From the Vault: Authenticity, Part 1
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we venture into the vault once more. We are going to be rerunning our series on authenticity. This is going to be Authenticity Part 1. That's Part 1 of 3, and it originally aired 3-19-2024. Let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪

hey welcome to stuff to blow your mind my name is robert lamb and i am joe mccormick and today we're going to be kicking off a series on a uh a concept that i have been thinking about a lot lately that is the idea of authenticity i've been thinking about doing an episode on this sort of off and on for i think several years now

Authenticity is really interesting to me because it is one of those concepts that is extremely important. It's highly relevant to our lives. We probably think about it every single day. And at the same time, it is sort of vaguely defined. We don't often stop to think about what it really means or to analyze how we evaluate it or what our criteria of authenticity are.

And so forth. And I think that's kind of a shame because our judgments about personal authenticity play into all kinds of things into how we relate to friends, acquaintances and coworkers, whether we trust political candidates, how we make business decisions, how we understand and evaluate music and poetry and other works of art and entertainment. It's it's threaded all through our lives.

It even comes down to basic decisions that you wouldn't even think of as getting into the core of authenticity. Like, I think everybody has at least one, I don't know, T-shirt or other kind of garment in their wardrobe. And you may find yourself wondering some days, is this the day I wear this? Can I pull this off? And to some extent, you may be wondering about authenticity. Like, can I wear this and be authentic? Or

Or are people going to see through me and they're going to question whether I actually support that band or whether this is the appropriate color scheme for me and so forth? Is this t-shirt really me today? Exactly. Yeah. And as we'll get into, like, that answer may change day to day. Like, you know, we're not necessarily the same person day to day. And what is authentic one day may not be authentic the next. Right before we started recording, I was thinking about how

authenticity is even often prescribed as a remedy for when people are having difficulty with social relations or social interactions. Like when somebody is like, I'm having trouble making friends or I'm having trouble with dating. What am I doing wrong? What's the first thing people usually say to them? Just be yourself. That is it. That is advice there. Essentially, that means be authentic, though. It's a paradox, right? Because at the same time,

There's no other way to hijack your own authenticity than by overthinking your authenticity. Yeah. Or at least that can be the case.

Yeah. So, you know, we invoke this concept all the time. We make judgments about it all the time. These judgments are highly relevant to our lives. But often we'd be – I think if you press most people on what does it really mean, they'd probably have to think about it for a bit before they could come up with an answer. So I'm interested in exploring this question. What is authenticity in a person, in a statement, in a work of art? It seems to have –

some overlap with honesty but is not the same thing as honesty in fact I think quite famously there are people in the real world and like fictional characters you can think of who are known not to be honest but are still widely considered authentic in some way like tricksters and liars and rascals who are not thought to be reliable truth tellers yet they're also not thought to be personally fake and

You know, a lot of like lovable scoundrels in movies. Han Solo is a character who like lies all the time, but he is you would probably judge him as authentic. Yeah. Yeah. He's true to himself. And that's one of the things we admire about him. Like, you know, he shoots from the hip.

And while we might have a hard time coming up with a clear and all cases appropriate definition of authenticity, we definitely know what it is in opposition to its antonym, right? The opposite of an authentic person is a person who is authentic.

fake. I think we all have this idea in our mind of a fake person, and we know them when we meet them. Yeah, yeah. But even this is, of course, difficult to figure out as well, because there's so many different versions of quote-unquote fakeness in an individual. Like, what is the context? Is it like a social situation? I think that tends to be a situation where a lack of

authenticity is considered more of a red flag as opposed to, say, like a customer service environment where, you know, there's a lot of back and forth there as well. And there is some nuance as well. You can certainly come off too fake in a customer service situation. But there is like a level of like I am putting on the public face

I am not being 100% myself because I am also representing this company or whatever. That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, there are some jobs that just require you to act a certain way regardless of what you're feeling inside. Yeah. It's also interesting to think about, yeah, this whole idea of like an authentic person versus a fake person, like someone who lies all the time, because if someone lies all the time,

Then they tell the truth in a manner of speaking. You know, it's kind of like that old night at nights and knaves logic puzzle that was that is popularized by the two gates seen in Jim Henson's labyrinth, which Sarah ultimately solves via answer laundering. Right. So one of the gatekeepers always tells the truth and the other always lies. And with that, you can solve the logic puzzle.

Right. Because since they're both absolutes, you can compare their answers and eventually get yourself to the absolute truth of the scenario. So the dog at that gate that lies all the time, you would probably not think of as a fake person, as someone who's inauthentic.

The way one of the dogs at the gates, I think, would actually be fake would be if they like cultivated an outward facing persona as a truth teller, but then secretly told lies sometimes, you know, like if one of the dogs at the gates actually broke their own rules about lying and telling the truth. Right. Because then they would be inconsistent, which is which is ultimately, I guess, what we're we're getting at when it comes to like the fear of someone in a social scenario being fake is that they will.

They will break a seeming track record like, you know, oh, they seemed like they were so authentic and they were my friend, but then they weren't my friend. Whereas if they were if they hated you the whole time, but they perfectly kept up the front of being your friend for, say, years or the course of your entire lifetime, then they're essentially your friend. Right. Like if the if the fake is perfect, it becomes the truth.

That's a really good point. And I think in reality, that would correspond with some philosophical ideas of authenticity we'll get into in just a second.

So for a direct definition of authenticity in persons, and of course, you know, that term gets applied to other types of things as well. And we'll discuss that in a minute. But in persons, I was looking I was looking at a paper by Erica R. Bailey and Aaron Levy that I'm either going to discuss later in this episode or probably possibly in part two of this series.

But in that paper, the authors defined an authentic person as, quote, someone whose behavior is genuine and reflects their true inner qualities and feelings.

And I think this definition does get at a large part of what people mean with this word. Usually authenticity has something to do with your outward behavior accurately reflecting your true inner feelings and your true inner character. So in short, authenticity is when the outside matches the inside or when something is in fact what it seems to be or when someone is in fact who they claim to be.

But while that's, I think, pretty straightforward to understand, it still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Yeah, I mean, for starters, of course, we can never truly know somebody's actual inner reality, their actual inner thoughts. So it's all just us doing a mental model of what this person's inner thoughts and actual intentions are.

And then it's, yeah, it doesn't necessarily bear close scrutiny, right? Because along these lines, a person with no filters or composure whatsoever is the most authentic person you could hope to meet. And generally speaking, these are qualities you come to expect from, say, a cat or a dog. But a great deal of striving to be a mature human is knowing or learning.

learning how to manage the inner self and outer expression. And as we grow up, there's a great deal to learn and develop along these lines. And then we continue to learn and develop along these lines, ideally. You know, it's kind of a, it's a never-ending journey of trying to figure out how to do all this stuff and how to find that balance between how you are inside and how you appear outside to not necessarily everyone at once, but, you know, different groups at different times. How do you present yourself?

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point. I mean, we think we value authenticity as a desirable trait in people to be friends with people to put our trust in as leaders and so forth. But in reality, a person who authentically outwardly enacts every feeling they have and every thought they have, we would usually view that person as lacking in some kind of self-control. Yeah. So I think there's a, there's a sort of contradiction there within our desires. Yeah.

But anyway, so while this definition I just mentioned, like the is what it seems to be or are who they claim to be definition, I think does cover a lot of the usage of authenticity in everyday life, especially when applied to persons and to artifacts.

Discussing authenticity is complicated by the fact that this word is used to refer to a lot of different ideas that are all somewhat related but also somewhat different. So I think about a secondary usage of authenticity when describing an activity or a product that has a known cultural history. An example that comes to my mind is making a recipe for spaghetti carbonara.

According to a lot of people, there will be an authentic way to make this dish. You got to use eggs, but not cream, et cetera, et cetera. And there are many inauthentic ways to make spaghetti carbonara. And to some people, there is something actually shameful or bad about making it in one of the allegedly inauthentic ways. Right.

And the same category of cultural authenticity or inauthenticity, I think I really often see it applied to food, but I think it also gets applied to things like clothing, dances, crafts and other art forms.

And so this understanding of authenticity has some overlap with the is what it claims to be definition, but it also seems to rope in some other things. It relies on additional assumptions. Yeah, it's interesting. The culinary example is really interesting to ponder because the reality, of course, is that many examples of the authentic in culinary tradition, these were at some point the inauthentic new approach, you know, making use of, say, new ingredients, right?

There are a number of dishes you can find throughout global cuisines that you think of it as a particular form, but you're incorporating ingredients that were brought in from some other location and just became associated with that particular dish. That's right. So I think the idea of authenticity in these sort of like cultural performances or, you know, making a recipe or something is,

What it suggests is you're doing it the way it's always been done. But in basically no case has it ever actually always been done any particular way. Yeah, yeah. So maybe being a little pedantic there, but the point – because the point still holds that when we're talking about an authentic culinary experience –

We mean that it's firmly rooted in the tradition and not a tradition that's existed since the beginning of time, but has maybe existed for centuries, maybe decades, maybe just a few years. And it also is probably rooted in a particular culture. But again, the paradox is that authenticity is rarely truly set in stone. It just may have the feeling of such.

Yeah, I think that's right. And while we are sort of questioning these various ideas of authenticity and how much truth there is to them, really, at the same time, like, I feel it. Like, you know, if I see somebody, like, making spaghetti carbonara with, you know, just, like, heavy cream and American cheese and mixing it together with bacon –

It's not like I think they're doing something morally wrong, but I do recognize there's some kind of gap there. There is like a difference between what they're doing and what a person might understand them to claim to be doing, if that makes any sense. Maybe that's too many orders removed, but do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Though, yeah, like I say, it's hard to really figure out where to land on this because I was thinking about classic cocktails.

as an example of this. In many cases, these are not terribly old

but people do get very possessive of original recipes and so forth. Take the Mai Tai, for example, which we did a whole episode of Invention on years back. We interviewed Jeff Beach Bumberry about the origins of the Mai Tai. It was a pretty fun chat. But yeah, the Mai Tai is a classic tropical drink that...

merely dates back to 1944. And when we talk about an authentic Mai Tai, we're generally talking about this 1944 Trader Vic recipe. And in this particular case, you might ask, well, does inauthentic equal bad? Well, oftentimes, yes. There are plenty of bad Mai Tais out there that are inauthentic. But there are also noted historic variations of the Mai Tai that are not bad drinks. And

And there are various contemporary spins on the cocktail that range from good to great. So in a weird sense, something can at once be authentic and inauthentic. You can have a great spin on the Mai Tai that is inauthentic when compared to the original recipe, but can still be an authentic product of a particular mixologist or bartender's skill and creativity. ♪

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I think that's a great point. And I think, yeah, what you're getting at there with like, there's another type of authenticity that can be achieved, even if the recipe is not the same as what it originally was. But you're saying an authenticity emerges out of a another mixologists creativity and skill and putting something together.

And that taps into this whole other nebula of meanings that people today attach to the word authenticity, which has something to do with like it is related to outward behavior, but is not necessarily about that matching your matching your inner character or matching your inner feelings. It's more about like behavior that is an achievement of your greatest potential or like living your best life. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.

There is a way people talk about being an authentic existence, being one in which you do your best. You're like become the best version of yourself that you can be and do the best you can do. Like a kind of a spin on that. And just our lingo is occasionally go here. Someone refer to a, say, a particular director or creator, and they'll be like, oh, this individual, they're the real deal.

Or this movie, this song, this is the real deal. You know, it doesn't necessarily connect to anything in particular, but it does kind of at least imply that like this is authentic. This is a work of someone's labor and love and passion, like someone put in the work here.

Another phrase that expresses this idea is the idea of someone coming into themselves as an artist or as a leader or as whatever, like they are becoming the real version of themselves by doing something great. Yeah. What does that mean? Like they they fulfilled the prophecy, achieved their terrible purpose. Yeah.

So yet another definition of authenticity that has been very important is one that is particular to existentialist philosophy in which I don't claim to be an expert on existentialist philosophy. So I hope I'm summarizing it well enough here. But the way I understand it is that in this branch of philosophy, authenticity has this specialized meaning that

Where an authentic existence is basically living without illusions, accepting the extent to which you are free to control your actions and accepting that you are thus defined by your actions. And so I think a big emphasis of the existentialist understanding of authenticity is accepting that you are what you choose to do.

And there's not like a separate secret you that's the real you that is different than what you do. What you do is what you are. And in order to be authentic, you have to accept that what you do is what you are. Okay, so it's not you are not who you are, not what you would like to do. You are not what you are thinking about doing.

You are not what you regret not doing. You are what you actually do. What you actually choose to do is who you are. That's the way I understand it. Okay. Fans of existentialism complain at us in email if you think I'm wrong. If you choose to. Yeah.

And then, of course, there are even more ideas of authenticity that we can continue to explore in the rest of the series. But even coming back to the baseline of the is what it seems to be or or the you are who you claim to be definition, there are still a bunch of questions that we can be left to wonder about. Like, why do we place so much value on authenticity and why is authenticity especially important in some domains of life?

What are the criteria of authenticity in a person or in a personal expression? What outward signs are we actually looking for when we make judgments about it? Are we good at making those judgments accurately? I think we're going to look at a paper on that in just a minute. And also, if we go with the definition above, do we truly value authentic behavior as much as we think we do?

All right, let's dive into it. Well, so we're probably going to address authenticity from the angle of psychology research in a number of different ways in the series. But I wanted to start off by discussing a paper that was one of the first things that really interested me when I started researching this topic. This is the paper I mentioned earlier by Erica R. Bailey and Aaron Levy, published in the journal Psychological Science in 2022.

And the title of the paper is, are you for real perceptions of authenticity are systematically biased and not accurate. That'll give away the conclusions. But I think there's some interesting stuff to learn along the way. Hmm.

So at the time this paper was published, the authors were affiliated with Columbia University. I think since then, Bailey has taken a position at Berkeley. But this paper begins by asking a simple question. How good are we at making accurate judgments about who is authentic and who is not?

This paper, again, is the source of the phrasing of the definition I mentioned earlier that, quote, So, if the way they behave outwardly reflects who they really are and how they really feel…

And most of us behave as if we think we're good at making these judgments about others. You know, we do this all the time. You talk to somebody for five minutes and after you walk away from them, you are pretty much ready to say, Jimmy was so earnest and sincere. I really like him. Or Jimmy was so fake. I couldn't stand that guy. It's almost embarrassing to look back on how quickly we think we can make these judgments about people.

Yeah. I mean, of course, it makes sense given like why these this capacity for judging exists. I mean, it comes down to basic survival scenarios in which it maybe doesn't pay to have an open mind. You know, coming back to the, you know, the very worn out example of is there a tiger in the in the weeds there or is there not a tiger? Well, you know, sometimes it depends.

You can't keep an open mind about the scenario. You have to make a judgment call and then make your survival choices accordingly. And, you know, that it holds true in life and death situations, but then it ends up applying to these various social contexts that are not life and death.

That's right. So you could look at it on one hand as there is a survival incentive for us to be suspicious and to not give out trust too easily. You could also look at it from the other hand and say maybe there are some scenarios where there is incentive to trust more easily maybe than we should because like, I don't know, trusting like you don't want to be hung up being suspicious of people preventing you from cooperating to survive. Right, right. Yeah.

And ultimately, like inaction on any given scenario is inaction, like nothing is getting accomplished. Exactly. So in the background section of their paper, the authors talk about, well, they review previous research confirming that we really do make these judgments about authenticity and we base a lot on them. Like people who are perceived as authentic have been found to be more well-liked.

Uh, more easily trusted and authenticity is apparently considered especially important when people select leaders. If you're going to look to someone for leadership, for some reason, people want somebody who is authentic, somebody who that, where they think the outside matches the inside. Now, Rob, you brought this up earlier, but when you think about it, it.

It really would be kind of difficult to make a judgment about another person's authenticity, especially after just a limited amount of time knowing someone. Because to really judge somebody's authenticity by this main definition we're talking about, you would have to both know someone's true inner self, questionable whether that's even a definable concept, and then also observe their behavior carefully enough to

accurately evaluate how well it matches their inner self. And both of those are non-trivial. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, especially when you consider that

A lot of the time when we're making these knee-jerk judgment calls, they're very simplistic, right? When we think we're understanding a person's inner self, we're like, oh, they seem nice on the outside, but inside, a slippery snake. And in all likelihood, they're not just complete evil on the inside. There's a fair amount of complexity there. There are reasons why they might be behaving this way or the other and so forth. You know, it's...

most people's inner self that we cannot see, again, to be clear, is going to be rather complex with a lot of different moving parts there. Absolutely right. And, you know, I think a lot of the inauthenticity that we encounter day to day is situational and based on temporary roles rather than based on people's like permanent personality traits. For example, you know,

probably one of the most common ways you encounter clear inauthenticity is when a salesperson is being really nice to you. You know, does this salesperson really love me or do they really want me to buy something from them? I mean, everybody knows what's going on there, but it's based on like a situation and a role more so than like that person's inherent personality that they're just always a fake snake. Right. Like it's, yeah, just as it's, it's,

probably not the case that they're a fake snake that's just 100% pretending to like you and be cool about everything. It's like the opposite is also unlikely, that this is 100% the real person here, that they are really this into the product. It's probably a balance. Like maybe they are really into the product, but maybe they also have had a very long day and they are having to sort of act a little bit to get through this encounter, you know, and it's not necessarily a reflection on you, the customer.

Exactly. So the authors of this paper suggest that in lots of cases, making judgments about the authenticity of others is what they call, quote, a prohibitively difficult social judgment to make. So their hypothesis is that we are not actually as great as we think we are at assessing Jimmy's authenticity after talking to him for five minutes or maybe even after working with him on a project for six weeks, as we will see in some of these upcoming experiments.

Our authenticity judgments of others, they hypothesize, will exhibit a range of distorting biases, most of which will be related to the personality of the rater rather than the person being rated on a scale of authenticity. Yeah.

In other words, authenticity is largely in the eye of the beholder. So this paper includes three different experimental studies. The first study is just a survey on the Internet of lay people to try to establish two things that were assumed, but they wanted to confirm them experimentally. Number one is people do believe they can tell who is authentic and who is not.

And number two is people think that authenticity is a very important trait in others. It matters a lot. And their surveys did indeed conclude that that is what people think.

A great friend can blow your mind in a lot of ways, like with a fantastic fact or an amazing anecdote. But now T-Mobile wants you to experience a new kind of mind-blowing relationship. T-Mobile 5G home internet. They've got this thing called Wi-Fi mesh that basically means parts of your house where the Wi-Fi was spotty before can be, well, great.

And catching up with the latest shows and movies is easy because Hulu with ads and Paramount Plus Essential are included in your plan. It's easy to see why T-Mobile is number one in customer satisfaction for home wireless internet nationwide by J.D. Power. That's right. T-Mobile has home internet with great benefits like these and a price for every budget. And thanks to PriceLock, they won't raise your rate on internet. Check availability at T-Mobile.com slash home internet.

Price lock exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Guarantees regular monthly rate plan price of fixed wireless 5G internet data with qualifying service. Additional terms apply. For J.D. Power 2024 award information, visit jdpower.com slash awards.

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And there's nothing like a world-class audio system to just transport you to a better headspace. Then there's the Murano's massaging leather-appointed seats. Yeah, massaging seats. Talk about melting away your stress. So, could getting stuck in traffic become your happy place? I don't know. It sounds like it could in the all-new Murano. You should probably check one out for yourself. You gotta drive the all-new 2025 Nissan Murano today. Bows and massaging leather-appointed seats are optional features.

Today's episode is brought to you by USPS.

Business owners and shipping managers, let me ask you something. How confident are you in your shipping process? If you're not using USPS Ground Advantage service, you might not be as in the know as you could be. Here's the deal. With USPS Ground Advantage service, staying informed isn't just an option, it's the standard. Imagine this. When your shipment leaves the dock, you know about it. It's in transit, boom, you know. And when it reaches your customer, you guessed it, you're in the know again.

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you know. Hi, it's Jenny Garth. We all know the importance of taking care of our physical and mental health. But what about our sexual health? I've been there. Feeling totally stuck when it comes to my libido. That's why I started taking Addi.

And let me tell you, I have seen firsthand what a difference it can make in how you feel. Addi is the only FDA-approved pill clinically proven to help certain premenopausal women have more interest in sex, have more satisfying sex, and lower the stress from low libido. Addi has helped hundreds of thousands of women get their drive back.

including me. Talk to your doctor or visit ADDYI.com to learn more about Addy, the little pink pill. Individual results may vary. Addy, or flibanserin, is for premenopausal women with acquired generalized hypoactive sexual desire disorder, HSTD, who have not had problems with low sexual desire in the past, who have had low sexual desire no matter the type of sexual activity, the situation, or the

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The second study was this was a series of surveys to test how good we are at judging authenticity, the authenticity of others.

Now, you can imagine the methodological problems presented here. How do you objectively characterize a person's true inner self and feelings? And how do you measure the extent to which their external actions reflect that inner self? You can't really do that. That's not possible. But the authors come up with, I think, what I think is a very clever proxy to look at. So what they do is they compare other assessments to self-assessments. So how does that work?

So the test subjects in this study, this part of the paper, were incoming MBA students who were randomly assigned to classroom work groups of four to six students each. And these participants would work together continuously throughout the semester of this school year.

and would complete a number of surveys over the course of six weeks at different time intervals, including surveys about themselves, answering questions about their own authenticity and personality and

And at multiple time points, rating the authenticity and personality of other members of their group, people they had been working with, but also people who they didn't know before. So they're randomly assigned in these groups and they would get to know them over the course of the study. And so I think this method makes a lot of sense. It would be hard, maybe even impossible to test and quantify a person's true self.

but you can compare what other people say about you based on your actions to what you say about yourself in private. And that, that comparison can tell us a good bit. Now the authors do explore some complications here that extend from using self-rated authenticity as a standard. For example, they point out that previous studies have found that people, uh,

this was interesting they perceived their own positive actions as authentic to themselves uh relative to their own negative actions which are less authentic to themselves you know that's how we are and self-ratings of authenticity also appear to be influenced by mood so maybe if you are feeling in a good mood you will also rate yourself as a more authentic person

So there are complications here. But understanding these limitations, I still think self-ratings seem like a good point of comparison to look at when to compare with the ratings by others. So survey questions asking people about their own authenticity would include agreeing or disagreeing to a very on like a number scale with items like I am true to myself in most situations or I am more sincere in my interactions than strategic.

This was to examine authenticity as a stable trait, meaning like a sort of semi-permanent trait of a personality. But then they also measured what is called state authenticity, which can change over time and is more of a feeling in the moment with items like I feel fake or I feel like I am pretending to be something I am not.

They also asked people to compare their actions to their inner selves with statements like, there have been times when I felt like I couldn't be myself with my classmates.

And then participants were also asked to judge whether others knew who they really were or not. And then they also took a personality test based on the the big five model. So what were the findings here? Well, the researchers found that self rated trait authenticity was not predictive of other rated trait authenticity. So in judging authenticity, what people said about themselves had no relationship on average to what other people said about them.

Same thing for state authenticity. State, remember, was I feel fake versus the permanent trait of I am fake. Again, in this case, no relationship at all emerged between self-ratings and other ratings. Same for the questions about acting authentically. No pattern of correlation between self-ratings and other ratings.

Overall, there was no significant relationship between self and other rated authenticity, which is pretty strange given how confident we are that we can that we know whether others are being authentic or not.

So all that mental energy you may put into deciding whether you're going to wear that T-shirt today, it may be just completely useless because people are going to decide you are being authentic or inauthentic via that choice in a way that has nothing to do with how you're feeling about it.

Yeah. And this doesn't rule out that there will be individual cases where you accurately perceive that somebody is being fake with you. I mean, obviously, we do probably make correct judgments about that sometime. But what this study found is at least within this setting where it's like students working together on classroom projects over the course of six weeks, no pattern emerged at all. On average, people could not tell.

One observation that struck me as interesting was that the authors write, quote, the majority of the variance in authenticity ratings had to do with differences between the ones making the ratings and across unique relationships rather than differences in the target. So to explain that, at least within this experiment, when you perceive someone else as fake, you

That apparently does not have a lot to say about that person individually and tends to say more about you as the perceiver or the unique relationship between you and that person you're perceiving. So there, there weren't like individuals in these experiments who were repeatedly getting rated as, as fake or as real by everybody around them. Instead, the, like the patterns seem to emerge individually.

in the people doing the ratings of others or in individual one-on-one relationships between people. Okay, so yeah, so you can be very skewed in how you're going to interpret an individual moving forward. Like, what's the name of our, is it Jeff? Is Jeff our hypothetical? Oh, I think it was Jimmy today, yeah. Jimmy, okay. So like, if your first exposure to Jimmy in the workplace is him like actually blatantly stealing somebody's lunch and eating it in the break room.

And then you have actual personal interactions with them. You might be inclined to think, oh, this Jimmy's a snake. He's stealing people's lunches and being sneaky. He must be inauthentic with me as well. But, of course, if we slow that down and we think about it, it's entirely possible for someone to have no qualms about stealing people's lunches and also, like,

be honest and well-meaning in their personal interaction with you. I mean, this is not an impossibility in human behavior and personal judgment. Right. So whereas you might think that if one person perceives Jimmy as fake, then everybody else will perceive Jimmy as fake as well. But that's not the case. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Instead, it's more likely that that I am perceiving lots of people around me as fake or that there's something special about my relationship with Jimmy that makes me think he's fake. Or I guess to put a positive spin on it, you know, it's like you have, you know, and I think we probably have all had these situations where we have a certain preconceived notion about somebody and then we have a really positive interaction with them and that turns things around and we may be able to reflect on that later and be like, well, I used to.

And it may boil down to, I used to think this person was inauthentic, and then I got to know them a little bit, or then I worked with them a little better, or so forth. And in those cases, we can actually kind of see how this can shift.

Oh, that's very interesting. I want to come back and discuss the variable of familiarity at the end here. Couple more things before that. Some interesting biases emerged in the data. I'm not going to go into everything, but just a couple of things that stood out to me. One thing is people were likely to rate other participants as more authentic than they rated themselves. Right.

So that's kind of interesting. It compares to a lot of, you know, on a lot of measures, people kind of have a high opinion of themselves. People on average rate themselves as more honest, more altruistic, whatever, than other people. But on authenticity, at least in this experiment, that's not the case. People on average rated other people as more authentic than themselves. So they thought that they were a little bit faker than everybody else.

In a way, though, this could be kind of a backhanded conflict because it might not be a situation of thinking that everyone around you has a complex inner life, but kind of dismissing people as being like just the sum of their actions. Like not even thinking about the fact that there is a lot of inner thought going on behind the scenes with a particular individual. It's like, oh, I just passed that person in the hallway. Yeah, yeah, I guess they're 100% what I see that they are. Yeah.

We're fine, yeah. No questions of authenticity at all, but it could be kind of a situation where, yeah, because you don't think about them. You take them completely for granted, and you think that this one thing you see them do is all they are. I think that's quite possible. Another thing that was interesting here, we were talking about the idea of authenticity being in the eye of the beholder and that it like –

Ratings of the authenticity of others seem to say more about the rater than the ratee. Apparently people rated themselves, people who rated themselves as more authentic also rated others as more authentic. Right.

So there was just sort of a direct correlation there. Like, I think I'm more authentic. Thus, I think other people are more authentic. And in this particular study, it found there were no individual demographic facts or personality traits that resulted in subjects being significantly rated as more or less authentic. Nothing really about people seem to contribute there.

A third study attempted to replicate study two with a larger sample size, but with a few changes, this time with a mix of virtual and in-person interactions instead of just purely in-person meetings. And this study broadly found the same thing as study number two. Also, study three found the same biases as study two. However, in this study, they did find a couple of personality and demographic factors that correlated with other ratings of authenticity.

Here, people were more likely to be rated as authentic if they were high in the big five personality trait known as agreeableness.

And the big five personality traits are typically openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Agreeableness is a general rating of pro-social tendencies, including trust, kindness, generosity, things like that. So people who were higher in trait agreeableness were thought to be more authentic. And also, interestingly, people who were a little bit older were rated as more authentic. Yeah.

But overall, the authors concluded, quote, we found no evidence that people can accurately identify who is authentic. So that's that's the top line there. We're going around making judgments about authenticity of other people all the time.

maybe sometimes these judgments are correct, but within the confines of this study with like students working together in classrooms, there was no correlation on average. On average, people were no better than chance at judging the authenticity of others. Oh, wow. Now I want to come back to the thing you were mentioning a minute ago about people getting to know each other, Rob, because this was one of the most interesting things that jumped out at me from the discussion section of this paper was,

So the authors write, quote,

other rated authenticity grew increasingly more positive relative to the targets self-rated authenticity. So does that make sense? Like, as you get to know somebody better, they're over there still sitting there saying like, yeah, sometimes I feel fake. I can't, I feel like I can't be myself around people. The face I show the world is not who I really am. And you are over time as you get to know them better saying more and more like so authentic. So themselves. Interesting. Yeah.

That's a fascinating one, though, to try and square away. Like what is because it would seem to say something different about each individual in this relationship, you know? Yeah. I mean, there could be a number of ways to explain that. I kind of wonder and I want to be clear. I don't have special insight here. I'm just kind of wondering that.

I wonder if that could be just a function of liking that, like, if we think authenticity is a desirable trait that like good people who are worthy of being liked are, are authentic as you grow to like somebody more because you know them better. You just naturally like it drags up all of their positively associated traits in your estimation. And that would include authenticity, which is actually something you have no insight into. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I guess there could be a certain amount of confirmation bias there too, right? It's like, okay, you've reached the point where you like this person and therefore you encounter these various examples that you were just going to hold up as, oh, look, they're being authentic there. And maybe you're going to be more forgiving of the moments that could be interpreted as inauthentic.

Um, if you had a different mood or a different demeanor concerning this person, you know, because on the other hand, someone that you have already sort of prejudged as inauthentic and maybe you don't like them, something about them rubs you the wrong way. You might be on sort of hyper alert, like, all right, what's, what's Jimmy doing today? That's just fake as heck. What's he wearing? Ah, I can't believe he thought he could pull that off. That seems highly plausible to me. Yeah. Yeah.

But let's see, should we call part one of our study of authenticity there and come back and look at it some more next time, maybe with explorations of authenticity in art and music and film? Yeah, yeah. It'll continue to be sort of a quagmire, though, trying to figure out what is authentic, what isn't authentic, what is fake, and so forth. So, yeah, we'll get into some discussions of music and art and film and so forth.

So we'll pick up with all that on Thursday. Just a reminder to everybody that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, a short form episode on Wednesdays, Lister Mail on Mondays, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks to our guest producer today, Max Williams. Thanks for stepping in, Max. It's a big help. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. Thank you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft.

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