The Variability of Concepts

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We asked people for their judgments on how likely they thought somebody was to share their concepts. And based on that, we wanted to know are people well calibrated to the likelihood that somebody is aligned with them. Most of the time, as we talked about, someone else is not activating the same concept even for the same word in the same context. People really are not on the same page. You have very few features that everybody agrees do or don't apply. For Obama, Obama is often held up as an example of a polarizing politician. There's very little in the middle.

Is a hotdog a sandwich?

Well, that depends on your definition of a sandwich (and a hotdog), and according to the most recent research in cognitive science, the odds that your concept of a sandwich is the same as another person's concept are shockingly low.

In this episode we explore how understanding why that question became a world-spanning argument in the mid 2010s helps us understand some of the world-spanning arguments vexing us today.

Our guest is psychologist Celeste Kidd who studies how we acquire and conceptualize information, form beliefs around those concepts, and, in general, make sense of the torrent of information blasting our brains each and every second. Her most recent paper examines how conceptual misalignment can lead to semantic disagreements, which can lead us to talk past each other (and get into arguments about things like whether hotdogs are sandwiches).

• Celeste Kidd's Website: https://www.kiddlab.com

• Celeste Kidd's Twitter: https://twitter.com/celestekidd

• How Minds Change: www.davidmcraney.com/howmindschangehome

• David McRaney’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidmcraney

• YANSS Twitter: https://twitter.com/notsmartblog

• Show Notes: www.youarenotsosmart.com

• Newsletter: https://davidmcraney.substack.com

• Latent Diversity in Human Concepts: https://tinyurl.com/25544m3v