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