Latest / Masters in Business / Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast)

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Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · Masters in Business

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Speaker 1: M This is Mesters in Business with very Results on
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Speaker 1: Bluebird Radio. Here this week on the podcast, boy Do
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Speaker 1: I have a fascinating guest, Professor Richard Nisbet of the
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Speaker 1: University of Michigan. This could be the most influential academic
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Speaker 1: that the average person has never heard of. His work
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Speaker 1: has touched on everything UM from psychology to intelligence, to
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Speaker 1: childhood and child rearing, UH to pharmaceutical side effects. It's
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Speaker 1: it's just endlessly astonishing who he is, the research he's done,
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Speaker 1: understanding the impact of culture and society on UM, just
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Speaker 1: how we think and how different let's just use East
0:51
Speaker 1: versus West as examples as different parts of the world
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Speaker 1: approach problem solving and societal issues and economic sen just
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Speaker 1: endlessly fascinating. He's written a dozen books, the most recent
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Speaker 1: of which UH is Thinking, a memoir, which was quite fascinating.
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Speaker 1: He's one of these people. I don't want to say
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Speaker 1: he name dropped because he worked with all these people,
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Speaker 1: but he just so casually works in UM various characters
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Speaker 1: from you know, the canon of twentieth century psychology and
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Speaker 1: economics and and UH academia because he was really there
1:30
Speaker 1: as all these things were being developed. UM. I mentioned
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Speaker 1: During the interview, Professor David Dunning of Dunning Krueger is
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Speaker 1: the one who said, Hey, I work with Richard Nisbet.
1:43
Speaker 1: You should really talk to him, and and really, what
1:47
Speaker 1: more do you need than that as an introduction. I
1:51
Speaker 1: wish we had another two hours. The conversation was absolutely fascinating.
1:56
Speaker 1: It's a deep dive into intelligence and thinking and how
2:02
Speaker 1: we get smarter both as individuals and society. Absolutely fascinating.
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Speaker 1: I'm going to stop here and say, with no further
2:12
Speaker 1: ado my conversation with Richard Nisbet. This is Mesters in
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Speaker 1: Business with very Renaults on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special
2:26
Speaker 1: guest this week is Professor Richard Nesbitt. He is the
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Speaker 1: co director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the
2:34
Speaker 1: University of Michigan, focusing on culture and reasoning and basic
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Speaker 1: cognitive processes. No less than Malcolm Gladwell called him the
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Speaker 1: most influential thinker in my life. And when Professor David
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Speaker 1: Dunning yes that Dunning offered to make an introduction, I
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Speaker 1: jumped at the chance. Professor Richard Nisbit, welcome to Bloomberg.
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Speaker 1: Thank you. It's my pleasure to have you. Before we
3:00
Speaker 1: dive in, I just want to give you a little
3:02
Speaker 1: bit about my background, because I have no real psychology background.
3:07
Speaker 1: My biases the world's of behavioral finance and cognitive eras
3:12
Speaker 1: really in the context of investing decisions, especially bed investing decisions.
3:18
Speaker 1: So pardons some of the naivete that I may exhibit
3:22
Speaker 1: in some of my questions. There's like the slightest bit
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Speaker 1: of overlap between what I've looked at and and your
3:29
Speaker 1: whole career, and that's why I found it so interesting.
3:32
Speaker 1: And and let's start with your career. There's nothing really
3:36
Speaker 1: in your background growing up in El Paso and in
3:40
Speaker 1: California that suggests an academic career in psychology. What led
3:45
Speaker 1: you to the study of human reasoning and decision making? Oh,
3:49
Speaker 1: I think it was just luck and key, and that's
3:53
Speaker 1: what I was meant to do. But I learned it
3:56
Speaker 1: very early. Fortunately, I read Calvin Hall's Primer of Freudian
4:01
Speaker 1: Psychology and it was just za, that's it, That's what
4:04
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do, right right. Interesting that I really like
4:08
Speaker 1: the idea that has been talked about, and you you
4:11
Speaker 1: reference it um in your book Thinking, a Memoir, which
4:14
Speaker 1: we'll talk about in in a few moments, that the
4:18
Speaker 1: human propensity for floored reasoning was advantageous on the Savannah,
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Speaker 1: but it really doesn't service well in a modern society.
4:26
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about that, right, Um, well,
4:30
Speaker 1: there's a whole enterprise I'm sure you're aware of and
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Speaker 1: psychology and economics showing Uh, people's reasoning is flawed in
4:40
Speaker 1: many respects, and most of them was Many people said, well,
4:45
Speaker 1: that can't be. You know, I managed to get through
4:47
Speaker 1: my day pretty well. Uh. That's sometimes um self delusional,
4:54
Speaker 1: but but by and large it's correct to say we
4:58
Speaker 1: were not terrible at eavening across the boards. It's just
5:02
Speaker 1: that the Industrial Revolution and then in spades, the information revolution,
5:08
Speaker 1: just changed the nature of what we need to do. Uh,
5:14
Speaker 1: and in our reasoning in everyday life. Uh. It gave
5:18
Speaker 1: us data, It gave us uh numbers, Uh, it gave
5:23
Speaker 1: us graphs, It gave us reports from people that we
5:27
Speaker 1: never heard of. We encounter people that we don't know
5:31
Speaker 1: at all. All of this is just completely unanticipatable from
5:36
Speaker 1: the life of a hunter gatherer. So the problem is
5:40
Speaker 1: the rug has been pulled out from under us, so
5:43
Speaker 1: we make errors all the time. Quite quite interesting, some
5:48
Speaker 1: of the research that you've done on cognition is really
5:52
Speaker 1: quite fascinating because it's so challenging to figure out what's
5:56
Speaker 1: actually going on in people's minds. I was kind of
6:00
Speaker 1: intrigued by some of the research that was done on
6:04
Speaker 1: birthwater and how that impacts people's career choices and aversion
6:10
Speaker 1: to risk taking or not. Tell us a little bit,
6:13
Speaker 1: or even how they embrace risky your sports. Tell us
6:17
Speaker 1: a little bit about birthwater and and how did you
6:21
Speaker 1: figure out that was significant? Well? Um, I was my
6:28
Speaker 1: advisor UH and graduate school at Columbia, Stanley sh Actor
6:33
Speaker 1: UH studied birth order and one thing he discovered is
6:35
Speaker 1: that firstborn females are more frightened of the prospect of
6:41
Speaker 1: electric shock than later born females. And I thought that's
6:46
Speaker 1: interesting because I've always been kind of afraid of getting hurt,
6:50
Speaker 1: and my younger brother was getting hurt all the time
6:54
Speaker 1: when he was a kid. UM, So I sort of
6:58
Speaker 1: filed that away. And then I heard of one of
7:02
Speaker 1: these people who looks at primates UH, and she studied monkeys, UH,
7:11
Speaker 1: and she just made this offhand observation that when a
7:14
Speaker 1: monkey mother has her first baby, she's all arms and
7:18
Speaker 1: legs and tails. Keep it in the tree to keep
7:20
Speaker 1: it from falling thirty down thirty feet down from the
7:23
Speaker 1: forest canopy. Uh. By the time her fourth or fifth
7:28
Speaker 1: kid has come along, the kid falls out. Damn, I'm
7:32
Speaker 1: gonna have to pick the thing up. Um. She just
7:35
Speaker 1: so first borns are protected, uh in a way that
7:40
Speaker 1: later borns aren't. So I said, I said, how can
7:43
Speaker 1: I test this? And I started looking at uh sports
7:48
Speaker 1: and uh the birth order of people who played dangerous
7:53
Speaker 1: sports versus non dangerous sports. And it turns out there
7:58
Speaker 1: later born is about more likely to play a dangerous
8:03
Speaker 1: sport than a firstborn. So. Um, and that's I just
8:08
Speaker 1: found out recently. There have been twenty studies since, all
8:12
Speaker 1: supporting that general statistic and is a giant number. We're
8:18
Speaker 1: usually looking for a couple of percent here or there
8:20
Speaker 1: to identify some difference of of note, this is clearly
8:25
Speaker 1: not only replicable, but very significant. Yeah, it's it's surprisingly strong.
8:32
Speaker 1: If if I had been predicting what I'd find, I say, oh,
8:36
Speaker 1: maybe a ten or fifteen percent edge. But no, it's huge.
8:40
Speaker 1: So another one of your books, Geography of Thought, you
8:44
Speaker 1: put forth the theory Asians and Westerners have maintained very
8:48
Speaker 1: different systems of thought for thousands of years and these
8:52
Speaker 1: differences are scientifically measurable now now that's when it was
8:58
Speaker 1: first introduced. Was a pretty radical premise, but you had
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Speaker 1: a data to back it up. Tell us a bit
9:03
Speaker 1: about that. Well, it is a radical premise. And Um,
9:09
Speaker 1: I just happened to have a student a number of
9:13
Speaker 1: years ago from China, a really brilliant guy who's actually
9:17
Speaker 1: now dean of social sciences at Kingwa University, which is
9:21
Speaker 1: the top university in China. Uh, and actually had been
9:25
Speaker 1: working together for a while. He said, you know, Dick,
9:27
Speaker 1: you and I think completely differently about a lot of
9:31
Speaker 1: different kinds of things. And I said, well, tell me more,
9:34
Speaker 1: and he gave me a version of the following. He said,
9:39
Speaker 1: you think very analytically, very linearly. When you look at
9:44
Speaker 1: some object or person, you are you thinking what are
9:48
Speaker 1: the attributes of that object or person? Uh? And you
9:52
Speaker 1: come up with rules? Are you you consult your rules
9:57
Speaker 1: about that kind of object or person to figure how
10:00
Speaker 1: it's going to react, how it's going to behave um?
10:04
Speaker 1: He said, I, as Chinese, UH think much more Um. Holistically,
10:13
Speaker 1: I pay much more attention to the context of everything,
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Speaker 1: objects and people. I pay attention to relationships, I pay
10:21
Speaker 1: attention to similarities. Uh, and this bruces all kinds of
10:26
Speaker 1: different conclusions between you and me looking at the same situation.
10:31
Speaker 1: Now that's actually he didn't quite say all of that,
10:34
Speaker 1: but he said stuff that was similar to that. In
10:36
Speaker 1: what I just said is a summary of our results. UM.
10:41
Speaker 1: And speaking of big effects, not everything I do get
10:44
Speaker 1: big effects, I can assure you. But Uh, I didn't
10:47
Speaker 1: actually believe him exactly. Although I had read a book
10:51
Speaker 1: by Nakamura called Ways of Thinking of Eastern People, so
10:55
Speaker 1: I was prepared for some differences. Certainly, not the different
11:00
Speaker 1: is as large as we found. Uh. My favorite examples
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Speaker 1: of these cognitive differences really have to do with perception
11:11
Speaker 1: more than reasoning, although there are plenty of big differences
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Speaker 1: for reasoning. UM. Were one of our studies, and this
11:18
Speaker 1: was done with Takahiko Masuda. Uh. We showed underwater scenes
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Speaker 1: two Americans in Japanese for twenty seconds, UH, and then
11:33
Speaker 1: we asked them, what tell me what you saw. The
11:37
Speaker 1: Americans will say something like, well, I saw three big
11:41
Speaker 1: fish swimming off to the left. Um. They had one
11:46
Speaker 1: fin on top, they had pink stipples on their bellies. UM.
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Speaker 1: There were rocks and shells on the bottom. So on
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Speaker 1: the Japanese nearly always start with the context. I said,
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Speaker 1: I saw what looked like a stream. The water was green. Uh,
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Speaker 1: there were rocks and plants on the bottom. Uh, there
12:08
Speaker 1: were three big fish swimming off to the left. Now,
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Speaker 1: in total, we got more reports about context from the Japanese,
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Speaker 1: from the Americans, then from the Americans, and more observations
12:27
Speaker 1: about relationships like the frog was on the lily pad
12:31
Speaker 1: um and uh so Uh it turns out and and
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Speaker 1: the difference there between number of observations about the context,
12:45
Speaker 1: it's increase over what Americans do. Uh. And that's done
12:51
Speaker 1: with no loss of information about the central objects. Uh.
12:56
Speaker 1: So there and so we wanted to see, well, what
12:59
Speaker 1: are they doing? Are they looking at this this thing differently?
13:03
Speaker 1: And the answer is yes they are. Um. We put
13:07
Speaker 1: a GisMo on their heads, um with a camera back
13:11
Speaker 1: at their eyes, so we know where they're looking at
13:14
Speaker 1: every moment. This is done with still photos uh and uh.
13:21
Speaker 1: We show people the photos for ten or twenty seconds,
13:25
Speaker 1: um and um. What we find is that the Americans
13:31
Speaker 1: spend almost all their time looking at the object, the
13:36
Speaker 1: front of it, at the back of it, at the
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Speaker 1: top of it, at the bottom of etcetera. The Japanese
13:43
Speaker 1: uh spend much much more time on the context, and
13:48
Speaker 1: they're actually constantly looking back and forth between the context
13:53
Speaker 1: and the object. Um. So uh. They they're not just
13:58
Speaker 1: seeing the object and the context, they're seeing relationships between
14:04
Speaker 1: the object uh and the context. So uh. This is
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Speaker 1: the The effects are huge for perception. Uh. There are
14:12
Speaker 1: some very large effects for cognition as well, which I
14:16
Speaker 1: can tell you about if you're interested. Uh. So um.
14:22
Speaker 1: One thing that we do, we do very simple studies
14:26
Speaker 1: to make our points. Uh. We show people a picture
14:32
Speaker 1: of a monkey. Uh. Ah. Let's let's get me take
14:39
Speaker 1: a better example. We show people a picture of a
14:43
Speaker 1: cow uh grass uh and um and a monkey uh.
14:50
Speaker 1: And we say which two of these pictures go together? Uh.
14:55
Speaker 1: The Americans said, well, the monkey and the cow go
14:58
Speaker 1: to better go together because they're both animals. The Asians
15:02
Speaker 1: are much more likely to say, well, the cow and
15:05
Speaker 1: the grass go together because the cow eats the grass.
15:09
Speaker 1: So they're seeing relationships automatically that are not so salient
15:14
Speaker 1: to us. Uh and uh. They're paying much more attention
15:19
Speaker 1: to the object. Uh. Some of the more consequential differences
15:24
Speaker 1: have to do with understanding human behavior. UM. There is
15:29
Speaker 1: UH an error UH in reasoning that people make. UM.
15:34
Speaker 1: I wonder how many of your guests have heard of.
15:37
Speaker 1: This error is called the fundamental attribution errors. So we
15:43
Speaker 1: tend to attribute the causes of behavior to a person's
15:49
Speaker 1: attributes UM. That is, UM, his personality, his abilities, his attitudes. UH,
15:57
Speaker 1: and we tend to ignore the con text. UH. East
16:01
Speaker 1: Asians are much more likely to pick up on the
16:05
Speaker 1: context and to attribute behavior to the context than we are.
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Speaker 1: UM and UH. An example of this UH is UH
16:17
Speaker 1: we do a study where we say, we've asked that
16:23
Speaker 1: this person you're about to hear from UH, We've asked
16:27
Speaker 1: him to please state the case uh as if you
16:32
Speaker 1: were in a debate for why marijuana should be legalized
16:38
Speaker 1: or some other topic and so UM and we say,
16:42
Speaker 1: either this person gave this talk in response to a
16:48
Speaker 1: psychology professor's request in response to a political science assignment,
16:56
Speaker 1: or UH in respond to a debate coach who said,
17:02
Speaker 1: I want you to give me the pro arguments. UH
17:05
Speaker 1: as if you were in a debate and people then
17:08
Speaker 1: hear this UH speech and now you asked them, UH,
17:14
Speaker 1: what are you suppose this guy actually thinks uh and um.
17:20
Speaker 1: People are hugely influenced by what he's said, even though
17:25
Speaker 1: they know he was chosen randomly to give this particular talk.
17:30
Speaker 1: Now Asians East Asians. When I say Asians, I nearly
17:36
Speaker 1: always meet East Asians, Japanese, Chinese uh and um and Koreans,
17:45
Speaker 1: but others as well. Uh we um tell people, Uh, well,
17:56
Speaker 1: they've been told that this person was required to give
17:59
Speaker 1: this each what do they think? They tell us? Americans teals, well,
18:03
Speaker 1: he thinks pretty much what he said. Asians don't do that.
18:07
Speaker 1: I don't really nobody thinks because he was assigned to
18:11
Speaker 1: do this by somebody else. And that effect is really huge.
18:15
Speaker 1: I mean, we make the error in that situation of
18:19
Speaker 1: very big airror that they are much less likely to make.
18:24
Speaker 1: They do make the fundamental attribution error also, but it's
18:30
Speaker 1: just not nearly as frequently. I'm not nearly as strong
18:35
Speaker 1: an effect. We're going to talk more about the fundamental
18:38
Speaker 1: attribution err in a little bit, but I have to
18:40
Speaker 1: ask what is the societal or cultural basis for this
18:46
Speaker 1: difference between looking at things either with or without context
18:51
Speaker 1: and relationships, and how does it manifest itself in in
18:56
Speaker 1: each society. Clearly there's a different structure in both, and
19:01
Speaker 1: the behaviors and economies and everything else are so different.
19:05
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about what leads to this
19:08
Speaker 1: and then where it goes from there. Uh. Well, first
19:12
Speaker 1: of all, point out you, as you did earlier, that
19:16
Speaker 1: the differences go back thousands of years UH and UM.
19:22
Speaker 1: For example, for example, if you look at UM physics
19:26
Speaker 1: beliefs in the West and in the East, UM, the
19:31
Speaker 1: it turns out Westerners have always tended to have physical
19:37
Speaker 1: beliefs which were of a variety of the fundamental attribution
19:42
Speaker 1: Here they try to explain the behavior of objects purely
19:46
Speaker 1: in terms of properties of a object. So you know,
19:49
Speaker 1: the object felled because it's heavy. The Easterns have only
19:54
Speaker 1: objects fell because the material supporting it wasn't sufficient to
19:59
Speaker 1: bear the way. So they understand the relation between the
20:02
Speaker 1: context and UH and the object and UH. Years ago
20:08
Speaker 1: already Chinese were well aware of the concept of action
20:15
Speaker 1: at a distance UM. So they understood the reason for
20:20
Speaker 1: the tides, for example, which was not understood even by Galileo. Uh,
20:26
Speaker 1: he didn't get it right. And they also had a
20:29
Speaker 1: good concept of magnetism UH, and of acoustics. So they
20:35
Speaker 1: they had very accurate lay intuitive physics as compared to Westerners. Now,
20:45
Speaker 1: so that and the and the category and the logic
20:48
Speaker 1: by the way, uh apropool of analytic reasoning. UH logic
20:55
Speaker 1: was the story goes invented by Aristotle because he got
20:59
Speaker 1: sick of hearing allows the arguments in the marketplace and
21:02
Speaker 1: the political assembly. Um So he said, okay, can we
21:08
Speaker 1: agree that if your argument has this structure, it's allows
21:12
Speaker 1: the argument. Uh So. UH logic was formalized very early
21:19
Speaker 1: in the West. It was never very much of an
21:22
Speaker 1: interest in the East. Uh. And it was never formalized.
21:26
Speaker 1: And there was only a very brief period in the
21:29
Speaker 1: third century BC when there was any concern with logic
21:34
Speaker 1: at all, and the it basically dropped out of of
21:40
Speaker 1: the intellectual armaments of the East. So why do we
21:47
Speaker 1: get these perceptual differences and these cognitive differences and also
21:51
Speaker 1: as a consequence, the social differences? Uh? I believed early
21:58
Speaker 1: on without much of it's that it was because of
22:01
Speaker 1: the type of of economy uh that East Asians had
22:09
Speaker 1: of versus Europeans. Uh. East Asians had a great especially
22:17
Speaker 1: in China. I mean terrific circumstances for mass agriculture. Mass Agriculture,
22:24
Speaker 1: especially rice culture, demands lots of cooperation from people. So
22:30
Speaker 1: effective action depends on my looking at what you're doing
22:35
Speaker 1: and understanding the relationship between your action and my action
22:39
Speaker 1: and so on. So I'm constantly looking out there, and
22:42
Speaker 1: I'm seeing the reasons for behavior, I'm seeing the context
22:46
Speaker 1: that creates them, and just and incidentally, if I'm paying
22:49
Speaker 1: attention out there, I have better understanding of physics. Um so.
22:57
Speaker 1: Um And I had a very sharp Turkish student a
23:04
Speaker 1: while back, who's oh, and I should say, what what
23:10
Speaker 1: was the situation in Greece. Well, Greece was mountains descending
23:14
Speaker 1: to the sea. Mass Agriculture is just not in the
23:17
Speaker 1: cards in that situation. People to make a living by
23:22
Speaker 1: trading and fishing and kitchen gardening and so on. Um So,
23:27
Speaker 1: it's they don't have to pay attention to and then
23:30
Speaker 1: herding sheepherding, especially goat. Uh So, they don't have to
23:34
Speaker 1: pay attention to other people in leading an effective life.
23:38
Speaker 1: Um So, this Turkish student says, why I know an
23:42
Speaker 1: interesting town in Turkey where there are three major occupations farmers, fishers,
23:49
Speaker 1: and herders. Now, if you guys are right about why
23:55
Speaker 1: uh people think holistically in the East and analytically in
24:00
Speaker 1: the west. Uh. Then we ought to find that the
24:03
Speaker 1: farmers and the fishers think more holistically than the herders.
24:09
Speaker 1: And that turns out to be true. So the herder
24:12
Speaker 1: sees the monkey and the cow as being related, and
24:16
Speaker 1: the and the farmers and the fishers see the cow
24:19
Speaker 1: and the grass uh to be um related. And uh.
24:27
Speaker 1: So then the really beautiful study on this was a
24:33
Speaker 1: former student of mine looked at UH reasoning in China saying, well,
24:43
Speaker 1: people ought to be more holistic and South China than
24:46
Speaker 1: in North China because, Uh, you make your living historically
24:53
Speaker 1: in the south by rice farming, which is extremely social dependent.
24:58
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't do anything without lots of people cooperating,
25:02
Speaker 1: and it's wheat farming in the north of China, which
25:06
Speaker 1: is much less dependent on other people. Sure enough, people
25:11
Speaker 1: reason more holistically in the South of China than in
25:14
Speaker 1: the North of China. Quite a very long answer to
25:18
Speaker 1: your question, No, but it's quite fascinating. Some of those
25:21
Speaker 1: things I found in the book were really fascinating and curious.
25:25
Speaker 1: And there's a thread that runs through all of this
25:29
Speaker 1: UH that that is just intriguing. I want to start
25:33
Speaker 1: with something that I thought was an urban legend, but
25:36
Speaker 1: you presented very differently. One of the few factors that
25:39
Speaker 1: predict success as a scientist is the amount of time
25:44
Speaker 1: and childhood that person is sick. So explain that. Well,
25:49
Speaker 1: my theory about that is who knows, it's a Factum,
25:54
Speaker 1: we don't really know why. But my theory is that
25:58
Speaker 1: if you're sick, you spend a lot of time in
26:00
Speaker 1: bed by yourself, and there's not much to do. This
26:04
Speaker 1: is pre TV. There's not much to do but read
26:08
Speaker 1: and think. Uh. And um, this is gonna stand you
26:12
Speaker 1: in good stead for certain kinds of occupations. Um, actually,
26:18
Speaker 1: I think most occupations. Um. So then the reason that's
26:25
Speaker 1: in my book, Uh, there's in the fact that it's
26:28
Speaker 1: sort of an interesting tidbit, Uh, is that I spent
26:31
Speaker 1: a huge amount of time alone wandering the the area
26:37
Speaker 1: of El Paso, Texas, which is right across the border
26:41
Speaker 1: from Warez. And Uh it was it was a wonderful
26:45
Speaker 1: place to wander around. I would go down to the
26:47
Speaker 1: Rio grand I would go to the irrigation canals and
26:50
Speaker 1: look at the cat catfish and the crayfish. Uh. There
26:54
Speaker 1: was a UM kind of motel for Mexican farm workers.
27:01
Speaker 1: UM that I would uh go down and visit those folks,
27:06
Speaker 1: usually taking a bunch of Walt Disney comics which I
27:10
Speaker 1: had paid ten cents for and I charged them five
27:13
Speaker 1: cents uh or and I much later I realized this
27:16
Speaker 1: is a parado improving exchange. I got some money which
27:22
Speaker 1: for the my comics, and they got their comics cheaper
27:25
Speaker 1: than they would have had for them in the store. UM.
27:30
Speaker 1: So it was it. I wandered around a lot, so
27:34
Speaker 1: I was thinking a lot, and I was something of
27:37
Speaker 1: an icelet that were not other kids in my neighborhood.
27:39
Speaker 1: So I did a lot of reading these days that
27:43
Speaker 1: wouldn't happen they be doing um looking at uh Instagram
27:49
Speaker 1: or um playing video games. Right, there's no downtime in
27:54
Speaker 1: those potential negative ramifications for that. So let's talk about
27:59
Speaker 1: some of your other research that that is somewhat intriguing.
28:03
Speaker 1: Telling people about drug side effects has no impact on them,
28:08
Speaker 1: and this eventually leads to regulation about all the drug
28:12
Speaker 1: disclosures we see on pharmaceuticals and TV ads for different drugs.
28:17
Speaker 1: You're credited or blamed or at least your research is
28:21
Speaker 1: credited or blamed for those disclosures. Tell us how you
28:26
Speaker 1: came to that conclusion. Well, um, very early on, I
28:31
Speaker 1: did a study where I asked people to take a
28:36
Speaker 1: series of electric shocks of increasing intensity, and I asked
28:40
Speaker 1: him to when can you first feel it? When does
28:43
Speaker 1: it first become painful? And when is it too painful
28:46
Speaker 1: to bear? By the way. A lot of people say, well,
28:49
Speaker 1: I would never. I would walk out of the room. No,
28:51
Speaker 1: you wouldn't. Everybody trying to be cooperative, and I presented
28:57
Speaker 1: is a reasonable thing for them to be doing for science.
29:00
Speaker 1: People will do it, um. But for some of these people,
29:04
Speaker 1: I say, I want you to take this pills called
29:07
Speaker 1: sproxin uh and um. It will cause your heart to
29:14
Speaker 1: race a bit. It will come back and make your
29:16
Speaker 1: breathing heavier and more irregular. If you may find that
29:20
Speaker 1: your palms are a little bit sweaty, you may get
29:24
Speaker 1: a tightness feeling in your stomach. These are the symptoms
29:29
Speaker 1: people experience when you're giving them electric shock. They're the
29:33
Speaker 1: arousal symptoms that just come with the territory. Other people
29:37
Speaker 1: will say it'll just give them a few junk symptoms.
29:39
Speaker 1: It will cause headache and some matching. Uh and sure enough,
29:45
Speaker 1: and this is for some reason you're asking them about
29:47
Speaker 1: things all all the big effects studies of ever an
29:50
Speaker 1: enormous effect. The people who have been told that the
29:54
Speaker 1: arousal will accompany the drug H take four times the
30:00
Speaker 1: amperation of other people. Uh. And, by the way, and
30:04
Speaker 1: this gets opens up a line of work which we
30:07
Speaker 1: may want to talk about later. The reason he is
30:09
Speaker 1: completely unconscious. You you ask people, you know, tell me
30:13
Speaker 1: what did you think about the drug while you were
30:15
Speaker 1: taking the shock? And I wasn't thinking about the drug
30:18
Speaker 1: at all. Yes, they were, and what they were thinking
30:22
Speaker 1: was they're getting more and more aroused as this thing
30:27
Speaker 1: that I've been sure enough, their heart rate, they're breathing
30:30
Speaker 1: patterns and so on or changing, just like we said
30:33
Speaker 1: they would. They attribute the arousal, which otherwise would be
30:38
Speaker 1: multiplying the pain, the pain experience. Uh. They're treating as
30:43
Speaker 1: an external, external thing. It has nothing to do with
30:46
Speaker 1: you know, my thoughts or emotions or uh anything else.
30:53
Speaker 1: It's just it's just that drug that caused those symptoms.
30:58
Speaker 1: Um and Uh. I did one other study which showed
31:05
Speaker 1: a therapeutic out come for this kind of thing I
31:09
Speaker 1: advertised for insomniacs. This was done at Yale UH with
31:15
Speaker 1: Yale students UH for a study on on dreams. Allegedly. UM,
31:22
Speaker 1: so I found out how long it took them to
31:24
Speaker 1: get to sleep the previous two nights before they come
31:27
Speaker 1: into the lab UH, and I tell them for the
31:33
Speaker 1: next two nights, I want you to take this pill
31:37
Speaker 1: before you go to sleep. And it's an arousal pill. UH.
31:42
Speaker 1: It's going to cause you know, this meal may become
31:46
Speaker 1: your breathing may may become irregular, your heart rate may
31:51
Speaker 1: become faster, et cetera, all the arousal symptoms. Other people
31:56
Speaker 1: we say nothing to about the effects of this pill,
32:00
Speaker 1: or we actually say it will reduce their arousal symptoms.
32:05
Speaker 1: And our anticipation was, I mean, here, this is based
32:09
Speaker 1: on my myself as an insomniac. I used to you know,
32:13
Speaker 1: lie in bed and you know, thinking about the day
32:17
Speaker 1: and the future, and there were things I was concerned about,
32:21
Speaker 1: and I start thinking about them and I get kind
32:24
Speaker 1: of worked up, and so I'm saying, you know, I'm
32:26
Speaker 1: getting aroused, and that done. That's a very bad idea.
32:30
Speaker 1: So we anticipated and found that the people that we
32:34
Speaker 1: had given the arousal instructions to got to sleep more quickly.
32:41
Speaker 1: The nights that they took the bill, the people we said, uh,
32:47
Speaker 1: the pill will will reduce your arousal, took longer to
32:53
Speaker 1: get to sleep because we're thinking, you know, the the
32:57
Speaker 1: the arousal that they experience because of they're worried about
33:02
Speaker 1: the situation with their girlfriend or our exam tomorrow whatever. Um. Though,
33:09
Speaker 1: the arousal that occurs as a result of these these scary,
33:14
Speaker 1: unpleasant thoughts. Um They they'll they'll say, well, it must
33:21
Speaker 1: be particularly bad tonight because I've got this pill that's
33:25
Speaker 1: supposed to call me down. And by the way, that
33:27
Speaker 1: was based on a personal experience as well. I after
33:31
Speaker 1: I had insomnia for quite a while as undergraduate, I said, okay,
33:34
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give up. I'm gonna take a sleeping drug.
33:37
Speaker 1: And I took a sumin X and lay in bed
33:41
Speaker 1: waiting for it to take effects, which it never did,
33:45
Speaker 1: And it took me longer to get to sleep because
33:48
Speaker 1: I said, well, this this ought to get rid of
33:51
Speaker 1: those irreleval symptoms that I have, and it didn't. So
33:56
Speaker 1: years later somebody said, well, samin X is practically useless.
33:59
Speaker 1: So uh, it was never going to have an effect.
34:03
Speaker 1: So so what's the relationships Taken the pill at bedtime
34:08
Speaker 1: and think it will reduce arousal, it takes them longer
34:11
Speaker 1: to get to sleep because they think, look, I've got
34:15
Speaker 1: it at least as much arousal as usual and even
34:19
Speaker 1: though I've got a pill in me. So Uh, the
34:24
Speaker 1: general point made by those two studies is that uh,
34:29
Speaker 1: you can have uh the effects of a pill. Uh
34:34
Speaker 1: that uh that that that aren't really there there there
34:38
Speaker 1: arousal is not being produced by that pill or reduced
34:44
Speaker 1: by that pill, but by other experiences. Um. So this
34:51
Speaker 1: work got picked up by the f D a M
34:58
Speaker 1: because drug companies did not want to tell people about
35:04
Speaker 1: the side effects that they might have from the drug,
35:07
Speaker 1: because they said, well, the power of suggestion. We're psychologists, Sara,
35:11
Speaker 1: and we know that the power of suggestion is such
35:14
Speaker 1: that people are going to be experiencing these things that
35:18
Speaker 1: uh they're not really uh have anything to do with
35:22
Speaker 1: the pill, but they're gonna attribute they're gonna uh they'll
35:26
Speaker 1: they'll they'll invent these effects. They'll start having these effects
35:30
Speaker 1: if you tell them about it, because via the power
35:33
Speaker 1: of suggestion. So let me jump in here and ask
35:37
Speaker 1: a quick question. What's the relationship between the expected physiological
35:43
Speaker 1: arousal in this external source and what I think lay
35:48
Speaker 1: people think of as the placebo effect. Well, the placebo
35:54
Speaker 1: effect is, in fact, you get certain symptoms, uh, certain experiences. Uh.
36:04
Speaker 1: And if you've been given uh what is actually a
36:08
Speaker 1: placebo uh and told that it will improve your condition
36:12
Speaker 1: the pain or uh, your flu symptoms or whatever, people
36:18
Speaker 1: will in fact often experience those things or think that
36:22
Speaker 1: they're experiencing those things. So there is definitely a phenomenon
36:26
Speaker 1: of the placebo effect. But in a way, this is
36:29
Speaker 1: the opposite. In fact, I mean, this pill is not
36:35
Speaker 1: causing any any symptoms of any kind, but they they
36:41
Speaker 1: they think that the pill is causing certain symptoms. So,
36:48
Speaker 1: but it very much depends on the symptoms. If it's
36:50
Speaker 1: arousal symptoms, uh, they will attribute any naturally occurring arousal
36:57
Speaker 1: to the pill. Uh and uh if it's uh decreasing
37:02
Speaker 1: arousal symptoms, they'll attribute any arousal to their own state,
37:08
Speaker 1: to their actual state, which they will assume is worse
37:14
Speaker 1: than they might have thought. So you can read into
37:16
Speaker 1: people's experiences arousal. Let's due to some external source or
37:22
Speaker 1: you can read it out. So so the FDA requires
37:27
Speaker 1: that all possible side effects be reported. Um. You mentioned
37:33
Speaker 1: David Dunning earlier on that on your program. Uh, and
37:39
Speaker 1: he's done a fascinating study showing that um, people who
37:45
Speaker 1: have been uh well just a second, let me let
37:50
Speaker 1: me make sure I get the the story right about
37:53
Speaker 1: what he's finding. Yeah. Uh, Dunning has found that, uh,
38:00
Speaker 1: people are less likely to pay attention to side effects
38:06
Speaker 1: if you list twenty seven side effects, you know, like
38:09
Speaker 1: the TV ads where there's may call blah blah blah
38:12
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. The more symptoms you give them, the
38:17
Speaker 1: less attention they paid to any of them, and the
38:20
Speaker 1: less likely they are to remember it later. If you
38:23
Speaker 1: just tell them a few of the very most important ones,
38:27
Speaker 1: they're likely to retain that information. Um. So you know,
38:33
Speaker 1: psychology has a lot to do with what drug effects are,
38:38
Speaker 1: and what drugs side effects are, and what people attribute
38:43
Speaker 1: the side effects too. So so let's jump to attribution theory.
38:49
Speaker 1: What is the fundamental attribution error in acting versus observing.
38:55
Speaker 1: I'm kind of intrigued in my field that when someone
39:00
Speaker 1: sees a successful investor, a trader, um they tend to say, well,
39:05
Speaker 1: that guy got lucky, But when they themselves are doing
39:09
Speaker 1: pretty good, instead of crediting luck, it's obviously due to
39:13
Speaker 1: their own skill set. How is that related to the
39:17
Speaker 1: attribution theory, Well, in a way, that's almost the opposite
39:21
Speaker 1: of the attributionary and the fundamental attributionary attribute behavior to
39:33
Speaker 1: an attribute of the person, a personality, trade, or an
39:35
Speaker 1: ability that really should be understood in terms of context
39:41
Speaker 1: or situation. Um so um. But in showing that this
39:49
Speaker 1: is a there's a difference in our likelihood that we
39:52
Speaker 1: make this error for ourselves versus others. Um. If you,
40:00
Speaker 1: um uh, show people a video of someone behaving in
40:08
Speaker 1: a particular way and ask them why they did it,
40:10
Speaker 1: they'll they'll go for the for the person's attributes, for
40:14
Speaker 1: their traits instead of paying attention to the context. But
40:18
Speaker 1: if it's they themselves who are doing this, they're they're
40:21
Speaker 1: they're they're they're responding to the significant extent to the context.
40:26
Speaker 1: So they say they attribute the behavior their own behavior,
40:30
Speaker 1: they're much more likely to attribute it to the context
40:32
Speaker 1: of the situation than they would the same behavior by
40:37
Speaker 1: someone else. That's quite interesting. You mentioned an endless array
40:43
Speaker 1: of different. Um, very famous psychologists and sociologists that you've
40:48
Speaker 1: worked with over the years. Two of the people you
40:52
Speaker 1: discuss really stand out and and I have to reference
40:57
Speaker 1: both of them. Um, there's an old joke about Amos
41:00
Speaker 1: Diversky that says, you know, the amis Diversky i Q
41:03
Speaker 1: test is the smarter a person is the sooner they
41:07
Speaker 1: figure out that Diversky is smarter than them. Um, is
41:12
Speaker 1: that your line in the book. It seems to suggest
41:15
Speaker 1: you're the person who coined that. Yes, I'm the person
41:18
Speaker 1: who claims that it's become I mean every psychologist knows
41:22
Speaker 1: that line for sure. I mean it's interesting that you know,
41:25
Speaker 1: the smarter you are quickly to realize you're not as
41:28
Speaker 1: smart as someone else. Actually, this is related to a
41:30
Speaker 1: dunning finding, right, I mean, Um, the more knowledgeable people are,
41:35
Speaker 1: the more the better calibrated they are uh for uh
41:42
Speaker 1: for understanding uh the world they understand. They know very
41:48
Speaker 1: little about science. So I'll tell you I don't know.
41:51
Speaker 1: You asked me a question I can't answer. I don't
41:53
Speaker 1: I don't know enough. More ignorant people will give you
41:56
Speaker 1: an answer because they don't realize they don't have the
42:00
Speaker 1: withal meta cognition as a distinct skill set from actual
42:06
Speaker 1: knowledge of the space exactly. So the smarter somebody is,
42:11
Speaker 1: the more likely they are to stand aside and not
42:15
Speaker 1: and not give you an opinion about something if they
42:18
Speaker 1: don't have feel like they have sufficient sufficient knowledge. And
42:23
Speaker 1: we're going to spend a little more time talking about
42:26
Speaker 1: intelligence and i Q and how malleable and modifiable that
42:31
Speaker 1: is in a moment. But there's a quote you paraphrase
42:35
Speaker 1: of of Hans. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his name right,
42:38
Speaker 1: Hans cell you Hans Um. Success in a science is
42:43
Speaker 1: a multiplicative function. It's intelligence times education times, ambition times,
42:50
Speaker 1: curiosity times, hard work times, the ability to get along
42:55
Speaker 1: with people and not just super high i Q s.
42:58
Speaker 1: Explain that it's quite a fast an eating little formula. Right. Well,
43:03
Speaker 1: you have to have all those things to be a
43:05
Speaker 1: successful scientist, and my my guess is that you have
43:08
Speaker 1: to have pretty much all those things to be a
43:10
Speaker 1: successful to be successful in business. Um and um, I
43:17
Speaker 1: mean I have I know someone who had a tested
43:21
Speaker 1: i Q of a hundred and eighty four and he
43:25
Speaker 1: was incredible. I mean you didn't have to be with
43:27
Speaker 1: him for very long to realize, oh my god, this
43:30
Speaker 1: guy is really super super smart. Um. And but he
43:35
Speaker 1: was slightly autistic. I mean, he was slightly off. He
43:41
Speaker 1: would make comments that were inappropriate. Uh, he would laugh
43:46
Speaker 1: when that wasn't the right reaction and so on. Uh.
43:50
Speaker 1: And he had a PhD from a major university. Uh,
43:54
Speaker 1: and he only managed to get very middling of a jobs.
44:01
Speaker 1: Academic jobs in his career should have been, you know,
44:04
Speaker 1: at a major university, and he was on very minor places.
44:08
Speaker 1: So that's a case of you know that that the
44:10
Speaker 1: particular thing that he lacked was ability to get along
44:16
Speaker 1: with people. But ambition is another thing that you often
44:20
Speaker 1: see if somebody he's got the whole package, but it
44:22
Speaker 1: just doesn't care enough to to to put it all
44:27
Speaker 1: into into play. There's a quote that makes this point,
44:31
Speaker 1: by the way, which I really love from Warren Buffett,
44:35
Speaker 1: who says, you know, investing is not a game where
44:39
Speaker 1: the smartest guy wins. If you've got an i Q
44:43
Speaker 1: of a hundred and sixty, you may as well sell
44:46
Speaker 1: thirty of those points because you're not going to need him.
44:49
Speaker 1: And there's there's a lot to that. You know, it's
44:52
Speaker 1: not just raw processing power, it's judgment and decision making
44:58
Speaker 1: and the ability to seek context, and a lot of
45:02
Speaker 1: those things aren't necessarily i Q there, they're a different
45:07
Speaker 1: form of intelligence, which kind of goes to and I
45:11
Speaker 1: don't wanna I don't wanna give the game away, because
45:13
Speaker 1: we'll talk about this in a moment, but it kind
45:16
Speaker 1: of goes to the concept that there are a lot
45:20
Speaker 1: of different ways to improve intelligence and improve, um, how
45:27
Speaker 1: successful a person can be. And you point out in
45:30
Speaker 1: the book that the average IQ score in developed Western
45:35
Speaker 1: economies has risen over the past century. Tell us a
45:39
Speaker 1: little bit about that, right, well, that it act actually
45:43
Speaker 1: probably started with the industrial or revolution. Um. Suddenly you
45:48
Speaker 1: have a workforce that needs to be able to read
45:51
Speaker 1: and write and do arithmetic. So you start increasing the
45:56
Speaker 1: amount of schooling, introducing it are if it's already they're
46:01
Speaker 1: sort of an embryo. You enhance the education. Uh. And
46:07
Speaker 1: for the last two years, the amount of time that
46:12
Speaker 1: people spend in school is just kept on increasing. Ah.
46:17
Speaker 1: And this is hard to believe it. Right after World
46:20
Speaker 1: War Two only about six or eight percent of the
46:22
Speaker 1: population had a college degree. Uh. And college does make
46:27
Speaker 1: you smarter. And by the way, I had a data
46:29
Speaker 1: about that if you want to hear about that. To
46:31
Speaker 1: my surprise, I really didn't. I just thought, you know,
46:35
Speaker 1: college teaches you stuff. I didn't realize it actually makes
46:38
Speaker 1: you smarter and lots of very important ways. Well, it
46:41
Speaker 1: does both, right. It teaches you things, but it also
46:44
Speaker 1: gives you a framework to think about things. It's more
46:49
Speaker 1: than just here's a list of data points, memorize them.
46:52
Speaker 1: It's here's how to Here's a set of cognitive rules
46:56
Speaker 1: and mental models that you can use to solve problems exactly.
47:02
Speaker 1: UM so UM that An example UM that I like
47:08
Speaker 1: is UM I have lots of lots of my studies
47:13
Speaker 1: and lots of Firsky economist studies. By the way, UM
47:17
Speaker 1: I had to do with showing the errors and reasoning
47:20
Speaker 1: that people make because they don't think statistically or probabilistically
47:25
Speaker 1: when they should. I mean, it's a these habits of
47:29
Speaker 1: thought are not they're not common. We don't we don't
47:33
Speaker 1: we're not typically taught them in such a way that
47:37
Speaker 1: they can make contact with everyday life events. UM. For example,
47:43
Speaker 1: they're one of their most famous studies. Uh. Is you
47:47
Speaker 1: say there's a town where there are two hospitals, one
47:52
Speaker 1: has about fifteen births per day, and the other has
47:55
Speaker 1: about sixty births per day. At which of these hospitals
47:59
Speaker 1: do you think there would be more days in the
48:02
Speaker 1: year when or more of the births were boys. Most
48:09
Speaker 1: people say that it shouldn't make any difference. Uh, And
48:13
Speaker 1: about as many say it would be the larger hospital
48:16
Speaker 1: as would be the smaller hospital. In fact, it's astronomically
48:22
Speaker 1: more likely to happen at the smaller, smaller one. Right,
48:26
Speaker 1: You're more likely to get a random outcome with a
48:28
Speaker 1: smaller data set than you are with the larger data
48:31
Speaker 1: is four times larger data set, Right, I mean you're
48:34
Speaker 1: gonna go far away from if there's three births uh
48:39
Speaker 1: per day, because uh, it's gonna be either two thirds
48:45
Speaker 1: zero three thirds boys. That's um so, uh so that's
48:53
Speaker 1: the case. We understand the law of large numbers. By
48:56
Speaker 1: the way, even a hunter gatherers understood the law of
49:00
Speaker 1: large numbers and a lot of important contexts. But we
49:04
Speaker 1: don't have it stored away as an abstract rule to
49:08
Speaker 1: any time there's a little light that goes on in
49:11
Speaker 1: our heads. Data. Oh yeah, what's the end? What's the
49:15
Speaker 1: number of cases? My favorite example of somebody not using
49:20
Speaker 1: the law of large numbers and not understanding that the
49:25
Speaker 1: more variable the dimension you're looking at, the more data
49:31
Speaker 1: it's important to have to make a judgment. And this
49:34
Speaker 1: comes from when I went for the first time to Europe.
49:37
Speaker 1: I spent about a week in London week or ten days,
49:41
Speaker 1: and it was absolutely gorgeous weather. I'm in blue sky,
49:45
Speaker 1: seventy degrees every single day, and I came away start
49:48
Speaker 1: with a lingering feeling that, you know, the British or
49:51
Speaker 1: such complainers, they actually have wonderful weather, but they're always
49:54
Speaker 1: complaining about the rain. Well, I I got h what
49:59
Speaker 1: I deserve. The next time I went to London. It
50:01
Speaker 1: never stopped dreaming the entire time. So now I wasn't
50:08
Speaker 1: so foolish just to think that weather isn't as variable
50:12
Speaker 1: in England as it is anywhere else. But I just
50:14
Speaker 1: didn't take the trouble to say, wait a minute, how
50:17
Speaker 1: much evidence do I really have about what the weather is?
50:21
Speaker 1: Um so any rate. I studied people's failure to apply
50:27
Speaker 1: the law of large numbers when they should. They're attributing
50:32
Speaker 1: causality when the data they have is purely correlational. I
50:36
Speaker 1: studied their inability to apply the regression, statistical regression concept, uh,
50:44
Speaker 1: two problems and so on and UH. When I was
50:49
Speaker 1: doing that work, I used to say, you know, not
50:51
Speaker 1: only are we stupid, but you can't make a smarter
50:53
Speaker 1: with these things. So when I said, well, you know,
50:57
Speaker 1: I'm going to prove that, I mean, I don't actually
50:59
Speaker 1: know for a fact that you know, you can't teach
51:02
Speaker 1: people these things. To my astonishment, in fifteen or twenty minutes,
51:07
Speaker 1: you can teach the law of large numbers, the regression principle, UH,
51:12
Speaker 1: the cost cost benefit principles, including a crucially important one
51:18
Speaker 1: of uh of of the cost principle. UH that UM,
51:31
Speaker 1: I can't retrieve money I've already spent by consuming something.
51:37
Speaker 1: So you know, I got go to a movie and
51:39
Speaker 1: it's a lousy movie. You know, I may say, well,
51:42
Speaker 1: I don't want this thing, is hardly worth it. I
51:45
Speaker 1: just assumed be sitting at home. But you know, I
51:48
Speaker 1: don't want to waste the money I paid. You know
51:50
Speaker 1: which an economist says, honk wrong. You can't waste that money,
51:55
Speaker 1: you already wasted it. Uh. All you can do now
51:59
Speaker 1: is has send good money after bad. Uh. You talk
52:04
Speaker 1: about this with books, And I had this experience more
52:08
Speaker 1: or less around the same time you did the realization that, hey,
52:13
Speaker 1: I'm not liking this book. I'm under no obligation to
52:17
Speaker 1: finish it. It's not homework. I didn't sign a contract
52:20
Speaker 1: if I'm not enjoying it. Put it aside. I know
52:23
Speaker 1: people who have a real emotional difficulty in saying no, no,
52:27
Speaker 1: I started it, I have to finish it. Well, I
52:30
Speaker 1: was absolutely you know, pathological. I mean, if I started,
52:34
Speaker 1: by God, I was going to finish it. Uh. And
52:37
Speaker 1: and I don't know who told me that that's a
52:39
Speaker 1: good rule. I guess I just invented it myself. But
52:42
Speaker 1: of course it's a perfectly terrible rule. Uh. Whatever point
52:46
Speaker 1: you're not enjoying or you're not learning, then you should stop. Um.
52:51
Speaker 1: People don't have that principle, Uh, at such a level
52:56
Speaker 1: of abstraction that it will make contact with all the
53:00
Speaker 1: problems in life that it should so. Um so, But
53:05
Speaker 1: you teach them in the laboratory just a very few
53:08
Speaker 1: problems using one of these principles, or actually just giving
53:12
Speaker 1: them the abstract principles, and either either one will help people.
53:18
Speaker 1: And if you give them both abstract and concrete cases,
53:21
Speaker 1: of course, um, they do even better. So I decided
53:25
Speaker 1: to say, well, what what does college do for you
53:28
Speaker 1: on these things? And I gave them a package of
53:31
Speaker 1: problems like the the the that are solvable by using
53:36
Speaker 1: the some cost rule, or the law of large numbers,
53:40
Speaker 1: or the concept of statistical regression, which is that, uh,
53:45
Speaker 1: extreme events are not likely to be so extreme the
53:51
Speaker 1: next time they're encountered. We don't have that wired into us.
53:55
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a tremendously important principle that we you
54:00
Speaker 1: know it, just it doesn't come with the hardware or
54:04
Speaker 1: the software for that matter, or the software. It doesn't
54:08
Speaker 1: come with this when in in a few million years
54:13
Speaker 1: of evolution would we have ever experienced things like exponential
54:18
Speaker 1: growth or compounding. If it never comes up, it's just
54:23
Speaker 1: a total blind spot to us until we're walked through. Right. Well,
54:31
Speaker 1: Although that said, I've watched people get the money whole
54:35
Speaker 1: problem explained to them. The you know do do you
54:39
Speaker 1: do you stay with your original choice of the three doors,
54:43
Speaker 1: or once a door is revealed, do you switch? Even
54:46
Speaker 1: after you lay out the statistics to people, a lot
54:49
Speaker 1: of people still refuse to accept that the odds have
54:52
Speaker 1: changed and you should switch. Right, So we looked at
54:57
Speaker 1: all of these kinds of things, and I'm and they
55:00
Speaker 1: were just simple problems like I've just been talking about.
55:03
Speaker 1: Or you tell people, uh, you know, at the end
55:07
Speaker 1: of uh, the first couple of weeks the baseball season,
55:11
Speaker 1: there are usually several batters with averages of four fifty
55:15
Speaker 1: or higher, but no one ever finishes the season with
55:18
Speaker 1: that an average. Why do you suppose that is? Now,
55:22
Speaker 1: if you ask this question of the U of M
55:24
Speaker 1: freshman before he set foot in the classroom, he will say,
55:28
Speaker 1: and I'm making it he because he's more likely to
55:31
Speaker 1: know about baseball. Uh. He will say, well, you know
55:35
Speaker 1: the pictures make the necessary adjustments. Or you know, they
55:40
Speaker 1: they they're doing so well, they kind of goof off
55:42
Speaker 1: and stop trying as hard. After uh education lasting four
55:49
Speaker 1: years at the University of Michigan, they're like they said, well,
55:51
Speaker 1: wait a minute, early on in the season, there haven't
55:54
Speaker 1: been that many at bats. If you think about it, uh,
56:00
Speaker 1: after your first at back, your your average is either
56:03
Speaker 1: zero or one. Uh So when you get more and more,
56:07
Speaker 1: but nobody really has a four fifty level of ability
56:10
Speaker 1: and that's going to show over the long haul. So
56:14
Speaker 1: I mean it goes from like giving you that kind
56:19
Speaker 1: of answer to sixty or see that kind of answer.
56:24
Speaker 1: I mean, college is hugely important for making you smarter.
56:30
Speaker 1: Peter teal to the contrary. Notwithstanding uh and uh so
56:36
Speaker 1: this was I was bowled over, But this I couldn't again.
56:39
Speaker 1: It's a tremendously strong effect. I mean, it's people go
56:43
Speaker 1: on average from answering of our problems correctly to our
56:49
Speaker 1: problems correctly. None of these things that you know, the
56:53
Speaker 1: statistical rules, probabilistic rules, economic rules, psychological rules, none of
56:59
Speaker 1: these things, uh are taught explicitly nearly as much as
57:05
Speaker 1: they should be. I went and got after I did
57:09
Speaker 1: the study, I went and got an economic economic couple
57:11
Speaker 1: of economic economics texts, uh to see what they did
57:16
Speaker 1: with the sunk cost, And both of them they spoke
57:20
Speaker 1: of it only in business situations. Uh. They didn't say, oh,
57:24
Speaker 1: by the way, this principle is important to you every day,
57:29
Speaker 1: um in many many ways, or the opportunity cost principle.
57:33
Speaker 1: They're they're not, they're not. They make no effort, And
57:37
Speaker 1: statistics courses make no effort to say, look, statistics is relevant,
57:42
Speaker 1: you know all the time, and probability and so on.
57:47
Speaker 1: So there are opportunities to do uh greatly improve people's education.
57:54
Speaker 1: Won't affect their i Q, but as sure as that
57:56
Speaker 1: makes them smarter. Uh. And it's tragedy that these things
58:01
Speaker 1: are rarely taught, certainly not in the way of UH
58:05
Speaker 1: that will make contact with every other live events in
58:08
Speaker 1: high school. Instead, we make high school students take algebra,
58:12
Speaker 1: which they're not gonna use. I mean a tiny fraction
58:15
Speaker 1: are ever going to use in algebra. Uh. And tragically
58:19
Speaker 1: a lot of people drop out of high school because
58:22
Speaker 1: they can't hack algebra well, algebra to go out of
58:27
Speaker 1: the curriculum, as far as I'm concerned. And um, and
58:30
Speaker 1: put probability, economics and statistics in. Yeah, I think that's
58:37
Speaker 1: a fabulous suggestion. Last question in this segments on thinking.
58:43
Speaker 1: You've now been at the University of Michigan for quite
58:46
Speaker 1: a long while. Uh, tell us about how you came
58:51
Speaker 1: to leave Yale and end up at Michigan, right, Uh, well,
58:56
Speaker 1: my story there appall's most people who hear it. That's
59:01
Speaker 1: why I asked, UM, so I was at Yale, personally
59:05
Speaker 1: got the university, and I went to Michigan. Despite the
59:09
Speaker 1: fact that the day of my interview it was in February.
59:15
Speaker 1: An arbor is not a lovely place in February. It
59:18
Speaker 1: may surprise you, don't know. And this was a particularly
59:21
Speaker 1: unlovely day because there was dirty, patchy snow lying all
59:25
Speaker 1: around the very cold um And I had was interviewed
59:30
Speaker 1: by the executive Committee of the department, and uh, they
59:34
Speaker 1: most of the time, and the discussion was spent with
59:36
Speaker 1: him discussing baseball, which I know nothing about and isn't
59:41
Speaker 1: really relevant to my career. Uh. And I spent the
59:46
Speaker 1: bulk of my time, well not the bulk, but the
59:49
Speaker 1: single the single person. I spent most time with a
59:52
Speaker 1: colossal bore. But I went to the University of Michigan anyway.
59:57
Speaker 1: In fact, I made up my mind I would go
1:00:00
Speaker 1: the University of Michigan absolutely regardless of what happened on
1:00:05
Speaker 1: when I was there, because I had heard only good
1:00:09
Speaker 1: things about the university, about the psychology department, about the town, etcetera.
1:00:16
Speaker 1: I'm going to improve my life and all of these ways,
1:00:20
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to pay any attention to the
1:00:22
Speaker 1: concrete data which I get. And that's a huge bias
1:00:26
Speaker 1: that we have. You know, if if if I saw it,
1:00:29
Speaker 1: it must be real. Well, no, it might not be. Uh,
1:00:33
Speaker 1: you have better ways of finding out what an object
1:00:36
Speaker 1: is like than examining it yourself. That's what we have
1:00:41
Speaker 1: speech for and the ability to read, and we can
1:00:45
Speaker 1: get information rather than relying on our own senses. And
1:00:50
Speaker 1: it was, in fact the absolute right decision for me,
1:00:54
Speaker 1: so I got what I deserved. Quite quite interesting. Let's
1:00:58
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about some of the impacts of
1:01:03
Speaker 1: your research on geography of thought. I'm kind of intrigued
1:01:08
Speaker 1: by the conclusion that we focus way too much on
1:01:12
Speaker 1: genetics and we really should be paying a whole lot
1:01:15
Speaker 1: more attention to the environment, the culture, and the society.
1:01:20
Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about that, right, Well, Um,
1:01:24
Speaker 1: I had studied reasoning for many, many years, and if
1:01:29
Speaker 1: you're a psychologist, to sort of keep up on the
1:01:33
Speaker 1: literature on many fields and one of them and most
1:01:36
Speaker 1: psychologists know something about his intelligence. But for some reason
1:01:41
Speaker 1: I got to thinking seriously about the intelligence literature. And
1:01:45
Speaker 1: the more I thought and the more I read, the
1:01:48
Speaker 1: more I realized that psychologists had gotten things desperately wrong
1:01:54
Speaker 1: with intelligence. And there's a book that has all these
1:01:58
Speaker 1: desperately wrong things, and it's called the Bell Curve. And
1:02:01
Speaker 1: most of your listeners believe what the Bell curve tells them.
1:02:05
Speaker 1: They believe that genetics is accounts for um of the
1:02:14
Speaker 1: variation that you find an intelligence. They think that early
1:02:18
Speaker 1: childhood environment is not all that important unless it's their
1:02:22
Speaker 1: own kid and they've got to get there desperate to
1:02:24
Speaker 1: get him in the very best uh daycare situation, which
1:02:27
Speaker 1: is a mistake. Um. They um. They underestimate the lifetime
1:02:40
Speaker 1: learning opportunities that make us uh much smarter or not,
1:02:45
Speaker 1: as the case may bee. UH. They think that blacks
1:02:50
Speaker 1: and whites have are separated in their i Q scores
1:02:54
Speaker 1: on the average by fifteen points. They think, well, probably
1:02:58
Speaker 1: maybe some of that genetic um. They think Asians have
1:03:03
Speaker 1: higher i Q s than than your people of European
1:03:07
Speaker 1: descent um and so on and all of that is
1:03:11
Speaker 1: wrong um and uh. And I wrote a book called
1:03:16
Speaker 1: Intelligence and How to Get It uh, which shows what's
1:03:20
Speaker 1: wrong with all of that. Uh. The arguments are pretty
1:03:24
Speaker 1: complicated in the case of, for example, how much of
1:03:29
Speaker 1: i Q is due to your genes? UM. The most
1:03:35
Speaker 1: interesting thing I can say about it, first of all,
1:03:37
Speaker 1: it's it's I don't know what the contribution of genes is.
1:03:41
Speaker 1: I know it's less than sixty, way less than of
1:03:46
Speaker 1: the variation. Uh. And the most interesting and important thing
1:03:51
Speaker 1: I can say about genes and intelligence is that the
1:03:56
Speaker 1: the contribution to the i Q of a population of
1:04:01
Speaker 1: upper middle class people only is about eight. It is
1:04:07
Speaker 1: huge there. They're The variation that you see between, you know,
1:04:12
Speaker 1: between people who were raised in upper middle class environments
1:04:16
Speaker 1: is largely variation that's produced by their genes. In this country,
1:04:23
Speaker 1: the contribution to i Q of genes of the lower
1:04:27
Speaker 1: class is practically zero. How could that possibly be well,
1:04:34
Speaker 1: because upper middle class families are all alike. Uh, they're
1:04:38
Speaker 1: like happy families. The happy families are all alike. Upper
1:04:43
Speaker 1: middle class families are all alike with respect to cotny
1:04:46
Speaker 1: skill that they're they're very good, and there's not that
1:04:49
Speaker 1: much variation. I mean, lawyer Smith and businesswoman Jones, their
1:04:55
Speaker 1: kids are all getting essentially the same environment we respect
1:05:00
Speaker 1: to cognitive skill training. So wait, let me interrupt you here.
1:05:03
Speaker 1: So when you say the same environment there they read.
1:05:08
Speaker 1: Their parents pay attention to them, They go to even
1:05:11
Speaker 1: a decent school. And so everybody who has that similar
1:05:17
Speaker 1: upper middle class or even middle class background is gonna
1:05:22
Speaker 1: take the most advantage of their own genetic background, but
1:05:25
Speaker 1: working class students you're suggesting get almost none of that, Yeah,
1:05:31
Speaker 1: because of the chaos that you find UH in in
1:05:35
Speaker 1: many of those families. And this has nothing to do
1:05:38
Speaker 1: with race, This has nothing to do with religion. This
1:05:41
Speaker 1: is really everybody just scrapping really hard to make ends meet,
1:05:46
Speaker 1: and it it's not the ideal circumstance for raising a child, right.
1:05:52
Speaker 1: And you know, some environments obviously lower class environments are
1:05:55
Speaker 1: as good as you would ever find in an upper
1:05:57
Speaker 1: middle class. But some of the environments are chaos chaotic
1:06:02
Speaker 1: in the extreme, uh, and not much goes on that's
1:06:06
Speaker 1: going to facilitate uh somebody rising to their level of ability. Um.
1:06:15
Speaker 1: And when the environment is massively different across UH individuals,
1:06:21
Speaker 1: as it is in the lower classes, then uh, it's
1:06:25
Speaker 1: the environment that's going to drive the bus. And genes
1:06:28
Speaker 1: are not really much relevant. A little side points that
1:06:33
Speaker 1: all make here, and this is that this is true
1:06:40
Speaker 1: only in the US among rich countries. In Scandinavia especially,
1:06:48
Speaker 1: the contribution of genes to i Q is just as
1:06:51
Speaker 1: great for the lower classes people with the least money
1:06:55
Speaker 1: as it is the most money, because they're they're making
1:06:59
Speaker 1: sure that the poorest have good things going on in
1:07:02
Speaker 1: their environment, schooling and so on. So that um so
1:07:07
Speaker 1: the genes can't express themselves. Uh in the lower classes
1:07:13
Speaker 1: in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Um so. Um So that's that's
1:07:22
Speaker 1: the most interesting thing I can say about genes and
1:07:26
Speaker 1: the environment. Well, let's stay with this is that, because
1:07:29
Speaker 1: you really raise too fascinating questions, and I'm going to
1:07:35
Speaker 1: assume you answered it in intelligence and how to get it?
1:07:39
Speaker 1: The first is what should parents of any economic background
1:07:44
Speaker 1: be doing to help their children become as intelligent and
1:07:49
Speaker 1: successful as possible? And then the bigger question is what
1:07:52
Speaker 1: should the US as a society be doing? Yeah, all right,
1:07:58
Speaker 1: of great Christians. Uh there it is wonderful anthropological work
1:08:06
Speaker 1: that's gone on. Looking at where you just live with
1:08:10
Speaker 1: a family for a few weeks or months and see
1:08:14
Speaker 1: what goes on. Uh in the upper middle class family,
1:08:19
Speaker 1: Uh that they typically eat dinner together, and the dinner
1:08:23
Speaker 1: table conversation is kind of like a tennis game. I mean,
1:08:27
Speaker 1: dad says something, and mom says something, and the kid
1:08:30
Speaker 1: says something, and the dad responds to what the kids said,
1:08:34
Speaker 1: and so on. They learned how to think to a
1:08:37
Speaker 1: significant extent in family gatherings. These kids get taken to
1:08:42
Speaker 1: the museum, they get read to, uh, often by quite
1:08:49
Speaker 1: good books. Uh, in the lower class family. And and
1:08:54
Speaker 1: this is intact. I mean we're not talking about pathological
1:08:58
Speaker 1: I mean it's you know, debts. Dad's a lunch pale dad,
1:09:01
Speaker 1: and and and mom's uh homemaker. Um, intact family. Uh.
1:09:10
Speaker 1: There isn't much in the way of conversation with the kid.
1:09:13
Speaker 1: You tell the kid what to do, and the kid
1:09:16
Speaker 1: asks you for something, and that it's just not at
1:09:18
Speaker 1: all the same thing. Uh. There often is some reading
1:09:23
Speaker 1: uh in the lower class on it. You know, there
1:09:25
Speaker 1: may be some little golden books. I don't know if
1:09:28
Speaker 1: they still have those, But when the most of this
1:09:31
Speaker 1: research was initially done, uh, those were common. Um. And
1:09:36
Speaker 1: kids may get read to some Uh. And they don't
1:09:43
Speaker 1: tend to go to museums. Uh. They don't have their information,
1:09:49
Speaker 1: their their fiction of the top level, most interesting, most
1:09:56
Speaker 1: likely to be food for thought. So Uh, there is
1:10:02
Speaker 1: a huge difference between upper and lower class in cognity skills.
1:10:07
Speaker 1: Some of that is undoubtedly genetic. I have no idea
1:10:10
Speaker 1: what fraction, but we know most of it is environmental.
1:10:15
Speaker 1: And this comes from studies of adoption. Uh, what happens
1:10:21
Speaker 1: to a kid from a lower class who gets adopted
1:10:24
Speaker 1: into a middle class family as compared to the kid
1:10:29
Speaker 1: who stays in the family of origin. And the answer
1:10:33
Speaker 1: is that's worth twelve to eighteen points in i Q.
1:10:36
Speaker 1: I mean, that's enormous. That's the difference between somebody who
1:10:40
Speaker 1: might or might not graduate from high school versus someone
1:10:44
Speaker 1: that you would expect with complete college and might well
1:10:46
Speaker 1: go on to post graduate work. Um. So uh. And
1:10:52
Speaker 1: that's that shows how important the environment is. And that's
1:10:56
Speaker 1: that's the end of the question. What should a country
1:11:01
Speaker 1: like the United States be doing? If we have the
1:11:04
Speaker 1: goal of hey, we want to see more of our
1:11:07
Speaker 1: kids succeed. We want to level the playing field and
1:11:10
Speaker 1: make sure everybody has the opportunity to do their best.
1:11:15
Speaker 1: What is Scandinaview doing that we're not? Well? First of all,
1:11:19
Speaker 1: they have they have daycare from I don't actually the
1:11:22
Speaker 1: word go um and uh daycare is it's important. I
1:11:31
Speaker 1: mean a good daycare program is important for intelligence for sure.
1:11:35
Speaker 1: If we with the respect to specifically I quh, the
1:11:39
Speaker 1: very best daycare programs that we have might may have
1:11:46
Speaker 1: an early effect that tends to largely fade on i
1:11:49
Speaker 1: q UM. But the Nobel Prize winning economist Heckman at
1:11:56
Speaker 1: University of Chicago is summarize the evidence of what happens
1:12:02
Speaker 1: to these kids thirty years after they either have daycare
1:12:07
Speaker 1: or don't, and the differences I seem to be only
1:12:11
Speaker 1: telling you about really big effects today. It's like increase
1:12:17
Speaker 1: in the likelihood that the kid will graduate from high school,
1:12:20
Speaker 1: a like increasing the likelier that to go to college,
1:12:25
Speaker 1: UH having cutting in half of a likelihood that the
1:12:30
Speaker 1: kid is going to go to jail or be a
1:12:32
Speaker 1: public charge. I mean, stuff is being learned in there
1:12:35
Speaker 1: about dealing with other people and self control, cooperation and
1:12:42
Speaker 1: so on that are tremendously not not i q but
1:12:47
Speaker 1: they're cognitive skills and social skills with a huge payoffs.
1:12:51
Speaker 1: And by the way, the economists have shown that good
1:12:55
Speaker 1: daycare UH pays back UH in a ratio of nine
1:13:01
Speaker 1: to one, that is, nine dollars gained for every one
1:13:05
Speaker 1: dollar spent on daycare. The gain to the treasury is
1:13:10
Speaker 1: significant over the lifetime of a kid. So, I mean
1:13:15
Speaker 1: it's just so important that early childhood education and there
1:13:19
Speaker 1: and to the policy thing. Of course, in the the democrats,
1:13:25
Speaker 1: UM three point five trillion. Hope. Uh, there is early
1:13:32
Speaker 1: childhood care for everybody. That that's a huge investment. I mean,
1:13:37
Speaker 1: it's a hugely valuable investment, not to mention the human
1:13:41
Speaker 1: suffering and and h and human well being that are involved.
1:13:48
Speaker 1: Quite quite intriguing. I want to talk about some of
1:13:52
Speaker 1: the things you've discussed about the state of of psychological
1:13:58
Speaker 1: research and academic research in general. Uh, most importantly with
1:14:03
Speaker 1: the reproduction problem. Tell us what's happening, um in the
1:14:09
Speaker 1: ability to reproduce academic research? Right. Well, this is a
1:14:15
Speaker 1: matter of some passion for me, as you might imagine.
1:14:19
Speaker 1: Several years ago, UH, psychologist named Brian Noseck and a
1:14:25
Speaker 1: lot of other psychologists published an article in Science claiming
1:14:31
Speaker 1: that only of the psychology experiments that they attempted to
1:14:37
Speaker 1: replicate actually did replicate. UM. By the way, even if
1:14:42
Speaker 1: that were true, which it isn't, it would be better
1:14:46
Speaker 1: than what the drug companies do. Uh. Their replication rate
1:14:51
Speaker 1: is significantly lower than But the research was deep flawed
1:15:00
Speaker 1: in many ways. For one thing, UH, a lot of
1:15:05
Speaker 1: the studies were chosen because someone found the results to
1:15:09
Speaker 1: be implausible. So only fifty of the on their face
1:15:14
Speaker 1: of it, implausible research uh got reproduced would be the
1:15:18
Speaker 1: way to describe what they did. But they they did
1:15:25
Speaker 1: a lot of things that were astonishingly far from what
1:15:29
Speaker 1: the original investigators did. Uh. Italians were asked of opinions
1:15:35
Speaker 1: about African Americans. Well, they don't have the same understanding
1:15:38
Speaker 1: of African Americans in Italy that we do. Uh. People
1:15:43
Speaker 1: are asked, um how they would feel about, you know,
1:15:48
Speaker 1: flubbing a question in college class, but people who uh
1:15:53
Speaker 1: and replicating this by somebody who makes an error uh
1:15:57
Speaker 1: in business quite a different kind of thing. Uh. And
1:16:03
Speaker 1: if you, if you improve on this situation, you'll get
1:16:08
Speaker 1: about of people of studies replicating. Just simply asking the
1:16:18
Speaker 1: investigator of the studies said, look, this is our understanding
1:16:22
Speaker 1: of what you did. Uh? Is that right? And they say, yeah,
1:16:26
Speaker 1: go ahead, or know you're missing something there? Uh. Just
1:16:30
Speaker 1: that gets it up. But in fact there was. It's
1:16:38
Speaker 1: extremely misleading to talk about the replicability of randomly selected studies,
1:16:45
Speaker 1: let alone the replicability of implausible seeming studies. Because I've
1:16:51
Speaker 1: asked I started asking people after this came out, Uh,
1:16:55
Speaker 1: can you think of any finding in psychology which seemed
1:17:01
Speaker 1: interesting and important? When it came out. Uh, that then
1:17:05
Speaker 1: turns out not to be the case and doesn't replicate. Um,
1:17:12
Speaker 1: and uh people have to think for a while. I've
1:17:15
Speaker 1: only got a list of about a half dozen studies
1:17:17
Speaker 1: like that at this point. So that's enough to tell
1:17:21
Speaker 1: you we don't have a replicability problem. It's a certain class,
1:17:25
Speaker 1: you know, run of them l studies are Uh. But
1:17:28
Speaker 1: if studies you know, have been vetted appropriately. Uh, there's
1:17:33
Speaker 1: there's a very low rate of misinformation getting into the system.
1:17:39
Speaker 1: And you're talking about actual lab studies, not things like
1:17:44
Speaker 1: Freud's abstract theory of the ID subsequently being replaced by
1:17:49
Speaker 1: a different thesis of psychology. You're talking about actual experimental psychology. Right.
1:17:56
Speaker 1: Let me give you an example. Uh. It's a one
1:18:00
Speaker 1: thing that we haven't gotten onto is how incredibly much
1:18:04
Speaker 1: we are affected by small, situational, contextual things in our lives. Uh,
1:18:12
Speaker 1: they were affected unconsciously. One of clever study you have
1:18:16
Speaker 1: people hold a pencil in their mouth with the end
1:18:22
Speaker 1: of the pencil pointing in, which gives you kind of
1:18:25
Speaker 1: a sour puss and feel when you do that. Are
1:18:29
Speaker 1: you have them hold it between their teeth, Uh, horizontal
1:18:34
Speaker 1: to the floor, which makes it makes it you feel
1:18:37
Speaker 1: like you're smiling. And you have people look at cartoons
1:18:41
Speaker 1: under one of these conditions or the other, and sure enough,
1:18:44
Speaker 1: people who have been forced to smile I think the
1:18:48
Speaker 1: cartoons are funnier. So then there's like ten or twenty
1:18:53
Speaker 1: studies attempting to replicate that effect and they don't find it.
1:18:57
Speaker 1: So that study just drops up. People's stop referring to this.
1:19:00
Speaker 1: It doesn't work. It turns out that all of the
1:19:04
Speaker 1: studies that attempted to replicate this have a video camera
1:19:07
Speaker 1: on the person. Very the person knows that he's being watched.
1:19:11
Speaker 1: The whole point about this thing is that you're unaware
1:19:16
Speaker 1: in a conscious way of the fact that your facial
1:19:19
Speaker 1: expressions has been manipulated, and that's what allows the effect
1:19:23
Speaker 1: to occur. So sure enough, when you do it with
1:19:26
Speaker 1: the video camera, you don't get the effect. When you
1:19:29
Speaker 1: do it without the video camera, you do get the effect.
1:19:32
Speaker 1: Um so, uh so the the work is is really
1:19:38
Speaker 1: very bad. On the other hand, I will say that, uh,
1:19:44
Speaker 1: that's article started a movement to look at the practices
1:19:49
Speaker 1: of psychologists research practices, and there have been a number
1:19:53
Speaker 1: of improvements. Uh uh, you're more likely. Going back to
1:19:58
Speaker 1: the law of large numbers, you're more like it to
1:20:00
Speaker 1: get a spurious result if you use a small number
1:20:03
Speaker 1: of subjects, because you you may uh you know, get
1:20:09
Speaker 1: something happening that isn't very likely to happen. You just
1:20:13
Speaker 1: use the small enough sample that you get it. I
1:20:17
Speaker 1: went back and looked at some of the studies early
1:20:20
Speaker 1: in my career, and I was appalled at how few
1:20:23
Speaker 1: subjects I used, uh, including the studies that I mentioned
1:20:29
Speaker 1: about externalizing arousal effects ends of twelve per sell and
1:20:37
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's inappropriate. Uh. And over time, like
1:20:41
Speaker 1: everybody else, drifted to much larger numbers of cases than that. UM.
1:20:48
Speaker 1: But now no one would ever use in as low
1:20:51
Speaker 1: as most of us used at least some of the
1:20:54
Speaker 1: time decades ago. UM. And there there are other pract
1:21:00
Speaker 1: just this to some good, some not so good. But
1:21:03
Speaker 1: the ones that are good, they're they're valuable that they
1:21:06
Speaker 1: have changed people's behavior. So so, speaking of doing experiments,
1:21:11
Speaker 1: I'm kind of fascinated by things like introspective reports, where
1:21:16
Speaker 1: people are verbally describing what they're thinking about how they're thinking,
1:21:22
Speaker 1: and you kind of reach the conclusion that these sorts
1:21:25
Speaker 1: of things. At best, people can explain what they think
1:21:30
Speaker 1: they're thinking about, but not really how they actually think.
1:21:35
Speaker 1: Tell us a bit about that, right, well. Um, some
1:21:39
Speaker 1: of my favorite studies here about showing that we don't
1:21:43
Speaker 1: know what's going on in our heads. One beautiful one
1:21:46
Speaker 1: shows people of matrix of four cells up, down, right, left,
1:21:53
Speaker 1: and it tells us such a I'm gonna put an
1:21:55
Speaker 1: X on the computer screen and one of those uh
1:21:59
Speaker 1: quadr and Uh, I want you to predict where it's
1:22:03
Speaker 1: going to appear. So early on the subject does terribly,
1:22:09
Speaker 1: and he gets better and better as time goes on.
1:22:15
Speaker 1: That's because there are rules that are determining where that
1:22:19
Speaker 1: X appears. It never appears in the same quadrant twice. Uh.
1:22:24
Speaker 1: It has to appear in quadrants to before it can
1:22:30
Speaker 1: appear in quadrant four, ETCETERA complicated rule system. Uh. And
1:22:37
Speaker 1: we know that people have learned the rules because when
1:22:40
Speaker 1: you change the rules, they fall back down to chance level.
1:22:44
Speaker 1: Now you ask this, if you say, tell me you
1:22:46
Speaker 1: you do it. You were doing so great there and
1:22:48
Speaker 1: then kind of you know, honest to say, you kind
1:22:52
Speaker 1: of fell apart. What happened? And I said, well, I
1:22:55
Speaker 1: just I just lost the rhythm. Um. We had psychology. Uh.
1:23:00
Speaker 1: Some professors us some of the subjects, and one of
1:23:04
Speaker 1: them said, well, I think you were showing me distracting symbols. Uh, subliminally.
1:23:12
Speaker 1: So here are people learning rules uh that are quite complicated. Uh,
1:23:18
Speaker 1: and no awareness that they've learned those rules at all.
1:23:24
Speaker 1: What's that? That's quite interesting? Yeah. So Uh. The Nobel
1:23:30
Speaker 1: Prize winner economist, organizational psychologist, um cognity psychologist Herbert Simon
1:23:39
Speaker 1: uh won the Nobel Prize. And you know, for while
1:23:43
Speaker 1: I was going around saying I do think a loud protocols.
1:23:46
Speaker 1: I have people solve problems and they think aloud, and
1:23:50
Speaker 1: that tells me the process that they're using to solve
1:23:53
Speaker 1: the problem. And my bryans action, Well, no, it it
1:23:58
Speaker 1: just says that they tell you how their theory of
1:24:02
Speaker 1: how they would have solved the problem, which happens to
1:24:05
Speaker 1: correspond to your theory. But that not isn't necessarily what's
1:24:10
Speaker 1: going on. Uh, And uh these studies established that. And
1:24:16
Speaker 1: and there was a controversy that went back and forth
1:24:18
Speaker 1: between uh Simon and me. Uh and uh he actually
1:24:24
Speaker 1: gave me a beautiful example of this. He says, you know,
1:24:28
Speaker 1: when when people play their first chess game. Um, it's
1:24:34
Speaker 1: uh uh. They they play, they make several moves, and
1:24:40
Speaker 1: then you asked them why you did that, and they
1:24:43
Speaker 1: can't tell you that I don't I don't know. I
1:24:44
Speaker 1: just was moving things randomly. I don't know why I
1:24:47
Speaker 1: was doing that. And Simon says, no, Actually, they were
1:24:51
Speaker 1: following rules. It's called Duffer's rules. Everybody plays the same
1:24:56
Speaker 1: way before they really have gotten any expertise at all.
1:25:00
Speaker 1: It says, then if they continue to play, and they
1:25:02
Speaker 1: read books and they talk to other chess players, they
1:25:06
Speaker 1: are now beautifully cognizant of what's going on, and there
1:25:10
Speaker 1: they can tell exactly why they moved the rook to
1:25:14
Speaker 1: this position instead of the bishop and so on, and
1:25:17
Speaker 1: they're quite accurate. Then if you look at chess masters,
1:25:20
Speaker 1: I mean, world class players, they're no longer accurate about
1:25:25
Speaker 1: what they're doing because they've forgotten some of the stuff
1:25:29
Speaker 1: they learned in books in a in a conscious way.
1:25:33
Speaker 1: And it's precisely because their masters is that they've invented,
1:25:37
Speaker 1: but they've induced certain rules that they're following, but they're
1:25:41
Speaker 1: they're hopeless. An example, an even simpler example is uh, language,
1:25:46
Speaker 1: we don't know what grammar is. If you try to
1:25:50
Speaker 1: have people explain English grammar, they're hopeless. They can't say
1:25:57
Speaker 1: a single correct thing. Uh. Nevertheless, we rarely violate those rules.
1:26:03
Speaker 1: We just don't have a conscious grasp on what they are.
1:26:07
Speaker 1: So we're constantly learning things, inducing things uh that uh
1:26:13
Speaker 1: we're not aware of in a conscious way, solving problems
1:26:17
Speaker 1: in an unconscious way. Um and uh. One of my
1:26:23
Speaker 1: very favorite studies, you have people in a lab. There's
1:26:29
Speaker 1: two ropes hanging down from the ceiling. There's a bunch
1:26:33
Speaker 1: of objects lying around on the tables in there, and
1:26:37
Speaker 1: the experimenter says, I want you to tie the two
1:26:40
Speaker 1: ropes together. But the problem is they're too short to
1:26:44
Speaker 1: do that. So you have to find a way. And
1:26:47
Speaker 1: one way is very obvious. You tie an extinction cord
1:26:52
Speaker 1: to one and you go over and grab the other,
1:26:54
Speaker 1: and you can now tie them together. And there are
1:26:57
Speaker 1: a lot of things like that. And after the subject
1:27:00
Speaker 1: has been stumped for a while, Uh, the experimenter says, uh, okay,
1:27:07
Speaker 1: so um uh, they do do it another way. Bill
1:27:14
Speaker 1: can do nothing, So then he goes he's been wandering
1:27:17
Speaker 1: around the lab while this is going on, handling around.
1:27:21
Speaker 1: He casually puts one of the ropes into motion. Then,
1:27:26
Speaker 1: typically within forty five seconds, the subject grabs a rope,
1:27:31
Speaker 1: ties a heavy object like a pair of pliers, to
1:27:34
Speaker 1: a second moving like a pendulum, goes to the other rope,
1:27:38
Speaker 1: grabs the pendulum rope and ties them together, and the
1:27:42
Speaker 1: investigator says that that's very that's very clever. How did
1:27:45
Speaker 1: you happen to think of that? And again, this is
1:27:48
Speaker 1: another one of the studies to use psychology professors as subjects.
1:27:52
Speaker 1: And one says, well, um, I thought of uh, monkeys, uh,
1:27:58
Speaker 1: swinging through trees across the river. The imagery occurred simultaneously
1:28:06
Speaker 1: with the solution, and he said, do you think it
1:28:08
Speaker 1: could have influenced you the fact that I put the
1:28:12
Speaker 1: rope in emotion? No, no, no, no, no. It's all
1:28:14
Speaker 1: about monkeys and rivers and swinging. And people have no
1:28:19
Speaker 1: idea why they were able to solve that problem. Now,
1:28:23
Speaker 1: this is not just a curio. It turns out that
1:28:27
Speaker 1: the unconscious mind is going on solving problems all the
1:28:32
Speaker 1: time for free. We're not aware of what's going on,
1:28:36
Speaker 1: but it's happening, and that's that's great. I mean, uh,
1:28:41
Speaker 1: it's uh. Most of the stuff that that goes on
1:28:46
Speaker 1: is accurate. So that's reminds me a little bit of
1:28:50
Speaker 1: some of the split brain experiments where people who have
1:28:55
Speaker 1: had their I guess it's the corpus colossum severed. So
1:28:59
Speaker 1: what they've seen, their eye goes to the left side
1:29:01
Speaker 1: of the brain, the left eye goes to the right side.
1:29:03
Speaker 1: But they're not communicating. And if they're showing shown two
1:29:06
Speaker 1: different things, two different images in each eye, they're unaware
1:29:10
Speaker 1: of why they're actually engaging in the sort of behavior
1:29:14
Speaker 1: they do based on whether something was shown to one
1:29:17
Speaker 1: side of their brain or the other. Is that related
1:29:21
Speaker 1: to this? It's a perfect example to bring to this.
1:29:26
Speaker 1: Those people are confabulating that they don't that the investigator
1:29:31
Speaker 1: has shown them something to the left eye. Uh, and
1:29:36
Speaker 1: that gets incorporated in the person's thinking about what's going on.
1:29:39
Speaker 1: But but it's not conscious, it's not been presented to
1:29:44
Speaker 1: the verbal hemisphere. So yeah, it's exactly that. It's a contabulation.
1:29:50
Speaker 1: We're going we're confabulating all the time. So when somebody
1:29:55
Speaker 1: asked me why I did something, Uh, if it's a psychologist,
1:29:59
Speaker 1: I say, well, you know, bear in mind who I am.
1:30:03
Speaker 1: I wrote you know all those articles about unconscious reasoning.
1:30:09
Speaker 1: So I don't really know why I did what it is,
1:30:11
Speaker 1: but I'll give you a story which sounds acceptable to
1:30:15
Speaker 1: me and will do you? Now, you you can only
1:30:18
Speaker 1: do this with psychologists. You can't. You can't just do
1:30:22
Speaker 1: this with aunt maa do well, thank you finally lost it?
1:30:26
Speaker 1: Um so? Uh, but we can put the unconscious to
1:30:32
Speaker 1: doing more work than it than it does and uh
1:30:37
Speaker 1: if you, but you have to give it some material
1:30:41
Speaker 1: to work over. So I use my teaching technique, my
1:30:45
Speaker 1: seminar teaching techniques. I hand out thought questions one week
1:30:49
Speaker 1: for and that will be the what we'll focus on
1:30:52
Speaker 1: in the seminar next week. And my joke about that is, uh,
1:30:57
Speaker 1: this is simple somewhat like the thought questions you may
1:31:00
Speaker 1: have seen in other classes, with the difference being that
1:31:03
Speaker 1: I expect you to have thought about these questions. Uh. Now,
1:31:08
Speaker 1: if I sit down just before class and write the
1:31:11
Speaker 1: thoughts questions out there, not going to be very good
1:31:13
Speaker 1: and the class is not going to be great. But
1:31:16
Speaker 1: if I just sit down for ten minutes and say, well,
1:31:18
Speaker 1: what are the main points? And I want this material
1:31:21
Speaker 1: to make and what would I do if somebody raises
1:31:25
Speaker 1: a you know particular point, how how would I deflect
1:31:30
Speaker 1: the discussion in that direction? And so on. I don't
1:31:34
Speaker 1: have to think for long. But then, you know, several
1:31:37
Speaker 1: days later, without having consciously thought about the thought questions
1:31:40
Speaker 1: at all, I sit down and start taking the thoughts
1:31:44
Speaker 1: questions by dictation. Just they start flowing out of my bid.
1:31:49
Speaker 1: And it turns out that if you ask highly creative people,
1:31:54
Speaker 1: I mean the great people uh point Array, the mathematician,
1:32:00
Speaker 1: Amy Lowell, the great uh poet Uh, if you ask them,
1:32:05
Speaker 1: you know, how did you come up with that? There?
1:32:08
Speaker 1: They say saying, well the point to Ray says, well,
1:32:11
Speaker 1: I put my foot on the I booth on vacation.
1:32:15
Speaker 1: I wasn't thinking about work at all, and at the
1:32:17
Speaker 1: moment I put my foot on the step of the bus,
1:32:20
Speaker 1: it occurred to me that the functions I needed to
1:32:23
Speaker 1: solve this problem where the very Fuxian functions that I
1:32:27
Speaker 1: had used to solve another problem years ago. Amy Lowell says,
1:32:32
Speaker 1: you know, I was in a art museum and I
1:32:35
Speaker 1: saw sculpture of bronze horses, and I thought, you know,
1:32:39
Speaker 1: it might be an interesting topic, uh for a um
1:32:44
Speaker 1: for a poem. Someday months later, she sits down, and
1:32:48
Speaker 1: as she says, the poem was there without having thought
1:32:53
Speaker 1: about it consciously in that period of time. The point
1:32:55
Speaker 1: being if you prime the unconscious with something, it'll still
1:33:01
Speaker 1: it'll golf doing work, including at night. I have a
1:33:03
Speaker 1: friend who said, you know, um, I'm working on Calculus
1:33:08
Speaker 1: homework problems, you know, and get the problems three and
1:33:11
Speaker 1: it's not. I can't figure it out and work for
1:33:14
Speaker 1: thirty minutes, nothing's happening. So it just goes to sleep,
1:33:17
Speaker 1: and often it's not. It wakes up. It's, oh, that's
1:33:20
Speaker 1: a beast up problem. That's all. That is amazing. A
1:33:26
Speaker 1: lot of the unconscious work, conveniently enough, gets done while
1:33:30
Speaker 1: we're asleep. Huh. That's absolutely fascinating. We've been speaking with
1:33:34
Speaker 1: Professor Richard Nisbet of the University of Michigan. If you
1:33:38
Speaker 1: enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure to check out any
1:33:41
Speaker 1: of the previous four hundred UH interviews we've conducted. You
1:33:45
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Speaker 1: favorite podcast UH source. We love your comments, feedback and
1:33:53
Speaker 1: suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg
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Speaker 1: dot net. Sign up for my daily reads at helps
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Speaker 1: dot com. Check out my regular column at Bloomberg dot
1:34:02
Speaker 1: com slash Opinion. Follow me on Twitter at Ridholts. I
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