After I finish a lecture there is usually a line, and most of the people standing in it want a book signed. But someone always waits until the line is gone. They stand off to the side while the room empties out, and then they ask me the question I have now been asked in something like a dozen countries.
It is never “why do people believe this stuff.”
It is almost always “my brother.” Or “my mother.” Or “my closest friend since we were nine.” And then, more quietly: what do I do.
They are not asking for an explanation. They want instructions for what they could do next with people that they love.
What I say about this in Misbelief?
Misbelief is not stupidity. That is the first thing to say and the hardest thing for people to accept. Stupidity is a very comfortable explanation that allows us to ignore the person and the problem. It is also very incorrect. What I found instead was a funnel that takes people and changes them over time. It starts with stress that pushes people to look for anything that would explain to them what is going on. It is not any kind of stress that pushes us to find an answer, it is, especially the unpredictable kind of stress. The kind of stress that makes us wonder about what is really going on. After stress, our cognitive gets to work and after that personality joins in. Finally, the social forces of acceptance and belonging, echoing beliefs and becoming more extreme, cement the misbelief, and it makes leaving the group of misbelievers very expensive
I did not choose this subject. It chose me in 2020, when I started appearing in other people’s videos as an Illuminati henchman, complete with a speech I never gave.
The chapter I could not write
When I started working on Misbelief, I assumed I knew how the book would end. There would be a final chapter, and that chapter would tell you how to get your brother back.
I planned for it. I read for it. I spent two years interviewing for it.
I did not find it.
The trouble is that once people enter the funnel the forces to maintain them there are just too powerful. It also became clear that the standard responses of simply giving people more information or giving them some facts is not going to do much to change anyone’s opinion.
So, instead of one solutions chapter, the book grew small boxes scattered through it,wherever the research actually supported doing something. I called them “Hopefully Helpful.”
That name is not modesty. It is an accurate description of my confidence. Some of them will help some people some of the time, and I cannot tell you in advance which ones. There are 25, spread across chapters 3 through 11.
One is called “How to Have a Nondebate,” which is about removing the scoreboard from a conversation so that neither of you is playing to win. Another is “The Three Razors,” which hands you Occam’s razor, Hitchens’ razor, and a gentler version of Hanlon’s, offered as hygiene for your own thinking rather than as weapons for somebody else’s.
All 25, in one place
Enough people wrote asking me for specific pieces of advice that I finally pulled all 25 out of the book and put them into a single document. It is here for you to read.
https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf
I also realized that 25 pieces of advice might be too much to go through. Maybe it is Thursday. You are about to have a conversation on Sunday. You are already upset, and you are not going to read a booklet and work out which four paragraphs apply to you.
So the boxes became a tool. It asks up to three questions about the conversation you are actually about to have, and then hands you three of the 25. Not all of them. Three.
https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/
I did not stop there and I created a second tool. This is not a tool to plan a conversation, it is a tool that was created to try and fix something about a conversation that maybe did not go the way you planned for it to go. It is a post-mortem you run the same evening, while it is still fresh. Thirteen questions, about three minutes.
The design of this tool, and what I think makes it worth while is that it asks what you did, not what you meant. From the inside, those two feel like the same thing. They are not, and the distance between them is where most of these conversations quietly go wrong.
https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/
What I had to give up
Writing this book cost me a belief of my own. It was the belief that there is an answer that could make a person take a U-turn and come back. There isn’t such simple answer. What is left is smaller, and it is about aiming for small steps over time.
And here again are all the links. Hopefully, you will make good use of them.
The 25 boxes, free: https://misbeliefbook.com/pdfs/Hopefully-Helpful-Boxes.pdf
Before the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/conversations/
After the conversation: https://decisionaids.danariely.com/went-badly/
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Like Before we argue for the perspective of a particular political party, it’s worth pausing for a question an American philosopher posed more than fifty years ago. When I asked thousands of people to answer it honestly, I discovered something surprising: our disagreements are far smaller than we think.
Imagine the following exercise: tomorrow morning, you are born again. You don’t know which family you’ll arrive into. Maybe a wealthy home, maybe a poor one. Maybe a big city in the center of the country, maybe a remote town. Maybe you’ll be born healthy, maybe with a serious illness. You know nothing about the particular situation you’ll be born into. Now ask yourself: what would you want that country to look like? How would you want it to treat its citizens?
This exercise was proposed in 1971 by the American philosopher John Rawls, in a book — “A Theory of Justice” — that is considered to this day one of the cornerstones of thinking about justice. Rawls called the idea “the veil of ignorance,” and his claim was simple and profound: a just society is one you would be willing to enter it in a random position.
A just society is a society we would be willing to enter first and only then learn that we have been born into a particular economic setting, a medical condition, a gender, and ethnicity.
Under normal circumstances, when we are asked whether our country is a just one, we answer partly from the perspective of justice — but we can’t help but to also answer from the perspective of our own narrow, particular interests. The rich tend to think high taxes are a bad idea; the poor tend to think the opposite. And these narrow interests shape our sense of justice in every domain of life.
But behind the veil of ignorance, when we don’t know whether we will end up at the top or at the bottom, only the question of justice itself remains. What, really, is a just country?
For years, the veil of ignorance served as an important exercise in philosophy seminars. Then my colleagues and I decided to see what happens when you hand it to real people. We asked them to design a country that would be, in their eyes, just — from behind the veil of ignorance. We surveyed a representative sample of more than five thousand Americans: rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats.
What we learned from the results was that Americans thought a just country would be even more equal than Sweden. And, of course, they thought that the actual distribution of wealth in the United States is very far from just.
What was even more interesting: the agreement. Rich and poor, Republicans and Democrat voters (in the 2004 election), men and women — all of them drew remarkably similar ideal distributions. In the noisy political debate, they seem like they are serious enemies. Behind the veil of ignorance, the distance between them nearly disappears.
As our own elections approach, it’s worth running this exercise on our own political beliefs. Ask yourself honestly: would you be willing to enter today’s United States of America in a random position? And if the answer is no — what USA would you design from behind the veil of ignorance?
My guess, based on what we saw in the study, is that if we think in veil-of-ignorance terms, we will discover that we want a very different country from the one we have — and also, mainly, that we agree on much more than we think.
If you find this topic interesting, I’m attaching below two links, one for a very wonderful YouTube video that somebody did about our research, and another one for a short TED lecture I gave on the same topic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_how_equal_do_we_want_the_world_to_be_you_d_be_surprised
Before we argue for the perspective of a particular political party, it’s worth pausing for a question an American philosopher posed more than fifty years ago. When I asked thousands of people to answer it honestly, I discovered something surprising: our disagreements are far smaller than we think.
Imagine the following exercise: tomorrow morning, you are born again. You don’t know which family you’ll arrive into. Maybe a wealthy home, maybe a poor one. Maybe a big city in the center of the country, maybe a remote town. Maybe you’ll be born healthy, maybe with a serious illness. You know nothing about the particular situation you’ll be born into. Now ask yourself: what would you want that country to look like? How would you want it to treat its citizens?
This exercise was proposed in 1971 by the American philosopher John Rawls, in a book — “A Theory of Justice” — that is considered to this day one of the cornerstones of thinking about justice. Rawls called the idea “the veil of ignorance,” and his claim was simple and profound: a just society is one you would be willing to enter it in a random position.
A just society is a society we would be willing to enter first and only then learn that we have been born into a particular economic setting, a medical condition, a gender, and ethnicity.
Under normal circumstances, when we are asked whether our country is a just one, we answer partly from the perspective of justice — but we can’t help but to also answer from the perspective of our own narrow, particular interests. The rich tend to think high taxes are a bad idea; the poor tend to think the opposite. And these narrow interests shape our sense of justice in every domain of life.
But behind the veil of ignorance, when we don’t know whether we will end up at the top or at the bottom, only the question of justice itself remains. What, really, is a just country?
For years, the veil of ignorance served as an important exercise in philosophy seminars. Then my colleagues and I decided to see what happens when you hand it to real people. We asked them to design a country that would be, in their eyes, just — from behind the veil of ignorance. We surveyed a representative sample of more than five thousand Americans: rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats.
What we learned from the results was that Americans thought a just country would be even more equal than Sweden. And, of course, they thought that the actual distribution of wealth in the United States is very far from just.
What was even more interesting: the agreement. Rich and poor, Republicans and Democrat voters (in the 2004 election), men and women — all of them drew remarkably similar ideal distributions. In the noisy political debate, they seem like they are serious enemies. Behind the veil of ignorance, the distance between them nearly disappears.
As our own elections approach, it’s worth running this exercise on our own political beliefs. Ask yourself honestly: would you be willing to enter today’s United States of America in a random position? And if the answer is no — what USA would you design from behind the veil of ignorance?
My guess, based on what we saw in the study, is that if we think in veil-of-ignorance terms, we will discover that we want a very different country from the one we have — and also, mainly, that we agree on much more than we think.
If you find this topic interesting, I’m attaching below two links, one for a very wonderful YouTube video that somebody did about our research, and another one for a short TED lecture I gave on the same topic.
The good life is behind the more difficult door.
Imagine that you have two apartments in the same building, on the same floor, two doors right next to each other. In one apartment lives your human spouse. In the other apartment lives a robotic version of that spouse. And imagine that we are a few years into the future, so the technology is not today’s clumsy technology. The AI is better, the robotics are better, the whole thing is convincing.
Now, imagine that you come home at night from a difficult day at work. You are stressed, you are worried, you are depleted. And as you walk down the hallway toward the two doors, you start thinking: which door am I going to open tonight?
Behind one door, the robotic spouse is waiting. The robotic spouse always compliments you. Always supports you. It knows your needs, it anticipates them before you say a word, and it makes you feel good right now, at this moment. Behind the other door is your human spouse, who is basically the same as your human spouse right now. Maybe they also had a difficult day. Maybe they want to talk about the thing you forgot to do.
So which door do you pick to open?
Now imagine that it is a year later. Over the past year, some nights you opened the door to your human spouse, and some nights you opened the door to your robotic spouse. A year into this arrangement, how is your relationship with your human spouse? Most likely, it is worse than when you started. Relationships are not frozen in place. They grow when we invest in them and they shrink when we don’t, and every night behind the robotic door was a night of not investing. Or more correctly, it was a night with the opposite of investing.
And here is the important part: the decline does not stop, and it does not even stay at the same speed. In year two, your human spouse is not hurt the way they were in year one. They are more hurt. They have had another year of watching you choose the other door, another year of feeling compared to a machine that never has a bad day. So they become a little angrier, a little more distant, a little less pleasant to come home to. Which means that in year three the human door is even less inviting than it was in year two, so you open it even less often, so they become even more hurt, and even more hurtful. The relationship is not just worse. It is getting worse faster.
What about five years later? I am willing to guess that five years in, your relationship with your human spouse would be so much worse that on most nights you would not want to see them, and they would not want to see you. And so, one comfortable evening at a time, you would end up with the robotic spouse almost every night. Not because the robot won. Because the human relationship, starved night after night, slowly lost.
Here is the part that worries me. Nobody would ever sit down, look at their life as a whole, and choose a robotic spouse as their picture of a good life. If we made the choice once, seeing the whole road ahead, almost all of us would choose the human. But that is not how we will face the choice. We will face it one night at a time, tired and stressed, standing in front of two doors, and on each individual night the easy door will win. The choices will be small and local, and the outcome will be large and permanent.
Of course, I am not really talking about robotic spouses. I am talking about how we use AI in general.
Every day, many times a day, we stand in front of our own version of the two doors. We can struggle with writing something, get stuck, fight with the words, and eventually produce something we are proud of. Or we can hand it off to an AI model and produce it with much more efficiency and none of the struggle. We can think through a hard decision ourselves or ask for the answer. We can practice a skill, or delegate it. Each easy choice makes perfect sense on its own. And each easy choice also takes a small bite out of the person we were hoping to become.
Why is this so worrisome? Because we are not static either. The same decay that happens to the neglected relationship happens to the neglected skill. Take my own case, writing. If I hand my writing to AI today, tomorrow I will be a slightly worse writer. Not dramatically worse, just a little. But if I handed writing fully to AI every day for a year, my ability to write to reason through an argument, to come up with something genuinely creative, will have undoubtedly go down. Exactly the way the relationship behind the human door went down. And the spiral has the same cruel shape. The spouse who is chosen less becomes angrier and harder to choose; the skill that is used less becomes weaker and harder to use. In year two I am a worse writer than in year one, so the gap between what I can produce and what the AI can produce is bigger, so the easy door is even more tempting, so in year three the gap is bigger still. The person behind the human door became more hurtful every year. The writer behind my own door became weaker every year.
So what do we do? I would like to propose a simple principle: a good life is a life where we take the core things we care most about and keep them for ourselves. Not everything. There is plenty that AI should do for us, and I am happy to hand over the scheduling, the paperwork, the tasks that were never going to make us grow. But the core things, the relationships we want to be in and the skills that define us, those we protect. A good life is a life where we keep developing. Where we invest in our relationships and don’t run from them and we choose deliberately to invest in our most important skills and don’t hand them off.
The technology will keep getting better. The robotic door will keep getting more attractive. The big question, and I mean this as a real question and not a rhetorical one, is whether we will have the wisdom to make the right choices when we face our two doors.
Originally published at THE HILL.COM on 07/13/2024
When Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed a law in June requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state, it reignited the longstanding debate over the separation of church and state.
Opponents are pleading with federal judges to block the mandate before the school year begins in August. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation are actively seeking to challenge the law in court, arguing it is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
From my perspective as a social scientist, a law requiring the Ten Commandments to be hung over every classroom across the state is flawed for reasons that go beyond its constitutionality. I see it as a fundamentally ineffective mandate, because heaps of research say so. And did I mention it would be a waste of tax dollars?
In the extensive research on human dishonesty, one clear finding emerges: Passive reminders of ethical conduct, like displaying the Ten Commandments, do not significantly influence behavior. To instill moral values and ethical behavior, active engagement and a sense of relevance are crucial. Simply hanging up a poster of the Ten Commandments on a classroom wall would not foster the active, lived experience of ethical principles.
Consider the Hippocratic Oath taken by physicians. Properly invoked, the Hippocratic Oath inspires students of medicine and practitioners alike to actively engage with its ethical calling and think about its principles at important moments, not just because it has been deeply ingrained in the fabric of the medical community. Unlike passive displays, active engagement creates a sense of commitment to ethical principles, which opens the door to more ethical behavior.
Louisiana’s new law exemplifies bureaucracy at its worst — it imposes a mandate based on a principle that extensive research has shown to be ineffective. It’s not just controversial; it will make schools feel as if they have dealt with the problem of ethics, when in fact they will not have.
Moreover, the assumption that the Ten Commandments can serve as a universal moral code is increasingly out of touch with contemporary American society. Over the past few decades, the relationship of the average American with religion has become more diffuse, and the influence of traditional religious codes has decreased.
Research conducted over the past decades on moral reminders concludes that active engagement with the moral reminder — such as the Ten Commandments — can decrease dishonesty. But, given Americans’ waning religiosity, that effect is diminished.
For the Ten Commandments to have an impact on thought or behavior, people have to first buy into the idea that the Ten Commandments are a meaningful set of moral rules. Displaying a moral code that doesn’t carry meaning is the equivalent of hanging a poster written in a foreign language.
Together, these two points mean that if someone wants to increase the ethics of our schools and the ethical behavior of our students, the first thing they need to ensure is that the set of moral principles has very deep and broad buy-in.
Next, the engagement with this set of ethical reminders has to be active and intentional. Of course, such programs are much more complex to carry out than simply hanging the Ten Commandments in different corners of schools — but they have the advantage that they might also work to have an impact.
Finally, the trend of setting up rules that are designed to make a political splash and maybe get some headlines but are not thoughtfully designed for efficacy further erodes our trust in politicians and institutions at large — government, corporations and even academia.
As these institutions lose their authority, there is a collective rejection of standard norms of behavior, which I believe are at play in our so-called “culture wars” and other societal trends that have upended American society in recent years.
The breakdown of trust in government and moral codes that historically guided Americans poses a critical question for our democracy: Can we still function effectively without a shared belief system? As we head into another election year, this question becomes even more pressing. Yet its implications extend far beyond politics.
Without a sense of mutual agreement on our ethical principles and without trust that the people leading us are truly interested in our long-term well-being, any efforts to improve behavior — whether through passive or active means — are doomed to fail.
Link to original publication: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4768231-louisiana-ten-commandments-law/
I’m not sure about you, but in the last few years, I have felt the creep of increased bureaucracy. In general, I think about bureaucracy as having two components. The first is positive, where we’re trying to make things structured, procedural, easier, and less time-consuming. The second is the negative one. This part is about the development of a bureaucratic sub-organization that often has different goals than the overall organization. This bureaucratic sub-organization often ends up serving itself rather than the organization as a whole. This is the kind of bureaucracy that I’m noticing more and more of, and it is deeply troubling me.
One of the challenges is that it is natural for the bureaucratic sub-organization to try and influence the organization as a whole to do less, take less risks, innovate less, and in doing so make the life of the people at the bureaucratic sub-organization easier. It is also tempting for the bureaucratic sub-organization to try and grow by making up new functions, new jobs, and hire more and more people that are part of the bureaucratic sub-organization. And finally, there are the impacts of bureaucracy on the way employees are being treated.
To examine this more carefully, I recently opened a website called the Center for Advanced Bureaucracy (https://centerforbureaucracy.com). Here, I detailed my reflections this way of thinking and share some warning. Check my video on “The Bureaucracy of a Red Sofa.”
Please follow the link (https://centerforbureaucracy.com), have a look, and let me know what you think.
In a world that is hyper-brutal and punishing of mistakes, offenses, and missteps – small or large – on both social media and in real life, it might seem odd for me to promote making more mistakes. Yet, I want to make the case for making more and better mistakes.
I am an expert on mistakes. Not just in the purely theoretical or academic sense, but in the real-life sense. When I was nearly 18, an accident disfigured over 70% of my body with burns, removing nearly all functionality from my hands. I spent the next three years in a hospital missing out on many of the normal experiences of young adulthood. It could have filled me with rage, depression, or regret. Instead, it inspired my life’s work studying human behavior and trying to figure out what we can do to make our lives better. (It also inspired my signature half-beard.)
In my professional life, I have conducted countless studies that just didn’t work out the way I assumed they would. I have left positions under complicated circumstances. I had startups that failed. I’ve had interactions with colleagues that I wish had gone differently. Each of these experiences, while very painful at the time, were opportunities for observing myself and human nature. They became experiences of personal and professional growth.
I have also spent the better part of the past three years reliving a set of decisions I made and actions I took over a decade ago, around a now-infamous study of human behavior using car insurance data. Working in partnership with trusted colleagues, I did what was expected and right at the time. When the findings of the original study were called into question years later, we re-tested our assumptions, publishing results that put doubt on the original findings. When issues with the original data set were uncovered, we retracted the paper. Later we re-examined and replicated the findings, and in early 2024 published two papers that show that the effects of signing first matter (links to the papers are at the bottom of this post), but also that they matter in a more nuanced and complex way. Such is the scientific process. (See link to my official statement about this event).
As I was trying to understand what went wrong with the 2012 paper, people were very quick to criticize and question my professional judgment, casting a shadow over my life’s work. “Where did it all go wrong?” I have asked myself many times a day for the last few years. I have looked long and hard, but given that so much time has passed, I have come up empty-handed, and I simply don’t know for sure what went wrong. “Should I have done things differently?” Evidently. But as I examine all my decisions, I feel that I did the best I could at the time. And I’m okay with that.
Do I wish I did not make these mistakes? Of course. And, not at all. I obviously wish I did not make these specific mistakes, but in general, I accept these circumstances and continue to believe wholeheartedly that mistakes are essential to growth and evolution. Which brings me to my argument: We should all be making more and better mistakes.
What do I mean by that? To start, there is no reward without risk. Think about venture capitalists or investors in the stock market. As they approach their portfolios, they know that getting higher returns necessarily means taking greater risk. Risk, in the context of investing, is about investing in both sure things and in long shots.
Sometimes we also take risks to invest in ourselves or try something new – moments in our lives where we take a leap of faith and hope that things will work out. There is an expectation and understanding that some things will work out and some won’t, but overall, we know that we will be better off for having tried. Succeed or fail, the secret to success is charging forward boldly in new directions.
As a professor, I teach students about the logic, or lack thereof, in taking risks. We do case studies on Amazon’s fail-fast approach. We openly analyze past mistakes to learn from them. We talk about fostering cultures that will help us avoid another O-ring disaster.
There are mountains of self-help books and countless life coaches in the world, each telling us in their own ways that it is imperative to live in service of our desires, free of judgments of others and with more forgiveness for our shortcomings. “It’s okay to fall down. You just have to get back up.”
But the case for mistakes does not end here. It is not just about trying more and accepting more mistakes as the price of learning and success.
I am also advocating for better mistakes. What do I mean by better mistakes? We need to do the wrong thing the right way in order to maximize our learning. Specifically, we should aim to make more mistakes from bold action and fewer mistakes from inaction.
Popular wisdom says that when we look at our life in general, we will feel the most regret over the things we didn’t do. And yet, asymmetrical fear of regret leads us to fear mistakes from bold action more than mistakes from inaction, making us less likely to try new things – and more likely to do nothing.
When it comes to making the case for better mistakes, it means that we should be bolder and a little more fearless, by making a particular effort to make more mistakes from action. Taking calculated risks with a clear objective and having the courage to dust ourselves off if these risks don’t pan out. And try again.
Take, for example, the recent testimony of the three university presidents in front of Congress and the rest of the world. There is no question that this was a tragic performance that set academia back years, at a cost of public opinion that will take decades to rebuild. My sense is that these three university presidents should have dusted themselves off and worked even harder to tackle head-on the violence and hatred on their campus. This of course is a tall ask, and some of their efforts, particularly the more novel and creative ones, might have backfired. Yet, they should have taken more risks and tried different and novel approaches that might have contributed to their universities and to our understanding of how to help people to live in peace and civility with each other.
Sadly, the reactions to their testimonies prompted universities to do the exact opposite. Instead, universities now seem to be working hard to do as little as possible in order to fly under the radar. They seem to be largely motivated by a hope that students, faculty, trustees, and donors will soon forget about this particular war, and maybe even stop paying attention to anything that happens in the world altogether.
If we did more of the opposite of doing nothing and instead took bolder risks, would we more frequently experience the pain of erring, hit ourselves over the head, and say, “Why did I do this?” Sure, we would. But by accepting the downsides of bold action, we also increase the chance that we will learn something useful about how to move forward. If universities took bolder risks, maybe they would have lived up to their social mission and helped all of us better understand how to reduce hate, improve dialogue, and more.
At the end of the day, the progress of society and the success of any individual is made based on the totality of actions. And the biggest enemy of progress is fearing mistakes so much that we end up doing nothing.
To be sure, society can’t function without rules, boundaries, and consequences, but they should be proportionate. We must change the way we judge one another, to allow room for rehabilitation, reconciliation, or recompense. We must promote safer environments for failure, growth, and learning. Otherwise, we will motivate subterfuge among those who try and fail, and instill fear among those who might’ve tried but couldn’t stomach the potential aftermath.
For my part, I am planning on many more years of mistakes. I don’t intend to let fear and regret drive my decisions. I want to keep learning and growing. I intend to continue to make my own mistakes, and I even hope to normalize making more of them. I am optimistic enough to believe that as a culture, we can find a way forward that encourages people to take risks, fall down, and then get back up.
In the words of the famous philosopher, Yoda: “Pass on what you have learned. Strength. Mastery. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is.”
LIVE AND LEARN.
Irrationally yours,
Dan
Links to the papers
Link to the paper “How Pledges Reduce Dishonesty: The Role of Involvement and Identification“: https://tinyurl.com/ycpumrtk
Link to the paper “I Solemnly Swear I’m Up To Good: A Megastudy Investigating the Effectiveness of Honesty Oaths on Curbing Dishonesty“: https://tinyurl.com/53mbn5ws and see also a link to a discussion about this paper: https://youtu.be/AjQ58irCZGg
I’m very happy that my book MISBELIEF will soon be published in Russia. Here is the Russian translation of the title:
TIME OF MISBELIEFS: Why Smart People Are Liable to Falsifications, Spread Rumors and Believe in Conspiracy Theories.
I wonder what the reaction will be in Russia, and how much the Russian readers will think about this book in terms of what’s happening in Russia, and how much they will think of it in terms of what’s happening outside of Russia.
You can learn more about the book MISBELIEF here.
The two main themes of this episode are Inattentional Blindness and Revenge.
Inattentional Blindness
Inattentional blindess occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight. The stimulus is something they would easily notice if they were not distracted. In other words, inattentional blindness is the inability to see something due to lack of attention, not because of vision related issues.
The term was coined by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock in 1992 and is also the title of their book, published by MIT Press in 1998, in which they describe the phenomenon and the discovery story. A well-known study that demonstrates inattentional blindness was carried out by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. In their study they asked participants to watch a video and to count how many times the actors in white passed a basketball to each other. Once the video was over, they asked the participants whether they noticed the person in the black gorilla suit. The results showed that by paying attention to the actors in white, the majority of participants did not notice the gorilla.
More recent research on inattentional blindness suggests that it is less pronounced for people with ADHD and that it becomes more pronounced with age.
For more information on Inattentional blindness see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Gorilla
Revenge
Revenge is one of the most interesting human impulses. There is a joke where God comes down to a farmer and tells him to wish for anything he wants under the condition that his neighbor would get twice as much. The farmer just had an intense conflict with his neighbor over water rights and he replies, “Whatever I get, my neighbor gets twice as much?”
“Yes,” God answers.
The neighbor says, “In this case please take out one of my eyes.”
This sums up revenge. The fact that we are willing to sacrifice something to make our target lose even more. In the strict sense, revenge is an irrational impulse because the person who is exacting revenge often loses something (time, effort, money, etc.) for the privilege of the revenge. Why would they make such a sacrifice instead of simply never interacting with their enemy again? When we look at revenge from a more holistic-social perspective, we see that society at large benefits when individuals are worried about acting badly because of possible revenge, keeping them on their better behavior. In this way we can think about revenge and the fear of revenge as a built-in policing mechanism embedded within our psychology. (I explore this more in The Upside of Irrationality.)
For more information on Revenge see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge
https://www.psychologs.com/the-psychology-behind-revenge/#google_vignette
The main social science terms used in this episode are:
Boasting
Boasting is a version of bragging. Bragging is when someone speaks with excessive pride and self-satisfaction about their own achievements, possessions, or abilities. Boasting often also involves a sense of proving superiority so that others feel admiration or envy.
Curiosity
Curiosity is a broad topic, but for the purpose of this episode, curiosity is a powerful motivator. When I try to make this point, I usually say something like “When I was twelve, my mother had a very unique approach to raising us and giving us a sense of autonomy.” Then I stop and wait a few seconds. And continue, “My mother is great, but I have nothing specific to say about her approach. What I do want you to think about is how curious I have made you about my mother and her approach. Even now that I have told you this was just a trick to make you aware of your curiosity, you are probably still curious about my mother.” This is why curiosity is a motivating force that can drive people to seek more information, fostering learning and exploration.
For more information on Curiosity see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154620300875
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612316300589
Family estrangement
Family estrangement is the loss of a previously existing relationship between family members, mostly through emotional distancing, often to the extent that there is negligible or no communication between the individuals involved for a prolonged period. Estrangement is often unwanted, or considered unsatisfactory, by at least one party involved.
For more information on Family estrangement see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_estrangement
Social alienation
Social alienation refers to a feeling of disconnection from a group or society that someone identifies with. This disconnect can lead to a sense of isolation, estrangement, and lack of belonging. Social alienation goes beyond simply being alone. It’s more about the quality of one’s social connections and the feeling of not truly fitting in.
For more information on Social alienation see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_alienation
Hope
The psychology of hope delves into the mind’s perspective on the future and its belief in positive outcomes. It encompasses an attitude that good things will come, combined with the agency to make it happen. The key aspects of a hopeful mindset are: Goals (having clear and meaningful direction; Agency (the belief that a person has the ability to influence their future); Pathways (identifying multiple ways to reach the desired goals); and Optimism (a positive mindset that the goals are achievable).
For more information on Hope see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope
Quotes related to hope: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hope
Misdirected attention
In psychology and in everyday life, misdirected attention refers to any situation where someone’s focus is unintentionally shifted away from something important. This can happen due to distractions, irrelevant information that pulls attention away from the task at hand, cognitive biases that cause us to overlook important details, or emotional arousal that narrows our focus so much that we can’t concentrate.
For more information on Misdirected attention see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misdirection_(magic)
Power of free
The word “free” has a remarkable psychological power that can influence our decisions and behaviors in ways we might not realize. This phenomenon, often referred to as the “zero-price effect” has been extensively studied and documented within the realm of marketing and consumer psychology.
To start with, the word “free” triggers a positive emotional response, making us feel happier and more inclined to accept an offer. This emotional hook bypasses our rational thinking, making us less likely to carefully weigh the pros and cons of whatever is being offered.
In addition, free items are perceived as having a higher value than their actual cost, even if it’s minimal. This is because when free is concerned we avoid losing money, and free eliminates much of the perceived risk that is inherent to any exchange. Even if the item itself might not be valuable, the “free” label makes it seem like a good deal we shouldn’t miss.
For more information on Power of free see: Predictably irrational https://predictablyirrational.com
Memory Triggers (with smell)
There are many times in which we know we have specific memories, but we have a hard time accessing them. When we encounter a cue that was present during the original encoding of the experience, this can help to bring up the memories from that event into our awareness. For me, when I revisit the burn department, the smells of the hospital and the ointments, always brings up a very strong set of emotions and memories. Although I have been back to the burn department many times, the flood of these emotions and memories always catches me by surprise.
In this episode Alec uses smell to try and trigger his memories. What is interesting is that scents bypass the thalamus and go straight to the brain’s smell center, known as the olfactory bulb. The olfactory bulb is directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus, which explains why the smell of something can immediately trigger a detailed memory or even intense emotion.
For more information on Memory triggers (with smell) see:
https://www.discovery.com/science/Why-Smells-Trigger-Such-Vivid-Memories
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-smells-trigger-memories1/
Unexpected loss
Bad things that happen to us are bad on their own. But bad things that happen unexpectedly are much more psychologically damaging than the same bad thing happening expectedly. Expected loss is no exception. To be clear, loss is always bad, but when the loss is unexpected dealing with it is much more complex, takes longer, and is harder to accept. Unexpected loss can also include elements of self-blame, even if there was no way to know or to have changed anything.
For more information on Unexpected loss see:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/healing-trauma-s-wounds/201504/dealing-unexpected-loss
Pride
Pride is “the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one’s own importance.” Pride may be related to one’s own abilities or achievements, positive characteristics of self, friends, family, or even one’s origin and country.
Pride is one of the most interesting emotions because some view it as positive and some as negative: Aristotle and George Bernard Shaw, for example, both considered pride a profound virtue. Others, including most religions, view pride as negative and even a sin. In Judaism, pride is even called the root of all evil. Catholicism views pride as one of the seven deadly sins. When viewed as a virtue, pride in one’s abilities is known as virtuous pride, greatness of soul, or magnanimity, but when viewed negatively, as a vice, it is often known to be self-idolatry, sadistic contempt, vanity, or vainglory.
For more information on Pride see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride
Narcissism
Narcissism is a self–centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs often at the expense of others.
In my experience, more and more people are now interested in narcissism, particularly when they break up with someone and they blame the failing of the relationship on their ex’s narcissistic tendencies. My view is that romantic relationships with narcissists are very captivating, and that being in love with a narcissist is very fulfilling and all-consuming in the short term (because, after all, they encourage endless engagement with them), but it is difficult to maintain such a relationship in the long run.
Narcissism exists on a continuum that ranges from normal to abnormal personality expression. While many psychologists believe that a moderate degree of narcissism is normal and even healthy, there are also more extreme and less healthy intensities of narcissism. When people become excessively self-absorbed they are defined as having a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), where the narcissistic tendency is so powerful that it becomes difficult to function.
For more information on Narcissism see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism
And, again, for fun, here are a few pictures from the set.
Predictably Irrational was published on this day (Feb 19th), 16 years ago — 2008. This was just the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, when we were all trying to understand what went wrong and what are the limits of human irrationality. Predictably Irrational came out at a good timing to help us rethink human irrationality.
I suspect that the crisis of misinformation and polarization that we are facing these days is even more severe and with consequences that are even more dire. Although the damage that we have caused ourselves in this misinformation and polarization crisis (not with bad intention, just by not understanding our human nature) is much slower-moving and not as clearly observable. Which translates into a relatively calm nonchalant approach, where we are not yet in the panic mode we should be in. This time too, I just wrote a book about these topics – Misbelief.
I know that it might seem that my books predict important breaking points in society, but this is not true. I had a few books in between these two that did not coincide with any large-scale crisis.