Me. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

Episode 166. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

And the me, and the people's brains, you know, how we see, how we interpret information

in front of us, all that low-level stuff connects to kind of more high-level difficult decisions

and concepts that we think about and all the usual stuff that we think of as

thinking and you know going about our lives so anytime that there's a connection between

you know low-level stuff and high-level stuff in the brain and behavior that gets me

very excited. That's psychologist David Lavari. So my name is David Lavari.

So my name is David Lavari and I'm a social psychologist.

I research human behavior and right now I'm based at Harvard University

in the psychology department and the business

school there. Earlier this year Laveari along with his colleagues Daniel Gilbert,

Timothy Wilson, Bo Severs, David Amadeo, and Falia Wheatley produced a study that revealed just the sort of thing he loves to research,

a connection between the way we process information in general to the way we approach larger phenomena like institutions

social problems and everything from war to policing to teaching a musical

instrument. Lervari and his team found evidence for something they call,

prevalence-induced concept change.

When we set out to change the world by reducing examples of something we have deemed problematic and we succeed.

A host of psychological phenomena can mask our progress and make those problems seem intractable, as if we're only treading water when in fact we've created

the change we set out to make.

To understand what this means, we need to build up to the idea by first discussing another idea in psychology called

Creep.

...