Why We Overthink (Amanda Montell)
Why We Overthink (Amanda Montell)
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Amanda Montell is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, as well as Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism and Wordslut. Amanda is a linguistics major from NYU and all of her work centers around the way that words—and thoughts—shape our minds, and how our minds are permeable to other factors, whether it’s the halo effect, confirmation bias, or Cult-like sensibilities. Amanda is also the host of a podcast, “Sounds like a Cult.”
MORE FROM AMANDA MONTELL:
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
Follow Amanda on Instagram
Amanda’s Website
Amanda’s Podcast: “Sounds Like a Cult”
Amanda’s Newsletter
AMANDA MONTELL TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Congrats on having a sleeper hit because most books as explode and die for a book like cultish to catch wind over time is rare. So well done. Thank you
AMANDA:
For saying that. I appreciate that. Yeah, I am grateful for that. I'm shocked by the whole thing. It feels very outside of me when a piece of work takes on a life, you can put all these pieces in place, but you can never really predict what effect it's going to have or how it's going to be embraced or why or when, and so I just kind of sit back and perceive it all and I'm grateful.
ELISE:
And all of your work so far, probably not all, but the work that I'm familiar with is focused on the co-option of our minds and the sensitivity that we all have to being taken over or led or influence. What I loved about cultish in particular was that yes, there are the cults that we know about and are mocking toward, but then everything in some ways is a cult. Anything with any sort of vital movement that requires a group is kind of a cult. Is that the theory?
AMANDA:
Cultish, cultish.
ELISE:
Cultish. Yeah. Yeah. How we define it for us, because I liked that distinction that sports teams can be cultish and SoulCycle.
AMANDA:
Sure. The trouble is that there is really no hard and fast definition for the word cult. It's pretty subjective. It has a lot to do with your background, what you bring to the table when you think about these groups. Cultural normativity plays a huge role. There are so many jokes that are made in religious studies like cult plus time equals religion or a cult is a group where the leader thinks he can talk to God. A religion is a group where that leader is dead, but then, but then we can see that cultish groups fall along a spectrum, and on one extreme end you have the heaven's gates and the Jones towns. And then as you inch your way along the spectrum, you might encounter organized religion, but some people might put organized religion on that extreme with those frenchier groups. And then as you get to the middle, you find multilevel marketing organizations.
And then on the more innocent end, you might find cult fitness groups like SoulCycle and CrossFit. Trad wives would fall somewhere along the cultish spectrum. Glossier would fall somewhere along the cultish spectrum. There are folks who've attempted to come up with criteria like a charismatic leader ends justify the means philosophy, us versus them mentality, supernatural beliefs, exploitation of various kinds. But then the trouble is that plenty of fringy groups that could be called cults or clocked as cults based on what they're wearing might only check off a box or two. And then plenty of traditional religions or Silicon Valley companies or government bodies would check off every single box that you really need more than the word cult to be able to identify which groups are dangerous and destructive and truly too cultish for comfort as I sometimes say. But at the very same time, we are mystical communal beings by nature and being able to engage in certain rituals or irrational beliefs for a certain period of time as a coping mechanism or a way to form solidarity and manage life, that can be a really beautiful thing.
ELISE:
Cultish didn't feel judgmental to me in the sense of being more one curious, I would say, and two compassionate. We're going to talk a bit about that and how it enters into the age of magical overthinking, but so many people get pompous or patronizing about how could you possibly and what sort of loser and what an idiot or whatever it might be, these people who are susceptible to being co-opted in this way. But you write about it as this gentle slide. I was just watching the cyan on documentary last night on Max HBO Max, what emerged as a benefits and organization that's slid towards psychopathy, but that you're in it and they had people speaking to this. I recognize that I don't agree with everything that's happening, but I've gotten so much out of this and all my friends are here and this is my whole life. And you start to understand how these things take on a life of their own.
AMANDA:
Absolutely. I mean, I think anyone who has ever been in a job that did not fulfill its promises or have been in a one-on-one relationship that sort of felt cult-like could relate to these groups that might end up in a sensationalist documentary, but that are ultimately more relatable than you might think.
ELISE:
Yeah. And clearly you are a research as me search type of writer and writer.
AMANDA:
I've never heard that. I've never heard that. I like that.
ELISE:
Yeah, that's a therapist slogan, researches research.
AMANDA:
Oh, I like that. I'm only meeting with my therapist every month. Now, I should go back and internalize some of those slogans. Nancy hit me up.
ELISE:
But the age of magical overthinking or understanding some of these biases or effects and the way that they entrap us or corral us or transfix us, seem to me like a way for you to examine your own psychological interiority. So let's start with probably the painful part of it, which is Mr. Backpack and having a relationship. I also dated, I know we're not supposed to pathologize each other, but in my twenties I dated, I would probably say it was a malignant narcissist. And in that relationship, which lasted for several years, I was like, how is this happening to me? But it was such an important, informative experience for me to recognize, oh yeah, this can happen to people like me. And that's the point. It's given me so much more compassion when I encounter women or people in the world who are like, I don't understand what happened. It's like, why do it happens to everyone?
AMANDA:
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess I'll back up and maybe give a little bit of exposition about how cultish maybe planted the seeds for this book that I just wrote. Excellent. Cultish is about the language of cults from Scientology to SoulCycle. It's exploring wide range of cultish groups and how their leaders use language in particular to influence their followings and how that language shows up in places we might not otherwise think to look. And as I was researching the mechanics of cult influence for that book, I kept coming across mention of cognitive biases, some of the better known ones like confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy ones that I had heard of in the context of politics and things like that. And they definitely related to explaining why someone could spend 20 years in Scientology, even though it didn't make sense to them anymore or anyone on the outside, but more urgently, I noticed that these biases also explained many of my own everyday behaviors that I could never justify to myself from my choice to stay for seven years in this relationship that really did feel like a cult or my tendency to engineer online conflicts with enemies I'd invented in my own head on social media.
And they could also explain so many of the irrational behaviors I was noticing in the zeitgeist at large, from intense cycles of celebrity worship and dethronement to the widespread embrace of Instagram manifestation gurus to why we enter fight or flight in response to a non-urgent threat, like a curt email from a boss. And so I had to put this fascination with cognitive biases on hold for the purposes of cultish, but I knew right away that I wanted my next book to explore how cognitive biases, these innate mental magic tricks that we play on ourselves, these psychological shortcuts that we unconsciously make in order to reckon with our limited time and memory storage and cognitive resources to make these resource rational decisions, how these psychological shortcuts are clashing with the information age. So that is the setup of the book. Every chapter is dedicated to a different cognitive bias, which I use as a lens to explore some facet of modern irrationality.
And the most personal of these chapters is this one called A Toxic Relationship is just a cult of one, which is maybe the most directly related to the cultish stuff from my last book where I talk about how learning about the sunk cost fallacy really helped me understand my choice to stay in that relationship. The sunk cost fallacy being our proclivity to think that resources already spent on an endeavor, time, money, but also emotional resources like hope or secrets justify spending even more. And that fallacy is often discussed in the context of economics. You might hear it discussed in the context of a poker game. You have a bad hand, but you've already put so many chips on the table, you can't fold now, that kind of thing. But I found that it could also relate to so many of these more personal, intimate decisions that I had made that I could never justify to myself.
And after I got out of that relationship with this guy whose pseudonym is Mr Backpack, in part because he liked to hike, he was obsessed with the outdoors as many in LA are, but also because he weighs on my shoulders still like a backpack. And I was able to sort of work through my shame that I experienced for so long after I got out of that relationship. Like how could I make this unforgivably ridiculous self debasing choice to stay with someone who did not make me feel loved or respected, who every time that we had an especially difficult moment, I would just post happier looking photos of us online. How did that make sense? And addressing that experience through the lens of the sunk cost fallacy and incorporating some other really interesting behavioral economic studies about additive versus subtractive solution bias really helped me work through that.
ELISE:
Yeah. Speaking of people, did you see that study about how the more someone on social media posts their partner, typically their sadness in the relationship, the two are co-regulate that too much posting means shit not good at home?
AMANDA:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I am an anecdotal example of that for sure, and it relates to one of the most mind blowing studies that I came across and included in that chapter of the book, which is that as humans naturally, but also those of us growing up in consumer society when confronted with a problem, our tendency is to add a whole bunch of cumbersome variables to the equation. So if we're experiencing pain in our relationship, I'll speak for myself. Every time we were really, really suffering and not doing well, it did not occur to me once to break up. I was like, you know what we need to do? We need to go on another vacation, or we need to get another cat, or we need to replace all our furniture. I don't regret any of my cats, but I was like, we need to add variables to the equation in order to fix this problem, even though the much more efficient decision would've been maybe to scale back, reassess, take something away.
And I quote a study when talking about that subject where participants were presented with a spatial puzzle involving colored blocks, and they could either solve the puzzle by adding or taking away colored blocks from this puzzle. The vast majority of participants opted for the much more overly complicated solution, which was to add a whole bunch of color blocks, whereas the much simpler but less intuitive solution would just be to take one single colored block away. We don't often think to take things away to solve a problem if we're struggling with our sleep, we don't think, oh, maybe I should put my iPhone away at 8:00 PM and stop with the afternoon coffee. Instead, we think, oh my God, I need to add a supplement and replace my bedding. I do this. And so noticing this tendency in us has really helped me clock it and stop it in everyday life.
ELISE:
You open the book with the halo effect, if I recall correctly, a study on celebrity and parasocial relationships. I'm curious, do you feel like that's more pronounced now or just more accessible and express because of social media? Because I feel like there were fewer people who punctured consciousness when I was a kid or permeated into our worlds depending on, I mean, I grew up in Montana, so a little bit far away or outside of mainstream culture, but still there were certain people who penetrated. I would imagine Madonna had the same level of parasocial fascination and obsession as Taylor maybe. I don't know. What do you think?
AMANDA:
I think there are a few things going on. I don't think we've always worshiped celebrities the same way that we are now. Studies reflect that celebrity worship is growing more intense, that more young people than ever are expressing worship of a media figure or an athlete as opposed to someone that they know in real life. And studies also reflect that young people who worship a person from their real life community, like a parent or a teacher, have higher academic achievement and higher self-esteem. But worshiping a celebrity on a pair of social level reflects the opposite or predicts the opposite, lower self-esteem, lower educational achievement. But I think a few things are going on. First of all, since the 1960s, trust in authority figures like the government and the healthcare system has really waned. I talk about that stuff in Cultish two, we are no longer looking up to our spiritual leaders and political figures in the same way that we did in the 1950s.
There was a stat that I quoted from the New York Times that said that 1958, I believe it was three quarters of Americans trusted the American government to do the right thing, almost always, which seems unfathomable now, but then a number of current events really damaged that trust, including the Vietnam War and Watergate. So much went wrong so quickly. Not to mention also in the 1960s, we got the Beatles and there were more teenagers in the US than ever. And so as trust in those other types of authorities was waning and the Beatles were entering the picture, and young people were so primed to pour all of their fanaticism into this new kind of paragon culturally, we really started shifting the subject of our worship, the types of role models that we were interested in to entertainers. And by the 1980s, we were ready for our first ever celebrity president and Ronald Reagan.
And now celebrities are not just here to amuse us or to soundtrack our lives. They're here to save us. And social media has definitely exacerbated those parasocial dynamics because there is at least the illusion that your God, Taylor Swift might actually answer your prayer in the forum of Harding, your comment or dropping an Easter egg that the fandom can then rally around and interact with. And there's so many online spaces for people to create a real lore or a real cinematic universe around their surrogate mother figure, surrogate God figure in these celebrities. And the intimacy of social media is only encouraging them to tread into spaces that they otherwise wouldn't have, whether they're activist spaces or political spaces or even spiritual spaces. So these lines have gotten blurry and the dynamics have gotten really hallucinatory and brutal, and our expectations celebrities are in a way higher than ever, and thus also easier than ever to disappoint.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, it's interesting. We have within the world of celebrity politicians, as you mentioned, Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Trump, these strong men, however you want to interpret that, but within the celebrity space, it feels very gendered. I don't know if this is your experience as well, but beyond Harry styles, who is a fluid person, we do this primarily to women. I write about it in my pride chapter, is this playbook or cycle in which we decide that a woman has had enough attention, and so we put her in her place and then we rinse and repeat. And that it also overlaps with feelings of scarcity and also envy. But curious about what you think is happening and why men are more immune.
AMANDA:
Yeah. Well, I do believe that the more marginalized a public figure is, the slimmer their margin of error when it comes to propping them up on a pedestal when it comes to white male figures, we make more room for the complexity of their humanity. They have to betray us much more egregiously to fall from grace, whereas we lift up women and particularly women of color so high off the ground that it's dehumanizing worship sounds flattering, but it isn't. It really eliminates one's space for error and complexity when they're so far off the ground that you can't even see them anymore. They also have further to fall, and this relates to the halo effect as well because they'll back up and explain that the halo effect has adaptive background. It developed for evolutionary reasons. It was a way that we used to find role models efficiently.
You can imagine a time in human history when you would clock someone in your small community with big muscles and intact teeth, and you might jump to the conclusion that they were a skilled fighter or a skilled hunter, and thus someone who might be good to align with for survival purposes. But we are now mapping that conclusion, jumping those impulses onto these modern pair of social relationships. So we see in particular a female pop star, and we jump to the conclusion that because we like her music and it speaks to us that she must be nurturing, that she must care about us as much as we care about her, that maybe she aligns politically with us, even though there is little to no evidence to suggest that is true. I think in the way that the halo effect in real life more negatively affects women that is just blown out of proportion with celebrities.
I don't know if you ever went through this as an adolescent where you discovered that your mother was a human being for the first time and you felt the need to punish her. I remember when I was growing up and coming of age, and it became clear to me that my mom was not this perfect role model, but had flaws. I felt the need to punish her psychologically more than I felt the need to punish my dad, which feels extremely gendered. And we are seeing those same dynamics happen on a much broader, again, more illusory scale with our celebrity mothers, so to speak.
ELISE:
It's interesting. So you would equate it to sort of the higher the pedestal, the veneration of these women as the ultimate in femininity in some ways means that we topple them.
AMANDA:
Absolutely.
ELISE:
It's one of those things that's consuming for me to really understand the mechanisms at play. You talked a bit too within this, which I think is significant for everyone, famous or not, but with the advent of social media personality or persona, it comes from mask. You love etymologies too, obviously, but that with any cultivation of a exterior presence, you are creating a projection or there's definitely going to be some distance or a gap between who you are and who you perform yourself as. We all know the stories about performers who isn't Beyonce, incredibly shy and introverted, and then she's Beyonce, right? So there's this gap, and I don't know if you've heard this, but nature of horrors of vacuum, no, but we dump all of our projections into it and all of our assumptions and create our own expectations of who these people are.
AMANDA:
And I think we do this in so many arenas of life. One of the early points I make in this book is that human beings are not perfectly rational. I think as technology becomes more advanced and information becomes democratized, do we have this impression that everything is knowable and that the answer to any question can be found at the click of a button, but we're not built to be able to parse through information perfectly like a robot. We are just making the best of our limited memory storage and time and cognitive resources. And so we jump to a lot of conclusions, and yet we're not aware that we're doing that. And so we are just going on the information that we have about celebrities and we're filling in the gaps. And during times of incredible sociopolitical tumult, when we really feel the need for a larger than life role model, in a way, we start to fill in the gaps more dilution than we otherwise would.
ELISE:
Yeah, I'll butcher this quote, but young talks about how the larger the size, the larger the group, the lower the consciousness, and that when we get into these mass movements around people, there's definitely going to be a lot of shadow. It's an endless mystery to me why the male artists are so much less
AMANDA:
Or so much less
ELISE:
Compelling or why they're just not compelling in that way. I'm trying to think. I feel like Ryan Gosling as Ken was compelling, but that was the character. I don't know. I can't figure it out
AMANDA:
For that chapter. The whole crux of that chapter, which is called Are You My Mother Taylor Swift hinges on this pair of studies or there were a few different studies correlating sort of less than stellar parental relations with celebrity stalking proclivities and how young people lacking in so-called positive stressors from their real life. Parental figures in communities were primed to focus on what was called trauma in the virtual world. So I really think there's some aspect of mothering going on here. We are looking for surrogate mothers in these celebrities. I came across some meme the other day on Instagram that was Women's Roman Empire is thinking about what your mother was like when she was your age. Are men obsessed with thinking about their mothers and the relationship between who they are and their background with the type of art they consume? I don't know what motivates men.
ELISE:
Yeah, I don't think they have the same level of interiority or I would say are allowed to have the same level of interiority or curiosity. And
AMANDA:
These are generalizations. Of course, I happen to live with a man that I sometimes joke, but I also mean it somewhat sincerely that I swear to God I have more toxic masculinity than my partner Casey. Yeah,
ELISE:
Very possible. Very possible. Amanda,
So let's pick another bias. I thought this was fascinating. Can't remember which chapter this was in, but it was about the spontaneous trait transference. I don't know if it was zero sum, it was, but it was about how when you're maligning someone, your fellow conversationalists, you take on those traits. Can you talk a bit about that?
AMANDA:
Yeah, yeah. So there's a chapter in the book called The Shit Talking Hypothesis, which addresses this bias called zero sum bias, which is our tendency to think that another person's gain inherently means your loss. And this also has an evolutionary backstory. It stems from generations of stiff resource competition and human history growing up 20,000 years ago. Another woman in my category of my similar age, similar build really might be a threat to my ability to find mates or food or whatever. But we are now approaching so many arenas of life where resources are kind of limitless and abstract like success or followers or beauty or clout or whatever. We are still treating those as zero sum and it's causing us a lot of pain. And there's gendered associations with this as well because several studies that I came across found that women are primed to make more upward comparisons and downward identifications.
So when a young woman scrolls through her social media feed or clocks other people in a room, she will only notice the women that she perceives as superior, whereas men are shown to do the opposite. And so the great irony and tragedy of all of this is that women and particularly young women often perceive the women that have the most in common with them, a k, a, the women that could be their dearest friends and confidants as their worst threats like that, that person's sheer existence in the world as a cool, beautiful, successful person puts your coolness success and beauty at stake or threatens it in some way. And so in that chapter, I talk about how I have struggled with this in many ways throughout my life and some of the tactics that I've attempted in order to reckon with that, some of which were healthier than others, but I don't know how anyone listening can relate to the impulse to want to shit talk.
Women you feel threatened by as a bid to figure out how you are better than them or something. What's this competitive thing that the patriarchy has really set us up for the zero sum game that is engineered for women in particular. But I found that when we shit talk other people, so often this thing called spontaneous trait transference occurs where we start to assume the qualities that we're lambasting in this third party in the eyes of our interlocutor. So if I'm out here roast roasting my coworker as being shady or I don't know unstylish or something like that, all of a sudden I'm going to start to look shady and unstylish. So that was really striking to learn because it sort of goes against Freud's catharsis theory, which has been disproven so many times with it's idea that you just need to vent. We just need to vent to get our emotions out so that we can release them. But shit-talking, someone never made anyone want to shit-talk them less the way that doing a bunch of cocaine never made anyone want to do less cocaine. So these are some of the thoughts that I passed through in that chapter.
ELISE:
It's interesting. I would say the spontaneous trait transference also to me suggests the AA statement. You spot it, you got it. And that so much of it is shadow projection. And what we tend to destroy or deprecate or criticize in each other is what we've disowned in ourselves. So the classic example being, as you were saying, you're railing against someone for being a bitch and petty and who does she think she is? And what you're really saying is you're holding up a mirror to yourself. So the trait transference in a way makes sense, right? Your behavior in that moment is also petty and deprecating and in some ways, and so you're just reflecting the way that this person is mirroring you or what you refuse to see. I love seeing a cultural idea confirmed by research, and that's
AMANDA:
My kink, that's your kink.
ELISE:
And this tendency too, I don't know how you wrote about it, but seeing other women in your lane online, and I guess you primarily talk about debut novelists who are essentially cool and relaxed and wildly chill and effortlessly stylish, but again, this idea of pervasive scarcity for women, that there can only be one. So therefore to have that thing I must destroy her. I certainly couldn't befriend her or learn anything from her, but her presence is an existential threat to my own
AMANDA:
Potential, which I really took some cues from Anne Friedman and ASO's piece on Shine Theory, that viral piece from the cut in 2013, and I'm no physicist, but from what I understand about light,
ELISE:
You could be in your next life,
AMANDA:
In my next life. If you turn on a light, it does not inherently dim the rest of the room. It actually makes it brighter. And if you turn on two lights, the whole room gets even more illuminated so another person's light does not dim yours. In fact, with your light combined, it makes the whole room brighter. And so that sounds kind of like woo and cliche, but I really have been internalizing it when I come across a woman online who I immediately start to clock is a threat to my existence. I have started to instead push past that impulse and instead say, slide in her dms and express a sincere congratulations for her book and offer to get copy sometime. And genuinely, I have found that almost always the person responds something really kind back. And I have made a few sincere real life friends this way that I could have just allowed to live rent free in my head as some sort of threat, but instead, we're real life friends. And that has been such a freeing exercise.
ELISE:
Well, no, and I commend you for it because men are really good at this. They're not governed, I don't believe, by the same rules of scarcity. And so you see this sort of easy comradery amongst men who are in the same spaces. They're propping each other up, they're proposing each other for panels, they're interviewing each other, they're promoting each other's work. And so that work inherently has legs. There's an expansion of audience that benefits everyone. And it's certainly been my experience, which makes me sad, but it's deeply confirming of this reality for women, which is that the women who seem the least inclined to support my work or support me are the ones who are most, this isn't a hundred percent true, by the way, obviously, but that many of the people who are in this lane with me are not interested in any sort of collaboration. Collaboration, yeah. And I think this is mine. Stay away from my kingdom. It's like, well, we're never going to permeate culture with any of these ideas if that's how we think about it.
AMANDA:
Totally. No, I stand by absolutely every friend that I have made this way. It really works. I think too, sometimes others just need a license or permission to be nice to you because yes, there is this great con that we're supposed to be in competition, but I have not, a single DM that I have slid into was met with malice. No, I mean, it's not like I became besties with everyone who I originally perceived as a threat and hoped would become my friend, but a few of them we text all the time and we really help each other through these weird careers that we have, and I'm so grateful for that. And so yeah, sad that our society has set up this really nefarious zero sum game for women in particular.
ELISE:
It's very entrenched in our psychology and it's very hard to break. And I think the more that we can help each other illustrate, because so many of these become these repetition patterns where it's like, well, but this is true. The scarcity is real. There is only going to be one woman on that panel or there is going. So the more that we can say, actually, the only way to change that pattern is not to replace the woman on the panel with another woman, but to make the panel bigger or ask for some seats from men. I just don't think men are conscious of it. It's not part of their awareness, whereas I feel like this governs the lives of women in a way that is not helpful. I don't think that men are consciously like, let's make a mantle. Let's not create any space for any women.
Man, I don't think that a mantle, I didn't coin it, but isn't it good? But I think that they're just not even aware that they're doing it. It's an invisible pattern. But women know or are more, we know. We know when we're in charge. We know. Let's talk about, this made me laugh. You write, I have a personal habit of narrativizing my life so aggressively that it sometimes prevents me from sincerely experiencing it because I discard any plot points that don't feel on brand for the genre or trope of my character. This is, I think in the chapter on confirmation bias. I'm going to guess, but this is true, right? And part of this is the beauty of being human is that we use stories to create meaning and identify the patterns, which are very real. But where does this go too far? Amanda? Take us home.
AMANDA:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think one of the big themes in this book that comes up in several chapters is how often we as human beings misattribute cause and effect because we're just trying to infuse some kind of cosmic logic into events and feelings that we can't make sense of. And sometimes this manifests as conspiracy theories, and sometimes it manifests in the form of me telling myself that my life is a story and that this can't happen unless I accomplish this, or I refuse to accept that this is happening to me because it doesn't make sense. And I repeatedly tell myself stories about myself that are made up because I don't know whether it's natural or has to do with being a writer or what, but I will sometimes really try to shoehorn plot points into my life because I want it all to feel meaningful.
And part of the beauty of writing this book was that I got to parse through what in the mind is causing me to do that. It's not just these biases that have to do with a misattribution of cause and effect, but also some biases having to do with our tendency to think that something is true just because we've heard it repeated multiple times. And if I repeat myself a story about my life in my head multiple times, I will truly start to internalize it as true. And something that's been cool about writing the book and talking to other people about it is that I continue to learn new things from these biases and apply them in new ways. And so much of the book is about accepting randomness, accepting irresolution, accepting when an answer can't be found, and having compassion and skepticism and holding those two things at the same time.
ELISE:
Beautiful. Well, congrats on everything. Oh,
AMANDA:
Thanks.
ELISE:
Stay out of trouble.
AMANDA:
Yeah, right. Let me
ELISE:
Know how I can help. Are you going to go back to school and pursue your PhD in neuroscience?
AMANDA:
Oh my God, hell no. No. My parents are PhDs. This is the great irony of my life growing up, I was such a little theater kid, and I was like, I'm going to be an entertainer. And then of course, I would go on to write about sciencey topics, but my parents are scientists. I was like, I will never be like that, and I'm not. The thing about my writing is that oftentimes the things that I write about, whether it's linguistics or psychology, they're discussed in the formal context of academia. And I use all of these concepts as a poetic motif to explore various relationships in our lives, whether it's that between language and power, or that between our habits and our rationalities and pop culture. And so I really try not to come from a place of authority. If you want behavioral economics authority, I have so many books I would recommend, but if you're interested in the Overthinkers Delight, slightly more accessible guide to reckoning with these ideas, then I think that's what I have to offer. No PhDs. For me,
ELISE:
Amanda Montel is highly entertaining. And I love any book that is effectively a means for understanding your own thinking, because I think it creates an immediacy that's highly relatable. And my guess is at least one of these chapters, one of these, whether it's the negativity bias or confirmation bias, et cetera, will resonate with you. The one that we didn't get a chance to talk to is the IKEA effect, which made me laugh, which is about how anything that we imbue anything that we make with extra qualities and value, which of course makes sense, but I think it's a testament to the fact that so many of us find not only pleasure, but therapy and handy work, like making things, knitting, embroidery, painting, fixing things around the house, that there's something about using our hands to make things that feels incredibly good.