Speaker 1: Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
Speaker 1: This is Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for an
Speaker 1: older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This episode
Speaker 1: is part two of our series on the Seven Day Week,
Speaker 1: and it originally published on March five. Enjoy Welcome, Just
Speaker 1: about to Blow your Mind production of My Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're
Speaker 1: back with part two of our series on the seven
Speaker 1: day Week. What is it? Where did it come from? What?
Speaker 1: What's it doing in our brains? All right now? When
Speaker 1: we cut off in the previous part of this series
Speaker 1: about the week, you were talking a bit about some
Speaker 1: sources you were reading about the history of the week,
Speaker 1: where the seven day week comes from. Because obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the main things we talked about in the
Speaker 1: last episode is that other major blocks that we use
Speaker 1: for measuring times, such as the month, the year, and
Speaker 1: the day, are all based on facts about nature, usually
Speaker 1: about astronomy. You know, how the Earth moves, Earth moves
Speaker 1: around the Sun, or how the moon moves around the Earth,
Speaker 1: but the week has no such basis in physical reality.
Speaker 1: It's an artificial construction, with the possible exception that some
Speaker 1: people think there may be some underlying biological UH rhythms
Speaker 1: that contribute to it. One hypothesis that's been offered is
Speaker 1: the menstrual cycle or things like that, but it's hard
Speaker 1: to know for sure. So we know at least that
Speaker 1: the week is not based in astronomy. So where does
Speaker 1: it come from historically? Yeah, And in that we were
Speaker 1: getting into this idea of the market week. The time
Speaker 1: it takes for vegetables or fruit to UH to travel
Speaker 1: in from market UH, be sold in, mark it, and
Speaker 1: then for UH the individuals who brought it there to
Speaker 1: return then to the fields. Um. This would be just
Speaker 1: a basic market cycle, a market week. UH. And one
Speaker 1: of the sources that I was discussing here was um
Speaker 1: Avatar Zerubaville is the seven day circle. UM, So you know,
Speaker 1: point the author here points to the ten day market
Speaker 1: week of ancient Southern China, various other systems as well,
Speaker 1: because again there's nothing set in stone about it taking
Speaker 1: seven days to reach any given market anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1: It's going to vary obviously. Uh, so you have you
Speaker 1: have different systems that were in place, the ten day system.
Speaker 1: We also see the eight day system that emerged in
Speaker 1: what is now Italy. This is the Etruscan system. And
Speaker 1: so the Truscan system that that the name of that
Speaker 1: would come from the Etruscan culture, a culture that inhabited
Speaker 1: the Italian peninsula before the Roman period, right, and then
Speaker 1: the Romans would of course inherit the Intruscan system, and
Speaker 1: this eventually became the internudenum tempests, or the period between
Speaker 1: the ninth day affairs, which Zaruberville rights involves the Roman
Speaker 1: practice of inclusive counting, in which the last day of
Speaker 1: one cycle is the first day of the next. So
Speaker 1: this involves a market day held every eight days. Market
Speaker 1: and social life revolved around this market day, and schools
Speaker 1: and courts were closed for that day as well. It
Speaker 1: was also a day to set work aside to go
Speaker 1: to the baths um, and the cap limit for guests
Speaker 1: was raised as well, so you could have more people
Speaker 1: over on this market day. Now, the decline of the
Speaker 1: eight day week, the author rights, coincided with the expansion
Speaker 1: of Rome. It simply became too big for this system.
Speaker 1: To logistically work anymore. Um, and you know this comes
Speaker 1: down to the fact that a true urban economy ends
Speaker 1: up demanding continuous commerce. But this this was interesting as well.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read a quote from the seven Day Circle here. Quote. Coincidentally,
Speaker 1: the astrological and Christians seven day weeks that had just
Speaker 1: been introduced into Rome were also becoming increasingly popular. There
Speaker 1: is evidence indicating that the Roman eight day week and
Speaker 1: those two seven day cycles were used simultaneously for some time. However,
Speaker 1: the coexistence of two weekly rhythms that were entirely out
Speaker 1: of phase with one another obviously could not be sustained
Speaker 1: for long. One of them clearly had to give way.
Speaker 1: As we all know, it was the eight day week
Speaker 1: that soon disappeared from the pages of history forever. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you're positing a time here where there exists such
Speaker 1: things as weeks, sort of like the weeks we imagined,
Speaker 1: but not everybody's using the same weeks at the same time,
Speaker 1: so they're just sort of like overlapping different systems that
Speaker 1: different people are using, which sounds incredibly chaotic and not
Speaker 1: especially useful. Yeah, yeah, because it's it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: exactly imagine what this would have been like, because we
Speaker 1: think the week is just set in stone, it's just
Speaker 1: this this grid work that arranges our lives. But too
Speaker 1: and and then I'm tempted to try and think of it, Well,
Speaker 1: maybe would be like using both uh, you know, pounds
Speaker 1: and uh and and and grahams or something, you know,
Speaker 1: having to to use two different systems of measurement. But
Speaker 1: it's not quite that either, because because there's still like,
Speaker 1: you know, there's still a certain length to um uh
Speaker 1: you know, to to some fencing or care at, etcetera. Um.
Speaker 1: But but when you're dealing with with time here and
Speaker 1: you're dealing with these market cycles, it it seems like
Speaker 1: you would just you know, would just be this confusing
Speaker 1: arrangement to have these two or more overlapping systems of
Speaker 1: different different amounts of time. Well, it's a big difference,
Speaker 1: is that. Say, if you're converting from standard to metric,
Speaker 1: there's a fixed conversion rate. It's not like how many
Speaker 1: pints go into a leader changes every day. But if
Speaker 1: you but if you have weeks of different numbers of
Speaker 1: days and everybody's not on the same one, you can't
Speaker 1: just line it up and say, oh, okay, this day
Speaker 1: in our cycle is the is this other day and
Speaker 1: somebody else's cycle. It would change every cycle because they're
Speaker 1: not the same numbers, right, Like imagine like thinking back
Speaker 1: on on like TV. Uh, just like TV programs and
Speaker 1: TV schedules like what you of NBC and CBS, um
Speaker 1: had not only like different schedules of what's coming out,
Speaker 1: but they had different calendars, like different days of the week,
Speaker 1: Like one did an eight day cycle and the other
Speaker 1: one day to seven day cycle. Like that would be
Speaker 1: that would be incredibly confusing, you know, trying to figure
Speaker 1: out like what what is on what day and what
Speaker 1: is opposite another show. It's it's it's just like again,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's interesting to try and imagine what this
Speaker 1: would have been like. But if I'm understanding zarubaval right
Speaker 1: in this quote, what he's saying is that, um, so
Speaker 1: you had this original sort of eight day cycle, the
Speaker 1: Etruscan system that was inherited by the Romans, but then
Speaker 1: you had these other systems of seven day weeks, the
Speaker 1: the astrological, the Roman astrological even day week, and the
Speaker 1: Christians seven day week, which I believe would be inherited
Speaker 1: at least in part from the from the Jewish Sabbath observance. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That that all this being said, it is important to
Speaker 1: realize that there is still a reality to a market
Speaker 1: week cycle. In many cases, you know, you have other
Speaker 1: four forces haven't changed what's happening with people actually bringing
Speaker 1: in crops and in the in the economic activities surrounding
Speaker 1: the sale of those crops. Um. Then even if you
Speaker 1: end up adopting, say a seven day week, you can
Speaker 1: still see these other market cycles uh, coexisting with it.
Speaker 1: And he points to some examples of this, points out
Speaker 1: that both Christian and Islamic use of the seven day
Speaker 1: week heavily influenced the continent of Africa. But you still
Speaker 1: see four day market cycles in parts of Africa, as
Speaker 1: well as eight and sixteen day weeks as well. So
Speaker 1: these e can amic rhythms in many cases still remain
Speaker 1: um or even if those economic rhythms shift like they're
Speaker 1: still not gonna necessarily, uh you know, conform completely to
Speaker 1: the seven day week cycle that has been superimposed on
Speaker 1: a region. Now, he he points to in uh, some
Speaker 1: other week cycles that are that are pretty interesting. He points, uh,
Speaker 1: for instance, to the nineteen day be High cycle of
Speaker 1: social and religious activity who was introduced in eighteen forty
Speaker 1: four by the Persian prophet uh Saeed Ali Mohammed, also
Speaker 1: known as Bob b a b Uh. It's generally spelled
Speaker 1: in English. UH. Nineteen is apparently a mystical number in
Speaker 1: the Behigh faith. And we see that in the use
Speaker 1: of a nineteen week year in the Behidh faith as
Speaker 1: well as a nineteen year va head um. And then
Speaker 1: three hundred sixty one years make a cooler shay. And
Speaker 1: that's because nineteen times nineteen equals three d sixty one uh.
Speaker 1: So UM, all that's interesting as well. Here's an entire
Speaker 1: stem that's based on nineteen four mystical purposes UH, spiritual
Speaker 1: purposes uh, similar to the the adoption of the seven
Speaker 1: within uh. You know, the the cycle that we we
Speaker 1: know and are immersed in. He also mentions that the Maya,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, used a twenty day um unital,
Speaker 1: which was the quote cornerstone of the entire Maya time
Speaker 1: measuring system. UH. The Mayan and the Aztecs solar calendars
Speaker 1: consisted of three hundred and sixty five days, made up
Speaker 1: essentially of eighteen twenty day weeks plus five blank days. UH.
Speaker 1: They also had a two hundred sixty day UH divination
Speaker 1: calendar year that was used exclusively for divination. There's also
Speaker 1: a ninth century Indonesian system that he mentions that they
Speaker 1: made use of both a five day market week. Six
Speaker 1: five and seven day weeks were used then to chronicle events,
Speaker 1: and the Indonesian system had several uses, but the main function,
Speaker 1: according to Zarubaville, was divination. UH. There were the right
Speaker 1: days to do various things, both inherently sacred things such
Speaker 1: as say, bearing the dead, and things that we might
Speaker 1: think of in you know, sort of modern life as
Speaker 1: being mundane things like moving or starting a new business,
Speaker 1: but of course, within the confines of a given culture,
Speaker 1: those things too may be considered highly sacred. So these
Speaker 1: are more examples of the what we talked about in
Speaker 1: the last episode, which is that you know it it
Speaker 1: depends on how you define a week to say where
Speaker 1: the week comes from. Because there's there's a history you
Speaker 1: can track of our current unbroken system of seven day cycles,
Speaker 1: but there also have been just lots of other things
Speaker 1: throughout the world throughout history that subdivided the month into
Speaker 1: some number of days. But it wasn't necessarily the same
Speaker 1: as our seven day week, right, And and I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting to think about how, on on one hand,
Speaker 1: you have very practical, very real world considerations and arranging
Speaker 1: these days into weeks uh and and saying well, I
Speaker 1: need to know what we're calling four days from today.
Speaker 1: I need to know what we're calling eight days from
Speaker 1: today so that I can plan things out. But then
Speaker 1: also getting into this divination area of well, is there
Speaker 1: something about the day after tomorrow that makes it more
Speaker 1: appropriate for me to do this act or this other
Speaker 1: act or to make a certain decision on that day. Um,
Speaker 1: And you kind of get into the sort of the
Speaker 1: roots of divination that we've discussed on the show before,
Speaker 1: where it becomes this kind of um system that you know,
Speaker 1: you may and it certainly entails supernatural ideas about seeing
Speaker 1: into the future and using imploying luck uh and uh
Speaker 1: and you know perhaps the uh you know, the good
Speaker 1: will of various deities. But it also is about like
Speaker 1: making uh, making space for decision and like helping decisions
Speaker 1: be made and and and in introducing randomness in some cases. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually got me wondering about the same thing, about whether
Speaker 1: a cycle of days in a week, whether that's seven
Speaker 1: days or whatever other number. Just having a named day
Speaker 1: within the cycle could aid in productivity and in spurring action,
Speaker 1: uh instead as opposed to say, defferring action forever, because
Speaker 1: if you live in a system where you don't have
Speaker 1: named days within a cycle. Again, I don't know this,
Speaker 1: I don't have direct evidence of it, but I wonder
Speaker 1: if that's sort of just um would allow you to have, well,
Speaker 1: you have right now and then maybe you have a
Speaker 1: concept like tomorrow, and then beyond that you've just got
Speaker 1: the future. And so like it does having a named
Speaker 1: day that's, you know, a predictable number of days ahead
Speaker 1: of now allow you to plan action in a way
Speaker 1: that you're more likely to follow through on an execute. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it reminds me of some studies that I've
Speaker 1: I've seen about the importance of having deadlines just for
Speaker 1: productivity reasons. And I mean to a certain extent. I
Speaker 1: guess this varies depending on what one's you know, job is,
Speaker 1: what one's industry is. But the basic seven day week
Speaker 1: kind of has a built in deadline like Friday is,
Speaker 1: at least to a certain extent, always a deadline. Like
Speaker 1: it's assuming again that you have a job where you
Speaker 1: don't have to work on Saturday and Sunday, like that's
Speaker 1: the last day of the week. So in many cases
Speaker 1: you're trying to get something done, you're trying to reach
Speaker 1: like some level of finality, right, or at least it
Speaker 1: leans it's it allows you to lean into that interpretation anyway. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it at least it gives you a principle on
Speaker 1: which to organize those those timelines. I mean again, I
Speaker 1: wonder like if we didn't have weeks and we just
Speaker 1: you know, just worked whenever, and you were like, how
Speaker 1: long is it gonna take me to do this? I mean,
Speaker 1: how how long do we We would usually say I
Speaker 1: don't know, one week, two weeks, and what would you
Speaker 1: say that I'm gonna say, thirteen days is how long
Speaker 1: it will take me. Yeah, there's something weird about like
Speaker 1: a thirteen day estimate on something, right, Why why not
Speaker 1: bump it up to fourteen days? Like it would seem
Speaker 1: equally wrong to give a fifteen day estimate on something
Speaker 1: like why is it taking two weeks in one day?
Speaker 1: Why can't it just take two weeks? That just seems
Speaker 1: like trolling. Yeah, well, maybe here is a good place
Speaker 1: to come back to some psychology research about the effects
Speaker 1: of the week, because in the previous episode I mentioned
Speaker 1: a psychology paper that looked into what it called mental
Speaker 1: representations of week days. This was by Ellis at All,
Speaker 1: and we talked about it in the context of the
Speaker 1: idea that while the week is broken into different types
Speaker 1: of days, weekends and week days, each day is also
Speaker 1: its own distinct concept, and this paper examined this in
Speaker 1: a number of ways. Overall, I'd say it's findings would
Speaker 1: be not very surprising to anybody who's ever been to
Speaker 1: school or had a full time job that was organized
Speaker 1: on regular bank hours. But it's good to have that
Speaker 1: information anyway, because a lot of times, you know, I
Speaker 1: often have this thought where like, you do a study
Speaker 1: and then the results come back and people say, like,
Speaker 1: that's obvious. Why do you need to do a study
Speaker 1: to know that. It's like, well, because if you if
Speaker 1: you just go by your assumptions all the time, you're
Speaker 1: actually going to turn out to be wrong a good bit,
Speaker 1: so it's worth checking. But it did find that, for example,
Speaker 1: people were most conscious of what day it was on
Speaker 1: Mondays and on Fridays, as measured by reaction times when
Speaker 1: asked to name the day, it found that people were
Speaker 1: most likely to feel like it was the wrong day.
Speaker 1: I feel like it was a different day than it
Speaker 1: was on days that were in the midweek, so Tuesday, Wednesday,
Speaker 1: and Thursdays. That's also not very surprising. Those are sort
Speaker 1: of the the middle days, the days that are you know,
Speaker 1: easy to get lost in the shuffle. It found that
Speaker 1: in terms of affective response, people really really like Fridays
Speaker 1: and really dislike Mondays, and the other days in between
Speaker 1: basically just kind of slope up and down between those extremes.
Speaker 1: And of course the standard note that these responses, as
Speaker 1: well as the ones in the um UH studies I'm
Speaker 1: about to mention here are are primarily, I think from
Speaker 1: industrialized societies in North America and Europe, where the seven
Speaker 1: day work week is highly salient. I have no way
Speaker 1: to prove it, but I strongly suspect that you would
Speaker 1: not find these same patterns at all if you were
Speaker 1: to exclusively survey populations that were less connected to this
Speaker 1: type of of economic work cycle, for example, rural farmers
Speaker 1: or hunter gatherers. But since then, I just wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about a bunch more studies. I was looking at
Speaker 1: about the days of the week and how we represent
Speaker 1: them in our brains, how we feel about them, and
Speaker 1: how they affect our behavior. Uh So, a couple that
Speaker 1: I looked at had to do with people's feelings about
Speaker 1: days of the week, following up on that, you know
Speaker 1: idea from the previous study that people like Fridays, they
Speaker 1: don't like Mondays. So one study I looked at was
Speaker 1: from twenty eleven published in Psychological Reports by Charles s Irany,
Speaker 1: Mitchell Burger, and Natalina as Latevska uh called factors affecting
Speaker 1: the extent of Monday Blues evidence from a meta analysis.
Speaker 1: This was a meta analysis that looked at a bunch
Speaker 1: of samples from previous studies that tracked both mood and
Speaker 1: days of the week and tried to see if there
Speaker 1: were correlations. And they said they did find evidence of
Speaker 1: a small but reliable quote Monday blues effect, so people
Speaker 1: had worse moods on Mondays, but the size of the
Speaker 1: effect varied greatly depending on what types of demographic groups
Speaker 1: featured in the sample. So for contrasts, they mentioned that
Speaker 1: samples focused on university students showed a large and consistent
Speaker 1: Monday Blues effect. College students really hated Mondays, whereas samples
Speaker 1: limited to a smaller, different cohort. The one they single
Speaker 1: out is married men who were not students showed a
Speaker 1: smaller effect. It was still there, but much smaller and
Speaker 1: with greater variation between the samples. Rob, does this track
Speaker 1: with your experience that you hated Mondays more when you
Speaker 1: were like a college student or younger in general? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it. I mean, it's it's easy to sort of
Speaker 1: fall on on sort of stereotypes when thinking about this.
Speaker 1: You know, you think of like the college student is
Speaker 1: is out partying all weekend and then open and they've
Speaker 1: got to go to class Monday morning, and uh and
Speaker 1: the married adult is maybe not partying all weekend. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: I um, I don't. I don't think I ever remembered
Speaker 1: necessarily just hating Mondays. But if I if I didn't
Speaker 1: like my job, then I was probably adverse to to
Speaker 1: going back on Monday to work there. I feel like nowadays, though,
Speaker 1: like Monday I really don't have a problem with in
Speaker 1: large part because I feel like I'm actually well rested
Speaker 1: on a Monday, whereas I'm i'm less' not that I'm
Speaker 1: i'm like losing a lot of sleep, but during the
Speaker 1: course of the week, I feel like I kind of
Speaker 1: steadily lose a little bit of sleep towards the end,
Speaker 1: so that Fridays I'm a little more worn out. Um,
Speaker 1: and then I catch up on my leap over the
Speaker 1: weekend and by Monday, I'm good to go. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: something I think might be underappreciated, especially when it gets
Speaker 1: to a study will look at in a minute on
Speaker 1: on on behavior the the effects of cumulative fatigue over
Speaker 1: the course of week days. I think that that is
Speaker 1: a very good idea. But okay, So so that was
Speaker 1: that one study. Another one I looked at was by Stone, Schneider,
Speaker 1: and Harder, published in twenty twelve in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Positive Psychology. This one used a huge telephone survey with
Speaker 1: like hundreds of thousands of participants, tested for demographic variables
Speaker 1: and how people felt about different days of the week.
Speaker 1: They found, again unsurprisingly, a strong preference for weekends. People
Speaker 1: really really love Fridays. They like weekends. Uh. This study
Speaker 1: found weaker evidence that people really hate Mondays. Uh. It
Speaker 1: was it was a more reduced Monday blues effect, but
Speaker 1: they did find some variations. This one also found that
Speaker 1: day of the week effects on mood in general were
Speaker 1: more pronounced in younger p bowl generally, and the day
Speaker 1: of the week had less effect on mood for older
Speaker 1: people and especially retired people. So that might not be
Speaker 1: surprising because I think a lot of these day of
Speaker 1: the week effects probably have to do with when you
Speaker 1: have to go to work. UH. They found no differences
Speaker 1: on the basis of gender or on the basis of
Speaker 1: the presence of a romantic partner. Now, it does seem
Speaker 1: strange that there wouldn't be much emphasis put on Wednesday, though,
Speaker 1: because it seems like, like Wednesday is hump Day, right,
Speaker 1: Like Wednesday is the day where you may, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: feel the satisfaction of knowing that the the you're you're
Speaker 1: halfway there, You're you're more than halfway there. You are
Speaker 1: over the hump and headed in towards that Friday that
Speaker 1: you're looking forward to. You want scientific confirmation of hump day,
Speaker 1: hump day confirmed. It's like if hump Day is I
Speaker 1: mean this kind of we come into our assumptions, right,
Speaker 1: I have these assumptions about hump days. But if those
Speaker 1: assumptions are not borne out in UH, in the data
Speaker 1: then then maybe it's just like it's a silly notion. Anyway, Well,
Speaker 1: there may be some ways in which hump day is
Speaker 1: a alien effect, but it just kind of gets lost
Speaker 1: in the noise of this this big study with a
Speaker 1: bunch of other things going on. Maybe it doesn't show up,
Speaker 1: just fades into the noise when you're asking people, how
Speaker 1: do you feel about today, about this day of the week,
Speaker 1: or how do you feel today on the day that
Speaker 1: I'm asking you this as opposed to other more targeted
Speaker 1: questions that may pull out the hump day nous of
Speaker 1: hump day, maybe questions about like optimism about the future
Speaker 1: or something. Now you could ask another question. Again, we've
Speaker 1: been talking about, well what's obvious or what we would
Speaker 1: just assume, But here's another question. Seems like it has
Speaker 1: an obvious answer. Why do people seem to like weekends
Speaker 1: so much more than week days? I think I think
Speaker 1: both common intuition as well as some of the data
Speaker 1: we've looked at already would tell us it's because people
Speaker 1: like being off work. Uh. Though interestingly, of course, not
Speaker 1: everybody's work hours conformed to the standard Monday to Friday
Speaker 1: nine to five, and some people and some people also,
Speaker 1: you know, even if they do conform to that, really
Speaker 1: enjoy their work. But at least at the population level,
Speaker 1: this effect shows up strongly anyway. So I don't know
Speaker 1: if you know people who are restaurant servers whose busiest
Speaker 1: work is on the weekends or something like that, if
Speaker 1: they're just not enough of them to balance out the
Speaker 1: survey data, or maybe somehow even though it's their busy
Speaker 1: work times, they that they prefer weekends as well. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I I haven't found data on that. But
Speaker 1: this question of what causes people to enjoy weekends the
Speaker 1: most has also been analyzed in some psychology research, sometimes
Speaker 1: referred to as the weekend effect. And I was looking
Speaker 1: at a study from ten in the Journal of Social
Speaker 1: and Clinical Psychology by Ryan Bernstein and Brown called weekends
Speaker 1: work and well being psychological needs satisfactions in the day
Speaker 1: of the week effects on mood, vitality, and physical symptoms. UH.
Speaker 1: This held true for all different kinds of jobs, no
Speaker 1: matter you know what kind of work you had. In general,
Speaker 1: on average, people like weekends better than week days and uh,
Speaker 1: and not just like them better like that, they reported, say,
Speaker 1: fewer physical aches and pains on the weekends and reported
Speaker 1: feeling that this I thought this was really interesting. People
Speaker 1: reported that they generally felt more quote competent on weekends
Speaker 1: than week days. You might assume the opposite would be true,
Speaker 1: that people feel like, Okay, I'm competent in my job,
Speaker 1: so I'm competent on week days, but no, people felt
Speaker 1: competent on the weekends. Maybe that's just because I don't know,
Speaker 1: jobs are overwhelming, or because the nature of work is
Speaker 1: often such that it interferes with your ability to do
Speaker 1: your job as well as you could be doing it.
Speaker 1: But anyway, this study looked at different factors that could
Speaker 1: be influencing why people have such a strong preference for weekends,
Speaker 1: and the researchers concluded that the most important factors were
Speaker 1: probably two. One of them is the ability to spend
Speaker 1: quality time with friends and family with loved ones, and
Speaker 1: the other is the freedom to choose one's own activities.
Speaker 1: People like self determination in what activities they engage in.
Speaker 1: So you might imagine a scenario where somebody is off
Speaker 1: work for the weekend. They don't have to go to
Speaker 1: their job, but they don't get to spend quality time
Speaker 1: with loved ones, and their time is taken up with
Speaker 1: some kind of obligatory activity that they don't choose themselves,
Speaker 1: and in that case, it might not actually feel like
Speaker 1: a weekend at all. It might be just as bad
Speaker 1: as work or worse. I know, I have this experience.
Speaker 1: I can get really down about like a weekend that
Speaker 1: is just jammed up with unwanted obligatory activities. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know for my own part, there are
Speaker 1: things like, for instance, listening to music. I might I
Speaker 1: almost certainly listen to music more on my own during
Speaker 1: the work week, uh, just because I'm plugged in more
Speaker 1: or and in some cases are released in the past.
Speaker 1: You know, I've I've been commuting and so there will
Speaker 1: be more sort of designated media time during the commute,
Speaker 1: and then on the weekends you don't have that. So
Speaker 1: not not not that that necessarily pushes weekend good or bad,
Speaker 1: but it certainly gives it a slightly different flavor. There
Speaker 1: there are things that the weekend and not offer that
Speaker 1: the that the normal week days do. Yeah, yeah, totally. So,
Speaker 1: I don't know, the ability to determine one's own activities
Speaker 1: and the ability to spend quality time with loved ones
Speaker 1: whenever that happens. It seems like those are are major
Speaker 1: factors that increase people's feeling of well being along multiple axes. Um.
Speaker 1: But it just so happens that those things, on average
Speaker 1: happened the most on weekends for people. But you know,
Speaker 1: individual mileage may vary. But but while the previous results
Speaker 1: might be pretty obvious, you could also imagine that there
Speaker 1: could be other effects of the seven day week on
Speaker 1: human psychology and particularly on behavior. Now, again, these would
Speaker 1: be highly dependent on a person's economic and cultural surroundings, because,
Speaker 1: as we talked about in the last episode, basically all
Speaker 1: the evidence indicates that the seven day week is is
Speaker 1: not a fact of nature, but but a mental technology,
Speaker 1: something we have created. So it will depend on what
Speaker 1: kind of week you use and what the week is
Speaker 1: used for in the place where you live. A couple
Speaker 1: of random examples that have been observed over the years
Speaker 1: that I wanted to point out. So one is the
Speaker 1: question of does the stock market behave differently depending on
Speaker 1: what day of the week it is other factors being equal. Uh,
Speaker 1: this one doesn't seem totally clear. It looks to me
Speaker 1: like some studies looking into this have found a correlation.
Speaker 1: Others have have not or have argued that the correlations
Speaker 1: that have been found can be explained away. Um. But
Speaker 1: just as one example of of a study that did
Speaker 1: find a correlation and said it couldn't be explained away,
Speaker 1: there was Gibbons and Hess from the Journal of Business
Speaker 1: in ninety one. The article was titled Day of the
Speaker 1: Week effects and Asset Returns, and this found against prediction
Speaker 1: that expected returns for stocks and bills on Mondays were
Speaker 1: lower than for other days of the week, or perhaps
Speaker 1: sometimes even negative. And they were just like, we don't
Speaker 1: know how to explain this, We don't know of what
Speaker 1: factor would would explain this. Another example I found in
Speaker 1: a pay or by Ellis and Jenkins published in UH
Speaker 1: plus one in twelve. I know for many years I've
Speaker 1: been calling this journal p l O S one A
Speaker 1: lot of people say that way, but I just read
Speaker 1: an article saying that the pronunciation, of course that stands
Speaker 1: for Public Library of Science. But so it is an acronym.
Speaker 1: But but they say plas rhyming with floss. So from
Speaker 1: now on I'm gonna try to remember to floss like
Speaker 1: plas plas instead of p L O S. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: how about plos Sometimes it's kind of since we have
Speaker 1: like often a capital P lower case L O than
Speaker 1: capital S, it seems like that would be possos. I
Speaker 1: know now that I've said it, I'm gonna get it
Speaker 1: wrong in the future and looks stupid. Plus plus plus
Speaker 1: like floss okay, so plus one. Uh. The The article
Speaker 1: was titled weekday effects Attendance Rate for Medical Appointments large
Speaker 1: Scale Data Analysis and Implications. This study examined over four
Speaker 1: point five million hospital appointment records from Scotland between two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight in two thousand ten and it definitely
Speaker 1: found a trend. They found that the did not attend
Speaker 1: rate was quote highest for Mondays eleven percent and lowest
Speaker 1: for Friday's nine point seven and decreased monotonically over the week.
Speaker 1: So it went down over the week until it got
Speaker 1: to the lowest on Fridays. And in keeping with the trend,
Speaker 1: we've we've seen a few times here that there may
Speaker 1: be a day of week effects difference by age. The
Speaker 1: study found that the pattern was steeper for younger age
Speaker 1: groups than for older ones. Well you know it's it's
Speaker 1: one is tempted to fall back on stereotypes there as
Speaker 1: well and say well, maybe younger people are less concerned
Speaker 1: about about health matters versus older people. But that's those
Speaker 1: are generalities and I'm not sure if we can really
Speaker 1: lean too heavily on those. But why would that affect
Speaker 1: today of the week. I mean it would still it
Speaker 1: would mean that younger people are less concerned about health
Speaker 1: matters maybe on Mondays Tuesdays, and so they get more
Speaker 1: concerned as those on they've been partying all weekend. I
Speaker 1: guess I don't know, but I know that that even
Speaker 1: as a as an adult, um, I uh, there have
Speaker 1: been times where I reached Sunday and then I say,
Speaker 1: I look at the calendars, like, all right, what's coming
Speaker 1: up this week? What did I what did I you know,
Speaker 1: put in the books for the week ahead, And then
Speaker 1: I'll say, oh, I have a dental appointment on Monday,
Speaker 1: and I and there might be a temptation to want
Speaker 1: to rearrange that just because you know the nature of
Speaker 1: the Monday is that you know, maybe you're not maybe
Speaker 1: you're not excited about Monday, or maybe you are excited
Speaker 1: about actually getting some work done on on Monday, kicking
Speaker 1: the week off right, and it doesn't feel appropriate maybe
Speaker 1: to then spend an hour or more somewhere else, even
Speaker 1: if it is something important like a medical appointment. I
Speaker 1: know exactly what you're talking about. Man, When you know
Speaker 1: you're scheduling six months out at the dentist or something,
Speaker 1: and you're like, uh, yeah, Monday, that sounds good, and
Speaker 1: then it's that Sunday and you're like, oh, no, I
Speaker 1: can do this. Yeah, I should have put it on
Speaker 1: a Thursday. The two examples I was just talking about
Speaker 1: of possible weekly fluctuations in human behavior with the stock
Speaker 1: markets and with missed appointments missed medical appointments. Those were
Speaker 1: both mentioned in the background of a paper from which
Speaker 1: I want to talk about because I found it interesting
Speaker 1: and this paper experimentally explored a unifying concept that might
Speaker 1: explain a number of weekly changes in behavior patterns, and
Speaker 1: that explanation would be in risk tolerance. So this paper
Speaker 1: is by Jet G. Sanders and Rob Jenkins published in
Speaker 1: Plus one called Weekly Fluctuations and Risk Tolerance and Voting Behavior.
Speaker 1: And so the authors of this paper point out several
Speaker 1: observed trends in human behavior across days of the week,
Speaker 1: including the two I mentioned a minute ago, with stocks
Speaker 1: and and medical appointments. But they also point out things
Speaker 1: as serious as rates of attempted suicide. There are there
Speaker 1: are uh, you know, you can observe trends throughout the
Speaker 1: week in all kinds of human behaviors. But they argue
Speaker 1: that despite these observations, there has not yet been a
Speaker 1: unified psychological explanation for them. There's not one, uh explanation
Speaker 1: that people have been able to give yet it would say,
Speaker 1: here's why we're observing these trends. And in this paper,
Speaker 1: the author's hypothesized that one psychological factor which could influence
Speaker 1: a wide range of behaviors by fluctuating throughout the week
Speaker 1: is risk tolerance. Now, they did multiple studies to look
Speaker 1: at this, but the first one that was like a
Speaker 1: direct lab study I thought was interesting because it involved
Speaker 1: a computer game that is designed to measure risk tolerance,
Speaker 1: and this is called the BART test. BART is an acronym.
Speaker 1: It stands for Balloon Analog Risk Task And as with
Speaker 1: a lot of these psychological tools, is so the BART
Speaker 1: is really designed to try to reduce or eliminate the
Speaker 1: influence of other variables to get as close as possible
Speaker 1: to testing just the factor in question, in this case,
Speaker 1: risk tolerance and the test works like this. Okay, so
Speaker 1: rob you imagine you sit down at a computer and
Speaker 1: you've been told in advance that you're gonna play a
Speaker 1: computer game that will lead to a variable cash payout
Speaker 1: at the end. You're gonna get some money by playing
Speaker 1: this game, but the money depends on your performance, and
Speaker 1: so the game works like this. In the game, you
Speaker 1: have a series of twenty balloons that you get to
Speaker 1: inflate one at a time. So you start on the
Speaker 1: first balloon and you press a button I think space
Speaker 1: bar to inflate this cartoon balloon. And every time you
Speaker 1: press the button there is a money value contained in
Speaker 1: the balloon that goes up, so say it's increasing by
Speaker 1: a penny every time you hit the space bar, So
Speaker 1: you're hitting the space you're increasing your payout. But as
Speaker 1: you keep inflating the balloon, you get closer and closer
Speaker 1: to some randomized point where the balloon will pop. And
Speaker 1: if you reach that point in the balloon pops, you
Speaker 1: lose all the money you've earned so far, it all
Speaker 1: goes away. So what you're trying to do is inflated
Speaker 1: as much as you can without it popping, and then
Speaker 1: get and then you're going to do something called banking it,
Speaker 1: which means you say, Okay, I'm done with this balloon.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to inflate it anymore. I'll just take
Speaker 1: whatever money is in there now. Yeah, and there's similar
Speaker 1: I've seen some stills of what these, uh the simple
Speaker 1: games tend to look like. And they tend to be
Speaker 1: very simple because it's not about believing that you're looking
Speaker 1: at a balloon. It's about like the basic risk, like
Speaker 1: do do I risk it now? Do I risk it now?
Speaker 1: But you you find a similar mechanic in some games
Speaker 1: as well, where there'll be something on the line and
Speaker 1: do you keep pushing it, do you keep holding or
Speaker 1: do you go ahead and cash out? It's the basic
Speaker 1: double down principle. Yeah, and so I think, yeah, a
Speaker 1: game like this is a is a pretty good attempt
Speaker 1: to isolate risk tolerance as as its own variable like that,
Speaker 1: there's that's pretty much directly what it's testing. There's not
Speaker 1: a lot else that you could imagine is going into this.
Speaker 1: So every single moment of the game, you can either
Speaker 1: gamble by inflating the balloon more, potentially increasing your ultimate payout,
Speaker 1: but also risking losing everything. You've you've gotten on this
Speaker 1: balloon so far, or you can bank it and and
Speaker 1: keep that money start the next balloon. The obvious correlation
Speaker 1: is that people with a lower risk tolerance at the
Speaker 1: time they're playing the game will tend to bank balloons
Speaker 1: earlier and protect the gains they've already made, whereas people
Speaker 1: with a higher risk tolerance while they're playing the game
Speaker 1: will tend to keep inflating to make the payouts bigger,
Speaker 1: you know, with the increased risk of losing the whole pot.
Speaker 1: And of course, you know, risk tolerance is going to
Speaker 1: vary to some degree by by like fixed personality traits,
Speaker 1: like some people are just more risk tolerant than other
Speaker 1: people across the board. But then it's also going to
Speaker 1: vary moment to moment by but within a person. So
Speaker 1: a person might have a generally high, low, or average
Speaker 1: risk tolerance, but other factors I don't know. Maybe if
Speaker 1: you give somebody a few alcoholic beverages, their risk tolerance
Speaker 1: probably goes up. This is why casinos like to give
Speaker 1: people free drinks. And apparently the Bart test has has
Speaker 1: been shown to predict real world risk taking in domains
Speaker 1: like health and economics, so it seems like this is
Speaker 1: probably a pretty good test. People who take more risks
Speaker 1: in the game also take more risks in real life.
Speaker 1: So in this study they played this game with a
Speaker 1: number of controls in place to try to isolate day
Speaker 1: of the week as the only relevant difference. Now a
Speaker 1: caveat the sample size on the study was not huge.
Speaker 1: It was twenty five players across five sessions each, so
Speaker 1: a total of a hundred and twenty five barts um.
Speaker 1: So I wouldn't put too much confidence on this result
Speaker 1: until I see it confirmed in follow ups. But the
Speaker 1: study did find an effect, and it was an interesting
Speaker 1: one one that is not exactly what I would have predicted. Because, Rob,
Speaker 1: if you had to guess in terms of risk tolerance
Speaker 1: fluctuations during the week, what what would you guess the
Speaker 1: day that one would take the most risks, the most
Speaker 1: and the least. I would say most on Friday, least
Speaker 1: on my day. I would guess exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1: I would think that people are most risk tolerant on
Speaker 1: Friday and Saturday. Those are the YOLO days, that's canonical,
Speaker 1: and people would probably mean the most risk risk averse
Speaker 1: on Mondays. You know, that's like the hunker down and
Speaker 1: get through this day. But strangely, this is not exactly
Speaker 1: what the researchers found that. It's there's some partial overlap
Speaker 1: with what we just guessed. So, first of all, they
Speaker 1: did not test on weekends. We don't have data on
Speaker 1: Saturdays and Sundays. They were just testing variations between week days,
Speaker 1: and they found that risk tolerance people are willing to
Speaker 1: take the most risks to inflate the balloons the most
Speaker 1: on Fridays and Mondays. But then after Mondays, risk tolerance
Speaker 1: went down, and then it reached its lowest average on Thursdays.
Speaker 1: So that was a hum moment for me. I I
Speaker 1: don't know, like Thursdays, they're supposed to sort of blend
Speaker 1: in with the other midweek days. They're very similar to
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Why would people be the most call aucious,
Speaker 1: the most averse to taking risks on Thursdays? I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe it comes down to just sort of the finish
Speaker 1: line view of the calendar week, where it's like, all right,
Speaker 1: on Thursday, Uh, you know, I'm over the hump, I'm
Speaker 1: coming in towards the finish. I I need to actually
Speaker 1: get some stuff done today. I need to I don't
Speaker 1: need to take a bunch of risks. Uh. Tomorrow, maybe
Speaker 1: when the finish line is in sight, I'll feel risk here,
Speaker 1: But today is all business. That's just a guess. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think there might be something to that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we can talk about a few options here,
Speaker 1: I guess. First, let's talk about what the authors themselves
Speaker 1: offer as as their preferred explanation. Um. So, for one thing,
Speaker 1: they hypothesize in their introduction that if risk tolerance varies
Speaker 1: throughout the week, it might be related to mood, since
Speaker 1: previous studies have found that mood has an influence on
Speaker 1: decision making. And I thought this part was also strange
Speaker 1: because the link between mood and risk tolerance is counterintuitive
Speaker 1: to me. But they cite multiple studies existing research showing
Speaker 1: that on average, people are more risk tolerance it will
Speaker 1: take more risks when experiencing certain negative moods, such as sadness.
Speaker 1: So apparently people experiencing sadness are more likely to inflate
Speaker 1: the balloon higher take more risks, whereas people experiencing happiness
Speaker 1: are more likely to be cautious and risk averse. This
Speaker 1: is another thing that's kind of the opposite of what
Speaker 1: I would have guessed from a gut feeling, though in
Speaker 1: looking at the research they cite, I guess it sort
Speaker 1: of makes sense maybe that, like feelings of sadness or
Speaker 1: despair can lead to a a what what do I
Speaker 1: have to lose? Kind of thinking? Right, right, And if
Speaker 1: you're optimistic, you're like, well, why should I be taking
Speaker 1: a risk Tomorrow's Friday? Yeah, I think this balloon, Yeah
Speaker 1: it's fine. So so that's kind of surprising already. But anyway,
Speaker 1: this fact would partially match the results they found in
Speaker 1: the balloon game, because okay, you assume people are generally
Speaker 1: in the worst mood on Monday. A lot of studies
Speaker 1: have found that, and then their mood gets gradually better
Speaker 1: throughout the week and then gets to its highest point
Speaker 1: on Friday. This would track with their finding that people
Speaker 1: take the most risks on Mondays and then get more
Speaker 1: and more cautious up to Thursday. Though then on Friday
Speaker 1: that correlation breaks because if the same pattern held, people
Speaker 1: should actually be the most cautious on Fridays of the
Speaker 1: lowest risk tolerance on Friday's because that's when they're in
Speaker 1: the best mood. But that's not what happens, Friday looks
Speaker 1: more kind of like the Yolo day that you and
Speaker 1: I would have guessed. It's it's on par with Mondays
Speaker 1: in terms of having high risk tolerance. So the authors
Speaker 1: explained this by saying, quote, the Friday recovery suggests that
Speaker 1: risk tolerance may track prospective mood more closely than it
Speaker 1: tracts current mood. On this account, risk tolerance is lowest
Speaker 1: on Thursday because that is when the most rewarding part
Speaker 1: of the week is imminent. When gain is expected, changes
Speaker 1: resisted risk aversion, When losses expect did, change is welcomed
Speaker 1: risk tolerance. And I don't know on this. I'm kind
Speaker 1: of halfway there on that explanation that that makes a
Speaker 1: certain kind of sense to me. But then again, isn't
Speaker 1: Friday already the highest mood because of prospective analysis? Like
Speaker 1: Friday itself is prospective happiness. People who work jobs with
Speaker 1: Monday to Friday schedules still have to go to work
Speaker 1: on Friday. But we love Friday's because we are thinking
Speaker 1: about the weekend being ahead of us. Yeah, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and unless it creeps even further back in the week here,
Speaker 1: and like so basically you're, uh, your most optimistic on
Speaker 1: Thursday because it's about to be Friday. And then of
Speaker 1: course when it's actually Friday, maybe there are some realizations that, well,
Speaker 1: you know, Friday is just another day and it's it's
Speaker 1: nothing magical about it. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think this is curious. I would say if more people
Speaker 1: test the same thing, if the same pattern the authors
Speaker 1: found here holds up in other studies, I would wonder
Speaker 1: if it's indicative of a multi variable input, Like maybe
Speaker 1: improving mood explains decreasing risk tolerance throughout the week, but
Speaker 1: then when Friday comes, some other psychological influence takes over.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that would be, but it's sort
Speaker 1: of overwhelms the effective mood on risk tolerance. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: I I don't know. Yeah, I mean it's sometimes it's
Speaker 1: it's hard for humans to live in the moment. Like
Speaker 1: a I think about like the ramp up to Halloween.
Speaker 1: You spend all of October moving towards Halloween and getting
Speaker 1: into the Halloween spirit and all. Sometimes I've found that
Speaker 1: when it's actually Halloween, it's still a lot of fun,
Speaker 1: but there's also the the the you know, the sadness
Speaker 1: that Halloween is about to be over. That that that
Speaker 1: there's going to be the sharp cut off, and now
Speaker 1: it's November, and now all these other factors are in play.
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about there. With two
Speaker 1: October files here, I feel like I get the most
Speaker 1: pleasure in like the first two weeks of October because
Speaker 1: then it's like there's so much October still ahead of us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But and then again, I don't know if this really
Speaker 1: this can really relate to the week by week experience,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I don't know. Now. Another interesting thing that
Speaker 1: goes along with his I was reading a short article
Speaker 1: by one of the authors of this study, uh Rob Jenkins,
Speaker 1: and he also said that the same pattern was born
Speaker 1: out in analyzes of historical chess games. That they they
Speaker 1: had done an analysis of big archives of chess games
Speaker 1: and try to quantify risky moves within those games and
Speaker 1: then correlate that with what day of the week the
Speaker 1: games took place on, and they found they say, they
Speaker 1: found the same thing that uh moves got uh more
Speaker 1: and more cautious on the on the trend from Monday
Speaker 1: to Thursday, so you know, riskier moves on Monday and
Speaker 1: then Thursday, very conservative playing and then Friday suddenly risky
Speaker 1: moves again. So that was not a part of this paper.
Speaker 1: That was just something i'd read the author talking about.
Speaker 1: But within this same paper, the authors also looked at
Speaker 1: how days of the week correlated with the voting preferences
Speaker 1: as expressed in opinion polls on a couple of big
Speaker 1: issues in UM in UK politics in recent years Scottish
Speaker 1: independence and bregsit And from the moment, I think I'm
Speaker 1: not going to focus on that because I feel like
Speaker 1: those kinds of issues have they're so noisy with real
Speaker 1: world data and so full of variables that are hard
Speaker 1: to control for uh. And of course the authors are
Speaker 1: aware of this, they make note of it, but I
Speaker 1: feel like that that may be harder to fix on
Speaker 1: day of the week effects and and things like risk aversion,
Speaker 1: because especially when you're looking at something like a big
Speaker 1: contentious political issue, like a huge part of political rhetoric
Speaker 1: is specifically aimed at manipulating how people frame political and
Speaker 1: voting choices in terms of risks. So it's hard to
Speaker 1: pick one side of a political issue and say, well,
Speaker 1: this is the one that's the more risk averse option,
Speaker 1: and the other one is the one that's more risk tolerant,
Speaker 1: because there may be lots of cases where voters on
Speaker 1: opposite sides of an issue in roughly equal proportions both
Speaker 1: believe their side to be the less risky one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's going to debend on on what sort of media
Speaker 1: you're consuming. One side is going to frame this is
Speaker 1: the obviously the risky choice, and the other side is
Speaker 1: going to say, no, this is the this is the
Speaker 1: risk adverse choice. Though they point out something interesting that
Speaker 1: does rely on a couple of conditionals. So if if
Speaker 1: they're finding is indeed true, if it is borne out
Speaker 1: that people's risk tolerance on average fluctuates throughout the week,
Speaker 1: and if it's true that there are consistent patterns that
Speaker 1: show up in populations, such as Thursday being consistently the
Speaker 1: most cautious day, the most risk averse day, then what
Speaker 1: day you hold elections or referenda on could actually affect
Speaker 1: the outcome, which I think is interesting. But another thing
Speaker 1: I was thinking about in the light of these assessments
Speaker 1: of risk aversion is coming back to your idea of
Speaker 1: the effect of week days being an effect of CUMU
Speaker 1: a live fatigue. I mean, I wonder how that would
Speaker 1: play into risk tolerance as expressed throughout the week. Does like, Okay,
Speaker 1: could it be that being progressively more tired as you
Speaker 1: go through the week and getting to Thursday, you've you've
Speaker 1: most likely had the most nights in a row where
Speaker 1: you didn't get as much sleep as you wanted, where
Speaker 1: you were trying to pack things in and get through
Speaker 1: the days that came before. Could that somehow express itself
Speaker 1: in terms of what kind of risks you're willing to
Speaker 1: take by Thursday? And then maybe some kind of mood
Speaker 1: effect takes over on Friday that overwhelms that fatigue, right,
Speaker 1: And then likewise, if if, if you're more prone to
Speaker 1: lose sleep over the weekend, would you have have this
Speaker 1: sort of scenario playing out, you know, moving into Monday
Speaker 1: where yeah, you didn't you didn't get a lot of
Speaker 1: sleep last night and the night before, uh, and here
Speaker 1: you are catching up. Another question I have is I
Speaker 1: wonder about interactions between between risk aversion as expressed over
Speaker 1: different days of the week and our feeling of freedom
Speaker 1: about what we get to do on on each day
Speaker 1: of the week. So, like, how is your risk aversion
Speaker 1: affected by it being a day where that is full
Speaker 1: of tasks that are not really up to you you
Speaker 1: just have to do them, versus on a day where
Speaker 1: you can do whatever you want. Yeah. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I can imagine a scenario in which, yeah, you haven't
Speaker 1: really had much in the way of choice, So now
Speaker 1: I have the choice to take a risk. Well, maybe
Speaker 1: I'm gonna take it. I don't know. It kind of
Speaker 1: comes back to the where we're talking about, though, is
Speaker 1: that there seems like there's a fair amount of noise
Speaker 1: in any of these considerations, and and so much just
Speaker 1: room for subjective interpretation. You know, it's just gonna vary
Speaker 1: so much depending on what an individual's life structure happens
Speaker 1: to be. Right, So if the pattern holds up, I
Speaker 1: do think that's really interesting with this Thursday thing, But
Speaker 1: I'm not convinced of any particular explanation yet. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: this does just make me want to, like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: do Bart tests on myself all, you know, all the
Speaker 1: time figure out what's what's going on in my brain.
Speaker 1: I guess it's hard to. I don't know. I guess
Speaker 1: knowing what I'm testing for would affects the outcome, so
Speaker 1: I can't really do that. But I want to bart myself. Well,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be a good pin and paper kind of
Speaker 1: BART scenario you can use. Well, I'd still know that
Speaker 1: I was taking the test, and I couldn't, like, you know,
Speaker 1: do it blinded. But yeah, in any case, I do
Speaker 1: hope that risk tolerance researchers use bart as a verb.
Speaker 1: But the way we have been doing I barted. I
Speaker 1: barted twenty five participants today. You know, I haven't had
Speaker 1: a chance to really research this, but it looks like
Speaker 1: there there are a few um balloon analog risk task
Speaker 1: tests BART tests that you can find online. Uh, though
Speaker 1: I will warn you that the one I clicked on
Speaker 1: it had some really loud sound effects. I don't know
Speaker 1: that we really need alloud air hissing sound effect every
Speaker 1: time I pump up the money balloon, So it only
Speaker 1: works if it's deafening pops, pops and pumps. Okay, I
Speaker 1: think maybe we've got a called this episode here and
Speaker 1: then come back later this week. That's right, we'll have
Speaker 1: more to discuss about the seven day week. We'll get
Speaker 1: into some more and probably some expected territory concerning more
Speaker 1: historical data, will probably get into some unexpected areas. As
Speaker 1: well concerning the seven day week period. Obviously, we'd love
Speaker 1: to hear from everyone. In the meantime, we've already been
Speaker 1: hearing from a number of people about these episodes, so
Speaker 1: keep it coming. Will remind you that our core episodes
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on two season Thursdays. Monday,
Speaker 1: we do listener mail Wednesday as a short form artifact episode,
Speaker 1: and on Friday that's our time to do Weird How Cinema,
Speaker 1: where we set aside most serious concerns and just focus
Speaker 1: on a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other to suggest topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For
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