Have you ever lost a friend to misperception?

Have you lost a friend or family member to the idea that your views had just gotten so different

that it was time to end the relationship? Perhaps even by unfriending each other on Facebook?

But perhaps the idea that our views are so different is not so accurate. Perhaps we're losing

each other based on warped visions of each other. I'm Tristan Harris, and I'm Azar Askin.

And this is your divided detention, the podcast from the Center for Human Technology.

Today on the show, we're talking with Adam Mastrayani, a post-doctoral research scholar

at Columbia Business School who studies how we perceive and misperceive our social worlds.

Together with Adam, we're going to explore how accurate and inaccurate our views of each other

actually are. And as you listen to the conversation, maybe keep in mind that relationship that you

might have lost to misperception. And maybe that you might be able to revive as a result of what you hear.

Adam, I am so excited to have you on your undivided detention. I think your work is both

incredibly critical. It's some of the most critical problems and also some of the most hopeful

because it shows that as bad as the world seems, perhaps it's not as bad as it appears in the

sense that we aren't actually seeing other people. And you have this incredible line. You say,

you know, people change when they think others are changing, but people misperceive others changes.

These misperceptions may be devil people's efforts to understand and change their social worlds,

distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones. When I hear that, I'm like,

it's as if when we look at the world, we're actually inside of a virtual reality headset.

And I am not seeing what other people really believe. I'm seeing a virtual world and they become

not just misperceptions, but false reality. And this would be fine if we were talking about

misperceptions of inconsequential things, but that's not what we're talking about. You know,

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