She studies why we see the same thing different ways - Emily Finn

We're living through a moment where polarization feels like it's at an all-time high by trying to understand more about how and why people are coming to such different interpretations of the same information. Part of our long-term goal is to, you know, maybe use our learning to try to design some interventions that can help people kind

of see other perspectives a bit better. I'm Emily Finn. I'm an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College. The core driving goal of my work is to understand why different individuals or even the same individual at different times can come to different understandings of the same sensory information even given the

exact same patterns of light and sound, you know, hitting our retinas and our ears. We're all kind of making meaning of that in different ways and there's different factors that influence how we might interpret that information uh that can lead to diverging conclusions that people reach. Um, and we're trying to understand the neuroscience and the

psychology behind that. the last few decades of human cognitive and and social neuroscience, there's been uh a strong focus on kind of the objective ground truth of a situation. And increasingly, you know, I think in my work and in the work of many others, we're starting to appreciate that there's a lot of situations where there

is no objective ground truth. There is no objectively accurate answer. And it's really important to take into account people's own subjective experiences of whatever they're being exposed to in that moment and sort of treating that as um you know their own personal ground truth in that moment so to speak. Pretty much all of us I would wager get into