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