Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: The first thing, right in the introduction here, that I thought was really interesting, that is a kind of a theme of the book is, what is thinking even for? Why do we even think? What's the point of it?

Steven: Well, what we proposed in the book is that thinking is an extension of action. People, like all organisms, are designed to act. That's how we evolved in order to act successfully in the world. The main function of thought, we think, is to make that action more effective. If you consider what it is we think about, we think about how the world works. What's going to happen in the future, what happened in the past and why it happened, who our relationships are and how we can get things done.

Steven: All of that ties into the question, how can we act in such a way as to make our situation better? Okay. Thinking is in order to help us act more effectively in the world. Well, what kind of thinking is going to be best for that? You know, sometimes mathematical thinking will be helpful. Like it's often useful to count how many pieces of fruit we have so that we can distribute them fairly. The truth is that mostly what we need to know in order to act effectively is how the world works.

Steven: If we're going to build a canoe, then we have to understand patterns of water. We have to understand what floats and what doesn't float. We have to understand how the human body is going to be able to sit comfortably in order to be able to propel the canoe forward. In the end, the most useful thing for us is to understand causes and effects. How our actions in particular are going to produce the effects that we want them to produce.

Andy: The second big idea of the book is that we tend to think we know more than we really do. This idea of the illusion of explanatory depth. Can you explain what is the illusion of explanatory depth and how does this test work?

Steven: Sure. What Leonid Rozenblit and his advisor at Yale, Frank Keil, did was they took a bunch of everyday objects like zippers, ballpoint pens, and toilets. They said to people, "How well do you understand how these things work? Rate on a one to seven scale, your understanding of how these things work." People gave a number and they indicated that they felt they had a pretty good understanding of how these things work.

Steven: Then Rozenblit and Keil said to them, "Okay. Now, explain in as much detail as you can, how they work. Give as full and complete an account as possible of the functioning of these everyday objects." What happened is they basically stumped people. People went, "Uh, well, uh." They really didn't have much to say. Then when Rozenblit and Keil again said to them, "How well do you understand how these things work?" People lowered their ratings.

Steven: In other words, people themselves admitted that they had lived in an illusion of understanding. That they had thought they had understood how these things work better than in fact they do. People live in this illusion that they understand when in fact they don't.

Andy: This I think is fascinating because it's something that parents of teenagers talk about a lot. They just think they know everything, but they really have so much to learn. How can I just help them see that they're not really all so smart as they think they are, and they maybe need to be a little more humble and not jump into risky situations with so much confidence? To me, this is a really interesting idea and you guys keep hitting on it throughout the book. You go into a lot of depth and have some really cool solutions or ideas on how to combat it in the end.

Andy: I love this cognitive reflection test that you talk about on page 81 and 82. You have these questions that come from a book of riddles originally, but one of them is a bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Most people say 10 cents, which is not the right answer. In a lake, there's a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half the lake? The first answer that comes to mind is 24, which is incorrect.

Andy: Then this last one was, if it takes five machines, five minutes to make five widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? No, it's not 100. Yet, that's the answer that we just really want to say. I love this test, but what is it? Why is this important? What does this test teach us about the way people think?

Steven: I love the test too. It was developed by a guy named Shane Fredericks. I think the basic thing it illustrates best is that there are two different kinds of thinking. There's the kind of thinking that generates intuitions. Consider the first question about a ball costs $1.10, the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Almost everybody has 10 cents come to mind.

Andy: Right.

Steven: We don't know why it comes to mind or how it comes to mind. In fact, despite a bunch of studies, we still don't really understand why 10 cents comes to mind, but it does. It's an intuitive response. We can try to verify it. That is we could do a little arithmetic and figure out whether it's the right answer. If we do that arithmetic, we discover, well, if the ball costs 10 cents and the bat costs a dollar more than the bat costs $1.10 and together, they cost $1.20. That's the wrong answer because together they're supposed to cost $1.10.

Andy: Right.

Steven: It's not that it's hard to figure out the right answer. It just requires a little bit of deliberation. I think what this test shows is that first there's a distinction between intuition, answers that just pop to mind, and deliberation. That deliberative process is a different kind of cognitive process. What's really interesting about the test is that some people pass it with flying colors, but most people don't. What does it take to pass it with flying colors? Well, you have to be able to suppress that original response.

Steven: You have to say, "Oh, I'm not going to respond 10 cents. First I'm going to check to see if I'm right." If you suppress that response, you can figure out that you're wrong and compute the right response. Most people just don't. Most people just blurt out what comes to mind. In fact, it seems to me that's exactly how we think about many teenagers, right?

Andy: Yeah. That's why I bring it up. They just do the first thing that comes to their head. "Oh, that sounds fun. Let's do it." Without taking that moment to just assess that, "Hey, well, I have this impulse that maybe it would be fun to do this crazy thing, but let me just think that through for a second and see if it really adds up. Oh no, actually wait a minute. On second thought, it doesn't. Maybe I shouldn't do that." It occurs to me that that's what all parents would hope that their teenager would do.

Andy: It's fascinating to me that this isn't just a teenage problem. This is a people problem. This is a human brain kind of problem, but it does seem like it's really apparent during the teenage years. I guess I just was wondering if there's anything that helps that, or that would help your teenager to get better at taking that extra second and just thinking about it before they blurted out or say, "Yeah. Let's do it."

Steven: Yeah. Well, that's a great question and a critical question. Before I get to that, let me just say a couple of things. You know, when I was thinking about what I was going to say on your show, because what do I know about teenagers? I mean, I did raise two of them, so that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge. I was thinking about what I would say on your show and what I thought was, well, teenagers are people too.

Steven: What I can say is that all of these complaints we have about teenagers and the concerns we have and the difficulties we have in communication, are complaints and concerns and difficulties that we have with everybody. In a sense, that there's nothing really special about teenagers, as far as I can tell. Except that perhaps they've developed fewer strategies for dealing with the kinds of conflicts and challenges that everybody deals with.

Steven: In order to provide an answer to your question, I'd like to raise the second big idea of the book, which is an attempt to explain why it is that people live in this illusion of understanding. What we propose is that we live in this illusion of understanding because we fail to distinguish what we know from what others know. I think I understand how a toilet works because there's a plumber who understands how the toilet works and I have access to the plumber's knowledge.

Steven: The knowledge is actually sitting in the plumber's head, not in mine, but I can use that knowledge. In general, we've developed in tribes and societies and communities in which we're not limited to our own personal knowledge. We have access to all kinds of knowledge in the heads of the people around us. The reason we have this illusion that we understand how things work is because there's a sense in which we actually do understand. It's just not our personal individual selves that understand. It's our communities that understand.

Andy: Yeah. We understand.

Steven: Exactly. Yet, we succeed as a community and we're constantly, like every moment of the day, we're taking advantage of that. We're taking advantage of knowledge that sits in other people's heads. We do it. What's interesting is that we do it without complete awareness that we are depending on other people. That's the illusion of understanding. We think it's in our heads. Why? Well, because for the most part, it doesn't really matter. As long as I can use the technology, it just doesn't matter that I don't understand it. It doesn't matter until something breaks.

Andy: Right.

Steven: When you think about that from a teenager's perspective. Here they are wondering what they should believe, how they should behave in the world, who they should identify with. I actually think those are very much the same questions. What they believe really turns out to be the same question as, who should they identify with? Because since we know so little and we depend on our communities for knowledge, then what we believe becomes a matter of who we trust.

Steven: It becomes a matter of who's around us and whose ideas we're going to accept. Teenagers are like people caught in the middle of political conflict who have no choice but to decide what side they're going to fall on. If everybody around them, if all the adults around them and all the other kids around them all believe the same thing, then everything's golden. There's no problem. There's no decision to make. What if the adults around you disagree? What if some of them are conservatives and others are liberals?

Steven: Then your friends, well, they may think something else entirely. Now, you have to decide which community you're going to go with. There are huge consequences to this choice. It not only determines what you believe and how you're going to act, it also determines who's going to like you and who's going to hate you.

Andy: I love this study that you talk about where you have these people come into the lab and you tell them a list of a bunch of things to remember. It's like couples. Then you quiz them on the things and you find that usually there's one member of the couple that will remember all the more technology things and another one will remember all the things that are furniture. There's one that'll be really good at that, or if it's related to wines, then this person will remember it.

Andy: You give them all the exact same list of things but you find that they kind of specialize a little bit and without even talking to each other and saying, "Oh, you remember that one. I'll remember this one." They just naturally remember the things that they're good at, or that they see as their area. They just don't remember the things that they feel like the other person is going to be better at. I feel like that just happens in any group.

Andy: I think as a teenager, it's like, you just … I don't even need to try to figure out some of this stuff because there's someone else in my group who's got that or who knows that. Makes choices for us in this area or in that area in how to be cool or in how to get girls. Because there's someone who's better at that than me I'll just let him tell me what to do when it comes to this or that. When it comes to working out or when it comes to whatever.

Andy: How do you help your kids start to see that and be more conscious about what things they want to get good at and when they want to just defer to other people?

Steven: Yeah. That's an interesting and tough question. Let me just provide one little corrective. The study that you're talking about was actually done by people in Dan Wegner's lab. It's not a study we did. They refer to it as transactive memory. Basically, the idea is that memory gets distributed over a group. That if you're a wine expert and people are talking about wine, then you'll remember what they said. If you're not a wine expert, if you're instead the football expert and people are talking about wine, then you won't even hear it, if the wine expert is in your group.

Steven: If the wine expert is hearing it, then you'll just automatically give them responsibility for remembering that information. The general idea is that there's what sometimes is called the distribution of cognitive labor, that happens automatically. That we each fill our roles. I'm the expert on football and someone else is the expert on soccer and someone else. We just automatically assign certain memory tasks and problem-solving tasks to the person that is the expert in that domain.

Steven: To try to apply this to your question, how should we talk to teenagers about this? I think what we have to do is acknowledge that there's a tension. Because on one hand we can't all be responsible for everything. The teenager can't be responsible for everything. You know, if the teenager is bad at math or not interested in math, then they're bad at math, not interested in math. You know, we can't all be all things to all people.

Andy: Right. Right.

Steven: Hopefully, they have some specialty. They have something that they bring to the table that they are the local expert on. You know, my understanding of the data is that if you give a kid a sense of expertise so that they're the one that gets appealed to on a particular subject. They don't have to be appealed to on all subjects. They just have to be a local expert. If they have that sense, then that's going to increase their self-esteem. It's going to make them feel like they're contributing to the group. They're actually going to be better at learning everything else as well.

Andy: That is so interesting.

Steven: There's this tension, because on one hand … Especially in today's society. It's one thing, if you grow up in a tribe and you never leave that tribe. There's a certain social role you fill. Like you're the expert canoe builder, and that's all you ever have to be. The thing is that all that's changed. Sometimes the person who does the hunting dies or gets sick and someone else has to fill that role. In today's society, we don't live in a fixed tribe.

Steven: We're constantly in different social situations, so we constantly have to morph and become new people. Then it becomes so much harder. It becomes so much harder to be the expert on X because there may be a different expert on X in the next group of people that you're with. You have to fill some other role. I think that's the complication.

Andy: Yeah. If you establish your identity as one thing, and then I'm the person who's really good at this thing and then you get to a new environment where suddenly there's a lot of other people who are better than you with that, then you could start feeling lost a little bit, or like, "Who am I? I used to be the basketball guy in middle school, but now here I am in high school and I didn't even make varsity," or whatever. You know? That seems like it creates a real identity crisis a little bit or a struggle.

Steven: Boy, I see that every day at my Ivy League university because we accept these students that were always the best at most of the things they did.

Andy: Valedictorian in high school.

Steven: Yeah. Exactly.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Steven: Then they come to Brown and all of a sudden they're not the best anymore.

Andy: Oh, maybe.

Steven: In fact, they may not even be particularly good. They may not be accepted into the choir or onto the crew team or whatever, because there are so many people that are better than them. Some of them handle it really poorly. They get depressed. They get anxious. They become show-offs and they're difficult and lose direction. Others handle it really well. I think the ones who handle it really well, what they do is they appreciate the contributions that everyone else is making.

Steven: They don't see themselves as having to be the star, but rather they see themselves as someone who can benefit by all the richness around them. Don't you love it when you meet people like that, who see greatness and appreciate it?

Andy: Yeah. Don't feel like they have to one-up you or compete with you or something, to prove that they're really good at this thing in order to feel like they matter. It's not easy though, huh?

Steven: It's not easy. It's not easy. In my mind, it's about understanding that you're all in it together. If you have other people on your team who are better than you, well, that's to your advantage.