
truly know somebody's actual inner reality, their actual inner thoughts,
so it's all just us doing a mental model of
what this person's inner thoughts and actual intentions are. And
then it's yeah, it doesn't necessarily bear close scrutiny, right
(08:33):
because along these lines, a person with no filters or
composure whatsoever is the utmost authentic person you could hope
to meet. And generally speaking, these are qualities you come
to expect from say a cat or a dog. But
a great deal of striving to be a mature human
is knowing or learning how to manage the inner self
and and outer expression. And as we grow up, there's
(08:55):
a great deal to learn and develop along these lines.
And then we continue to learn and develop along these lines. Ideally,
you know, it's kind of a it's a never ending
journey of trying to figure out how to do all
this stuff and how to find that balance between how
you are inside and how you appear outside to not
necessarily everyone at once, but you know, different groups at
different times, how do you present yourself?
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean,
we think we value authenticity as a desirable trait in
people to be friends with, people to put our trust
in as leaders and so forth, But in reality, a
person who authentically outwardly enacts every feeling they have and
every thought they have. We would usually view that person
as lacking in some kind of self control. Yeah, so
(09:39):
I think there's a sort of contradiction there within our desires.
But anyway, so while this definition I just mentioned, like
the is what it seems to be or are who
they claim to be definition, I think does cover a
lot of the usage of authenticity in everyday life, especially
when applied to persons and to artifacts. Discussing authenticity is
(10:01):
complicated by the fact that this word is used to
refer to a lot of different ideas that are all
somewhat related but also somewhat different. So I think about
a secondary usage of authenticity when describing an activity or
a product that has like a known cultural history. Example
that comes to my mind is making a recipe for
(10:24):
spaghetti carbonara. According to a lot of people, there will
be an authentic way to make this dish. You got
to use eggs but not cream, et cetera, et cetera,
And there are many inauthentic ways to make spaghetti carbonara,
And to some people there is something actually shameful or
bad about making it. In one of the allegedly inauthentic ways,
(10:49):
and the same category of cultural authenticity or inauthenticity. I
think I really often see it applied to food, but
I think it also gets applied to things like clothing, dances, crafts,
and other art forms. And so this understanding of authenticity
has some overlap with the is what it claims to
(11:09):
be definition, but it also seems to rope in some
other things, like it relies on additional assumptions.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, it's interesting. The culinary example is really interesting to
ponder because the reality, of course, is that many examples
of the authentic in culinary tradition, these were at some
point the inauthentic new approach, you know, making use of
say new ingredients that there are a number of dishes
you can find throughout global cuisines that you think of
it as a particular form, but you're incorporating ingredients that
(11:39):
were brought in from some other location and just became
associated with that particular dish.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
That's right. So I think the idea of authenticity and
these sort of like cultural performances or you know, making
a recipe or something, what it suggests is you're doing
it the way it's always been done, but in and
basically no case has it ever actually always been done
any particular way.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, yeah, so, and maybe being a little pedantic there,
but yeah, the point, because the point still holts that
when we're talking about an authentic culinary experience, we mean
that it's firmly rooted in the tradition, and not a
tradition that's existed since the beginning of time, but has
maybe existed for centuries, maybe decades, maybe just a few years.
And it also is probably rooted in a particular culture.
(12:28):
But again, the paradox is that authenticity is rarely truly
set in stone. It just may have the feeling of such.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Yeah, I think that's right. And while we are sort
of questioning the idea of these various ideas of authenticity
and how much truth there is to them, really, at
the same time, like I feel it, like, you know,
if I see somebody like making spaghetti carbonaro with you know,
just like heavy cream and American cheese and mixing it
together with bacon, It's not like I think they're doing
(12:57):
something morally wrong, but I do reckon n there's some
kind of gap there. There is like a difference between
what they're doing and what a person might understand them
to claim to be doing. If that makes any sense,
Maybe that's too many orders removed. But do you understand
what I'm saying?
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Yeah? Yeah, though, yeah yeah. Like I say, it's hard
to really figure out where to land on this, because
I was thinking about classic cocktails as an example of this.
You know, in many cases these are not terribly old,
but that people do get very possessive of, like original
(13:35):
recipes and so forth. Think the mytie, for example, which
we did a whole episode of Invention on years back.
We interviewed Jeff Beach Bumbarry about the origins of the
Mytai is a pretty fun shat, but yeah, my tie
is a classic tropical drink that merely dates back to
nineteen forty four. And when we talk about an authentic
(13:58):
my ti, we're generally talking about this nineteen forty four
trader Vic recipe. And in this particular case, you might ask, well,
does inauthentic equal bad? Well, oftentimes, yes, there are plenty
of bad my ties out there that are inauthentic, But
there are also noted historic variations of the my tie
that are not bad drinks, And there are various contemporary
(14:21):
spins on the cocktail that range from good to great. So,
in a weird sense, something can at once be authentic
and inauthentic. You can have a great spin on the
my tie that is inauthentic when compared to the original recipe,
but can still be an authentic product of a particular
mixologists or bartender's skill in creativity.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I think that's a great point, and I think, yeah,
what you're getting at there with like, there's another type
of authenticity that can be achieved even if the recipe
is not the same as what it originally was. But
you're saying an authenticity emerges out of another mixologist's creativity
and skill in putting something together, and that taps into
(15:13):
this whole other nebula of meanings that people today attached
to the word authenticity, which has something to do with
like it is related to outward behavior, but is not
necessarily about that matching your matching your inner character, matching
your inner feelings. It's more about like behavior that is
an achievement of your greatest potential or like living your
(15:37):
best life. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Yeah, there is a way people talk about being an
authentic existence being one in which you do your best
you're like, become the best version of yourself that you
can be and do the best you can do.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Like it kind of a spin on that and just
our lingos. Occasionally go hear someone refer to as, say
a particular director or creator, and they'll be like, Oh,
this individual they're the real or this movie, this song,
this is the real deal. You know. It's kind of
you know, it doesn't necessarily connect to anything in particular,
but it does kind of at least imply that, like,
(16:11):
this is authentic. This is a work of someone's labor
and love and passion, Like someone put in the work here.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Another phrase that expresses this idea is the idea of
someone coming into themselves as an artist or as a
leader or as whatever, Like they are becoming the real
version of themselves by doing something great.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, Like what does that mean? Like they fulfilled the prophecy,
achieve their terrible purpose.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah. So yet another definition of authenticity that has been
very important is one that is particular to existentialist philosophy,
in which I don't claim to be an expert on
existentialist philosophy, so I hope I'm summarizing it well enough here,
But the way I understand it is that these branch
(16:58):
In this branch of philosophy, authentic has this specialized meaning
where an authentic existence is basically living without illusions, accepting
the extent to which you are free to control your actions,
and accepting that you are thus defined by your actions.
(17:18):
And so I think a big emphasis of the existentialist
understanding of authenticity is accepting that you are what you
choose to do, and there's not like a separate secret you.
That's the real you that is different than what you do.
What you do is what you are, and in order
to be authentic, you have to accept that what you
(17:39):
do is what you are.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Okay, So it's not you are not who you are,
not what you would like to do. You are not
what you are thinking about doing. You are not what
you regret not doing. You are what you actually do.
What you actually choose to do is who you are.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
That's the way I understand it, Okay, Fans of existentialism
complain at us an email if if you think I'm wrong,
if you Tuesday, yeah, and then of course there are
even more ideas of authenticity that we can continue to
explore in the rest of this series. But even coming
back to the baseline of the is what it seems
to be or the you are who you claim to
(18:17):
be definition, there are still a bunch of questions that
we can be left to wonder about, like why do
we place so much value on authenticity? And why is
authenticity especially important in some domains of life? What are
the criteria of authenticity in a person or in a
personal expression, What outward signs are we actually looking for
(18:40):
when we make judgments about it? Are we good at
making those judgments accurately? I think we're going to look
at a paper on that in just a minute. And also,
if we go with the definition above, do we truly
value authentic behavior as much as we think we do?
Speaker 2 (18:55):
All right, let's dive into it.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Well, so we're probably going to address authenticity from the
angle of psychology research in a number of different ways
in the series, but I wanted to start off by
discussing a paper that was one of the first things
that really interested me when I started researching this topic.
This is the paper I mentioned earlier by Erica R.
Bailey and Aaron Levy, published in the journal Psychological Science
(19:20):
in twenty twenty two, and the title of the paper
is are you for real? Perceptions of authenticity are systematically
biased and not accurate that I'll give away the conclusions,
but I think there's some interesting stuff to learn along
the way. So at the time this paper was published,
the authors were affiliated with Columbia University. I think since
(19:40):
then Bailey has taken a position at Berkeley. But this
paper begins by asking a simple question, how good are
we at making accurate judgments about who is authentic and
who is not? This paper, again is the source of
the phrasing of the definition I mentioned earlier that quote. Theoretically,
(20:01):
a person is authentic when their behavior is genuine. That is,
their behavior reflects their true inner qualities and feelings. So
if the way they behave outwardly reflects who they really
are and how they really feel, and most of us
behave as if we think we're good at making these
judgments about others. You know, we do this all the time.
(20:25):
You talk to somebody for five minutes, and after you
walk away from them, you are pretty much ready to
say Jimmy was so earnest and sincere I really like him,
or Jimmy was so fake I couldn't stand that guy.
It's almost embarrassing to look back on how quickly we
think we can make these judgments about people.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, I mean, of course it makes sense given why
these this capacity for judging exists. I mean it comes
down to basic survival scenarios in which it maybe doesn't
pay to have an open mind. You know, comes back
to the you know, the very worn out example of
is there a tiger in the weeds there or is
(21:05):
there not a tiger? Well, you know, sometimes you can't
keep an open mind about the scenario. You have to
make a judgment call and then make your survival choices accordingly.
And you know that it holds true in life and
death situations, but then it ends up applying to these
various social contexts that are not life and death.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
That's right. So you could look at it on one hand,
as there's a survival incentive for us to be suspicious
and to not give out trust too easily. You could
also look at it from the other hand and say,
maybe there are some scenarios where there is incentive to
trust more easily, maybe than we should because like, I
don't know trusting, Like you don't want to be hung
(21:45):
up being suspicious of people preventing you from cooperating to survive.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Right right, and ultimately like in action on any given
scenario is in action, like nothing is getting accomplished exactly.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
So in the background section of their paper, the author
talk about they review previous research confirming that we really
do make these judgments about authenticity, and we base a
lot on them, Like people who are perceived as authentic
have been found to be more well liked, more easily trusted,
and authenticity is apparently considered especially important when people select leaders.
(22:21):
If you're going to look to someone for leadership for
some reason, people want somebody who is authentic, somebody who
that where they think the outside matches the inside. Now, Rob,
you brought this up earlier, but when you think about it,
it really would be kind of difficult to make a
judgment about another person's authenticity, especially after just a limited
(22:44):
time amount of time knowing someone, Because to really judge
somebody's authenticity by this main definition we're talking about, you
would have to both know someone's true inner self questionable
whether that's even a definable concept, and then also observe
their behavior carefully enough to accurately evaluate how well it
(23:07):
matches their inner self, and both of those are non trivial.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Yeah, it's it's interesting because you know, especially when you
consider that a lot of the time when we're making
these knee jerk judgment calls, they're very simplistic, right when
we think we are understanding a person's inner self, we're like, oh,
they seem nice on the outside, but inside a slippery snake,
you know, And in all likelihood it's they're not just
(23:32):
complete evil on the inside. There. There's a fair amount
of complexity there. There are reasons why they, you know,
might be behaving this way or the other and so forth.
You know, it's most people's uh, inner self that we
cannot see again, to be clear, is going to be
rather complex with a lot of different moving parts.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
There, absolutely right. And you know, I think a lot
of the inauthenticity that we encounter day to day is
situation and based on temporary roles rather than based on
people's like permanent personality traits. For example, probably one of
the most common ways you encounter clear inauthenticity is when
a salesperson is being really nice to you. You know,
(24:15):
does this salesperson really love me or do they really
want me to buy something from them? I mean, everybody
knows what's going on there, but it's based on like
a situation and a role more so than like that
person's inherent personality that they're just always a fake snake.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Right, Like it's yeah, just as it's it's probably it's
probably not the case that they're a fake snake that's
just one hundredercent pretending to like you and be cool
about everything. It's like the opposite is also unlikely that
this is one hundred percent the real person here that
they are they are really this into the product. It's
it's probably a balance, like maybe they are really into
(24:51):
the product, but maybe they also have had a very
long day and they are having to sort of act
a little bit uh to to get through this encounter,
and it's not necessarily a reflection on you, the customer exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
So the authors of this paper suggest that in lots
of cases, making judgments about the authenticity of others is
what they call quote a prohibitively difficult social judgment to make.
So their hypothesis is that we are not actually as
great as we think we are at assessing Jimmy's authenticity
after talking to him for five minutes, or maybe even
(25:24):
after working with him on a project for six weeks.
As we will see in some of these upcoming experiments,
our authenticity judgments of others they hypothesize will exhibit a
range of distorting biases, most of which will be related
to the personality of the rater rather than the person
(25:44):
being rated on a scale of authenticity. In other words,
authenticity is largely in the eye of the beholder. So
this paper includes three different experimental studies. The first study
is just a survey on the Internet of lay people
to try to establish two things that were assumed but
they wanted to confirm them experimentally. Number one is people
(26:04):
do believe they can tell who is authentic and who
is not. And number two is people think that authenticity
is a very important trait in others it matters a lot,
and their surveys did indeed conclude that that is what
people think. The second study, this was a series of
(26:30):
surveys to test how good we are at judging authenticity
the authenticity of others. Now you can imagine the methodological
problems presented here. How do you objectively characterize a person's
true inner self and feelings, and how do you measure
the extent to which their external actions reflect that inner self.
(26:50):
You can't really do that, that's not possible. But the
authors come up with what I think is a very
clever proxy to look at. So what they do is
they compare other assessments to self assessments. So how does
that work? So the test subjects in this study this
part of the paper were incoming NBA students who were
(27:11):
randomly assigned to classroom work groups of four to six
students each, and these participants would work together continuously throughout
the semester of this school year and would complete a
number of surveys over the course of six weeks at
different time intervals, including surveys about themselves, answering questions about
(27:32):
their own authenticity and personality, and a multiple time points
rating the authenticity and personality of other members of their group,
people they had been working with, but also people who
they didn't know before. So they're randomly assigned in these
groups and they would get to know them over the
course of the study. And so I think this method
makes a lot of sense. It would be hard, maybe
(27:53):
even impossible to test and quantify a person's true self,
but you can compare what other people say about you
based on your actions to what you say about yourself
in private, and that comparison can tell us a good bit. Now,
the authors do explore some complications here that extend from
using self rated authenticity as a standard. For example, they
(28:14):
point out that previous studies have found that people this
was interesting. They perceive their own positive actions as authentic
to themselves relative to their own negative actions, which are
less authentic to themselves. You know, that's how we are.
And self ratings of authenticity also appear to be influenced
(28:36):
by mood, So maybe if you are feeling in a
good mood, you will also rate yourself as a more
authentic person. So there are complications here, But understanding these limitations,
I still think self ratings seem like a good point
of comparison to look at when to compare with the
ratings by others. So survey questions asking people about their
(28:57):
own authenticity would include agreeing or disagreeing to a very
on like a number scale, with items like I am
true to myself in most situations or I am more
sincere in my interactions than strategic. This was to examine
authenticity as a stable trait, meaning like a sort of
semi permanent trait of a personality. But then they also
(29:19):
measured what is called state authenticity, which can change over
time and is more of a feeling in the moment,
with items like I feel fake or I feel like
I am pretending to be something I am not. They
also asked people to compare their actions to their inner
selves with statements like there have been times where when
(29:39):
I felt like I couldn't be myself with my classmates.
And then participants were also asked to judge whether others
knew who they really were or not. And then they
also took a personality test based on the Big five model.
So what were the findings here, Well, the researchers found
that self rated trait authenticity was an not predictive of
(30:01):
other rated trait authenticity, So in judging authenticity, what people
said about themselves had no relationship on average to what
other people said about them same thing for state authenticity.
State Remember was I feel fake versus the permanent trade
of I am fake? Again, in this case, no relationship
(30:22):
at all emerged between self ratings and other ratings. Same
for the questions about acting authentically. No pattern of correlation
between self ratings and other ratings. Overall, there was no
significant relationship between self and other rated authenticity, which is
pretty strange given how confident we are that we that
(30:43):
we know whether others are being authentic or not.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
So all that mental energy you may put into deciding
whether you're gonna wear that T shirt today, it may
be just completely useless, because people are going to decide
you were being authentic or inauthentic via that choice in
a way that has nothing to do with how you're
feeling about it.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Yeah, and this doesn't rule out that there will be
individual cases where you accurately perceive that somebody is being
fake with you. I mean, obviously we do probably make
correct judgments about that sometime. But what this study found is,
at least within this setting where it's like students working
together on classroom projects, over the course of six weeks,
no pattern emerged at all. On average people could not tell.
(31:28):
One observation that struck me as interesting was that the
author is right quote the majority of the variance in
authenticity ratings had to do with differences between the ones
making the ratings and across unique relationships, rather than differences
in the target. So to explain that at least within
(31:48):
this experiment when you perceive someone else as fake that
apparently does not have a lot to say about that
person individually and tends to say more about you as
the perceiver or the unique relationship between you and that
person you're perceiving. So there were there weren't like individuals
(32:10):
in these experiments who were repeatedly getting rated as as
fake or as real by everybody around them. Instead the real,
Like the patterns seem to emerge in the people doing
the ratings of others or in individual one on one
relationships between people.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Okay, so yeah, so you can be very skewed and
how you're going to interpret an individual moving forward, Like
what's the name of our is it Jeff? Is Jeff?
Are hypothetical?
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (32:37):
I think it was Jimmy today Jimmy.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Okay. So, like if your first exposure to Jimmy in
the workplace is him like actually blatantly stealing somebody's lunch
and eating it in the great room, and then you
have actual personal interactions with him, you might be inclined
to think, oh, this this Jimmy's a snake. He's he's
he's stealing people's lunches and being sneaky. He must he
must be inauthentic with me as well. But of course,
(33:01):
if we slow that down and we think about it,
it's entire it's entirely possible for someone to have no
qualms about stealing people's lunches and also like be honest
and well meeting in their personal interaction with you. I mean,
this is not an impossibility in human behavior and personal judgment. Right.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
So, whereas you might think that if if one person
perceives Jimmy as fake, then everybody else will perceive Jimmy
as fake as well, but that's not the case, right right, Yeah, Instead,
it's more likely that I am perceiving lots of people
around me as fake, or that there's something special about
my relationship with Jimmy that makes me think he's fake.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Or I guess to put a positive spin on it,
you know, it's like you have, you know, and I
think we probably have all had these situations where we
have a certain preconceived notion about somebody and then we
have a really positive interaction with them, and that turns
things around, and we may be able to reflect on
that later and be like, well, I used to and
it may boil down to I used to think this
person was in authentic, and then I got to know
(34:02):
them a little bit, or then I worked with them
a little better or so forth, you know, and you know,
in those cases we can actually kind of see how
this can shift.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Oh, that's very interesting. I want to come back and
discuss the variable of familiarity at the end. Here a
couple more things Before that, some interesting biases emerged in
the data. I'm not going to go into everything, but
just a couple of things that stood out to me.
One thing is people were likely to rate other participants
as more authentic than they rated themselves. So that's kind
(34:35):
of interesting. It compares to a lot of you know,
on a lot of measures, people kind of have a
high opinion of themselves. People on average rate themselves as
more honest, more altruistic, whatever than other people. But on authenticity,
at least in this experiment, that's not the case. People
on average rated other people as more authentic than themselves,
so they thought that they were a little bit faker
(34:57):
than everybody else.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
In a way that this could be it could be
kind of a backhanded conflict because it might not be
a situation of thinking that everyone around you has a
complex in our life, but kind of dismissing people as
being like just the sum of their actions, like not
even thinking about the fact that there is you know,
a lot of a lot of inner thought going on
behind the scenes with a particular individual. It's like, Oh,
(35:22):
I just passed that person in the hallway. Yeah, yeah,
I guess they're one hundred percent what I see that
they are fine, Yeah, no questions of authenticity at all.
But it could be kind of a situation where yeah,
you're just because you don't think about them, you take
them completely for granted, and you think that this one
thing you see them do is all they are.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
I think that's quite possible. Another thing that was interesting here,
we were talking about the idea of authenticity being in
the eye of the beholder, and that it like ratings
of the authenticity of others seem to say more about
the rater than the rate. Apparently people rated themselves. People
who rated themselves as more authentic also rated others as
(35:58):
more authentic, So there was just sort of a direct
correlation there, like I think I'm more authentic, thus I
think other people are more authentic.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
M okay.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
And in this particular study, it found there were no
individual demographic facts or personality traits that resulted in subjects
being significantly rated as more or less authentic. Nothing really
about people that seemed to contribute there. A third study
attempted to replicate study two with a larger sample size,
but with a few changes, this time with a mix
(36:29):
of virtual and in person interactions instead of just purely
in person meetings, and this study broadly found the same
thing as study number two. Also, study three found the
same biases as study two. However, in this study they
did find a couple of personality and demographic factors that
correlated with other ratings of authenticity. Here, people were more
(36:52):
likely to be rated as authentic if they were high
in the Big five personality trait known as agreeableness, and
the big five personality traits are typically openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness,
and neuroticism. Agreeableness is a general rating of pro social
(37:12):
tendencies including trust, kindness, generosity, things like that. So people
who were higher in trade agreeableness were thought to be
more authentic, and also, interestingly, people who were a little
bit older were rated as more authentic. But overall, the
authors concluded quote we found no evidence that people can
accurately identify who is authentic. So that's the top line there.
(37:36):
We're going around making judgments about authenticity of other people
all the time. Maybe sometimes these judgments are correct, but
within the confines of this study with students working together
in classrooms, there was no correlation. On average. On average,
people were no better than chance at judging the authenticity
of others. Oh wow, now I want to come back
(37:57):
to the thing you were mentioning a minute ago about
people getting to know each other, rob because this was
one of the most interesting things that jumped out at
me from the discussion section of this paper. So the
author's write quote. A surprising finding in our data was
that familiarity did not increase the accuracy of perceived authenticity. Rather,
(38:21):
the greater the familiarity between a raider and their target,
the less accurate their authenticity ratings became. Specifically, as familiarity increased,
other rated authenticity grew increasingly more positive relative to the
target's self rated authenticity. So does that make sense, Like,
as you get to know somebody better, they're over there
(38:43):
still sitting there saying like, yeah, sometimes I feel fake.
I can't I feel like I can't be myself around people.
The face I show the world is not who I
really am and you are over time as you get
to know them better, saying more and more like so authentic, so.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Themselves interesting thing. That's a fascinating one though, to try
and square away, like what is because it's it's it
would seem to say something different about each individual in
this relationship, you know.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Yeah, I mean there could be a number of ways
to explain that. I kind of wonder, and I want
to be clear, I don't have special insight here. I'm
just kind of wondering. I wonder if that could be
just a function of liking that, Like if we think
authenticity is a desirable trait, that like good people who
are worthy of being liked or are authentic. As you
grow to like somebody more because you know them better,
(39:34):
you just naturally like it drags up all of their
positively associated traits in your estimation. And that would include authenticity,
which is actually something you have no insight into.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Yeah, yeah, and I guess you could. It could be
a certain amount of confirmation bias there too, Right, It's like, Okay,
you've reached a point where you like this person, and
therefore you encounter these various examples that you were just
gonna you're gonna hold up as oh, look, they're being
authentic there, And maybe you're gonna be more forgiving of
the moments that could be interpreted as as inauthentic if
(40:06):
you had a different mood or a different demeanor concerning
this person, you know, because on the other hand, someone
that you have already sort of prejudged as inauthentic and
maybe you don't like them, something about them rubs you
the wrong way. You might be on sort of hyper alert, like,
all right, what's Jimmy doing today? That's just fake his heck, well,
what's he wearing? Ah, I can't believe you thought he
(40:28):
could pull that off.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
That seems highly plausible to me. Yeah, but let's see.
Should we call part one of our study of authenticity
there and come back and look at it some more
next time, maybe with explorations of authenticity and art and
music and film.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Yeah, yeah, it'll well, it'll continue to be sort of
a quagmire though, trying to figure out what is authentic,
what isn't authentic, what is fake, and so forth. So, yeah,
we'll get into some discussions of music and art and
film and so forth, so we'll pick up with all
that on Thursday. Just a reminder to everybody that's Stuff
(41:04):
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short form
episode on Wednesdays, listener mail on Mondays, and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Huge thanks to our guest producer today, Max Williams. Thanks
for stepping in. Max's a big help. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot COMTCT.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
The West
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Mayant, and I am Joe McCormick.
And today we're going to be kicking off a series
on a concept that I have been thinking about a
lot lately. That is the idea of authenticity. I've been
thinking about doing an episode on this sort of off
and on for I think several years now. Authenticity is
(00:36):
really interesting to me because it is one of those
concepts that is extremely important. It's highly relevant to our lives.
We probably think about it every single day, and at
the same time, it is sort of vaguely defined. We
don't often stop to think about what it really means,
or to analyze how we evaluated, or what our criteria
(00:58):
of authenticity are and so forth. And I think that's
kind of a shame, because our judgments about personal authenticity
play into all kinds of things, into how we relate
to friends, acquaintances, and co workers, whether we trust political candidates,
how we make business decisions, how we understand and evaluate
(01:18):
music and poetry and other works of art and entertainment.
It's threaded all through our lives.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It even comes down to basic decisions that you wouldn't
even think of as getting into the core of authenticity.
I think everybody has at least one I don't know,
T shirt or other kind of garment and their wardrobe,
and you may find yourself wondering some days, is this
the day I wear this? Can I pull this off?
And and to some extent, you may be wondering about authenticity,
(01:45):
like can I wear this and be authentic? Or are
people going to see through me and they're going to
question whether I actually support that band, or whether whether
this is the appropriate color scheme for me? And so forth?
Speaker 3 (01:59):
Is this T shirt really me today?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Exactly? Yeah? And as we'll get into like that answer
may change day to day, Like you know, we're we're
not necessarily the same person day to day, and what
is authentic one day may not be authentic the next.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Right before we started recording, I was thinking about how
authenticity is even often prescribed as a remedy for when
people are having difficulty with social relations or social interactions,
like when somebody's like, I'm having trouble making friends or
I'm having trouble with dating. What am I doing wrong?
What's the first thing people usually say to them, just
(02:34):
be yourself. That is advice there. Essentially that means be authentic.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Though it's a paradox, right, because at the same time,
there's no other way to hijack your own authenticity than
by overthinking your authenticity. Yeah, or at least that can
be the case. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
So, so you know, we invoke this concept all the time,
We make judgments about it all the time. These judgments
are highly relevant to our lives, but often we'd be
I think if you press most people on what does
it really mean, they'd probably have to think about it
for a bit before they could come up with an answer.
So I'm interested in exploring this question. What is authenticity
(03:13):
and a person in a statement in a work of art.
It seems to have some overlap with honesty, but is
not the same thing as honesty. In fact, I think
quite famously, there are people in the real world, and
like fictional characters you can think of, who are known
not to be honest, but are still widely considered authentic
(03:36):
in some way, like tricksters and liars and rascals who
are not thought to be reliable truth tellers, yet they're
also not thought to be personally fake. You know a
lot of like lovable scoundrels in movies. Han Solo is
a character who like lies all the time, but he
is you would probably judge him as authentic.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, yeah, he's true to himself and that's one of
the things we admire about him, Like, you know, he
shoots from the hip.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
And what we might have a hard time coming up
with a clear and all cases appropriate definition of authenticity,
we definitely know what it is in opposition to its antonym, right,
the opposite of an authentic person is a person who
is fake. I think we all have this idea in
our mind of a fake person and we know them
(04:23):
when we meet them.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah. Yeah, but even this is this is the course
difficult to figure out as well, because there's so many
different versions of quote unquote fakeness in an individual, Like like,
what is the context is? Is it like a social situation?
I think that tends to be a situation where a
lack of authenticity is considered more of a red flag,
(04:48):
as opposed to say, like a customer service environment, where
you know, there's there's a lot of back and forth
there as well, and there is some nuance as well.
You can certainly come off too fake in a cut
customer service situation. But there is like a level of
like I am putting on the public face, I'm not
being one hundred percent myself because I am also representing
(05:09):
this company or whatever.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, there are some jobs
that just require you to act a certain way regardless
of what you're feeling inside.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, it's also interesting to think about. Yeah, this whole
idea of like an authentic person versus a fake person,
like someone who lies all the time, Because if someone
lies all the time, then they tell the truth in
a manner of speaking. You know. It's it's kind of
like that old Knight Knights and Knaves logic puzzle that
was that was popularized by the two gates scene in
Jim Henson's Labyrinth, which Sarah ultimately solves via answerer laundering.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Right, So one of the gatekeepers always tells the truth
and the other always lies, and with that you can
like solve the logic puzzle.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
Right because since they're both absolutees, you can you can
compare their answers and eventually get yourself to the absolute
truth of the scenario.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
So the dog at that gate that lies all the time,
you would probably not think of as a fake person
as someone who's inauthentic. The way one of the dogs
at the gates I think would actually be fake would
be if they like cultivated an outward facing persona as
a truth teller, but then secretly told lies sometimes, you know,
like if one of the dogs at the gates actually
(06:19):
broke their own rules about lying and telling the.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Truth, right, because then they would be inconsistent, which is
which is ultimately I guess what we're we're getting at
when it comes to, like the fear of someone in
a social scenario being fake is that they will they
will break a seeming track record, like they'll you know, oh,
they seemed like they were so authentic and they were
my friend, but then they weren't my friend. Whereas if
(06:42):
they were if they hated you the whole time, but
they perfectly kept up the front of being your friend
for say years or the course of your entire lifetime,
then they're essentially your friend, right, Yeah, Like if the
if the fake is perfect, it becomes the truth.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
That's a really good point, and I think I think
in reality that would correspond with some philosophical ideas of
authenticity we'll get into in just a second. So for
a direct definition of authenticity in persons, and of course
you know that term gets applied to other types of
things as well, and we'll discuss that in a minute.
But in persons, I was looking I was looking at
(07:19):
a paper by Erica R. Bailey and Aaron Levy that
I'm either going to discuss later in this episode or
probably possibly in part two of this series. But in
that paper, the authors define an authentic person as quote
someone whose behavior is genuine and reflects their true inner
qualities and feelings. And I think this definition does get
(07:41):
at a large part of what people mean with this word. Usually,
authenticity has something to do with your outward behavior accurately
reflecting your true inner feelings and your true inner character.
So in short, authenticity is when the outside matches the inside,
or when something is in fact what it seems to be,
(08:02):
or when someone is in fact who they claim to be.
But while that's I think pretty straightforward to understand, it
still leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Yeah, I mean, for starters, of course, we can never
truly know somebody's actual inner reality, their actual inner thoughts,
so it's all just us doing a mental model of
what this person's inner thoughts and actual intentions are. And
then it's yeah, it doesn't necessarily bear close scrutiny, right
(08:33):
because along these lines, a person with no filters or
composure whatsoever is the utmost authentic person you could hope
to meet. And generally speaking, these are qualities you come
to expect from say a cat or a dog. But
a great deal of striving to be a mature human
is knowing or learning how to manage the inner self
and and outer expression. And as we grow up, there's
(08:55):
a great deal to learn and develop along these lines.
And then we continue to learn and develop along these lines. Ideally,
you know, it's kind of a it's a never ending
journey of trying to figure out how to do all
this stuff and how to find that balance between how
you are inside and how you appear outside to not
necessarily everyone at once, but you know, different groups at
different times, how do you present yourself?
Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean,
we think we value authenticity as a desirable trait in
people to be friends with, people to put our trust
in as leaders and so forth, But in reality, a
person who authentically outwardly enacts every feeling they have and
every thought they have. We would usually view that person
as lacking in some kind of self control. Yeah, so
(09:39):
I think there's a sort of contradiction there within our desires.
But anyway, so while this definition I just mentioned, like
the is what it seems to be or are who
they claim to be definition, I think does cover a
lot of the usage of authenticity in everyday life, especially
when applied to persons and to artifacts. Discussing authenticity is
(10:01):
complicated by the fact that this word is used to
refer to a lot of different ideas that are all
somewhat related but also somewhat different. So I think about
a secondary usage of authenticity when describing an activity or
a product that has like a known cultural history. Example
that comes to my mind is making a recipe for
(10:24):
spaghetti carbonara. According to a lot of people, there will
be an authentic way to make this dish. You got
to use eggs but not cream, et cetera, et cetera,
And there are many inauthentic ways to make spaghetti carbonara,
And to some people there is something actually shameful or
bad about making it. In one of the allegedly inauthentic ways,
(10:49):
and the same category of cultural authenticity or inauthenticity. I
think I really often see it applied to food, but
I think it also gets applied to things like clothing, dances, crafts,
and other art forms. And so this understanding of authenticity
has some overlap with the is what it claims to
(11:09):
be definition, but it also seems to rope in some
other things, like it relies on additional assumptions.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Yeah, it's interesting. The culinary example is really interesting to
ponder because the reality, of course, is that many examples
of the authentic in culinary tradition, these were at some
point the inauthentic new approach, you know, making use of
say new ingredients that there are a number of dishes
you can find throughout global cuisines that you think of
it as a particular form, but you're incorporating ingredients that
(11:39):
were brought in from some other location and just became
associated with that particular dish.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
That's right. So I think the idea of authenticity and
these sort of like cultural performances or you know, making
a recipe or something, what it suggests is you're doing
it the way it's always been done, but in and
basically no case has it ever actually always been done
any particular way.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, yeah, so, and maybe being a little pedantic there,
but yeah, the point, because the point still holts that
when we're talking about an authentic culinary experience, we mean
that it's firmly rooted in the tradition, and not a
tradition that's existed since the beginning of time, but has
maybe existed for centuries, maybe decades, maybe just a few years.
And it also is probably rooted in a particular culture.
(12:28):
But again, the paradox is that authenticity is rarely truly
set in stone. It just may have the feeling of such.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
Yeah, I think that's right. And while we are sort
of questioning the idea of these various ideas of authenticity
and how much truth there is to them, really, at
the same time, like I feel it, like, you know,
if I see somebody like making spaghetti carbonaro with you know,
just like heavy cream and American cheese and mixing it
together with bacon, It's not like I think they're doing
(12:57):
something morally wrong, but I do reckon n there's some
kind of gap there. There is like a difference between
what they're doing and what a person might understand them
to claim to be doing. If that makes any sense,
Maybe that's too many orders removed. But do you understand
what I'm saying?
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Yeah? Yeah, though, yeah yeah. Like I say, it's hard
to really figure out where to land on this, because
I was thinking about classic cocktails as an example of this.
You know, in many cases these are not terribly old,
but that people do get very possessive of, like original
(13:35):
recipes and so forth. Think the mytie, for example, which
we did a whole episode of Invention on years back.
We interviewed Jeff Beach Bumbarry about the origins of the
Mytai is a pretty fun shat, but yeah, my tie
is a classic tropical drink that merely dates back to
nineteen forty four. And when we talk about an authentic
(13:58):
my ti, we're generally talking about this nineteen forty four
trader Vic recipe. And in this particular case, you might ask, well,
does inauthentic equal bad? Well, oftentimes, yes, there are plenty
of bad my ties out there that are inauthentic, But
there are also noted historic variations of the my tie
that are not bad drinks, And there are various contemporary
(14:21):
spins on the cocktail that range from good to great. So,
in a weird sense, something can at once be authentic
and inauthentic. You can have a great spin on the
my tie that is inauthentic when compared to the original recipe,
but can still be an authentic product of a particular
mixologists or bartender's skill in creativity.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
I think that's a great point, and I think, yeah,
what you're getting at there with like, there's another type
of authenticity that can be achieved even if the recipe
is not the same as what it originally was. But
you're saying an authenticity emerges out of another mixologist's creativity
and skill in putting something together, and that taps into
(15:13):
this whole other nebula of meanings that people today attached
to the word authenticity, which has something to do with
like it is related to outward behavior, but is not
necessarily about that matching your matching your inner character, matching
your inner feelings. It's more about like behavior that is
an achievement of your greatest potential or like living your
(15:37):
best life. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Yeah, there is a way people talk about being an
authentic existence being one in which you do your best
you're like, become the best version of yourself that you
can be and do the best you can do.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Like it kind of a spin on that and just
our lingos. Occasionally go hear someone refer to as, say
a particular director or creator, and they'll be like, Oh,
this individual they're the real or this movie, this song,
this is the real deal. You know. It's kind of
you know, it doesn't necessarily connect to anything in particular,
but it does kind of at least imply that, like,
(16:11):
this is authentic. This is a work of someone's labor
and love and passion, Like someone put in the work here.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Another phrase that expresses this idea is the idea of
someone coming into themselves as an artist or as a
leader or as whatever, Like they are becoming the real
version of themselves by doing something great.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, Like what does that mean? Like they fulfilled the prophecy,
achieve their terrible purpose.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah. So yet another definition of authenticity that has been
very important is one that is particular to existentialist philosophy,
in which I don't claim to be an expert on
existentialist philosophy, so I hope I'm summarizing it well enough here,
But the way I understand it is that these branch
(16:58):
In this branch of philosophy, authentic has this specialized meaning
where an authentic existence is basically living without illusions, accepting
the extent to which you are free to control your actions,
and accepting that you are thus defined by your actions.
(17:18):
And so I think a big emphasis of the existentialist
understanding of authenticity is accepting that you are what you
choose to do, and there's not like a separate secret you.
That's the real you that is different than what you do.
What you do is what you are, and in order
to be authentic, you have to accept that what you
(17:39):
do is what you are.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
Okay, So it's not you are not who you are,
not what you would like to do. You are not
what you are thinking about doing. You are not what
you regret not doing. You are what you actually do.
What you actually choose to do is who you are.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
That's the way I understand it, Okay, Fans of existentialism
complain at us an email if if you think I'm wrong,
if you Tuesday, yeah, and then of course there are
even more ideas of authenticity that we can continue to
explore in the rest of this series. But even coming
back to the baseline of the is what it seems
to be or the you are who you claim to
(18:17):
be definition, there are still a bunch of questions that
we can be left to wonder about, like why do
we place so much value on authenticity? And why is
authenticity especially important in some domains of life? What are
the criteria of authenticity in a person or in a
personal expression, What outward signs are we actually looking for
(18:40):
when we make judgments about it? Are we good at
making those judgments accurately? I think we're going to look
at a paper on that in just a minute. And also,
if we go with the definition above, do we truly
value authentic behavior as much as we think we do?
Speaker 2 (18:55):
All right, let's dive into it.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Well, so we're probably going to address authenticity from the
angle of psychology research in a number of different ways
in the series, but I wanted to start off by
discussing a paper that was one of the first things
that really interested me when I started researching this topic.
This is the paper I mentioned earlier by Erica R.
Bailey and Aaron Levy, published in the journal Psychological Science
(19:20):
in twenty twenty two, and the title of the paper
is are you for real? Perceptions of authenticity are systematically
biased and not accurate that I'll give away the conclusions,
but I think there's some interesting stuff to learn along
the way. So at the time this paper was published,
the authors were affiliated with Columbia University. I think since
(19:40):
then Bailey has taken a position at Berkeley. But this
paper begins by asking a simple question, how good are
we at making accurate judgments about who is authentic and
who is not? This paper, again is the source of
the phrasing of the definition I mentioned earlier that quote. Theoretically,
(20:01):
a person is authentic when their behavior is genuine. That is,
their behavior reflects their true inner qualities and feelings. So
if the way they behave outwardly reflects who they really
are and how they really feel, and most of us
behave as if we think we're good at making these
judgments about others. You know, we do this all the time.
(20:25):
You talk to somebody for five minutes, and after you
walk away from them, you are pretty much ready to
say Jimmy was so earnest and sincere I really like him,
or Jimmy was so fake I couldn't stand that guy.
It's almost embarrassing to look back on how quickly we
think we can make these judgments about people.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, I mean, of course it makes sense given why
these this capacity for judging exists. I mean it comes
down to basic survival scenarios in which it maybe doesn't
pay to have an open mind. You know, comes back
to the you know, the very worn out example of
is there a tiger in the weeds there or is
(21:05):
there not a tiger? Well, you know, sometimes you can't
keep an open mind about the scenario. You have to
make a judgment call and then make your survival choices accordingly.
And you know that it holds true in life and
death situations, but then it ends up applying to these
various social contexts that are not life and death.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
That's right. So you could look at it on one hand,
as there's a survival incentive for us to be suspicious
and to not give out trust too easily. You could
also look at it from the other hand and say,
maybe there are some scenarios where there is incentive to
trust more easily, maybe than we should because like, I
don't know trusting, Like you don't want to be hung
(21:45):
up being suspicious of people preventing you from cooperating to survive.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Right right, and ultimately like in action on any given
scenario is in action, like nothing is getting accomplished exactly.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
So in the background section of their paper, the author
talk about they review previous research confirming that we really
do make these judgments about authenticity, and we base a
lot on them, Like people who are perceived as authentic
have been found to be more well liked, more easily trusted,
and authenticity is apparently considered especially important when people select leaders.
(22:21):
If you're going to look to someone for leadership for
some reason, people want somebody who is authentic, somebody who
that where they think the outside matches the inside. Now, Rob,
you brought this up earlier, but when you think about it,
it really would be kind of difficult to make a
judgment about another person's authenticity, especially after just a limited
(22:44):
time amount of time knowing someone, Because to really judge
somebody's authenticity by this main definition we're talking about, you
would have to both know someone's true inner self questionable
whether that's even a definable concept, and then also observe
their behavior carefully enough to accurately evaluate how well it
(23:07):
matches their inner self, and both of those are non trivial.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Yeah, it's it's interesting because you know, especially when you
consider that a lot of the time when we're making
these knee jerk judgment calls, they're very simplistic, right when
we think we are understanding a person's inner self, we're like, oh,
they seem nice on the outside, but inside a slippery snake,
you know, And in all likelihood it's they're not just
(23:32):
complete evil on the inside. There. There's a fair amount
of complexity there. There are reasons why they, you know,
might be behaving this way or the other and so forth.
You know, it's most people's uh, inner self that we
cannot see again, to be clear, is going to be
rather complex with a lot of different moving parts.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
There, absolutely right. And you know, I think a lot
of the inauthenticity that we encounter day to day is
situation and based on temporary roles rather than based on
people's like permanent personality traits. For example, probably one of
the most common ways you encounter clear inauthenticity is when
a salesperson is being really nice to you. You know,
(24:15):
does this salesperson really love me or do they really
want me to buy something from them? I mean, everybody
knows what's going on there, but it's based on like
a situation and a role more so than like that
person's inherent personality that they're just always a fake snake.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Right, Like it's yeah, just as it's it's probably it's
probably not the case that they're a fake snake that's
just one hundredercent pretending to like you and be cool
about everything. It's like the opposite is also unlikely that
this is one hundred percent the real person here that
they are they are really this into the product. It's
it's probably a balance, like maybe they are really into
(24:51):
the product, but maybe they also have had a very
long day and they are having to sort of act
a little bit uh to to get through this encounter,
and it's not necessarily a reflection on you, the customer exactly.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
So the authors of this paper suggest that in lots
of cases, making judgments about the authenticity of others is
what they call quote a prohibitively difficult social judgment to make.
So their hypothesis is that we are not actually as
great as we think we are at assessing Jimmy's authenticity
after talking to him for five minutes, or maybe even
(25:24):
after working with him on a project for six weeks.
As we will see in some of these upcoming experiments,
our authenticity judgments of others they hypothesize will exhibit a
range of distorting biases, most of which will be related
to the personality of the rater rather than the person
(25:44):
being rated on a scale of authenticity. In other words,
authenticity is largely in the eye of the beholder. So
this paper includes three different experimental studies. The first study
is just a survey on the Internet of lay people
to try to establish two things that were assumed but
they wanted to confirm them experimentally. Number one is people
(26:04):
do believe they can tell who is authentic and who
is not. And number two is people think that authenticity
is a very important trait in others it matters a lot,
and their surveys did indeed conclude that that is what
people think. The second study, this was a series of
(26:30):
surveys to test how good we are at judging authenticity
the authenticity of others. Now you can imagine the methodological
problems presented here. How do you objectively characterize a person's
true inner self and feelings, and how do you measure
the extent to which their external actions reflect that inner self.
(26:50):
You can't really do that, that's not possible. But the
authors come up with what I think is a very
clever proxy to look at. So what they do is
they compare other assessments to self assessments. So how does
that work? So the test subjects in this study this
part of the paper were incoming NBA students who were
(27:11):
randomly assigned to classroom work groups of four to six
students each, and these participants would work together continuously throughout
the semester of this school year and would complete a
number of surveys over the course of six weeks at
different time intervals, including surveys about themselves, answering questions about
(27:32):
their own authenticity and personality, and a multiple time points
rating the authenticity and personality of other members of their group,
people they had been working with, but also people who
they didn't know before. So they're randomly assigned in these
groups and they would get to know them over the
course of the study. And so I think this method
makes a lot of sense. It would be hard, maybe
(27:53):
even impossible to test and quantify a person's true self,
but you can compare what other people say about you
based on your actions to what you say about yourself
in private, and that comparison can tell us a good bit. Now,
the authors do explore some complications here that extend from
using self rated authenticity as a standard. For example, they
(28:14):
point out that previous studies have found that people this
was interesting. They perceive their own positive actions as authentic
to themselves relative to their own negative actions, which are
less authentic to themselves. You know, that's how we are.
And self ratings of authenticity also appear to be influenced
(28:36):
by mood, So maybe if you are feeling in a
good mood, you will also rate yourself as a more
authentic person. So there are complications here, But understanding these limitations,
I still think self ratings seem like a good point
of comparison to look at when to compare with the
ratings by others. So survey questions asking people about their
(28:57):
own authenticity would include agreeing or disagreeing to a very
on like a number scale, with items like I am
true to myself in most situations or I am more
sincere in my interactions than strategic. This was to examine
authenticity as a stable trait, meaning like a sort of
semi permanent trait of a personality. But then they also
(29:19):
measured what is called state authenticity, which can change over
time and is more of a feeling in the moment,
with items like I feel fake or I feel like
I am pretending to be something I am not. They
also asked people to compare their actions to their inner
selves with statements like there have been times where when
(29:39):
I felt like I couldn't be myself with my classmates.
And then participants were also asked to judge whether others
knew who they really were or not. And then they
also took a personality test based on the Big five model.
So what were the findings here, Well, the researchers found
that self rated trait authenticity was an not predictive of
(30:01):
other rated trait authenticity, So in judging authenticity, what people
said about themselves had no relationship on average to what
other people said about them same thing for state authenticity.
State Remember was I feel fake versus the permanent trade
of I am fake? Again, in this case, no relationship
(30:22):
at all emerged between self ratings and other ratings. Same
for the questions about acting authentically. No pattern of correlation
between self ratings and other ratings. Overall, there was no
significant relationship between self and other rated authenticity, which is
pretty strange given how confident we are that we that
(30:43):
we know whether others are being authentic or not.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
So all that mental energy you may put into deciding
whether you're gonna wear that T shirt today, it may
be just completely useless, because people are going to decide
you were being authentic or inauthentic via that choice in
a way that has nothing to do with how you're
feeling about it.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Yeah, and this doesn't rule out that there will be
individual cases where you accurately perceive that somebody is being
fake with you. I mean, obviously we do probably make
correct judgments about that sometime. But what this study found is,
at least within this setting where it's like students working
together on classroom projects, over the course of six weeks,
no pattern emerged at all. On average people could not tell.
(31:28):
One observation that struck me as interesting was that the
author is right quote the majority of the variance in
authenticity ratings had to do with differences between the ones
making the ratings and across unique relationships, rather than differences
in the target. So to explain that at least within
(31:48):
this experiment when you perceive someone else as fake that
apparently does not have a lot to say about that
person individually and tends to say more about you as
the perceiver or the unique relationship between you and that
person you're perceiving. So there were there weren't like individuals
(32:10):
in these experiments who were repeatedly getting rated as as
fake or as real by everybody around them. Instead the real,
Like the patterns seem to emerge in the people doing
the ratings of others or in individual one on one
relationships between people.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Okay, so yeah, so you can be very skewed and
how you're going to interpret an individual moving forward, Like
what's the name of our is it Jeff? Is Jeff?
Are hypothetical?
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (32:37):
I think it was Jimmy today Jimmy.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Okay. So, like if your first exposure to Jimmy in
the workplace is him like actually blatantly stealing somebody's lunch
and eating it in the great room, and then you
have actual personal interactions with him, you might be inclined
to think, oh, this this Jimmy's a snake. He's he's
he's stealing people's lunches and being sneaky. He must he
must be inauthentic with me as well. But of course,
(33:01):
if we slow that down and we think about it,
it's entire it's entirely possible for someone to have no
qualms about stealing people's lunches and also like be honest
and well meeting in their personal interaction with you. I mean,
this is not an impossibility in human behavior and personal judgment. Right.
Speaker 3 (33:20):
So, whereas you might think that if if one person
perceives Jimmy as fake, then everybody else will perceive Jimmy
as fake as well, but that's not the case, right right, Yeah, Instead,
it's more likely that I am perceiving lots of people
around me as fake, or that there's something special about
my relationship with Jimmy that makes me think he's fake.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Or I guess to put a positive spin on it,
you know, it's like you have, you know, and I
think we probably have all had these situations where we
have a certain preconceived notion about somebody and then we
have a really positive interaction with them, and that turns
things around, and we may be able to reflect on
that later and be like, well, I used to and
it may boil down to I used to think this
person was in authentic, and then I got to know
(34:02):
them a little bit, or then I worked with them
a little better or so forth, you know, and you know,
in those cases we can actually kind of see how
this can shift.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Oh, that's very interesting. I want to come back and
discuss the variable of familiarity at the end. Here a
couple more things Before that, some interesting biases emerged in
the data. I'm not going to go into everything, but
just a couple of things that stood out to me.
One thing is people were likely to rate other participants
as more authentic than they rated themselves. So that's kind
(34:35):
of interesting. It compares to a lot of you know,
on a lot of measures, people kind of have a
high opinion of themselves. People on average rate themselves as
more honest, more altruistic, whatever than other people. But on authenticity,
at least in this experiment, that's not the case. People
on average rated other people as more authentic than themselves,
so they thought that they were a little bit faker
(34:57):
than everybody else.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
In a way that this could be it could be
kind of a backhanded conflict because it might not be
a situation of thinking that everyone around you has a
complex in our life, but kind of dismissing people as
being like just the sum of their actions, like not
even thinking about the fact that there is you know,
a lot of a lot of inner thought going on
behind the scenes with a particular individual. It's like, Oh,
(35:22):
I just passed that person in the hallway. Yeah, yeah,
I guess they're one hundred percent what I see that
they are fine, Yeah, no questions of authenticity at all.
But it could be kind of a situation where yeah,
you're just because you don't think about them, you take
them completely for granted, and you think that this one
thing you see them do is all they are.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
I think that's quite possible. Another thing that was interesting here,
we were talking about the idea of authenticity being in
the eye of the beholder, and that it like ratings
of the authenticity of others seem to say more about
the rater than the rate. Apparently people rated themselves. People
who rated themselves as more authentic also rated others as
(35:58):
more authentic, So there was just sort of a direct
correlation there, like I think I'm more authentic, thus I
think other people are more authentic.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
M okay.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
And in this particular study, it found there were no
individual demographic facts or personality traits that resulted in subjects
being significantly rated as more or less authentic. Nothing really
about people that seemed to contribute there. A third study
attempted to replicate study two with a larger sample size,
but with a few changes, this time with a mix
(36:29):
of virtual and in person interactions instead of just purely
in person meetings, and this study broadly found the same
thing as study number two. Also, study three found the
same biases as study two. However, in this study they
did find a couple of personality and demographic factors that
correlated with other ratings of authenticity. Here, people were more
(36:52):
likely to be rated as authentic if they were high
in the Big five personality trait known as agreeableness, and
the big five personality traits are typically openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness,
and neuroticism. Agreeableness is a general rating of pro social
(37:12):
tendencies including trust, kindness, generosity, things like that. So people
who were higher in trade agreeableness were thought to be
more authentic, and also, interestingly, people who were a little
bit older were rated as more authentic. But overall, the
authors concluded quote we found no evidence that people can
accurately identify who is authentic. So that's the top line there.
(37:36):
We're going around making judgments about authenticity of other people
all the time. Maybe sometimes these judgments are correct, but
within the confines of this study with students working together
in classrooms, there was no correlation. On average. On average,
people were no better than chance at judging the authenticity
of others. Oh wow, now I want to come back
(37:57):
to the thing you were mentioning a minute ago about
people getting to know each other, rob because this was
one of the most interesting things that jumped out at
me from the discussion section of this paper. So the
author's write quote. A surprising finding in our data was
that familiarity did not increase the accuracy of perceived authenticity. Rather,
(38:21):
the greater the familiarity between a raider and their target,
the less accurate their authenticity ratings became. Specifically, as familiarity increased,
other rated authenticity grew increasingly more positive relative to the
target's self rated authenticity. So does that make sense, Like,
as you get to know somebody better, they're over there
(38:43):
still sitting there saying like, yeah, sometimes I feel fake.
I can't I feel like I can't be myself around people.
The face I show the world is not who I
really am and you are over time as you get
to know them better, saying more and more like so authentic, so.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Themselves interesting thing. That's a fascinating one though, to try
and square away, like what is because it's it's it
would seem to say something different about each individual in
this relationship, you know.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Yeah, I mean there could be a number of ways
to explain that. I kind of wonder, and I want
to be clear, I don't have special insight here. I'm
just kind of wondering. I wonder if that could be
just a function of liking that, Like if we think
authenticity is a desirable trait, that like good people who
are worthy of being liked or are authentic. As you
grow to like somebody more because you know them better,
(39:34):
you just naturally like it drags up all of their
positively associated traits in your estimation. And that would include authenticity,
which is actually something you have no insight into.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
Yeah, yeah, and I guess you could. It could be
a certain amount of confirmation bias there too, Right, It's like, Okay,
you've reached a point where you like this person, and
therefore you encounter these various examples that you were just
gonna you're gonna hold up as oh, look, they're being
authentic there, And maybe you're gonna be more forgiving of
the moments that could be interpreted as as inauthentic if
(40:06):
you had a different mood or a different demeanor concerning
this person, you know, because on the other hand, someone
that you have already sort of prejudged as inauthentic and
maybe you don't like them, something about them rubs you
the wrong way. You might be on sort of hyper alert, like,
all right, what's Jimmy doing today? That's just fake his heck, well,
what's he wearing? Ah, I can't believe you thought he
(40:28):
could pull that off.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
That seems highly plausible to me. Yeah, but let's see.
Should we call part one of our study of authenticity
there and come back and look at it some more
next time, maybe with explorations of authenticity and art and
music and film.
Speaker 2 (40:44):
Yeah, yeah, it'll well, it'll continue to be sort of
a quagmire though, trying to figure out what is authentic,
what isn't authentic, what is fake, and so forth. So, yeah,
we'll get into some discussions of music and art and
film and so forth, so we'll pick up with all
that on Thursday. Just a reminder to everybody that's Stuff
(41:04):
to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast,
with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short form
episode on Wednesdays, listener mail on Mondays, and on Fridays.
We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Huge thanks to our guest producer today, Max Williams. Thanks
for stepping in. Max's a big help. If you would
like to get in touch with us with feedback on
this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
the future, or just to say hello, you can email
us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot COMTCT.
Speaker 1 (41:45):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
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