How Bias Shapes Our Faith and Politics with Psychologist Erin Devers

Why is it so hard to admit when we’re wrong—even when the evidence is right in front of us? Cognitive bias isn’t just a problem for “other people”—it affects all of us, shaping how we think, vote, and even practice our faith. In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Erin Devers, social psychologist and professor, to talk about her new book The Unbiased Self (InterVarsity Press), where she draws on decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, and theology. Together, we explore why biases are baked into the way we process information, how these mental shortcuts affect our politics and faith, and what it actually takes to move toward greater humility and intellectual honesty. We also discuss the “bias blind spot,” confirmation bias, belief perseverance, and the surprising power of dialogue—even across deep disagreements.

Guest Bio:

Dr. Erin Elizabeth Devers is a social psychologist and professor whose work focuses on cognitive and emotional processes underlying human behavior, particularly around self-perception, social bias, and faith. She has taught social psychology since 2007 and is known for blending psychological science with spiritual insight. She is the author of The Unbiased Self, published by InterVarsity Press.

Resources & Links:

The Unbiased Self by Erin Devers (InterVarsity Press): https://bookshop.org/a/112456/9781514009765
Indiana Wesleyan University Faculty Page: https://www.indwes.edu/ 

Transcript

0:18

Hey there, Faithful, hey, it says live stream for some reason, Will, is there? Okay. All right. Well, I'll just mark this so we don't, okay. Hi there, Faithful Politics listeners, if you're joining us on our podcast stream and viewers, if you're joining us on YouTube, thanks for being here for another episode of Faithful Politics, where we love talking about all sorts of things that are happening in our world and things surrounding that. politics and faith and everything in between. I am your faithful host, Bertram, Pastor Josh Bertram. Of course I have our political host, Will. It's good to see you, Will. yeah. Hey, thanks, Josh. That makes one of us. And by the way, Hahaha I should point out just a little bit of insider baseball for our people watching or listening and for you, our guest, Aaron, as well as like every show that I'm on with Josh says it's good to see you. And I have a list of replies that I've asked chat GPT to give me. it's predictable. I know he's going to say it's good to see you, So. some of the ones on my list are like, well, that's one of them that makes one of us. Well, you're only human. I have that effect on people. Another response is, that's what I tell my mirror every morning too. I'm just letting you all know that these responses that I provide are actually on a list and one day Josh is going to change his opening. Maybe dude, I don't know. I'm a creature of habit, dude. I'm pretty, pretty bad at creature of habit. That's good though. I love that. That is good insider baseball. And of course, Will mentioned our guest first name, but this is, me introduce her more formally. Dr. Erin Elizabeth Devers, PhD. She is a social psychologist and professor whose work focuses on cognitive and emotional processes underlying human behavior, especially in the context of self-perception. Social Bias and Faith. She's taught social psychology since 2007 and is known for engaging teaching style and integrates cutting edge psychological science with the spiritual insight and practical relevance. We're going to be talking to her today about her latest book through InterVarsity Press, The Unbiased Self. And she's drawing on decades of research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and theology. And we can't wait to have her. Talk through this and answer all the other crazy questions. We might have surrounding this Aaron. Thank you so much for joining the program I'm so excited to be here. This is going to be so much fun. Yes, yes, I can already tell. love it. You know, sometimes we have guests that are like easy to talk to, and sometimes we have guests that are not so easy to talk to. And you're one of the easy talk to guests. I can already tell that. So that's nice. I appreciate that. So I got to ask, why are you so interested in cognitive bias? And why did you, I mean, we'll get into definitions of cognitive bias. So maybe I guess you could give us a brief definition and then explain. why you're interested in it and why you've written a book on it. Yeah, well, okay, I'll start with the definition real fast. So bias is a systematic error in thinking. And so we're all biased. And even though the title of my book is super optimistic and says that we could have an unbiased self, you're probably that's not possible to get there because to be fully unbiased, you'd have to have access to all the information. So we're not going to get there, but. The book is really to try and help us try to move towards accuracy. I got super interested in this and these have really been ideas I've been thinking about since 2002 when I started graduate school. And I was working in a lab where we studied the self and the self-concept and what things people do to maintain self-esteem. And we studied these quick and dirty tricks to feel better. And all the time in the back of my mind I was thinking, these quick tricks to feel better. don't promote growth and shouldn't we just be honest with ourselves about who we are and our failings? What's so wrong with being honest? Why do we need to protect the self? And so I started thinking about that in a Christian context. Is the self already secure? Does it need protection? And so that question really kind of guided a lot of my thinking for the past 20 years when I engage with students, when I think about, you know, when people face difficulty, how do they think about the self relative to who God is and how they're. managing it in light of difficulty. I've just loved this topic to try and figure out how do we pursue accuracy? How do we love God with our minds? And those have just been questions that have animated my thinking this entire time. And I'm super excited to get this opportunity with this book to talk about them. Yes. Are there ways that we use biases for good? mean, because I'm assuming if this is just a normal cognitive process that we probably utilize it for good and bad, we just tend to focus on the bad. So how are we using these biases to help us navigate life? So I promised the book that you can explain most of human behavior with two explanations, that people want to be right and they want to feel good about themselves. And so the first one, wanting to be right, doesn't sound like it's that bad. But it's our way of just organizing the world so we can make decisions so that we can understand how to categorize things, how to operate in the world. So it's a really normal human function. We start creating these categories for objects and for people so that we know how to navigate. And so there's nothing inherently wrong with that. What's difficult and often, you know, for simple kinds of conversations and solutions, those schemas work really, those ways of organizing work really well for us. Where it becomes complicated and where you see bias start to creep in as a potential problem is where we assume because we're not willing to do the extra cognitive work of gathering more information. So if someone were to ask me a question about a complex topic, let's say you were to ask me, is your opinion about immigration? And I go to the information that I have about immigration, and I give you this very well-developed answer with a great deal of confidence, not quite recognizing that I really don't know much about immigration. I'm not an expert on this topic. And it's complicated, and there's a lot more information out there than what my mind has access to in this moment. And so if I were to give those kinds of answers in order to respond to a question, it's inherently biased because I just don't have access to all the information and I shouldn't necessarily hold my opinion with such high levels of confidence because of that. So that's where bias creates a problem. But in everyday life, this motive to try and organize the world to make good decisions is a good thing. And I think where the bias creeps in though is when we are not willing to go the extra mile to recognize kind of the limits to our thinking. So bias is just baked into thinking, it isn't necessarily, but I think about it as a negative force because it's preventing us from pursuing accuracy. Yeah. Does that answer it? it does, yeah. And I'm glad you helped us kind of just better understand like what biases are and how we use them. Because I just wrote this, I wrote this sub stack recently talking about the church and state separation, an issue that we've spoken about a lot on the show. And I started off the sub stack by just talking about kind of my own don't know, cognitive biases growing up. didn't grow up in the church. I came to the faith much later in life. So, if you would ask me, kind of to your point, about church-state separation, during my years as an atheist, I would have been like, yeah, yeah, church-state separation, yeah, we got to maintain it, you know? But then somebody would ask me a question about, what do you think about Martin Luther King Jr.'s use of biblical... themes to promote social justice, like my argument would break down because I just didn't know how to respond to that. So it's like I found myself falling on my biases to fuel these very strong stances that I have. And in my social stack, I utilize the term behavior perseverance to kind of explain sort of like this mentality I had. So I'd love for you to either tell me how I was wrong in using that phrase? Or perhaps now I'm getting worried. I'm like, man, did I just write something? I'm going to go back and. always a nice edit button, isn't there? Can you edit it after you? Well, yeah, can we edit this? Because the thing I'm going to say is like, it's belief. Well, maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong. I say perseverance. So I don't know. I? Yeah, belief, perseverance is the way that I learned it. But I could be wrong. that's totally, I could have been. So please don't. I'm gonna use that in a sermon here soon, dude. want this to be part of the podcast where I sit like that, so please don't. But yeah, so mean, it's a combination of confirmation bias at the front and then belief for severance at the end. So it keeps you situated and prevents you from updating your attitudes. so it's unfortunate, but there's ways to overcome it. And I think part of... What I'm trying to encourage people to do is to, because one way to overcome in that case is to say, okay, put a number on it, like give a confidence rating to kind of say, given my level of expertise on this topic and given the amount of exposure that I've had, maybe I should hold this with about 60 or 70 % confidence that this is going the right direction and approach the conversation with that in mind so that you can. Leave room for already know in advance that you've given yourself room to be wrong and to update your attitude so that you don't feel like I need to cling to the attitude. Because part of the reason, the other reason people cling to the attitude is that they've built some sort of self identity or self esteem in the attitude. And so if myself is threatened, if I feel like if you tell me I'm wrong about this, this upsets my whole mode of who I am, my identity, I'm going to be really hesitant to be to be open to a new idea. So figuring out how to disconnect some of our identities from our attitudes so that we can hold them a little bit more loosely and with more humility is one of the things that, yeah, that I really hope that I learned how to do better and that I want other people to do as well, because I think it helps us connect. Because what you don't want to miss is the connection between another human. Yeah. And one of the really encouraging pieces of data that I just learned last week was If you were to ask people, and just your podcast with the two of you reminds me of this, if you were to ask people to predict, would you want to interact with someone who agrees with you or disagrees with you, people automatically pick that they want to interact with someone that agrees with them. But they manipulated whether you would have a dialogue or a monologue. And it turns out that people prefer dialogues just across the board. Dialogues are so much better. And so the dialogue effect actually overwhelms the preference for a person who agrees or disagrees. So the format actually, if you have a dialogue with someone you disagree, it's just about as enjoyable as having a dialogue with someone you agree with. And I just found that finding so amazing. And so when I see like, people that are saying, hey, we're going to present opposite sides and that your relationship has kind of grown over this time in part, because even if there were things you disagreed about, this format probably facilitates. really great conversation. that's so fascinating to me, because is the format like, hey, we're gonna set some ground rules and you need to listen and then you need to respond. Because I'm imagining like wanting to go into a dialogue where someone knowing that someone's gonna disagree with me, I feel like I would be anxious. And yet now I feel like I would enjoy that more. But before I'd be anxious, so is it like, hey, we have certain, like is it like perfect dialogue, so to speak, where like there's back and forth, listening, true listening, all that kind of stuff. Like is that part of it? Or is it just like, or was that not even considered in the context of what you're reading? Yeah, now I think, so what makes this different is it happens in an experiment. So people's expectations were really negative, but they were forced to do it. So they couldn't just decide to opt out really. They got in the situation and they had to. So if you can overcome that expectation and get in it, then you get that benefit. And so I think partly what's happening is people are letting their expectations, expectations are what guide behavior. So we're not really having these conversations, but if we did, we would really enjoy them. Wow, man. So, so I just want to, I want to bring us back just in a minute, like for a minute to this idea, right, that there's these are systematic errors, right? And they distort our lens. I've heard you say one, which makes sense to me that these are in a sense necessary because one, we don't have all the information. So we have to essentially choose directions and make choices based off of incomplete. imperfect information. And so that's going to automatically bias us in the neutral sense that we're going to prefer one choice over another, one idea over another. But I would love to talk about this idea. So we all have that going on. It's universal. And yet there's this thing like bias blind spot. And I would love for you to explain what bias blind spot is and really like What is it about the way, now that's two separate questions. Let's just go, what's by his blind spot and how does that affect us in from normal everyday conversations to big conversations like, know, immigration, gun control, know, death penalty, things like that. So the bias blind spot is this effect where you teach people about bias and people thought, okay, if we just taught people about bias, they'd become less biased. They'd notice these biases in themselves and they would rectify them. And it turns out that people who learn about bias are really good at seeing the biases of other people, but they think that they're less affected by them. so they did these really funny experiments where they found this effect. And then they thought, well, maybe some people are just a little bit more cognitively sophisticated. They're just a little bit better at thinking deeply, and they will not show this blind spot. So they had them take this test that asks these fairly tricky questions. And so you think really hard about the questions, you can get them right. But if you think about them really fast, you'll likely get them wrong. So they looked at the people who got really high scores on this test to see if they also showed the blind spot. And if anything, those people had a bigger blind spot. than the people who were less cognitively sophisticated. And so this idea that there's a blind spot is really affecting people across the board. It's not limited to people who are, you know, less intelligent or less cognitively sophisticated. what the difficulty with that is, and it really kind of mirrors, I talk about the passage where you've got the log in your own eye, but you're constantly looking at the speck in someone else's eye. And so it's really the logs in everybody's eye. We're not good at removing the log. so part of what's difficult in talking about bias is everyone's really great at seeing it in other people, but really bad at seeing it in themselves. And so part of my motivation in writing the book was to say, how can I help people turn the attention back to the self and recognize their own bias so that we can actually start to correct it? Because seeing it in other people, hasn't really helped us that much other than to separate us to what sounds like your second question, because it allows us to hold a moral high ground to say, look at me. You've got this problem. I don't. And therefore, I can monologue to you or preach to you and not listen to you. bright. Yeah, that makes sense. You know, we've been fortunate to talk to a few people that translate Bibles, and like, Trimper Longman and a couple others that are escaping me right now. And talking to Trimper, I remember him discussing the process by which people interpret Bibles and why... there's differences from one version of the Bible to another, because it's just kind of based on that individual's either personal biases, education, whatever, all the factors. So that's something that Bible translators have to contend with. But how do readers utilize bias when they are approaching scripture and or... even listening to sermons, because it's weird. It's like, you would think that if all the churches in America are preaching out of the same Bible, that on one level, all Christians in America would think the same way about certain things, like hot Bible. So how does that work? Talk to us about Bible and theology, or psychology and theology. I'm gonna try. will admit I'm not a theologian, so this isn't my background, but when you were talking, I mean, immediately I thought of like Issam Akali's book, you know, Reading While Black, and I just thought, okay, well, there is a way that we do this, and there are theologians out there that are writing about this topic, so I don't wanna step on anything that they've already said. But even when you're not thinking in broad categories of difference, all of us grew up with a certain sense of a self that we developed. And that self that we developed impacts what we pay attention to. So we pay attention to different things. And so I talk about maybe you were the smart one or the pretty one or the athletic one or the funny one. And you started thinking about yourself that way. And so you started categorizing things into that mindset. And so then when you meet other people, what's interesting is the categories we use for ourselves are not neutral. Then we use them to judge others and we use them to judge the information that we're being presented with and Sometimes it seems like maybe that's fine I tell a story in the book that my husband is really Schematic for athleticism and he could identify this person from like a hundred yards away and he'd say I think I recognize who that is and I said how could you he said well I recognize their lats and I'm like I Don't know what that is. I could definitely that's not a category I could use I can't I can't identify people that way that makes zero sense to me so That's freaking awesome. that's a scheme of the way he thinks about himself and it creates this ability to judge differently about things. And so you see the world differently. And in that example, maybe it seem so damaging, but especially if you consider context that we're in, it's really easy because I'm grading students to want to judge them very easily. Like, this is an A student, this is a B student, this is a C student. When the reality is, they're they're beloved children of God's interstate by grace just the way that I am. And I'm not sure how useful, I don't think God's gonna grade us. Well, I don't know how God's gonna grade us, so I will say that. But I'm not sure how God's gonna separate us when we get to heaven, but it's probably not the same way that I'm, the categories that I'm using. But those categories that I'm using are the lens through which I'm gonna read the Bible, the lens through which I'm gonna respond to sermons, the lens through which I'm gonna approach people. And so trying to be really thoughtful about. How do we want to judge ourselves and judge others? And then what's the lens we want to put on is part of what I'm trying to encourage people to do. And I don't think that that means that those other differences don't exist or shouldn't be part of the story. think our identities are complex. So I'm not saying we completely try to eliminate those other ways of categorizing because that's part of who God created us to be in terms of difference. But if it prevents us from loving other people well. if it prevents us from having a great conversation that can end in a hug, then that category maybe is not serving us the way that it should. Does that? no, that makes sense. mean, so if I'm thinking about, you said schema, and I'm really interested in that, in digging into that a little bit more, because the idea of these mental frameworks or filters through which we take in new information, right, or interpret. the world. Can you go in a little bit deeper into that for me? Because I feel like this is helpful for understanding how it actually is that we have bias. So I get that we have incomplete information. And so that's going to automatically going to make it so that we're going to make choices based on the information we have and form beliefs based on the information we have. But it's like, how does that bias even start occurring through these schemas? Is that kind of how it happens? Like, how do we know, like maybe even just a little bit more detail about how these biases come about in our thinking? Yeah, because I think anytime you're starting, let's imagine you're just starting at birth and you're starting to create these ways of seeing the world. And the ways that you're going to see the world are going to be contextualized to the time, the year you were born, the city, the location, the family structure, the socioeconomic situation that you're in. And so all of those things are impacting how you're categorizing seeing the world, what exposure you have. everyone's set of schemas is going to be different. so when we take in new information, which makes sense, we're using the old information that we have as a filtering to say, OK, what is this like? What is this not like? And then in so doing, our understanding of what that new information is could be very different from somebody else's who's operating from a different set of categories and ways of seeing. One of the stories I tell in the book is about the Central Park Five. And part of what was so damaging for one of the contributing factors to why the Central Park Five were wrongly convicted had to do with the beliefs of the jury surrounding false confessions. And they believed that no one would confess to a crime if they hadn't committed it. And so when these young boys were under duress, and thought that if they confessed they could go home and they were, you know, deprived of food and sleep, they produced these confessions, but the jury almost largely convicts them based on the fact that they believe that no one would confess if they weren't guilty. And so, so was so fascinating, not fascinating, but that's the way that that schema, that belief about confessions and the situations under which a person would confess to a crime changed the outcome for those kids. so then for people who aren't familiar with what happens, they were eventually exonerated. The real attacker was identified through DNA evidence and then these kids had really nothing to do with it. So there are consequences to holding false beliefs. and those schemas guide our processing of information. So they saw all of the evidence through the lens of this must be true because this person has confessed. Yeah, so it's like the evidence, couldn't be anything. Like it was all, all of it was just going to point towards their guilt because of this one thing where it's like, hey, they confessed and no one would confess to a crime they didn't get, they didn't do, which we found to be patently false. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's good. yeah, I hope, yeah. Yeah. So so I'm I'm a Christian. I'm a Jesus following Christian. And a lot of my early Christian experience, I was I was taught that we are some of the most more moral people on the planet. We can do no wrong. Our armpits don't smell like when I when I gave my life to Christ, it was. like automatic transformation, I could do no wrong and somehow it magically changed my voter registration to Republican. Can't explain it, Lord works in mysterious ways. But with that in mind, like how can sort of like this moral self image that we come up with, you know, make it harder to change our minds or to even like admit wrongdoing? Yeah, yeah, so for self, for self identity, is in part what you're talking about, it's like if my self identity as a Christian means that I'm, that I'm always right and that I'm always moral, then, then I'm not going to be open to even seeing, seeing the possibility that I'm wrong. And it'll be a quick, it'll be a quick way to bolster my self esteem. I can say, yeah, well, because I'm Christian, like. I'm always gonna be right about things. And so it'll make you feel really good. And one of the quick and dirty ways to feel better is called the above average effect. And so let's say you did something that wasn't great. You could be like, well, but I'm still above average. I'm still more than some of these other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right? It's like, okay, that wasn't great, but it's still better than most people. So when you do that, it turns out we do that even more. Like that bias is even bigger for people when you're asking them questions about morality. So they're like, in terms of morality, definitely above average on that one. So we use that to bolster self-esteem. And I guess I think part of the Christian story that I'm trying to tell here is that Christians ought to be best suited to be less biased. because we don't have to have our identity in being right or even in being moral that we can say, the blood of Jesus covers us. And therefore, man, I'm a sinner saved by grace. And so I can acknowledge my identity as somebody who doesn't get it right, who fails, who gets it wrong, who gets rejected, who isn't perfect or moral. Because Christ's blood is what paid the price for my sins and therefore I don't have to prove. that I'm more moral than anybody else because he's already he's the reason that I don't have to be judged as immoral. So that's part of I there's a really hopeful angle to this story that I'm trying to tell which is man, you're there's freedom. There's freedom. There's freedom from from having to find success or identity in the things that the world tells us we have to find it and that you don't have to have a certain, you know income or what are other things? popularity, number of followers in order to have value, that our value is already secure and therefore we're freed up to be who God's called us to be. I really like that. mean, it makes me think that there's a quote and I don't remember where it's from. was from C.S. Lewis, but I don't remember which book, but essentially it might have been mere Christianity now that I'm thinking about it. But the idea of, you know, that that Christians were better than other people. it's essentially like, no, not at all. They're just people that have acknowledged need for savior or like, right. Like that. the idea that Christians... Now, should we be because of our example in Jesus and the moral underpinnings of the Bible and the concern that God has with morality and how we treat others and everything in New Testament ethics? Yes. But to assume that someone is super moral when they're Christian, is that's not, it doesn't necessarily follow. And one of those things is that someone, you know, could have this need to be saved and that could make them, you know, that could make them especially bad. That they even feel this need, that they need to be saved or that they're attracted to this, you know, this religion or whatever it is that might offer them salvation and forgiveness of sins. You know, someone has to be aware of their sins and wonder. man, I am pretty bad, right? I do have these issues and maybe that might even be attractive for someone who's even worse than on average morally than someone who is, it's just an interesting thought. I would love to work through the idea of cognitive, not cognitive, I we've been talking about cognitive bias, but confirmation bias. That's a big one that comes out quite a lot. It's confirmation bias. Talk to us about what that is and how that played a role in your book and how it, man, how does it affect us when it's coming to these major issues that we're trying to figure out. Yeah, it's a big one. So confirmation bias is just seeking out information that confirms what you already think. And so, because it makes us both feel right and feel good about ourselves when we're like, look, man, all these other people agree with me. And so it leads to kind of leads to division because it really keeps you in the same thought bubbles that you've already been in because you're just wanting to see a regurgitation and revisiting. of things that you already believe. And it can lead to polarization, so you become more polarized in what you think, you become more convinced, more confident, and then it just leaves less room for you to recognize your own failing or things that you've missed or learn, anything new. So it's really damaging to our thinking. But I do think, I mean, they're really... There are ways to overcome it, which are really just exposing yourself to other ideas, which isn't really that mind blowing. But just trying to, yeah, right, because you don't want to, because it's unpleasant. But I think paying attention to the opposite news source, I think that's a really useful thing. News sources you don't usually pay attention to, pay attention to those. Having friendships across difference is really important for that. asking people, what am I not seeing here? Having people who critique your thinking to say, okay, even the process of how you're coming to a decision to say, I know that I can't totally control the outcome, but can we just look at the process? So one of the cognitive scientists I cite is Annie Duke, who is a poker player, and she writes a book about thinking in bets and part of what she does to get better as a poker player is she doesn't tell you what the outcome of the hand is, she's showing you what the hand was, and then she has her kind of outside group critique the process. Because there's another cognitive bias called outcome bias, whereas we judge the quality of someone's decision-making process based on how well it went at the end. And that's a problem, because you could have actually made a really great decision in terms of the information that you had, but because you don't have all the control and because we live in a probabilistic environment, the outcome didn't turn out great. But the process could have been excellent. And so trying to separate those two things is a really important skill to try and reduce bias. So I would say confirmation bias is definitely really prevalent. But just kind of figuring out how to find and engage with diverse sources is really the straightforward answer to how to fix it. No, I mean, that's really good. Just a quick follow up. These are automatic, right? So it's not like, I'm just going to... Obviously, it's affecting my choices, but it's like, maybe I'm not cognizant of the fact that, I just want to find sources that confirm what I think. mean, how automatic is it, I guess, when we're thinking about this? So I think for most people it is automatic. They may be surprised. And again, the bias blind spot applies here. So some people think, other people do that. I don't. I'm really great at reading other sources. But I think the way to really combat it is to the same way that you would have apps or websites open on your desktop. Keep one open that has a different perspective. make sure that your friend network is more diverse. So there are ways to then combat this so that your automatic thinking can get better just by building in an environment that exposes you to different ideas. And so then it just takes a one time shot decision to say, here, I'm going to diversify my environment. Then I'm going to engage with it. And then you don't have to think about it all the time. Then I don't have to say, I'm constantly trying to combat confirmation bias. It's like, I built in some remedies into my environment. So a lot of the fast thinking. So I really distinguish between fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking is what we're doing mostly. And so if you can get better at fast thinking, that's amazing. And the way to get better at fast thinking really requires some good slow thinking to set up your environment to promote the good fast thinking. And so that's one of them, just kind of setting up diverse sources around you so that you don't have to think hard about accessing them. They're just part of your normal routine. You know, I'm somewhat reluctant to ask this question because I don't want to make Josh look bad. No. Now I'm nervous. OK. But like, you know, I agree. I think think I think having diverse sources of news and just perspectives is really, really important. I I consume a lot of legal news. And one of the news sources, if you can call it news sources, is a podcast that is hosted by National Review. Andy McCarthy does a great job. I disagree with him on a lot of stuff, but I appreciate his insights from a conservative kind of viewpoint. And so it seems like having diverse thought is good for us. But how does that apply to pastors? Because I may be speculating here, but I don't think Josh knows the Koran as well as he knows the Bible. When you're going into a church and you've got a pastor and they're given a good message and overall they're just a good person. Like, I don't see lot of pastors communing or fellowshipping with people that have diverse thoughts. So like, how does that kind of come into play with, you know, faith leaders and what have you? Well, I think, I mean, we all have limited time, right? So time is going to be a big limiter on our exposure. And so trying to figure out how to prioritize what we're going to consume is hard because there's just so much out there, right? So trying to figure that out. And so I would say, you know, it makes a lot of sense that I'm spending a whole lot of time reading psychology than I am anything else. And so that's going to make. me biased in how I respond to things. so likewise, somebody who's a pastor is going to spend a whole lot more time in the Bible, and that's going to affect how they view things. think probably, so in order to avoid confirmation bias, I don't know that you need to make sure that everything's even. I don't think that's possible because we have roles that we're supposed to play, and those roles demand time towards becoming experts in those fields. So that would be really hard to say that you should make sure that you can know. And honestly, mean, man, you couldn't. There's just not time to know. It's just not even possible. So I think just trying your best to have at least a little bit of exposure to some other ideas, especially as they relate to the things that you're speaking about. if, know, Joshua preaching on a particular issue and, you know, the Koran also is relevant, then it would make sense to say, OK, let's compare how other religions have a this topic that seems like a great exercise but I'm not sure it means that he should spend you know days and days and hours and hours on on a I just don't think you know I'm not going to I have started to, I will say, I've got most of the alphabet, although I've probably forgotten it, because it was like a year ago. So I think, you know, and on topics where we don't know anything, just to have the humility to say, you know, man, I'd like to learn more about that. And I can't really just confirm what I already think because I can at least acknowledge like I don't know enough. There's a really funny finding that says that it requires a certain amount of knowledge to know what you don't know. And so to get to that spot is where I hope people can get to be like, okay, I may not. I may not be an expert on this, but I know where I fit in terms of my knowledge. And the most dangerous people are the people who think that they're experts who really don't know anything. then you're like, yeah, that's the called, yeah, called Dunning Bridges. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to just kind of in that same vein I wanted to you know get your thoughts about Something that I know I've personally have had to wrestle with, especially in the age of You know, Trump comes on the scene, you see a lot of folks that are just head over heels for everything he does. He can do no wrong. know, liberals like me are being like overly judgmental, you know, about like the behavior we're seeing and a lot of the folks that that's following him. But But then like, sometime I would say in 2016 or 2017, I came to this realization that the people that are kind of deifying, if you will, Trump, are doing a lot of the same things that I personally did when Obama was elected. You know, like Obama, first black president, I mean, very inspirational, know, great speaker. But then when you start peeling back the layers and you start digging a little bit deeper into what he did during his administration, much like I do with Trump. I'm like, you know, I feel like the stories I've been told weren't necessarily true, but I wasn't ready yet to publicly, you know, like say, hey, I may have been wrong. I still think he's a good guy, you know, maybe a family person character wise, but some of his policies I should have been more critical of. And I'm less afraid to do that now. But there was a period where I'm just like, I don't know. if I say this, you know, like, what will be the consequence of that? And I feel a lot of people are doing that today just with Trump, you know, like with whether it's tariffs or, you know, deportations of folks and whatnot. they're just like, something seems wrong. I don't really know what or I know what it is, but I'm afraid to tell other people. Like, can you talk a little bit about maybe like that tension that we all kind of feel when we get to that place? Well, think politics is a hard topic. I mean, the two of you have a lot of experience talking with people about it. Part of the reason it's hard is because it's emotional. People have an emotional connection to it. And so you're not really, it's hard to have conversations with people when it's very clear that what you're touching is so close to their identity and their emotions that you can't have a conversation where you could potentially voice an alternative position that wouldn't be perceived of as a kind of rejection of them as a person. And I think those are the kinds of conversations that I, you know, all of us get into them occasionally and, you know, mistakenly. In my case, I think, you know, I step on someone's sacred cow and I didn't mean to. And then you think, oh man, I wish I had just never had this conversation. But then on the other hand, you think, oh, but isn't it useful to be able to have these conversations with people? And I would say, I think, I think it is, and I think I would love to believe, and I'm sure I've heard some of your podcast episodes, so people are doing this. Having a conversation surrounding politics where they're willing to recognize that there's room for disagreement. And I think if there's room for disagreement, that's a productive conversation. But if people's emotions are too tied to it, and there's not room for disagreement, there's not a lot of utility to the conversation if it's going to create more division. And so I think one of the things that I... frequently try to grapple with is I wouldn't want my difference of opinion with somebody. So I'm going to share this story. So my husband had a really big medical incident and I had to run from class to drive him to the hospital. And so then when I came back to class, and so this was last fall, a student was wearing a political hat that happens to be the opposite of my political identification and I was telling the students what had happened in with my husband's medical condition and the student just said, hey, can I stand up and pray for you? And I said, absolutely, you know? But it just was really funny because in my head I thought, you Jesus commands us to pray for our enemies, but sometimes your enemies pray for you, you know? And I just kind of laughed and, you know, it's a joke because he's definitely not my enemy, but I just thought, I wouldn't want my political identification to prevent us from having that kind of connection and trying to figure out how do you balance those identities. kind of still holding a passionate view that you've like, hey, I've thought this through, this is what I think is right, and I wanna be willing to have the conversation with people to share those ideas. I'm not trying to shut that down, but just trying to figure out how do you also still bridge across that and have your enemies pray for you. I really like that. mean, this conversation is so important. It's so important. And I would love for you to talk a little bit about... There's so many directions I would love to go, but let's do this. When we're thinking about slow thinking, you had mentioned it, slow and fast thinking, right? Slow thinking. Maybe you could describe that a little bit more. What is the difference between the two? And why is slow thinking so important? You had alluded to it, you started talking about it, but what can we do during slow thinking? You had mentioned getting more sources and doing, but what can we do in slow thinking to make sure that we train our fast thinking better? there best practices? there things that we can do? to really train our fast thinking to be better like you mentioned before. Yeah, so I think slow thinking can be used to set your habits so that your fast thinking can be good. So one of the things I talk about is self-control is hard to maintain. We get tired of if you're just like, I'm just going to do this, or like you think about people with their New Year's resolutions where they're just like, I'm gonna muscle through this, I'm gonna do this really hard thing. And you can do that for a little while, but that's not gonna necessarily lead to long-term change. And part of the reason why is everything's just a lot easier to do with habits so that you don't have to muscle this self-control to do all the right things at all all the time. So when you're in a slow thinking phase, so slow thinking is just regular thinking, what most people think thinking is, when you can make a list, when you can speak out loud, it's the stuff that we mostly think of as what thinking is. so... When you think about what are the priorities, what are the things that are most important that you want to build into your day? What are the goals that you're trying to set, who you're trying to become? When you can sit and think about that and then consider, what are the habits that I would need to have to get there? When you think from the perspective of Christians, like if you want to have an active prayer life, if I want to have time for scripture reading, if I want to meditate or hospitality, how do I build those into my daily life? So one of the habit researchers that I cite, she, not Christian, but what she wanted to do is she wanted to exercise more. So what she decided to do was sleep in her exercise clothes so that when she would get up in the morning, it would be a friction. Like it would feel bad to have to take off her exercise clothes if she didn't exercise. So it just made it like one less thing she had to do, but also would make her feel like she was kind of punishing herself if she didn't do it and then had to take them off. And so for me, it's just, know, and this is for most people too, when you think about the... the things you do when you get up in the morning and the way your body just kind of knows how to do them before you get any kind of caffeine, you're like, here's what I do, here's what I do, here's what I do, and just kind of putting those things into practice. And so one of the things I tell students is even if you don't, even if you're not a morning person and you're not somebody who could sit and concentrate really hard about reading the Bible, you ought to open the Bible anyway because it opens this idea that God is present. And so figuring out how to get at least opening the Bible into that morning set of habits is really important because it just opens that schema for you for the day. So yeah, would say using your slow thinking to then figure out how to set up your environment to really kind of hack your fast thinking to make it easier for you to think about the things that you want to be able to think about and try and create friction around the things that you don't want to do or don't want to think about is one of my favorite suggestions of what to do. Yeah, Was I was just gonna ask like all the all the strategies and techniques that you've spoken about Are these skills? only really applicable for like neurotypical people or Would they apply differently like if you were on the spectrum or something like that? wow. So I don't study atypicality, I'm probably not going to be great at answering this question, so I want to start with that. Let me think some of these through. I think routines are really important for people who are atypical though. So I think actually even more so when you think about kids and adults who are on the spectrum. having that kind of predictability and routine so that, and honestly it probably works really well for people struggling with anxiety as well. So it's kind of a way of kind of limiting some of that intrusive thought by focusing you on the this is what I do next, this is what I do next, this is what I do next. So yeah, I'm not sure that all of my suggestions make sense for someone who would identify as atypical, but I would say the majority of what I'm thinking about right now would probably apply, yeah. Yeah, that was good. I was like, I texted Will, you threw her a curve ball, dude. I mean, love the curiosity. I love it. I couched it in humility to kind of say like hey this is not my field I'm just giving this take it from you. example of how you don't have the Dunning-Kruger effect and how you don't have all that and how you recognize your bias and your lack of information. So this is kind of the last big question. The three of us on this podcast are Christians, we're believers. A lot of people that listen to this aren't, and we are so thankful that you guys tune in. This isn't a Christian podcast, although we have a lot of Christians that come on, but this isn't a Christian podcast. We've had explicit episodes, like people throwing F-bombs. So if you ever want to, Aaron, go ahead and we're open to that. saying the f-word, should just opine, like saying the f-word does not disqual for you as being a christian though, right? No, no, no, no. So anyway, it doesn't. But I'm just saying, people don't typically think when you're looking in the Christian bookstore, wouldn't you be surprised? Let's just say this. If you're at a Christian bookstore, they don't exist anymore, really. And you look and you're getting some Christian subgenre and you see on the album, the next Hillsong album, if it said explicit, parental advisory, explicit lyrics, you're telling me you wouldn't be surprised? It depends if it's... Anyway, so let's see. What I was thinking though is like how, the reason that I brought up the Christian thing is that I want to talk about church, but this could even move to other communities, right? Because we've been thinking about like, how do we recognize bias in ourselves? But how do we work through bias as a community? Because the community is going to get biased. right, especially if you have group think and people coming together and they're all very similar. They're going to think the same thing. And we see that kind of bias. Like, obviously it starts in the person, the individual, but it takes on a life of its own. I feel like in a community and how does a church or a mosque or a synagogue, a temple, right? How does how do these communities of people or universalist or whatever, you know, church, how do they How do they combat bias as a community? What do do? Yeah, so I mean, this won't come as a giant surprise potentially, but like having some checks and balances because in fact, community is a great place to combat bias because as I mentioned, it's really hard to see it in yourself, but creating cultures in which people feel comfortable because their identities aren't based in their success to say because of that, I'm willing to take your critique. willing to I'm willing for us to critique this institution or this process or the ministries that we're doing. Let's try and think, well, how could we do this the best? then creating systems. I also teach research methods and statistics. So I'm somebody who loves to gather data about it. So I'm like, you design some surveys. You find out. You make sure everybody in your community gets represented. And you figure out, what do they see as the issues? How are we addressing them? Are we doing it well? So gathering that data and being willing to take the data as it comes, even when it's like, man, I thought everything was going well. And then you find out that it's not. Being willing to say, wow, I don't want to ignore that. I want to use that. I think having a kind of, for lack of better term, like a growth mindset as a community to say, we want to get better. We want to get better in service. We want to get better in love. We want to get better in what our goals are. And just creating some ways of checking how that's going. And then also providing that check for each other to kind of say, within a small group community, to kind of say, OK, I see that this is what you're trying to do. I want to acknowledge the ways that it's going well. also want to point out the ways that things you might not be seeing. And then having people that are open enough to kind of say, wow, thank you. I see that you're doing that for my growth and for my good. yeah, so I think actually communities where you see bias getting reduced. Now, can I give a lot of great examples of where I see this happening? Not necessarily. I would love to say that I have some really great stories about. where people are doing that well. But I do think you see that in some places in the nonprofit world, people are doing that. I mean, the whole idea that you're trying to apply for grants requires that you build in some of those structures. So that's not to say that they don't exist, but I can definitely see where we could be doing that, doing that better. Yeah, that's really good. mean, you know, we're trying to do that as a church. In our church, we have discussion after every River City Underground. That's the church that I lead. And it's in Richmond, Virginia. And so if you're in Richmond, come check us out. But anyway, so yeah, absolutely, that would be great. But what we do is we talk after every sermon and we kind of try to process it together. And I try to kind of like promote Hey guys, like, let's talk about what we're challenged with by this. Let's be honest about what's, you know, going on. Sometimes it works better than others. You know, sometimes it gets into just like how I felt and which is, which is fine. But I'm really trying to like get people to be really honest about what they think the Bible is saying and how that might challenge them or issues that they might have. And I found it like it's really difficult to get people sometimes to be really honest in those group settings. And so like what you said about getting, like how do we really help people understand, you don't have to be right. And I know you want to feel good about yourself, but you can feel good about yourself because we love you and because God loves you and because you have all sorts of skills and, you know, you're all sorts of reasons that you're good, that don't have to do with you being right in this particular instance. in this circumstance. And so like trying to figure out how to help people like let go of that is like, it's so hard to do. I mean, do you have any like advice for me, like working through that, like as a church, because it's like, I'm not necessarily going to get up there and like promote like to Wales Point, get up and promote like, hey, This is the Quran. We're going to treat the Quran at the same level as the Bible, because it isn't like this. This is a Christian church, right? And we believe in the authority of scriptures and there are certain things that are assumed in it. And yet at the same time, you want to have the most open conversation you can. I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that before we close? I think what I try to do with my students and just I think in general is to model as much as possible that I will receive their criticism well. I think also part of it is I try to be really, with my population, they're all. at least 20 years younger than me. And so I get to kind of say, you're the experts on what it means to be Gen Z. so inform me. And so I let, I have them sit at the front with me in class. And so I have one or two students every week who's like my co-presenter who I kind of go to as my question answerer. And it's a way of kind of modeling to them. Like I know that I don't have all the examples that you're going to bring that, that we have something to bring to each other. And I think then, So modeling a kind of willingness to take critique and like show me, teach me something, show me something and that I'm gonna take it really well and I can laugh at myself when I don't know, you know, I've learned some things that, words that I didn't know because of these 20 somethings teaching me stuff and then kind of laughing at me because you know, here's this old woman trying to do this, know. And I think that willingness to take critique and then I give critique. of them so they get critiqued back. think, I don't know, creating a culture where you model both the receiving and the giving of it and finding some people who maybe have a gift for it. I talk about cognitive dissonance as a spiritual gift. So if you can create dissonance for somebody, if you can create enough of it in a way that prompts them to change, that's amazing. Now, I don't have that. I hate confrontation, but there are some people out there that are really good at like... Hmm. I really love you and so I'm coming to you to confront you in love and like how do we do that? I have students in class write journal about how could you use cognitive dissonance as a spiritual gift which sounds really counterintuitive to lot of people but I think man that's how we get better and I think you know to your point I think just your genuine sense of like man I really want us to get to get better I think that usually comes across then people are like then I let me tell you what I think and they're like okay yeah I don't know that's none of that's revolutionary but no, but it's so good. I mean, and this conversation is so helpful and it needs to be had in so many spaces, in the Christian spaces, where we are terrible at recognizing bias. And I would love for us to get better at that and just critical thinking in general as part of like, I feel like a mission that God's going to put on me and and even in the way I do ministry. really, it's just been such a great conversation, Aaron. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, absolutely. How can people get the book? Is there a preferred vendor that you would like them to use? And how can they connect with you and your work? So yeah, I work at Indiana Wesleyan University, so it's erin.devors at indwest.edu. The book is available at wherever, like Amazon and Barnes and Noble and IVP Press. And then there's also the audiobook version. You can get it on Audible, on Google, on, I don't know, wherever. audiobooks are. So if you want to, get to hear me read it. So there's that too. So if you're somebody, I know it's also free on Hoopla if you have a library that can get you that one as well. So yeah, thank you. I mean, I appreciate getting to talk about this so much. And I appreciate the two of you kind of modeling like, hey, look, we're going to disagree about some things, agree about other things, and then invite a really good conversation around difficult topics. So yeah, I really, really appreciate that. Yeah, well thank you so much. It's people like you doing the work that you're doing that make it so we can do this and continue to have these productive conversations. So thank you so much for being a part of this today. Absolutely. And to our viewers and listeners, guys, thanks for joining us. If you're joining us on YouTube, make sure that you like, subscribe, hit the notification bell, share this with people that can use this information. This should be shared widely. and it should be shouted from the rooftops that we need to look at our bias and so we want to make sure you guys are doing that. So let us know in the comments what you think. We read them. We can't respond to every one, but we do read them. Hack the algorithm for us so we can continue to get this good stuff out there. And until next time guys, keep your conversations not right or left, but up. Thanks. God bless. Um, are you going to hit stop? Oh, I.