Two Movies on One Screen
“You think the President of the United States intentionally praised neo-Nazis in front of the world and figured that would go well? And Israel didn’t notice?”
Core Idea
The two movies framework describes how people watching the same events reach opposite conclusions - not because one side is stupid or evil, but because they’re processing information through different cognitive filters.
Adams traces this back to his training as a hypnotist. Hypnosis taught him that people don’t perceive reality directly. They perceive reality through mental frameworks that determine what information gets through and how it gets interpreted. The same facts pass through different filters and produce different conclusions.
What makes the two movies phenomenon different from simple disagreement is that evidence won’t change minds. Both sides incorporate new information in ways that reinforce their existing movie. The filter determines the conclusion, not the evidence.
The Mechanism
How do two people watching the same events end up in different movies? Adams identifies several factors:
Confirmation Bias: Once you’re in a movie, you notice evidence that supports it and dismiss evidence that contradicts it. This isn’t stupidity - it’s how human cognition works. The brain seeks coherence, and coherence means fitting new information into existing frameworks.
Social Pressure: Your movie determines your tribe. Changing movies means potentially losing friends, family, and career opportunities. The cost of switching is high, so people rationalize staying.
Media Environment: Cable news and social media algorithms serve content that reinforces your movie. You’re not seeing the same information as the other side because information is filtered before it reaches you.
Emotional Investment: Once you’ve publicly committed to a position - especially a morally charged one - admitting error feels like admitting you were the bad guy. If you called someone a racist for years and then learned you were wrong, what does that make you?
The Tells
Adams identifies several signs that someone is deep in their movie:
Word Salad: Responses that use sophisticated vocabulary but don’t form coherent arguments. When someone’s filter gets challenged with contradictory evidence, they don’t update their belief - they generate noise.
Topic Switching: When presented with evidence against one claim, the person immediately pivots to a different claim. “Well what about that time he…” becomes a refuge.
Too Many Reasons: Strong arguments tend to have one or two good reasons. When someone offers two hundred reasons against something, they likely started with the conclusion and worked backwards.
Emotional Escalation: As cognitive dissonance increases, so does the emotional temperature. The person gets angrier, not more curious.
The Artist vs. Economist
Adams illustrated the filter problem with a comparison between artists and economists:
“If you’re an artist, the thing that makes you an artist is that you don’t see clean categories. You see connections between things that normally aren’t related. The artist imagines that they can be combined. An artist is a conflator. An artist is a combiner.”
Economists, by contrast: “Let’s look at this little basket all right. I’m going to analyze this basket by itself. This basket probably doesn’t affect this basket. They’re just different things.”
Adams observed this dynamic when a prominent economist publicly changed his position after reviewing evidence - he looked at the facts, saw the context, and updated his view. An art director looked at the same evidence and didn’t budge, instead producing word salad to maintain his original position.
Escaping Your Movie
Is there a way out?
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Humility about perception: Your brain lies to you constantly. You have blind spots you can’t see by definition. The feeling of certainty is not proof of accuracy.
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Falsifiability tests: Instead of “is my position correct?” try “what would change my mind?” If you can’t articulate a falsifiable test for your beliefs, you’re not reasoning - you’re rationalizing.
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Steelmanning: Seek the strongest version of the opposing argument, not the weakest. Adams regularly engages with critics and tries to understand their perspective from the inside.
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Watch for tells: When you find yourself producing word salad, changing topics rapidly, or getting disproportionately emotional, something in your movie is being threatened.
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Meta-awareness: Know that you’re in a movie, even if you can’t escape it completely. “I don’t like to talk in absolutes,” Adams said, “because that’s how dumb people talk.”
Why This Matters
The two movies framework helps explain why winning arguments doesn’t work. If half the country is watching a different movie than you, persuasion doesn’t mean showing them better evidence. It means changing their filter.
And filters don’t change easily. They’re built on identity and emotion and social pressure. They’re reinforced daily by media and social groups. They feel like reality because perception is reality.
But knowing that you’re in a movie - that’s the first step toward seeing clearly.
See Also
- Persuasion Filter - Why people see what they expect to see
- Cognitive Dissonance - What happens when filters get challenged
- Reframing - Technique for shifting someone’s movie
- Fine People Hoax - Scott’s canonical example of two movies
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