Agnes:

Hello, Robin.

Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

So I wanted to talk about Foreplay. You wrote a blog post about this.

Robin:

I did.

Agnes:

And your blog post sort of focused, ended up focusing on argument foreplay. But before that, I just want to consider it more generally. So there’s… you gave a bunch of different examples; sexual foreplay. But then what are some of the other…

Robin:

A sermon, for example.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Movies. Meals.

Agnes:

So I’m interested in… Meals. Oh, you mean like appetizer?

Robin:

Right?

Agnes:

Yeah. So like, I would want to divide foreplay into two different categories: Unilateral and Bilateral. Right? So in the movie example, there were like previews. Right? That was the foreplay. In the meal example, it’s like appetizers. But in the sex example, it’s going to be bilateral, right? Like, both people are, you know, is engaging in the foreplay, both sides are engaging the foreplay, in some sense, right? Or participatory thing. Are there other examples of foreplay that are bilateral in the way that sexual foreplay is?

Robin:

Well, I would actually say the movie and the meal examples, some center is initiating some coordination. But the people in the theater together will hear each other laugh. People at the table will see each other eat. So you could say the people at the table are coordinating their mood of eating, and their pace of eating, and their style of eating with the appetizer. That is the appetizer functions to help them do the foreplay with each other before the meal. They’re not playing with the food, they’re playing with each other. In the same way, the movie audience, the movie audience isn’t playing with the movie. They’re playing with the rest of the audience.

Agnes:

OK. So they’re like getting into a mood together.

Robin:

Yes, and seeing that they are together in the mood, and enjoying that. And at a concert, right, the opening act of a concert or a political rally, that’s not so much to have you coordinate with the speaker as to coordinate with the other people.

Agnes:

OK, good. But like if you say, you know, I guess, I think… so take like a conversational foreplay, where, like when you… Often, even if you’re teaching a class, right, where in some sense, you really could just get down to business. People will be like, people will say, “Hi!” or “How are you?” or the students will…

Robin:

That’s right. How was your weekend?

Agnes:

“How was your weekend?” Right? So we have this come… and in a conversation, where you don’t know that it is going to ever get down to business so to speak, you might, that part could be protracted, right? So there’s this, in a way, what small talk is. It’s a kind of conversational foreplay, that most of the time never goes anywhere, right? You never get down to business in a conversation, you never actually explore anything, right? You just sort of coordinate as being on the same page. So, I see what you’re saying the case of the movie and the restaurant are also, there’s a group of people coordinating. But still seems different to me from that on the one hand and the conversation and sex case on the other, where it’s seems like there’s maybe… I don’t know. Is it there’s more agency involved? Or what, why did these cases seem different to me?

Robin:

Well, if the key idea is that you are reacting back and forth to each other’s reactions, then what you’re doing is checking how they reacted to what you did, and making sure they see how you reacted to what they did. And you’re going back and forth many times, sort of assuring yourselves that you see the reaction you expect to see or that you understand, and that you each sort of are aware of each other’s state, attitude, enthusiasm, abilities, et cetera. And so, there’s this book by Randall Collins, I mentioned in the post called, Interaction Ritual Chains, where he says this is just a very big feature of human behavior and a wide range of contexts. We just quite often want to go through these situations where we synchronize each other. So singing, dancing, but a wide range of other things. And he says the key function is that we are trying to sort of reassure ourselves that we are looking at the same thing in the same way with the same attitude and similar abilities, and similar style and habits, et cetera the way that we are assuring ourselves that. So if everybody in the process is reacting to everyone else, then we are all reaching some sort of mutual interaction, equilibrium, where we’re all aware of that. But it could also be that there’s a single focal point like the sermon speaker, who is not much reacting everyone else. But still, everyone else is reacting to them and they’re reacting to each other’s reaction. So in a sermon, maybe if somebody says amen, that maybe that emboldens the preacher to say this next thing even louder as if to expect an amen, for example, and that would be the way the preacher is reacting to the audience. But in a movie, we could laugh at something and then somebody else can hear that somebody else laughed, and we might then be more open to laughing. And the next thing we hear, because we as an audience are synchronizing our reaction to a movie that’s not reacting to us.

Agnes:

Right. So it seems to me that the… so I was inclined to think that at least in the sexual case and the conversation case, there is something like an exploration going on of trying to find things that we can see and say in the same way, right? So, like we’re trying to converge. In the case of a song, like singing together, or the food, these other cases, maybe it’s like it’s more of a foregone conclusion that there already is available to us, way of synchronizing. And we all know what it is, sort of in advance, so we can just sort of flip the switch and turn it on, right. But in conversation and in sex, there is less of that. Like, here’s the thing we can do where we know in advance that will be agreed on it, right? And so there’s more of like exploration of the space of like possible things we could be saying and doing so that we can hit on some that we would be doing together. So we could say that the one kind of foreplay, the kind in with the sermon, the movie, et cetera, is less exploratory. And the kind of the conversation in sex is more exploratory.

Robin:

So let me just call one narrow and one wide. A narrow ritual might be one where the range of ritual responses is very constrained, there’s not very many different things you could be plausibly be doing. And so we are just verifying and checking that you are within your expected slot in the narrow range. And other might be wide, in which case, there’s a wide range of possibilities that we might need to coordinate within. And then there might be more search, we might just fail initially to be in sync, and we might need to search to find a way that we could get to be in sync. So one of the evolutionary stories here, which I think is plausible, is that like, the first human superpower was this ability to watch somebody else hitting one rock against another, and you hit your rock against your rock the way that you saw them hit their rock, and that this ability to just watch somebody else, get into their head, and do the same thing they did is the superpower humans had that other animals didn’t have. So it’s intrinsically hard. But once you’re in synch, then it feels, you know, easy. So in some sense, once you’re sort of on a track, where you’re both doing it the same way, it can feel easy to keep on that track, but it might be hard to get to that synchronization. Like, even singing, you know, a choir singing together. When they are singing and syncing together, it sounds good and they feel very synchronized and together, but it could take a lot of practice to get the choir to the stage where they could do that.

Agnes:

Right. And so you might also ask the question, what is the point of the synchronization? Right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So, like you might think, well, groups synchronize in the form of things like group singing and stuff, because that facilitates, then acting as a group in certain situations, right? So the group will need to attack a common enemy or whatever, and being able to be, to have experience of synchronization or something, then helps it act as one.

Robin:

So there’s this actually relatively speculative, but still interesting, hypothesis that groups of humans in our ancestral past would dance together in a synchronized way so as to make a predator think they were one big animal instead of many separate potential victims of a predator. And you know, that’s at least evocative of an image of sort of the value of synchronization, that could be a value to synchronize. If you’re making noise together and moving your arms all together as if you were one big creature, then that could really put off a predator who’s judging the risk in terms of the size of their opponent.

Robin:

Right. So, like, I mean, in terms of the sort of scope, as you put it, the narrow or wide scope, right? Then there’s also… that describes the synchronization. But then there’s a further question about the relationship between the synchronization and some function that it might have.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Why bother to synchronize?

Agnes:

Right. And like, so what is… so let’s go to conversational synchronization, which is certainly different from… In your blog post, you talk about argument. But you’re primarily thinking of text arguments that somebody reads, right? Where, yes, we can, I suppose we can sort of imagine them synchronizing with all the other readers, but it’s a little harder to tell that story, because often you’re not in the same space as them. Right? So, but, so we’ll talk about conversation. What do you think is the point of conversational synchronization? What do we use it for?

Robin:

So first, I just want to make a distinction of functions on different timescales. So there are many things we need to synchronize, but some of them we do over years or months, or days. And some of them we might do in the few minutes before a particular conversation act. And so we should just think in terms of not just what functions could be performed, but what functions would be performed on what timescales. So for example, in a conversation, it will help if I’ve talked to you for years, for example, because I will know many things about you now. Like, I will know what some of the assumptions you have, the conclusions you have, the kinds of arguments you respect more, the kinds of topics you’re interested in. And I might even see your specific habits about how often you interrupt, how abstract you go, or how often you move between the abstract and concrete. So there’s just many things I could learn about you as a conversation partner, and that would be helpful over a long period.

Robin:

I’m going to interrupt for one second, that was just, empirically, that’s has seemed false to me. That is when you have interacted with someone for very many years, I’ve noticed that interactions actually seems to degrade.

Robin:

I agree. But I’m just talking in principle about the kinds of functions, so where we want to collect a set of hypotheses, and then we want to compare them to the data, and we want to ask which kinds of caught– reasons to synchronize could make the most sense on which scales. And in particular, we’re interested in the shortest scales, what are the reasons to be synchronizing in the previous few minutes of any particular thing you say.

Agnes:

Right. Right.

Robin:

So we’re trying to collect this library of possible explanations. So you know, for example, I think it’s just important to realize sort of the distant evolutionary clear function. So one is just, “watch what I do, do what I do” is a very important reason for synchronization for our distant ancestors. Right? So for example, the teacher is saying and the student is reciting has often been a form of education; the call-response. And you can think of that as sort of a literal watch what I do, and now, do what I do, in terms of memorizing even things together. So that is a function of conversation that has sometimes happened.

Agnes:

It’s interestingly, in a very literal sense, asynchronous, right? Because you want to do the thing after the person says it.

Robin:

Well, it’s not completely synchronous. But of course, I mean, conversation is alternating, you know, I say something, you say something, et cetera. So, we are synchronizing a conversation, we are not being completely synchronous in what we’re doing. Just like singing, right, we could harmonize but not be seeing the same notes at the same time. Right?

Agnes:

Right. But we might be singing like one on the same whatever song. And I think that, I mean, you might think, well, what is being synchronized in a conversation are two minds, right? Not the sounds. We don’t talk over each other. That’s not how we synchronize. But yes, at one in the same time, we’re like, we come to think something. And then that really is synchronized.

Robin:

We’re at least talking about the same thing, even if we’re disagreeing, but at least we are knowing. Basically, we have come to share a conversation and we need to share enough of the same things to share a conversation. But we don’t have to be saying the same things in that conversation, or even believing the same things, but we have to be close. I mean, just like in the song, the different notes we would sing in a song we need to harmonize, but they don’t have to be the same note, or even the same rhythm.

Agnes:

Right. But like, if we’re having a conversation and we’re talking about a topic, like there’s some time during which we’re both talking about that topic, even if we’re not both talking at the same moment, yeah. OK, but… And so, I mean, it seems to be sort of different from the call and response case. Because in that case, what’s happening is a teacher is teaching the learner, right? And so, like the teacher, in a sense… I mean, it’s like the movie case or the appetizer case, or the sermon case, where there’s one party that is just sort of producing…

Robin:

Driving the synchronization.

Agnes:

Driving, right? And they’re not, in effect, changing themselves to match the other person, right? It’s like…

Robin:

Or they need not be, but they might well be. So a good teacher, for example, will adjust to how the students respond. Let they…

Agnes:

Sure, sure, they will adjust how they present the material, but they’re not going to change their beliefs. Because presumably, they’re knowledgeable enough to…

Robin:

But, an example would be pronunciation, a language class, right? The teacher pronounces it one way and then they ask everyone to pronounce it the same way. And maybe they stop and say John pronounced it, and Mary pronounced it, and correct them, for example, and have everybody hear the correction.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, so, like, I think it’s an interesting… So maybe what I would say is those cases strike me as very narrow in the sense that there’s a…

Robin:

Sure, so we’re just collecting possible hypotheses, that’s just one to put on the list and checkmark and go on to the next.

Agnes:

Right, right. But what I want to note is that all in those, in the kind of teaching cases, they share the foregone conclusion character. That is, the teacher knows which pronunciation we’re going to coordinate on, it’s going to be this one, right? And we’re going to do it until you get it right. By contrast with a kind of free flowing conversation, neither of us knows, in advance, neither of us knew about this conversation where it would go, right? And so, there wasn’t like some kind of foregone conclusion. And so that, anyway, that’s what you’re calling the wider scope. I mean, that’s what seems to me, in a way, the more interesting case of why would people do that, why would people seek to coordinate, but have no antecedent commitment as to what they’re going to coordinate on.

Robin:

So in our book, The Elephant in the Brain, we talked about conversation, and what’s the function of sort of ordinary small talk. And we say, we offer the theory that each of you has a backpack of tools and resources. And the game is that if the conversation goes in random places that you can’t control or don’t control, and for each thing that comes up, you can pull something out of your backpack that’s relevant and interesting. And you have passed this test of being a good potential ally, who knows many relevant things.

Agnes:

I think like that’s a good description of you will be, because you have all these tools that you’ve learned, all these systems, and whatever.

Robin:

You do, as well. You have many tools and resources. That is you, for example, for a great many things, you have a literary allusion you can bring to mind, I do not. I do not have a good library of literary allusions for particular cases.

Agnes:

Fair point.

Robin:

But that’s, so that’s one model of conversations, such that it would be hard to predict the direction. That’s not so much a synchronization, so. So we want to pull in a synchronization story. That’s when I asked, why do people need to synchronize in conversation. And so now, we, so we mentioned before some sort of broad things in terms of conversation involves various people with different styles and habits. And so you might want to know a lot about the other person, so your habit and style could enter, mixed with theirs, like what topics, what kinds of arguments, what frequency of interruption, et cetera. So we’re just coordinating our style. But it seems like that if, you know, in the few minutes before any one thing we say, we wouldn’t be getting very much more information about that. And so that’s why I want to distinguish these timescales. You know, some of the most interesting thing is like, we’re synchronizing on a very tight timescale. And so something in the last few minutes of our mental, of our state is important for that synchronization. We’re trying to communicate that recent state. So if you think of, say music, you might say like, in music, you are emotional. The music elicits emotions. And you and those emotions will affect your tone of voice, and your pacing, and which syllables you emphasize in the words. And if we are in an emotional sync, now, we will emphasize the same syllables, we will pause at the same places because the words mean the same things to us. And we will be noticing that we are in a similar emotional state, because we are reacting to the music in a similar emotional way, that is it has the same emotional valence. It’s the same emotional symbolism to us. And that might be a thing that’s really important to us to enjoy the same song and know that it means the same thing emotionally to the other person. So for example, for soldiers, and it’s the Pledge of Allegiance, or patriotic song. Then if our voice cracks, the most emotional point of the song, then we each know that the other person deeply feels an attachment to the nation through this patriotic song. And that could be an important thing to feel at that moment, not just knowing, yeah, they are soldiers, they’re standing across of me. They’ve been a soldier around you for years, that’s not the thing you’re wondering. You’re wondering at the moment, how do they feel about my nation, and the song at that moment will tell you that. And that’s a thing we could be synchronizing at least in a song. Or even in a dance, dances, as well would… your emotions, or state and your attitudes would influence how rapidly you danced and how much variation and how much exuberance or control.

Agnes:

Right. To me, and so most small talk is pretty unemotional. And most conversations, I would say, are like, tend not to be very emotional. If you will intend, not to say cry, or like cry out from joy or whatever. I would say maybe the sort of exception is that like certain forms of indignation, say, or show up as those… Somehow, those emotions are most readily fit or accepted in conversation, for some reason. I’m not really sure why that one above others, but.

Robin:

Well, so let’s take some people who have seen each other before meeting each other again for the first time today, at least. They will say, “How are you?” “How are you doing?” They will each then use the usual performance, “I’m doing OK. Things are OK.” Of course, they might deviate and say things are terrible, right? But they will produce the synchronization on our mood, are we upbeat today, are we are we eager or reluctant. For example, we might show up at work and say, “How are you feeling?” and you’re saying, “Are you working hard or hardly working? Haha!” We’re just working stiffs here and that’s our stance here, and that’s the… I get that you’re working stiff and I’m working stiff, and neither of us are enthusiastic about this, but we know we showed up on time when we’re going to do it. That’s the kind of people we are. I mean, people are often just coordinating that kind of overall mood about their stance with respect to each other. You know, you’re saying, “I’m friendly to you today, because I’m not, maybe I’m mad at you, maybe you need to find out why I’m mad.” Right? And so we’re going to just coordinate our basic mood, our energy level, our sort of, you know, are we just in a temporary burst of enthusiasm, and do we have stamina that we can last with? Are we making jokes? Are we worried about something? Are you mentioning what we’re about to be worried about? Are we complaining about something?

Agnes:

People tend to be sort of down on small talk like that is when it comes…

Robin:

When you say they are, they are doing an awful lot.

Agnes:

Right, right. When it comes up as a topic, like, I mean… Right? People think, well, we should just jump in and have like the real conversation. Right?

Robin:

I think that’s just the intellectuals. I mean, most ordinary people will never say that. I think most people do not want the real conversation, they want to do the small talk.

Agnes:

Fair enough. But that’s why I say, when someone comes up with a topic, which it may only come up as a topic for intellectuals. I’m just saying I’ve never heard people really praise small talk so much. But on this theory, like it has a real function, right, which is this coordination and it sort of makes sense to say, well, I mean, how much would you like sex without any foreplay? Maybe not that much. So that’s the similar thing with conversation that we want this foreplay to be, to have a feeling of like being on the same page as the other person. And yet, you’re, you seem to be sort of against it in your blog post, like, at least when it comes to argument. So maybe like, say a little more about, like why shouldn’t we just be like, yeah, it has this really important function. That’s what we do so much of it, including an argument and all these other times. We need to be on the same page as the person we’re talking to.

Robin:

So it comes down to the hidden motives of arguing or using argumentation. So we present ourselves, at least to other people, at least as when intellectuals do as primarily being persuaded by the content of the arguments, or the logical content; what its premises are, what its data supporting examples are, sort of definitions, et cetera. Those sort of things. And we present ourselves as trying to persuade other people through those things as well. So that is the main meat of the persuasion is to be done through these logical elements. And then there are reasons to suspect that, in fact, we allow many other kinds of considerations to influence what we’re persuaded of, when, and how. That is, we have hidden processes that influence, well, who we’re willing to believe about what, when. And the claim would be that foreplay in conversation is revealing and showing in a little bit more detail what some of these hidden motives are, these hidden agendas with respect to who will allow us to persuade us of what. And so right there, we have the conflict. Should we embrace the usual explicit norms that is the content of the argument that should drive things? Or should we reject that and say, no? These other parts are relevant information, and it’s good to include them, and maybe we’re just too shy to admit that, but we should just be open and accept that. So that would be the next step of the argument is to say what are some of these plausible things in the conversation in the foreplay that are functioning that to persuade or not, to affect how much you’re willing to be persuaded. And then for each one, ask ourselves, how legitimate is that? How much do we embrace or support that?

Agnes:

So if we look at the other cases of foreplay, so, you know, sex and movies, and appetizers, is it similarly going to be the case that we have hidden motives for engaging in the foreplay that we don’t represent to ourselves? Like, is this a parallel story you’re going to tell in all the cases? Or is there only hidden motives in the argument case?

Robin:

There probably would be hidden motives in many other cases, and we want to think them through one by one.

Agnes:

Like with the appetizers. I mean, and I’m wondering why it would be, why the hidden motive would suddenly show. It’s not obvious to me, like when we say, well, the appetizers would draw getting on the same page or whatever? And I mean, I’ve never thought about it before is that’s what I’m doing when we’re having appetizers, but it seems like pretty plausible. And I don’t think I was hiding it for myself, either. I think I just never thought about it. So why don’t I have some kind of elaborate other story as to why I’m doing the appetizer thing?

Robin:

Well, I would say that for sexual foreplay, people certainly do have a variety of stories about why it is. And then many of these stories don’t agree with each other. And so, you know, and people are less explicitly trying to say, “Well, I’m checking to see if you’re in sync with me and your attitudes toward this.” That’s not something they say as explicitly. But you know, I would think, we just pick any of these things and we could get into the details we may well find. So for example, you might say, why do we have previews before the movie? Right? And you might say, well, because you might want to see the future movies. And you say, OK, but before previews, we then, we did the short movies before that, and then we had news before that. So we always had something before the main movie, even though it’s changed over time. And so now whatever reason you gave, you might have passed that ball, you want to know the news, and here’s a chance to give you the news, so that’s why there’s news before the movie. And that wouldn’t have been a full explanation, because there’s apparently this consistent pattern to always want something before the movie, even if it’s not the same thing. Or you might say with a concert, right, why is there an opening act before the concert? Why not just have the main act? And you might say, well, that’s in order to make sure smaller bands get a chance to be exposed, right? OK, that’s not really going to be the real reason.

Agnes:

Good. Good, good, yeah. That’s a good answer. Yeah. So what we see is that sort of what’s consistent is that we maybe didn’t have a good understanding of why there was like the sort of preview or foreplay version of the activity that was preceding the activity, and we came up with sort of specific reasons in each case, but there’s a more generic story to be told. But in the case of the movie and the appetizer, and whatever, the more generic story doesn’t undermine our account of the goals of the main activity, right? So the theory that we give appetizer foreplay does not change why we’re eating the main meal. Or, the theory that we give of why we have either the previews or the newsreel doesn’t change. We don’t have some now radically new account of what we’re doing when we’re watching the movie.

Robin:

It is substantially different. That is, I think we’re not aware of how much we are reacting to other people’s reactions to a concert, or a movie, or even a meal. So we do actually eat differently when we eat alone than we eat with other people. We watch movies differently in a crowd than alone. And music listened to by ourselves is a different experience than music listened to in a concert. And so the thing we are doing with the previews is synchronizing with other people in the crowd into a shared emotional state that’s heightened and strengthened by the fact that it’s shared. But we’re not acknowledging that as the reason for the opening act, or the previews, et cetera. And so we have to make up some other reasons.

Agnes:

OK, so acknowledging the place of the preview shows us the importance of this synchronization to us.

Robin:

Right. In general, we like to pretend we don’t care what other people think. And therefore, we like to pretend that we don’t care what other people around us are doing. It’s all just our personal reaction to things. But in fact, we do care a lot about what other people around us are doing. And that is very influential into what we do.

Agnes:

OK. Right. So…

Robin:

I have fun example, which is, I mean, from a blog post from a long time ago, which I almost find hard to believe, but basically said, you take people in sort of a bar or party scenario, and you give them things you claim as alcohol, but it’s not. They have similar sort of alcohol related behaviors that people who are actually drinking alcohol would have. Maybe not quite as extreme, but they slur or stumble, or act wild. And because in some sense, believing they took alcohol and believing that other people knew they took alcohol legitimized or allowed them to act in the alcohol style.

Agnes:

I mean, what you would need for this example to be a better example of the thing you’re talking about is they also gave the alcohol feel by themselves, and so that it had less of a drink.

Robin:

And didn’t change as much, right?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Yeah, that also happened.

Agnes:

But it’s possible that like, you know, it’s just the sort of placebo effect such that anyone who believes they’re drinking alcohol around people or by themselves will act alcoholic.

Robin:

Sure. But I would be fairly confident. In fact, believing you’re drinking alcohol around other people will embolden you more to act in the sort of social alcohol state, rather than in the low alcohol state, which I would think would be substantially different.

Agnes:

OK. So when we turn to argument, and so, like, here’s the thing that strikes me about argument, and that is going to be I think the more of a so to speak intellectual you are, and the more that you travel in circles of argument, the more sensitive you are going to be to the following considerations. Quite often, something seems like a good argument, but it isn’t one. We are often around people who are smarter than us, right? Who can argue better than we can, right? Every academic has met such a person, and you never know if you’re meeting a new person, if it’s someone like that, right. And so, like, part of what it is, I think, to be an intellectual is to, in some ways, not actually trust your own faculty for following arguments in the way that you once did. Because you can, at least many of us are like, yeah, I’ve so many times had the experience where that seemed like a good argument. But then later, I was like, ah, now here’s a problem, or a new evidence came in, or whatever. And so, you know, it’s not obvious to me that being somewhat reluctant to trust arguments is a sign of not being intellectual. It could, in a way be a sign of being very intellectual.

Robin:

So there’s, I think the scenario here is a public intellectual, magazine article, or something, which is relatively long and has some main argument it’s going to make. And then make that argument at some point, but typically doesn’t spend very much time making the argument sort of space, doesn’t even work that hard to define terms, doesn’t bother to sort of mention counter arguments, or alternative possible arguments. And instead, spends much of the article sort of giving anecdotes, personal history, literary allusions, clever, witty stories, and that sort of the typical structure. And so there’s two questions. One of which is like, well, could you have made the argument more reliable if you had spent more time on it? Like, elaborating, more detailed, more precise definitions, considering counter arguments, that sort of thing. And all this prelude, what exactly is it telling you about such that an intellectual would want to take it into account? So example, you could certainly imagine somebody who says, “Basically, I know a lot about this. Here are my credentials. Here’s all the other things I’ve learned about this topic. That’s why you should believe me. Here are testimonials from other people who say I know things about this. Or, you can imagine various proofs. Let me prove to you that I know something about this by listening various things that only somebody who understood the topic would know.” As you can imagine, doing demonstrations like that. And you can imagine, for example, like making clear what style of a person I am and what style of arguments I think about. Like, I’m a sociologist, so here’s sociology arguments that I’ll bring up. You know, the question is, how many of those kinds of information that would be relevant are actually what they are including in these articles? Or, are the things they are including signs that something else is going on? So laying my cards on the table, I say, the most plausible explanations I see for the actual things they’re including are, first, just impress you with their general status and impressiveness, and their command of vocabulary and literary allusions and putting words together well. And maybe their position in the world, you know, they’re trying to impress you. And we do have a large literature that says people are just more willing to believe things from people who are high status. And additionally, other thing they are trying to do is to, on topics that have a value valence, where it might be changing your values, or at least your political positions on topics that they want to show you they’re on your side. And so they’re trying to buy your side legitimacy by convincing you that they share your beliefs and other topics. They say your attitudes, and therefore, you can trust them on this particular topic as not to betray your values. You’re not going to betray your side of the political spectrum by agreeing with them here because they are solidly on your side. Those would be the two best explanations I can see. For most of that conversational thing. And I might even say, that’s similar in sex, actually. You might say, with sexual foreplay, one thing you’re trying to do is be, continue to be impressive, right? You don’t cringe into a crying ball in the corner and you don’t act nervous and jittery. But you’re also trying to assure them that you’re not just a slam bang, thank you, ma’am, sort of person that you have. You care what they feel. You care how they react. You want them to be enjoying it too. And you’re trying to produce this shared sense that you’re both paying attention to each other, and that it’s a joint experience, and not just something you’re trying to get a particular thing out of.

Agnes:

So I think as someone who has written a number of these things that you describe and then meet sort of the description that you just gave about longer piece that doesn’t have that many arguments in it, you’ve left out the main thing that those anecdotes, et cetera, are doing. Namely, getting the reader’s attention and interest. People are…like the number one thing, the number one problem is like people are bored by most writing. They read a little bit and then they want to stop reading. Right? So a really big thing you’re doing is just keeping them interested. And I don’t think that’s just a matter of impressing them, and I don’t think it’s just a matter of showing them on your – that you’re on their side.

Robin:

So tell us what does interest people. Like, to show that the topic has implications, they might not have realized what… I mean, the simple argumentative way to argue for any particular argument is to explain why the conclusion is so important, right? From since the beginning of time, this has been a big thing or whatever, right? But that’s not literally what you mean here, right?

Agnes:

No. So the most basic thing that interests people is stories, right? So if there’s a story, so a lot of sort of journalism will have the following format, like there’ll be a little story, and there’ll be a long analytical thing. And then only at the end do you find out what happened at the end of the story. I haven’t actually written anything in that format, but I read many things, right? That’s a simple formula for using the power of narrative to pull the reader through the piece, right? So that’s an example. So I would say like the number one obvious answer to the question of what holds people’s interest are stories. And it’s nothing to do with being on their side and nothing to do with impressing them. It’s just a different thing. It’s just holding their attention by telling you a story.

Robin:

So now, we might ask, why would humans be constructed so as to have this kind of filter on the arguments they will listen to or believe? That is, why do they need a story to proceed an argument?

Agnes:

Well, I don’t… here, I don’t think the issue is they need it to proceed an argument. I think it’s like, they just like stories, right, and they don’t like arguments so much. So we can ask the question, why don’t they just like hearing arguments? Right?

Robin:

But I think, we do have a literature on why people like stories. And so, I think we should just go there.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

That is if you say, well, the key thing is you have to package it with a story. And we’d say, fine, let’s talk about why people like stories.

Agnes:

OK, we’ll talk about that in one second, but I just want to pause and say, that’s not– that was my first answer. I have more answers to how to keep people’s attention. But let’s go with…

Robin:

OK, well… Wait, I would more like to hear another two or three examples, and then we can go back to stories.

Agnes:

OK. So like another, I think, important example is like asking a question, right? And if you pose the question in such a way as to make it sound really compelling, often by putting it in the form of like a paradox or something. Like, well, you might think you could just say this, but you can’t say this for this reason. And now, they’re puzzled. Right? And now, they want to know the answer. And so that, their desire to know the answer can sustain their attention. Notice that neither of these really has anything directly to do with arguments. That is, if you walk up to someone you’re like, “Want to hear an argument?” Like, they might say, yes, to be polite. But like, if you start telling them a story, they want to know what happens next. And if you get them interested in a question, they’re going to want to know the answer. So, arguments don’t have that. Like, we might call it “elenchtic structure,” the structure of desire that like a narrative has, and then a question and answer has. So those are two examples. I think, like a third example, would be describing something in a way that resonates with the experience of the reader. So, like describing a phenomenon that they’ve also experienced that that might come close to being on their side. But I don’t think that it necessarily has to suggest shared values or anything like that, but it sort of just suggests, it’s a… it fits the synchronization idea. It’s something like we see the world in the same way. Like this person is…

Robin:

Things like me.

Agnes:

Things like me. Something like that.

Robin:

Or is a… lives in a world like me.

Agnes:

Right. And so I don’t think it quite needs to go to allegiance, but it can just, you know, like when people on Twitter say like, relatable. Right? Like, here’s the thing, “Oh, I’ve experienced that,” whatever. So that’s a third thing. So these are three things that I think grabbed people’s attention and interest.

Robin:

So I mean, it’s a standard observation that, like if you want to kiss up to somebody, or flatter somebody, or you have somebody you want to get to like you, a common strategy is to find things in common and mentioned them, right? And so, you know, or even on dates, right, you’re trying to search for common elements where you can say, “I’m like you in these ways.” And typically, that does make people more willing to listen to you and open to you, and interact with you, right? And so that is roughly my side thing. It’s less about a binary sides. It’s just more in terms of the space of all people trying to convince you, “I’m like… I’m more like you than other people. So you should be more willing to listen to me than other people.”

Agnes:

I think… So when I do this thing, I often do it in relation to some experience or some framing of something that’s pretty universal, so that it wouldn’t convey the idea, the reader and I are more alike. It might convey the idea, oh, we all live in this shared space, where we have this experience. So I really don’t think that it fits your more general description of synchronization and being on the same page, and seeing that we find the world, you know, see the same thing the same way, blah, blah, blah, like the singing. It fits that. I don’t think it fits as well your bipartite thing of impressing, and care.

Robin:

So I think we just have this heuristic of noticing when people are like us, and then be more open to them. I don’t know that we actually bother to distinguish in which ways people are like us, everybody else is also like us. I don’t think we need to necessarily make a distinction. We just need to notice their ways, which they’re like us, and that’s enough.

Agnes:

Right. But like, I just think that your earlier way of formulating and in terms of that guy, Collins, right, is like we know that we sort of like live in the same world, and we sort of see things the same way. In any case, that seemed broader to me than the way you formulated it later. So it all, maybe all I’m saying is that it fits that earlier formulation better than the later one. But, OK, but tell me about why do we, why do people like stories? What’s going to be your debunking explanation for that?

Robin:

So, I just recently read an article by an author of this book, which I tweeted the article many years ago. But basically, they took hundreds of Victorian novels and they had, the people who had written analyses, literary critic analyses of these novels, like code, the novels in terms of the hero and the villain, and their various characteristics. And they came up with this pattern among all these Victorian novels, which probably would be patterns for model novels today. And they basically consistently showed that novels consisted of… had a hero and a villain, and the hero was pro-social, that is they were making choices against their personal interest and more for social interest. And the villains were the opposite. The villains were making choices for their personal benefit against the social benefit. And, this story is that such story, such stories allow us to affirm that we have that, those values that is we want to praise the pro-social person, and we want to disapprove and criticize the selfish person. And note these novels over and over again, repeat this pattern, whereby we can each read the story. So the idea would be, say, you and I are watching a movie together, right, and there’s a hero and the villain, we can see each other’s reaction to the story and see that we both approve of and admire the hero, and both are repelled by and disapprove of the villain. And we can, in great detail, approve and disapprove of the same actions together, and see that we are sharing the values about what are the approved and disapproved actions.

Agnes:

Yeah, that’s a very bad explanation of the role of narratives in the kinds of pieces I write or read, because that just doesn’t fit. So, like, I include narrative and little stories in the things I write, and they’re never like that. There’s never a hero and a villain.

Robin:

But do, are we invited to have a shared valuation of actions?

Agnes:

Not always. Like, I think…

Robin:

But often.

Agnes:

I think there’s something much more bare bones about a narrative, which is just what’s happening next? There’s a thing of like, I’m telling you, “Look, I went to the store, and I saw this guy.” And you’re like, “OK, what happened next?” And like, I guess my feeling is there’s something very deep about the way in which almost like our brains like it when ideas come in the same order that we have to store them in. Right? So, like in the case of an argument, when I’m presenting to you a series of claims, I could have jumbled them up in the other order in a scientific paper, whatever. It can often be presented in many different orders. The order in which, the way in which the ideas are organized and the order in which they’re presented are two totally different things. In a way, the order they’re presented is just the arbitrary that we have to put time on them. But in the case of a narrative, the order in which it’s presented is the same order as the order in which your brain has to receive it. And somehow, that is like very deeply satisfying.

Robin:

I agree that that’s satisfying. But I’m just reluctant to attribute all of the function of stories to that one thing.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess what I’m saying is that I think that that’s too… you’re getting into too much detail about a specialized subset of stories, where I can just tell you, you know, I read a lot of novels, and a lot of them just don’t fit that. More sophisticated novels don’t fit that pattern.

Robin:

This wasn’t a set of particularly unspecific. I mean, this was a representative sample of the most respected novels of this period, and it was a very strong pattern. It wasn’t just something of 5% to 10%.

Agnes:

That… fair enough. But still…

Robin:

I will strongly say if you… we just pick, we just pick 10 random movies off of Netflix, and we will have these heroes and villain in most of them.

Agnes:

I think a lot of… I agree with you that this is, for instance, very... a lot of movies do have this pattern.

Robin:

And a lot of novels, a lot of comic books, a lot of television episodes.

Agnes:

Right. Absolutely. But lots of them don’t. And I would say the narratives that show up in sort of journalistic pieces, like some of them will have this pattern, but like, many of them won’t. And people are still gripped by the narrative, even when it doesn’t have this pattern. So what they’re gripped by can’t be only this pattern. And it almost seems to me like you can put anything, almost anything in the order of a narrative, be like, “There was a guy and he was walking down the road.” And people just want to know what happens next. So something at this, there’s something brute appeal in the story to know what happened next.

Robin:

Right. But the actual story is that exists in the world that his stories have a lot of detail, right? And so there’s a lot of room for many factors to influence the choice of stories. One factor is just liking, here, you’re seeing a sequence of events, but there are great many stories will satisfy that criteria. So when we are trying to entertain with stories, we choose many other features to be gripping, entertaining, not just the fact that there are sequence of events.

Agnes:

Sure, sure. But like, look, the thing that we’re trying to explain here is the problem of holding the reader’s attention, which is getting them not to turn away, which is much less of a problem in the movie theater. People don’t tend walk out of movies, right? But when you’re writing stuff, like this stuff you’re describing, it’s public intellectual stuff.

Robin:

Or, even on YouTube or Netflix, people can just click stop and go on to the next one, so.

Agnes:

Right, that’s true. So there may be more of work going into this there. But in… you know, when you’re writing stuff, like one of the main things you’re trying to do is not get your reader to think you’re on their side or align with you or impress them, or whatever, but just get them not to look away, right? And so it seems, it’s just very obvious why a story, where, in effect, they want to know what happens next is a way to get them not to look away. That’s a simple explanation.

Robin:

OK. So, but this ability to do this thing you describe as trying to do is impressive. It literally is.

Agnes:

Sure. I agree that that’s impressive. And so I agree that someone watching me do that and seeing like the way that my pieces work, someone who has a little bit of a… you know, is who is attending to the actual way that things working could find me impressive for that reason. But I don’t think that the reader, what they’re doing is being like, “It’s so impressive how she’s using this story to hold my attention.” No, they’re just held by the story itself.

Robin:

Well, so we want to think in terms of different levels of explanation, different proximate causes and distal causes of phenomena. So here, if we just ask ourselves, why did the world evolve this habit of having articles look like this? That is asking this distal explanation question of where were the larger social, et cetera forces that conspired or coordinated together to produce this outcome? That’s going to be different than the, what’s in the head of the person as they’re reading it, that in their mind is the reason they would give for, say, why I stopped reading it or why I kept reading it. Or, even what was in the head of the author as they… you know, we asked them, why did you write that part? Right? So the two kinds, the distal and approximate explanations need to be coherent in the sense that they need to fit together, but they don’t have to be the same.

Agnes:

OK. But, I mean, look, I don’t think we’re going to get to the bottom of why do humans like narrative. That is like, it seems like…

Robin:

But I think that is what we need together.

Agnes:

Well, I think that’s like a… we have a separate podcast on that. But our… this one is supposed to be on foreplay, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So, you know, what we’re trying to do is understand what is the function of this sort of ancillary material that takes up a lot of the actual thing, right? I mean, if we think about your example of the basic thing of humans is that one person’s copying another, right? Like I’m hitting the rock and you see me doing it, and then you do the same thing. A crucial part of the story is that I got your attention. Right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So you wouldn’t start copying me if I didn’t get your attention in the first place.

Robin:

And a standard part of the literature is that people were more willing to copy prestigious people, high status people in the world. That was one of the main social heuristics people use about copying ideas that they copy the prestigious behaviors. If somebody who’s a good hunter, you want to go out and hunt like them, not go out and try to copy the bad hunters. And somebody, we might say, people, yeah, they want to copy. But in order to be persuaded to copy someone, they want to believe that that person is high status or prestigious. That’s going to make them much more willing to copy that person, including copying their beliefs by accepting their argument.

Agnes:

Right. So like an interesting… I think, commonality between sex and conversation. Here, it’s conversation, in particular. I’m thinking of less, the public intellectual typewriting is that, like, I think you’re trying to coordinate on something where you then can also sort of like independently stand by that thing. So like, you’re trying to find a form of sex with this person that’s going to be fun for you that you’re going to actually enjoy, right? And you’re trying to come to say the same thing as this other person, or to speak on the same topic as this other person, where what you end up saying should be something you actually believe, right? So it would be a failure case of sex, if you just ended up being like going through the motions. And it’d be a failure case of conversation if you just ended up sort of agreeing in words. But in your head, you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t think any of this… This is all bullshit.” Remember, right? So there’s sort of, you could say that there’s sort of failed sex and failed conversation. And it fails precisely when what you coordinate on is something that… I don’t know what the right word is, something like that doesn’t resonate with you at the individual level. Right? So there’s the possibility of failure there, which is really interesting. And I’m not sure, like, is there the same possibility of failure in the other cases, not in, maybe not in all of them?

Robin:

So we love to say the obvious things about sex, which are in the long prelude to sex, people are clearly both trying to impress each other, and trying to match. Those would be the dominant parts of the process, right? So, people dress up for the date. They take them to an expensive restaurant. They have, you know, knowing the issues of the day in the conversation of the date, right? People are doing a great many things to try to impress the other side. And in addition, they’re looking for common elements to produce a match, not just in general features, but also in sort of our immediate local style of like, how we’re laughing at the same things in the conversation, how we’re both enjoying a kiss, or whatever, right? So clearly, in sex, there’s a huge element of impressiveness and sharing something like values, right? Something like, we have a similar agenda here, and we’re willing to make similar… make compromises to the other person in order to interact together. We’re not just trying to dictate terms. And that’s just obviously true for sex. Right? Now, in conversation, it’s also true. So if you imagine like a party, where you’re wandering around the party, and now, in a sense, all the different groups at the party are competing for your attention, and you will choose which conversation to join. And you will, again, be looking for a combination of impressiveness and match. That is, if there is a celebrity in the room, you might be tempted to go hang out near their crowd and hear what they’re saying, because hey, they’re a celebrity, or somebody you’ve always heard was great. Or, maybe somebody mentioned before you. “You have to check out Johnny. He’s so great. He’s over there. You want to go?” et cetera. So there’ll be an element of impressiveness, right? And then there will also be an element of match, in the sense that if hear them talking about a topic you’re especially interested in, or maybe the only topic in the room where they’re doing intellectual argument, as opposed to mentioning sports events, you will be matching on style, matching on topic. And then if you start to join that conversation, you will be looking to see if they will include you, and whether you can find a rhythm together that works in the conversation. Do they… you might be willing to just listen and not be included if it’s more, if it’s good enough. So those have to be sort of obvious important elements.

Agnes:

Yeah, I think that they are. But I would characterize them slightly differently. So there’s something about this word impress that it is almost like obnoxiously neutral between two different possibilities. One is, suppose I’m trying to impress you. Right? One possibility there is I’m trying to get you to believe that I’m good. Where, I’m perfectly satisfied if you believe that I’m good in ways I’m not actually good, right? That is, I want you to have a high opinion of me regardless of whether that opinion is true. That’s one way to use the word impress. And it’s perfectly consistent with the word impress.

Robin:

It’s not the way I intended it, but.

Agnes:

Well, right. What I’m saying is that’s just what the word, the word impress, definitely covers that.

Robin:

Sure.

Agnes:

But it also covers the case where I think there are certain good things about me, truly good things about me that I want you to appreciate. I want you to be able to see how good I am, how good I really am. And so it’s a funny thing about the word impress that it covers just perfectly equally both of those two cases. And so it’s almost like if we had a word for see, like, if I say I see…

Robin:

But I don’t think that’s the main ambiguity here. I think it’s more about whether the kind of features that are impressive are actually related in what way to the end choice you’re making. So for example, with sex, you might think, well, I really care about this enjoyable sex act. But that won’t explain very much why you wanted to talk with the person who had more degrees, or is richer, or something else like that. And so we might not be honest with yourself about what kind of impressiveness you are willing to use to decide who you’re willing to have sex with early in conversation. You might not be honest with yourself about what features of a person will be the ones that will make you lower your argument standards to believe what they say, even on the basis of a weaker argument.

Agnes:

Right. So the question then is, what is the… when I want you to believe that I’m good, what do we mean by that? Right? Like, what kind of goodness? Right?

Robin:

What are the particular kinds of goodness? Yes.

Agnes:

And, you know, we might, I might think, like… well, what I want you to believe about me is just that sort of in a general sense, I’m a good person. Like, I’m a morally good person. And they’re, I’m not even necessarily saying that I’m better than anybody else. But I have a kind of like, goodness in me, a kind of value in me, like I want you to be able to see. And it’s important to me to relate to people, only to people who can see that, who can see my distinctive value and goodness shining forth. And I only want to have sex with people can see that. And I only want to have conversations with people can see that. Now, and I guess I have to think like, OK, that’s not crazy, to me. It’s not crazy that you only want to sort of coordinate in the sexual and intellectual ways with people who can see your value, and also with people whose value you can see. And…

Robin:

But this is between the opposite of breaking it down into parts that you’re sort of aggregating together into this one goodness word.

Agnes:

Right. And so what we might think is that what seems to be happening is that, like, let’s look at how I communicate my moral goodness to you. I might communicate it with like a literary reference, which is like, you might… that’s a little weird. Why do I think, why do I think that he’s going to think I’m a morally good person, if I make a reference to literature, right? Well, it’s like, I’m showing you that I’m sophisticated, right, and that I, you know, I have like this cultured sensibility. And maybe, like in our world, that is sort of the code by which moral goodness travels or something. That’s like how we recognize. Or it might be that I have a certain political sensibility that we share, or.

Robin:

OK. But just remember, my main claims were that the prelude, the foreplay in the conversation, at least, the sort of public conversation, the two main elements were, overall impressiveness, or overall goodness, if you like, and some sort of a match to you, that is to convince you that they are on your side in some ways. Not on a binary side thing, but just in high dimensional space, they’re closer to you.

Agnes:

Right. Right. So let me paraphrase now, and we should probably stop soon. I’ll paraphrase and then you get the last word, because we’re over time. So what’s happening in foreplay is that for a lot of important activities, before we coordinate on them with someone, we want to be certain both that the person with whom we’re coordinating them, with them on sees that we are good people. And we want to be able to see that they are good people. And that coordination, we can call that a moral coordination precedes the coordination on say, sex or conversation.

Robin:

And I would just say, if we look at this phenomena from the point of view of an intellectual, who holds up common intellectual norms, we will say, you’re not just willing to listen to an argument and grant its authenticity and accuracy if it’s a good argument. You’re saying, instead, I won’t listen to your good argument until you prove to me in these other ways that you are sufficiently high status, and sufficiently like me in important ways. I can frame that as good, but that isn’t then an obstacle to the spreading of accurate conclusions via accurate arguments. That is, the world of… we’re open to any good argument, and you have a good argument, and we’ll hear it in the– first, if you have… And if it’s a good argument, we’ll be persuaded, we’ll spread it to other people, that story is complicated and perhaps slowed by these other processes.

Agnes:

Right. So the moral of the story would be, we don’t take off our morality hat or the hat of striving and caring about trying to be good when we do intellectual activity. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

Robin:

I think it’s a bad thing.

Agnes:

OK, let’s stop there.

Robin:

OK, let’s stop there.