Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to blow your Mind from housetop works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome the stuff to go in your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and bad John mc comick. So, Robert,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you a question. Are you the
Speaker 1: kind of person who makes New Year's resolutions? Oh? I
Speaker 1: try to be very careful about it these days, and
Speaker 1: I also exclusively begin my New year on Chinese New
Speaker 1: Year these days. Oh, what day is that it's gonna be? Uh?
Speaker 1: I want to stay February eight this year. I could
Speaker 1: be wrong, but it's yeah. It generally occurs like one
Speaker 1: month out from from Western New Year because I feel
Speaker 1: mainly I feel that like if you're if you're gonna
Speaker 1: get excited about like turning over a new leaf, for
Speaker 1: getting back in the role of things. However you choose
Speaker 1: to take on a new year, like I try not
Speaker 1: to to, you know, strap my self to the mask
Speaker 1: too much, uh and make any kind of you know,
Speaker 1: a weird bargain about the future. But it's like just
Speaker 1: coming off the holidays, it's just too much chaos. Everything's
Speaker 1: out of order. It's the worst time in the world
Speaker 1: to decide you're going to start a new habit or
Speaker 1: a new cycle of doing things, or are you gonna
Speaker 1: or that you're gonna engage in any level of betterment,
Speaker 1: Better to wait until January is over and try that
Speaker 1: stuff out in February. That's that's my approach. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think if you're going to make a resolution, you should
Speaker 1: do it in the spring. Yeah, But have you ever
Speaker 1: made a New Year's resolution and like actually followed through
Speaker 1: with it, Like if you've tried it? Was it always
Speaker 1: just kind of a thing you thought about for a
Speaker 1: bit and then u um, maybe in the you know,
Speaker 1: earlier on. But like I think last year, I decided
Speaker 1: to stick to a basic yoga schedule, like decide what
Speaker 1: classes I was going to go to and make a
Speaker 1: point to go to them, and and worked out well.
Speaker 1: But that was a reasonable goal, like something that that
Speaker 1: I was already sort of halfway meeting, and then I
Speaker 1: just said, all right, we're gonna just roll with this
Speaker 1: this routine once things get going in February. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you've ever noticed this to be the case
Speaker 1: at a GEM or y m c A or something
Speaker 1: that you go to, but they're just horrible in like January,
Speaker 1: first half of February you just it's it's they're packed
Speaker 1: and then there and then the herd thins out. You know,
Speaker 1: suddenly nobody's coming anymore by March. Yeah, yeah, I definitely
Speaker 1: noticed that because I go to yoga at a y
Speaker 1: m c A and and I love it. I love
Speaker 1: my yoga teachers, all of the classes. But you do
Speaker 1: see that influx of new faces, and a lot of
Speaker 1: them are not gonna, not gonna stick around. And some
Speaker 1: of them will show up with their genes on in
Speaker 1: socks and with no understanding of what they're about to
Speaker 1: get into. Some will show up fifteen or twenty minutes
Speaker 1: late or leave fifteen or twenty minutes early. But it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just part of the process of people setting goals,
Speaker 1: trying new things, and not everything works out, and that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily a bad thing, but of course that that's
Speaker 1: always the kind of goal you see, right when people
Speaker 1: make New Year's resolutions, they it seems like they're almost
Speaker 1: always inherently narcissistic, like they are for personal improvement. But
Speaker 1: there for that kind of personal improvement, like I'm going
Speaker 1: to quit smoking, I'm gonna lose weight, I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: in shape. There for things that that aren't bad. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're good for you, but they're they're you know, sort
Speaker 1: of self focused. Yeah, I mean those seem to be
Speaker 1: the ones that dominate all the lists and advice columns
Speaker 1: that come out around this time of year. We want
Speaker 1: to you know, we want to look sexier and feel
Speaker 1: stronger and live forever. This is gonna be the year
Speaker 1: I live forever, exactly right, and really locking down eternity
Speaker 1: this year. Um. But instead of these kind of self gratifying, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, self improvement projects, I wondered about the personal
Speaker 1: betterment project of of trying to be a better person.
Speaker 1: I know sometimes people think about this in New Year's
Speaker 1: and and and why shouldn't we think about it? Like,
Speaker 1: if we're going to try to commit to changing our
Speaker 1: lives in some way for the better, why not try
Speaker 1: to be better humans? Yeah? And you know, and I
Speaker 1: know some individuals do engage in, uh in this kind
Speaker 1: of goal setting. But but it's it's also just as
Speaker 1: if not more difficult. It's more it's just as challenging
Speaker 1: as trying to change your body. You're going to try
Speaker 1: and change your your mind state. Instead, you're gonna change
Speaker 1: the way you interact with those around you and what
Speaker 1: you care about, and and try and do so in
Speaker 1: a in a meaningful way that actually lasts beyond January. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, how realistic is it to say this is
Speaker 1: the year I stopped kicking strangers down flights of stairs,
Speaker 1: because if that's already your thing, I mean, people really
Speaker 1: don't change all that much. People change, but it it
Speaker 1: takes a little bit more to to really turn over
Speaker 1: a new leaf. Well, that's an interesting thing. You point out.
Speaker 1: People don't change engine by and large. That's the extent
Speaker 1: to which that's true is depressing. It's very, very difficult
Speaker 1: to truly change our behavior in an effective, significant and
Speaker 1: permanent way. But fortunately we do have some science about
Speaker 1: the mind. And this is what we're gonna end up
Speaker 1: talking about today. If you make a New Year's resolution
Speaker 1: that you actually want to be a better person, you
Speaker 1: want to live a more moral life and treat others better,
Speaker 1: and not just in this vague form of you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do it some kind kind of promise, but
Speaker 1: in a way that actually gets results and changes your behavior.
Speaker 1: How can we do it? It seems like we should
Speaker 1: look to science. Yeah, because we were talking about leveling
Speaker 1: up the old d n D character sheet. Here we're
Speaker 1: talking about changing our stats. Uh, what does science have
Speaker 1: to say about stat adjustments on the real life character sheet? Right?
Speaker 1: And I can already hear people objecting and saying, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, you can't do that, because science is about
Speaker 1: empirical facts and morality is about values, and those things
Speaker 1: don't mix. Now, one of the things I'd say is
Speaker 1: that there, in fact, is an ongoing debate about whether
Speaker 1: you can derive moral values from science. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: you can, but we don't need to go there for
Speaker 1: the purpose of this discussion. Like that, that's a debate
Speaker 1: we don't even have to enter, because I would put
Speaker 1: up an analogy of engineering, like let's say you're building
Speaker 1: a hydroelectric dam. There is nothing about physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics,
Speaker 1: any of that that tells you that it's best to
Speaker 1: build a dam that produces the most electricity, cost the
Speaker 1: least money to build, has the lowest ecological impact on
Speaker 1: the river that you put it in, and has the
Speaker 1: least likelihood of failing and flooding everybody downstream. But if
Speaker 1: you start with those priorities as your assumptions, you can
Speaker 1: most definitely use scientific fields like physics and chemistry and
Speaker 1: fluid dynam amics to build the best possible dam to
Speaker 1: achieve those goals. And I think you can sort of
Speaker 1: approach morality in the same way. If you start with
Speaker 1: some given goals of improving moral behavior, and especially you
Speaker 1: want to start with specific ones like uh, like maybe
Speaker 1: making yourself more generous or being more honest, you can
Speaker 1: use research in neuroscience and psychology and related fields to
Speaker 1: optimize your moral behavior and use what we know about
Speaker 1: the human mind and the brain to fix the problem
Speaker 1: and get results, sort of trick your brain and making
Speaker 1: you the person you want to be. Yeah, So before
Speaker 1: we get into the actual research, I do definitely want
Speaker 1: to start with some caveats because the scientific study of
Speaker 1: moral behavior is far from perfect and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of potential difficulties we encounter when entering this field.
Speaker 1: One example would be a sort of lack of agreement
Speaker 1: on moral goal, like if a study is being conducted
Speaker 1: by a member of a religion that says tomatoes or
Speaker 1: minor gods and eating them as a heinous sin. Abstention
Speaker 1: from tomato products is a crucial part of moral behavior,
Speaker 1: and this is why it's important to study clearly specified
Speaker 1: types of behavior one at a time, like studying how
Speaker 1: much money someone gives to a charity as opposed to
Speaker 1: just studying how good of a person are you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and also in this getting into things that are
Speaker 1: more or less universally considered moral positives. Yeah. Um. Another
Speaker 1: thing would be that I think morality is an area
Speaker 1: where you have to be especially careful about experiment or bias.
Speaker 1: For example, it's probably no surprise that, uh, if your
Speaker 1: experiment ers are a group of liberals, they might find
Speaker 1: that liberals are more moral than conservatives, and vice versa.
Speaker 1: If their conservatives, they might find conservatives are more moral. Um,
Speaker 1: So you have to be especially cognizant of your of
Speaker 1: your you know, experimental controls put in place to limit
Speaker 1: the fact that the extent to which bias can affect
Speaker 1: the outcomes. And then you've got methodological difficulties like how
Speaker 1: do you test to see how moral somebody's behavior is?
Speaker 1: You know, you can invite them into a lab and
Speaker 1: have them play a game or do some kind of
Speaker 1: interaction under controlled conditions, but people might behave very differently
Speaker 1: under controlled conditions than they do in the wild. It's
Speaker 1: one thing to give somebody a questionnaire, or have to
Speaker 1: read a story and tell you how they feel about it,
Speaker 1: or put some pebbles in a cup, But ultimately we're
Speaker 1: talking about the real morality takes place in outside the lab. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then if you want to track people's morality outside
Speaker 1: the lab, you're pretty much gonna have to use self reporting, right,
Speaker 1: people are going to have to report to you what
Speaker 1: they did. And there is a pretty obvious problem there.
Speaker 1: How honest can we expect people to be about what
Speaker 1: their moral behaviors are. So, despite all those difficulties, I
Speaker 1: think this is still a field we can study and
Speaker 1: a place where we can try to look at some
Speaker 1: studies and apply them to our moral behaviors to see
Speaker 1: if we can hack our morals and and get under
Speaker 1: the get under the bedrock there and move some things around.
Speaker 1: So I think maybe the first place we should start
Speaker 1: is by looking at some traditional answers to the question
Speaker 1: of how to be a better person. Like, this is
Speaker 1: not a new question, obviously, people have been talking about
Speaker 1: this for thousands of years. You could look back to Socrates, Plato,
Speaker 1: and Aristotle, or you know, all the way up to
Speaker 1: more recent moral philosophers go a couple hundred years ago
Speaker 1: to Emmanuel Kant. These are people who had very strong
Speaker 1: opinions about how you could derive from first principles what
Speaker 1: the moral life was and how to live it. So
Speaker 1: the question is does moral philosophy or studying ethics make
Speaker 1: you a better person? And this is where a really
Speaker 1: interesting article from Ian magazine comes into play, written by
Speaker 1: Eric Gushway skivel Uh titled Well, the Ian magazine titles
Speaker 1: kind of shift, but I think the cheeseburger ethics with
Speaker 1: kind of a subhead how often do ethics professors call
Speaker 1: their mothers right? And it attempts to answer this question
Speaker 1: where Schwitz cable and he he chronicles his work and
Speaker 1: his work with another person named Joshua Rust over the
Speaker 1: years to study how exactly do people who study ethics
Speaker 1: and moral philosophy behave in their lives? Does does studying
Speaker 1: ethics make you a better person? And they seem to
Speaker 1: have found time and time again that the answer is no.
Speaker 1: Ethicists who are you know, professors who study ethics and
Speaker 1: moral philosophy for a living don't seem to be any
Speaker 1: better or worse than other professors. So professors of chemistry, history,
Speaker 1: et cetera, by a huge list of measures. Uh, they give,
Speaker 1: they give a list. In this article, Schwitz Cable says
Speaker 1: he looked at whether or not you vote in public collections,
Speaker 1: how often you call your mother, eating the meat of mammals,
Speaker 1: donating to charity, littering, disruptive chatting, and door slamming during
Speaker 1: philosophy presentation, responding to student emails, attending conferences without paying
Speaker 1: registration fees. There's a real killer there. Um organ donation,
Speaker 1: blood donation, theft of library books, and overall moral evaluation
Speaker 1: by one's departmental peers based on personal impressions. So there
Speaker 1: you get at least some third party info. Their honesty
Speaker 1: and responding to survey questions and joining the Nazi Party
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirties Germany. And what they found is that
Speaker 1: the ethicists uh and the moral philosophers just they're like
Speaker 1: everybody else. They're like the other professors studying. This doesn't
Speaker 1: make them do any better on these tests. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing that they did find it was different, is that
Speaker 1: ethicists tend to accept more rigorous moral standards than non ethicists,
Speaker 1: Yet they don't seem to be any more likely to
Speaker 1: actually follow them. So a couple of examples they give.
Speaker 1: One is that ethicists are way more likely than other
Speaker 1: people to say that eating the meat of mammals is
Speaker 1: morally wrong, yet they don't eat the meat of mammals
Speaker 1: any less than anybody else. They're also more likely to
Speaker 1: say that you should give more of your income a
Speaker 1: higher percentage to charity than other people say, but they
Speaker 1: don't give more than other people do. So it's like
Speaker 1: they tend to accept higher standards, but they can't meet them.
Speaker 1: So they have a more precise understanding of the sort
Speaker 1: of the ethical suit of armor we all should be wearing,
Speaker 1: but they're they're no more likely than we are to
Speaker 1: slip it on exactly. Yeah, that's a good way of
Speaker 1: putting it. And there are a lot of explanations. This
Speaker 1: is actually Schwitz Gables article is a really good one,
Speaker 1: and I h recommend reading it. It's very interesting. But
Speaker 1: and he gives lots of explanations for why this might
Speaker 1: be the case. But yeah, it appears that studying ethics
Speaker 1: and moral philosophy is not the answer to not necessarily bad.
Speaker 1: It's not that you shouldn't do it, but it's not
Speaker 1: going to make you behave more and morally at least statistically.
Speaker 1: Now there's another very traditional, classic answer to this question,
Speaker 1: how to be a better person, you get some religion
Speaker 1: in you. And the Udian magazine article went into that
Speaker 1: a little bit and mentioning members of the clergy and
Speaker 1: in questioning us and members of the clergy that asking them, hey,
Speaker 1: is they member of the clergy? Are they a better
Speaker 1: person than the the average person outside um, the church?
Speaker 1: And they said, um, you know it's probably about the same,
Speaker 1: maybe the clergy a little worse. Uh yeah, And and
Speaker 1: of course he could chalk that he chalked that up
Speaker 1: to It's possible they were just being humble about their
Speaker 1: own profession, but at least as as far as they
Speaker 1: presented publicly, they didn't think that they were any better
Speaker 1: than anybody else. And there have been plenty of studies
Speaker 1: that have looked into the relationship between levels of religiosity
Speaker 1: and moral behavior. Now, when we get into this, it's
Speaker 1: of course worth thing that this is a super loaded topic.
Speaker 1: People often have very strong feelings about whether or not
Speaker 1: religion is a good thing or a bad thing, So
Speaker 1: it's again very easy to see how bias could creep
Speaker 1: into scientific research on this subject if we're not careful.
Speaker 1: But like we said, there have been lots of studies. Uh,
Speaker 1: the answers seem to be I would say, very complicated
Speaker 1: and contradictory. You see stuff going on both sides in
Speaker 1: both directions on this. Uh. For example, I I know
Speaker 1: you found one study that a religious belief in Hell
Speaker 1: is linked to lower crime. Right, Yeah, that was awous.
Speaker 1: Twelve paper diversion Effects of Belief in Heaven and Hell
Speaker 1: and National Crime Rates by A. Zem F Sharif um Well,
Speaker 1: he co authored it at any rate psychologist, and he
Speaker 1: compared national crime rates with rates of belief in Heaven
Speaker 1: and Hell in sixty seven countries, and it came back
Speaker 1: with some interesting findings. First of all, Heaven's belief rate
Speaker 1: is almost always higher than Hell's belief rate um. And
Speaker 1: that kind of collaborates my personal theory that Hell is
Speaker 1: always an unwanted and add on for many religions or
Speaker 1: for even just semi religious people. It's the side dish
Speaker 1: we didn't order, and generally we don't want to eat it.
Speaker 1: But the papers major statistical finding was that nations with
Speaker 1: higher belief rates in Hell predicted the lower crime rates,
Speaker 1: while higher belief rates and heaven predicted higher crime rates.
Speaker 1: Wait what Yeah, so essentially that the idea here, I
Speaker 1: guess that you could say that the the stick was
Speaker 1: more effective than the carrot um as far as the
Speaker 1: religious worldview goes. Uh, And that health fearing citizens are
Speaker 1: more mindful of screwing up in this life, while the
Speaker 1: heaven crowd think they've got it knocked in the next life.
Speaker 1: No matter what. It's um. But but even this study
Speaker 1: underlying some of the problems here, because when you just
Speaker 1: talk about religion, what are you talking about religion? Has
Speaker 1: the one religion or even one slice of a particular
Speaker 1: faith might tweak the carrot stick scenario a little bit
Speaker 1: in one direction or the other. How is this system
Speaker 1: of faith enforcing more behavior? Is it? You know, is
Speaker 1: it really cutting you off from the world around you?
Speaker 1: And and uh? And focusing inward? Is it focusing outward?
Speaker 1: And it's going to vary from faith to faith. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's going to vary from person to person. I mean,
Speaker 1: part of the problem here is that when we're dealing
Speaker 1: with science, we're always dealing with broad statistical phenomena. So
Speaker 1: it might be the case that in general, religion makes
Speaker 1: people better, but it actually makes you worse, or vice versa.
Speaker 1: In general, it makes people worse, but it makes you better.
Speaker 1: You could be the anomaly, you could be different than
Speaker 1: the average. Yeah. And I also want to mention that
Speaker 1: there's a two thousand three Harvard study that determined economic
Speaker 1: growth responds positible but positively to the extent of religious
Speaker 1: but leaves notably those in heaven and hell. So their
Speaker 1: take was that high religious beliefs stimulate growth, stimulate economic
Speaker 1: growth because they help sustain behavior. But again that's a
Speaker 1: an economic view. But then again, there there's no We
Speaker 1: read some research this year about the effects of religious
Speaker 1: belief or at least correlations between religious religiosity and children
Speaker 1: and altruism, right, Yeah, this was Yeah, a new study
Speaker 1: that came out titled the Negative Association between religiousness and
Speaker 1: Children's Altruism across the World, and this was published in
Speaker 1: the journal Current Biology. Was a study of one thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred seventy children in Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa,
Speaker 1: and the United States and included five Muslims, two Christians,
Speaker 1: and three d twenty three non religious children. And what
Speaker 1: do they find. Their key findings were that, first of all,
Speaker 1: family religious identification decreases children's altruistic behaviors decreases decreases it uh,
Speaker 1: And that religiousness predicts parent reported child sensitivity to injustices
Speaker 1: and empathy, and that children from religious households are harsher
Speaker 1: in their punitive tendencies. Okay, so so this found at
Speaker 1: least in this one study, this broad survey of of
Speaker 1: religious and non religious children, and the children were from
Speaker 1: a couple of different religions, the religious kids did not
Speaker 1: do better in terms of being kinder to others being
Speaker 1: more altruistic. In fact, they did worse. Yeah, I imagine.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can sort of view it as the
Speaker 1: religion just provides a framework in which we make sense
Speaker 1: of our own moral achievements and failings, rather than a
Speaker 1: guideline that holds us up. Yeah. But then again, there
Speaker 1: have been other studies that, of course found religious spurring,
Speaker 1: a sort of religious priming, caused people to behave better right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a two thousand studies two thousand seven paper
Speaker 1: in Psychological Science that found both religious and non religious
Speaker 1: people shared more money with a stranger after reading sentences
Speaker 1: containing various whigious words such as spirit and God. But
Speaker 1: people were also more generous after reading words associated with
Speaker 1: secular authorities such as police. Uh. And then there's another
Speaker 1: study that was published in seventy three in the Journal
Speaker 1: of Personality and Social Psychology, and they found that more
Speaker 1: religious people were just as likely as rest less religious
Speaker 1: people to bypass a stranger in distress. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: that parody does seem to come through in the literature
Speaker 1: a good bit. I want to look at one more
Speaker 1: statistical study on religious behavior, and it wasn't just on
Speaker 1: religious behavior, but it included that. And that was a
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen study in in Science called Morality
Speaker 1: in Everyday Life by Wilhelm Hoffman, Daniel C. Waizenski, Mark J. Brandt,
Speaker 1: and Linda J. Skitka. And this is where they got
Speaker 1: a group of twelve hundred and fifty two participants and
Speaker 1: they were each participant received five text messages a day
Speaker 1: for three days. Each text message had a link to
Speaker 1: the studies website, which prompted them to record moral and
Speaker 1: in world experiences they'd gone through in the previous hour. So,
Speaker 1: did anything interestingly moral immoral just happened in your life?
Speaker 1: Did somebody do something moral or immoral to you, did
Speaker 1: you do something moral or immoral? Just some examples from
Speaker 1: a These were some great examples I read on a
Speaker 1: news release about this. The of the good deeds reported
Speaker 1: included sharing an extra sandwich with a homeless man. That's
Speaker 1: guys good. But examples of the types of bad deeds
Speaker 1: reported were arranging an adulterous encounter and quote hired someone
Speaker 1: to kill a musk rat that's not ultimately causing any harm. Well,
Speaker 1: I feel I can feel good then that I have
Speaker 1: not done either of those things this week, right, So
Speaker 1: maybe you should license yourself to do something evil because
Speaker 1: you haven't had a muskrat assassinated. I like that they
Speaker 1: were just arranging an adulterous encounter that because that brings
Speaker 1: to mind and maybe they were not engaged in it,
Speaker 1: but they just orchestrated the the rendezvous. Oh well, I
Speaker 1: mean that was the A lot of after the Ashley
Speaker 1: Madison leak, A lot of people had this defense, right,
Speaker 1: like I was sort of seeking an affair, but I
Speaker 1: never actually had one. Um. But anyway, so what did
Speaker 1: they find in this study? They found over the broad
Speaker 1: statistics of the study, religious and non religious people committed
Speaker 1: both moral and immoral acts with about the same frequency.
Speaker 1: There just really wasn't a big difference in how they acted.
Speaker 1: So these are what we've just talked about moral philosophy
Speaker 1: and ethics and in religion. These are not arguments against
Speaker 1: adhering to a religion or studying moral philosophy. It's not
Speaker 1: like saying you know that those are bad things to do.
Speaker 1: It's just certainly not clear that either of these will
Speaker 1: put you on the path to moral excellence. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: keep coming back to the suit of armor um analogy
Speaker 1: I made earlier. It's I guess the way to look
Speaker 1: at it is taking on a religious faith or even
Speaker 1: just kind of pseudo religious faith, or a new age
Speaker 1: a way of looking at it, any kind of worldview.
Speaker 1: It's not an exoskeleton that's going to power your body.
Speaker 1: It's it's more in line with a suit of armor, clothing,
Speaker 1: a mapping system, some sort of framework for how moral
Speaker 1: behavior can work. But you're still going to have to
Speaker 1: move in that thing yourself. You have to use. Your
Speaker 1: muscles are going to be the thing making you walk
Speaker 1: across the room. Yeah, I think that's a really good analogy.
Speaker 1: It's just like the ethics thing In both cases, the
Speaker 1: religion and the study of ethics might give you clearer
Speaker 1: ideas about what you think your moral goals should be.
Speaker 1: But in order to get the motivation to follow through
Speaker 1: on your moral convention convictions you're you just might need
Speaker 1: some better tricks, better tricks up your sleeve, and we
Speaker 1: might find find these tricks in studying psychology. So what
Speaker 1: do we know about the human brain and moral behavior?
Speaker 1: And are there anyways we can use science to trick
Speaker 1: the former into the ladder? Okay, okay, So we're now
Speaker 1: going to be looking at some scientific studies about factors
Speaker 1: that correlate to or per it's even cause differences in
Speaker 1: how we practice moral behavior towards others. And I think
Speaker 1: one of the biggest areas that's been studied in this
Speaker 1: field is generosity, that the act of giving and giving
Speaker 1: more to others, taking you know, self sacrificially offering to
Speaker 1: other people things that can help them. And there have
Speaker 1: been lots and lots of studies in this field, right, Yes,
Speaker 1: there have, and certainly we're not gonna be able to
Speaker 1: explore all of them today. Yeah, but we're going to
Speaker 1: try to offer a selection of some that we found interesting.
Speaker 1: And that might be useful in coming up with strategies
Speaker 1: of improving your moral behavior. And one of the findings
Speaker 1: has to do with how we respond to the idea
Speaker 1: of the victim in in the case where somebody needs
Speaker 1: generosity or somebody could benefit from your health. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: is from a paper Sympathy and Callousness The Impact of
Speaker 1: deliberative Thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims, And
Speaker 1: this is published in the General Organizational behavi if you're
Speaker 1: in human Performance. So the study basically looked at the
Speaker 1: whole face of the tragedy angle. Yeah, and you can
Speaker 1: probably be familiar with this just from your experience. Right,
Speaker 1: there's sort of you know that old quote, uh that
Speaker 1: one death is a tragedy, a million deaths or a
Speaker 1: statistic Yeah, it sort of goes along those lines, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This boils down to the you know, the common fact
Speaker 1: that if a tragedy occurs somewhere in the world, what
Speaker 1: are you going to respond to. You're gonna respond to
Speaker 1: a statistical breakdown about how many people are suffering and
Speaker 1: what happened, or are you going to respond to that
Speaker 1: one evocative photo of a single individual who's suffering? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it, you know it. It shouldn't be the case,
Speaker 1: but it is the case that the former is true.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you care about helping one person, you
Speaker 1: should care a hundred times as much about helping a
Speaker 1: hundred people, right, But that is not, in fact the case,
Speaker 1: That is not what our brains do. Yeah, this study
Speaker 1: found that when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable
Speaker 1: victims but failed to generate sympathy towards statistical victims. So
Speaker 1: some of the key takeaways from from this study where
Speaker 1: that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in
Speaker 1: giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has a perverse effect.
Speaker 1: Individuals give less to identifiable victims, but they don't actually
Speaker 1: increase giving to statistical victims. So no, so this is
Speaker 1: not just what we mentioned, but the fact that thinking
Speaker 1: about it deliberately doesn't help. In fact, it makes you
Speaker 1: less generous. Yeah, I guess it's kind of like you
Speaker 1: see through what were the old TV ads where for
Speaker 1: just pennies a day you can help this child. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't remember name the actors from what all in
Speaker 1: the family we do those commercials? No, it's true, you know,
Speaker 1: if there there's like a you know, Save the Children
Speaker 1: or something like that, they would say, this child is Jeffrey,
Speaker 1: you know, Jeffrey, Jeffrey needs help, when really the problem
Speaker 1: is that there are many, many children who are suffering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but the weird thing is that the study seems to
Speaker 1: indicate that we're more likely to want to help Jeffrey.
Speaker 1: But then if we are convinced that Jeffrey either isn't
Speaker 1: real or we're just like, that's just one kid and
Speaker 1: it's a seede problem going on, realizing that we don't
Speaker 1: actually want to we don't even want to help Jeffrey anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't want to hel Jeffrey, were we don't end
Speaker 1: up helping everyone else either, So it just kind of
Speaker 1: stalls out. Um. They they found that if organizations want
Speaker 1: to raise money for a charitable cause, it's far better
Speaker 1: to appeal to the heart with that photo of Jeffrey
Speaker 1: than to the head with you know, a full sort
Speaker 1: of MPR breakdown about who's suffering and what the needs
Speaker 1: are feeling, rather than analytical thinking drive donation. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of unfortunate because on one hand, you always
Speaker 1: want to provide people with the most true, accurate information possible. Right,
Speaker 1: But it turns out that in general, people respond more
Speaker 1: to perhaps a skewed, uh not fully curate picture of
Speaker 1: the problem. You're more likely to help if you haven't
Speaker 1: thought about the problem all that much, and you're responding
Speaker 1: emotionally to one particular anecdote about a particular person suffering
Speaker 1: rather than a true, you know, numerical representation of the
Speaker 1: scope of the problem and asked to think about it deliberately. Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, the takeaway from this though, might be that
Speaker 1: if you want to be more generous, focus on the
Speaker 1: focus on the anecdote, right, yeah, focus on and individuals,
Speaker 1: and and also like, don't give into the uh, don't
Speaker 1: don't give into the into the skepticism of or just
Speaker 1: the negativity of saying, hey, you're trying to manipulate me
Speaker 1: with this picture of this uh, this child or this
Speaker 1: suffering individual, Like, I guess take it at face value. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, unless there's something shady going on, take it
Speaker 1: it face value that, Yeah, this is what's going on,
Speaker 1: and I need to emotionally connect with this. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: what's another finding about weird ways we might encourage trick
Speaker 1: our brains into being more generous. Well, one way is
Speaker 1: to endure ritual pain. Uh, ritual pain. Huh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh so uh. This is one that I
Speaker 1: actually was turned onto by another Ian magazine article, and
Speaker 1: this one came from anthropologists Dmitri Zagats and he was
Speaker 1: studying um uh in particularly, he was looking at Thia
Speaker 1: pussum Uh festival, which is a Hindu festival uh thaih
Speaker 1: Posum is a Hindu festival celebrate on the full moon
Speaker 1: in the Tamil month of Thai, and devotees prey and
Speaker 1: make vows, and when their prayers are answered, they fulfilled
Speaker 1: their vows by piercing parts of their bodies such as
Speaker 1: their cheeks, their tongues and backs before you know, carrying
Speaker 1: on the sacred vessel along a for a kilometer parade route.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, yeah, so it does sound painful. Yeah, he was. So.
Speaker 1: He was looking at this while and studying it while
Speaker 1: also contemplating the work of French sociologists. He kneeled dur Time,
Speaker 1: who argued in elementary forms of religious life, that's the
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve work that the collective performance of ritual generates
Speaker 1: a kind of electricity and a static state of shared
Speaker 1: excitement that he referred to as collective effervescence. So, taking
Speaker 1: that in mind, he looked to see what what kind
Speaker 1: of effects does this painful ritual have on behavior and
Speaker 1: in particularly generosity, he found quote, those who had participated
Speaker 1: in the extreme ritual gave twice as much as those
Speaker 1: who had taken part in collective collective prayer. He found
Speaker 1: the same high levels of generosity among those who had
Speaker 1: him him themselves gone through the painful activities, uh as
Speaker 1: as those who had just merely followed the procession and
Speaker 1: without actually engaging in self torture. So, as it turned out,
Speaker 1: the painful ritual boosted pro social behavior for its participants.
Speaker 1: Huh So, so you can look at this in a
Speaker 1: number of ways, right, I mean you could think that, well,
Speaker 1: maybe just the sort of ecstatic state of mind that
Speaker 1: this ritual puts you in primes you to to give more.
Speaker 1: Or you could look at this as a function of
Speaker 1: just sort of a secondary function of being deeply involved
Speaker 1: in a in a social and religious community, right yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, on one hand, yeah, you can also say
Speaker 1: that you know you're feeling this pain and therefore in pain,
Speaker 1: you're maybe more empathetic to the suffering of others, but
Speaker 1: indeed you're also putting yourself in this collective effervescence. You're
Speaker 1: allowing yourself to perhaps um catch generosity, to to to
Speaker 1: to catch it as if it were some sort of
Speaker 1: a disease or an illness. And that leads us to
Speaker 1: another thing that scientists have found about generosity, which is
Speaker 1: that to a certain extent, it's contagious. Yeah. We and
Speaker 1: it's actually in specific ways that it's contagious. There are
Speaker 1: other ways in which its apparently not contagious us. But yeah,
Speaker 1: what if people found about the social contagion of generosity, Well,
Speaker 1: there was there's a paper the Social Contagion of Generosity
Speaker 1: my Molina Teviskova and Michael W. Macy, and they basically
Speaker 1: looked at two ways that you can encounter generosity. Either
Speaker 1: you're you've you've been a recipient, or you've watched someone
Speaker 1: else receive it. And they found that receiving help can
Speaker 1: increase the willingness to be generous towards others, but merely
Speaker 1: observing help can have the opposite effect, especially among those
Speaker 1: who have not received help yet. So it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, what's what's the word like, you know,
Speaker 1: passing the buck on, passing it, playing it forward or
Speaker 1: something it pay forward. The book stops here because I
Speaker 1: don't practice generosity to anyone. No, yeah, yeah, they there.
Speaker 1: I think there's a horrible movie about that in there.
Speaker 1: I believe that I have not seen it, so I
Speaker 1: can't pass judgment on it. But yeah, but the idea
Speaker 1: is that somebody who has had a kind thing done
Speaker 1: for them is more likely to do a kind thing
Speaker 1: for somebody else. And that was actually that was That
Speaker 1: finding was replicated in the paper Morality in Everyday Life,
Speaker 1: the same paper I talked about earlier. Yeah, that found
Speaker 1: the text message. When that found no major difference between
Speaker 1: religious and non religious people, it also found um support
Speaker 1: for moral contagion. They found that people who benefited from
Speaker 1: a moral deed were more likely to do something moral
Speaker 1: for somebody else later on. So you could potentially talk
Speaker 1: this up for being an argument for being a part of,
Speaker 1: if not a religious community, and some sort of close
Speaker 1: community that engages in generous activity right or even each other.
Speaker 1: And then also to outsiders. I mean, if you really
Speaker 1: wanted to trick your brain this way, you could set
Speaker 1: up a relationship with somebody where you say, hey, you're
Speaker 1: gonna be my generosity contagion buddy, and every day you're
Speaker 1: gonna do three nice things for me that I didn't
Speaker 1: expect that will maybe prime me to just be a
Speaker 1: more generous person for the rest of the world. So, like,
Speaker 1: pretend you're a vagrant, as if you're a character in
Speaker 1: a Sherlock home story. Uh, and then when people are
Speaker 1: generous to you, this will instill generosity in yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be. But at the same time, if you
Speaker 1: want to trick your brain into being more generous, apparently
Speaker 1: you shouldn't watch people being generous to others because that
Speaker 1: you can just kind of diffuse the responsibility there. You know,
Speaker 1: you watch somebody else doing some community work and you think,
Speaker 1: oh that's nice. Well, I'm glad those people are getting
Speaker 1: the help they need. I can go, you know, kick
Speaker 1: somebody down the flight of stairs. Yeah, or maybe even thinking, hey,
Speaker 1: nobody's helping me out, Well go on and do my thing.
Speaker 1: One more funny thing I found about generosity I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna spend a lot of time on. This was just
Speaker 1: the finding that supposedly there are gender differences in what
Speaker 1: encourages people to be more generous, and there's a study
Speaker 1: that found that apparently men are more likely to donate
Speaker 1: to the poor if reminded that doing so indirectly benefits
Speaker 1: them as well as opposed to other encouraging justifications like oh,
Speaker 1: the person really deserves the help, or they've had a
Speaker 1: hard time. Men are most likely to donate if you
Speaker 1: make the case to them that the donation is good
Speaker 1: for the donor. Okay, so if you need to trick
Speaker 1: yourself with that in mind, you can certainly use that
Speaker 1: from an influtive purposes. Well, let's move on to another quality, honesty. Honesty, Uh, Robert,
Speaker 1: don't want to put you in a scenario. Imagine I
Speaker 1: give you a die, like a gambling die, and I
Speaker 1: tell you that I'm going to pay you a sum
Speaker 1: of money corresponding to the number of your role. So
Speaker 1: the higher your role, the higher the payout. Six dots
Speaker 1: gets you the most money, the cyclops I gets you
Speaker 1: the least. And I ask you to roll your die
Speaker 1: once so that I can't see it, and this is
Speaker 1: the money roll. And then I allow you to roll
Speaker 1: the die a few more times, just so you can
Speaker 1: rest assured that the die is not loaded. It's a
Speaker 1: regular die. You can roll whatever number, and then I
Speaker 1: ask you via a computer terminal to enter the number
Speaker 1: from your initial money role. I remember nobody saw the role,
Speaker 1: but you you can enter any number you want. But
Speaker 1: should you be honest how much money we're talking here? Show? Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's say that I'm giving you about two fifty
Speaker 1: or three bucks per per dot on the die, okay,
Speaker 1: and then we're telling them all up. Yeah, Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: in that case, I'm probably gonna be inclined to just
Speaker 1: play by the rules because I'm gonna win some money,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna lose some money, and uh, there's not really
Speaker 1: any advantage in tweaking in my favorite. But if you're
Speaker 1: not gonna lose any money, well, I mean, but I
Speaker 1: am going to lose out on a maximum payout. But
Speaker 1: the amount you could lose by not by not reporting
Speaker 1: is not that much as you could get up to
Speaker 1: what like eighteen bucks maybe here? Yeah okay, but if
Speaker 1: it were for a single amount, if we were doing
Speaker 1: one die roll for say three d bucks, and and
Speaker 1: I didn't have it in my head that this is
Speaker 1: like coming out of your pocket, that this wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: hurt anybody that basically you had three d dollars to
Speaker 1: spend on this experiment, then yeah, I would definitely lie
Speaker 1: about it. So there's a price on your honesty. If
Speaker 1: there is a price on my honesty, if it does
Speaker 1: not hurt anyone, sure, yeah, I mean it would be
Speaker 1: different if it was like I really wanted to, yeah,
Speaker 1: take my wife out to dinner for our anniversary, but
Speaker 1: I'm also going to do this crazy dice game instead. Well,
Speaker 1: let's go back to about two fifty per per dot.
Speaker 1: Imagine this under two different scenarios. Number one, you can
Speaker 1: take as long as you want to enter the number
Speaker 1: into the computer, You do your roles, and you can
Speaker 1: just sit there and enter it whenever you want. The
Speaker 1: other scenario is you have to enter it very quickly,
Speaker 1: like within some number of seconds. Does this change what happens?
Speaker 1: M So I'm gonna have less time to decide if
Speaker 1: online or not. In that case, I probably tempted to
Speaker 1: just enter the truth. Yeah. Funny you should say that,
Speaker 1: because actually there's a study from Psychological Science in that
Speaker 1: found exactly the opposite. They found. The paper was tall
Speaker 1: called honesty requires time and lack of justifications. By h
Speaker 1: Shall shall Vie or the Elder and Yoela Barebi Meyer.
Speaker 1: And they found that people who could take as long
Speaker 1: as they wanted ended up being more honest. But wait,
Speaker 1: you might be asking, how did they know how honest
Speaker 1: people were being if they couldn't see the die uh.
Speaker 1: And here this is an interesting fact about the study.
Speaker 1: They just used the power of statistics over many roles.
Speaker 1: The average die roll will will begin to converge on
Speaker 1: the natural average of three point five. You can do
Speaker 1: the math yourself, you know, add up one through six
Speaker 1: and then divide by six possible possibilities. The average should
Speaker 1: be three point five. So if you try this with
Speaker 1: many participants and you notice at the end that their
Speaker 1: average is much higher than three point five, you can
Speaker 1: be pretty much certain that they're lying. We can assume
Speaker 1: almost nobody lied to reduce their payout. Uh. Thus the
Speaker 1: answers consisted always of a mix of truthful reports and
Speaker 1: then deceitful inflated reports. So they did one experiment where
Speaker 1: they forced people to enter their result within twenty seconds,
Speaker 1: and then of course they gave people as much time
Speaker 1: as they wanted and for the for the people who
Speaker 1: had to enter their role within twenty seconds, they found
Speaker 1: an average of four point six people were really really
Speaker 1: entering those sixes. And then they found that people who
Speaker 1: did not have any time pressure integ roll of three
Speaker 1: point nine. So both groups inflated their averages, but the
Speaker 1: people who had more time to deliberate, who didn't have
Speaker 1: a time constraint, were more honest they lied less. And
Speaker 1: then they did a separate experiment where they did it again,
Speaker 1: but they just gave people eight seconds, so even less
Speaker 1: time to make the decision. The people who had eight
Speaker 1: seconds had an average of four point four, so a
Speaker 1: little bit less than the people who had twenty seconds,
Speaker 1: But the people who had no time limit reported an
Speaker 1: average of three point four, so pretty much right on
Speaker 1: the average. So basically there's any Without time to reflect,
Speaker 1: people are going to default to cheating. Yes, So to
Speaker 1: take home here would be think long and hard about
Speaker 1: your moral decisions, and that will perhaps lead you to
Speaker 1: the more moral choice. Well, though that might not necessarily
Speaker 1: be the case with something like generosity. This is a
Speaker 1: funny thing where our our our decision to be moral,
Speaker 1: and the way we hack our brain to follow through
Speaker 1: with it is different depending on what moral quality we're
Speaker 1: trying to encourage. According to this study, the longer and
Speaker 1: more deliberately you think about something, probably the more honest
Speaker 1: you're going to be, the less likely to cheat you're
Speaker 1: going to be. But on the other one, you know,
Speaker 1: we we saw we saw the deliberative thinking about generosity
Speaker 1: made people less generous. Yeah. And in fact, there's a
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen study from the University of Missouri, Columbia,
Speaker 1: and they their findings actually say, trust your gut, don't
Speaker 1: think about it, just go with your gut instinct, and
Speaker 1: that's liable to be the more moral choice. How did
Speaker 1: that work out? Well? And I should know that the
Speaker 1: moral choice here within the framework of the experiment relates
Speaker 1: to to cheating. Uh. So they took a hundred individuals,
Speaker 1: they gave him a questionnaire to determine their their base
Speaker 1: dependency on gut instincts, and then they read them stories
Speaker 1: in which they they make a mistake uh and blame
Speaker 1: a co worker, and in the control group they take
Speaker 1: full responsibility for the mistake. So their findings were, first
Speaker 1: of all, the individuals who are prone to trust their
Speaker 1: instinctive hunches may at times be less likely to commit
Speaker 1: im moral acts compared to those who tend to discount
Speaker 1: their intuition. So yeah, if you're the type of person
Speaker 1: who says, is this the right choice? Is probably not
Speaker 1: the right choice, then you're probably gonna end up flipping right. Uh.
Speaker 1: They also found that people who tend to rely on
Speaker 1: their gut instincts are less likely to cheat after reflecting
Speaker 1: on past experiences during which they behaved in more like okay,
Speaker 1: And then they did a second experiment and potestimants were
Speaker 1: asked to write about a time they acted in morally
Speaker 1: um or a control topic with control group, and then
Speaker 1: they were asked to take an unsolvable i Q test.
Speaker 1: People who tended to rely on their gut feelings, uh,
Speaker 1: they found are less likely to cheat after reflecting on
Speaker 1: a time when they behaved im morally. And the theory
Speaker 1: here is that people try to compensate for past bad
Speaker 1: behavior by acting morally in the present. So you might
Speaker 1: be if you're a person who follows your gut instincts,
Speaker 1: you might be more likely to tell the truth if
Speaker 1: you think about a time you were dishonest in the past. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of depends on what your gut instinct tends
Speaker 1: to be. What's your base gut instinct. If your your
Speaker 1: gut instinct is always to lie about your your die roll,
Speaker 1: then you know, stick with it and know what you know,
Speaker 1: your gut know if your gut is uh is good
Speaker 1: or even right? Well, I mean that that gut instinct.
Speaker 1: It sounds like what they're talking about to me is
Speaker 1: what we would call conscience, right that you you can
Speaker 1: have rational deliberative processes about thinking about what's the thing
Speaker 1: to do? Should I do this? Should I not do it?
Speaker 1: But then there's also that sort of involuntary uh, that
Speaker 1: that internal critic that you don't even really have control over.
Speaker 1: It's just the thing that nags at you that tells
Speaker 1: you you really shouldn't do this. That sounds like the
Speaker 1: kind of gut feeling to me, right, Yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like mindfulness is a good take on from either of these,
Speaker 1: Like the greater extent to which you are just mindful
Speaker 1: of uh, the voices going on and the temptations and
Speaker 1: what's coloring your responses uh can be a great aid
Speaker 1: in making the correct moral choice. Yeah, Okay, I got
Speaker 1: another one. What about forgiveness? Is there any science related
Speaker 1: to forgiving others, not holding grudges and letting things go
Speaker 1: there is, and this is one that's uh, that's that's
Speaker 1: always fascinated me because because I I can be I'm
Speaker 1: tired about holding onto my grudges sometimes and and I
Speaker 1: don't want to hold onto them, you know, because grudges
Speaker 1: are horrible. They weigh you down, They feel your thought.
Speaker 1: You find yourself thinking about like somebody from high school
Speaker 1: that you hated, even though like that person, they don't
Speaker 1: even exist anymore in your life, but they're still caring
Speaker 1: weight on your conscious. Just get real happy when you
Speaker 1: see that person from my school posts something embarrassing on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's sort of thing. I feel like everyone can can
Speaker 1: relate to this on some point. You know, you end
Speaker 1: up keeping your Nixon enemy list in your head and
Speaker 1: and that you cling to it, but you really you
Speaker 1: don't want it in your life. You want to forget it.
Speaker 1: And uh. There's actually a two thousand fourteen study from
Speaker 1: the University of St. Andrews in Scotland that was published
Speaker 1: in Psychological Science, and they found that the details of
Speaker 1: a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression
Speaker 1: has been forgiven. So this is interesting when you think
Speaker 1: of unforgiven transgressions that might play out in your head.
Speaker 1: You know, that's essentially an unchecked off mental list because
Speaker 1: remembers we've discussed before. Uncompleted tasks also stick in the mind,
Speaker 1: right that. Let's that the zigarnic effect. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: you can see this applying to for fiveness. I'm yet
Speaker 1: to forgive that person, so they're right in my head
Speaker 1: and you've gotta wake up. Yeah, you've got a box
Speaker 1: that isn't checked yet. And or I have not avenged myself.
Speaker 1: I have not murdered them in their sleep and dumped
Speaker 1: their body in a creek exactly. I mean, no matter
Speaker 1: what happens to that person, I don't know. I think
Speaker 1: I would go with the Kung Fu movie mentality on
Speaker 1: this is you haven't really solved the problem until you've
Speaker 1: either forgiven them or they're dead, killed them or at
Speaker 1: least dead to you. If you can just if you
Speaker 1: can just completely like wipe them off, then then that
Speaker 1: works too, I guess, right, And since we're not advocating
Speaker 1: vengeful murder here, that the solution would seem to be forgiveness.
Speaker 1: And then there's also a two thousand fifteen study from
Speaker 1: the University of Missouri Columbia. They found it forgiving others
Speaker 1: protects women from depression, but not men, thus pointing to
Speaker 1: the importance of gender specific counseling or treatment. So they
Speaker 1: found that older women who forgave others were less likely
Speaker 1: to report depressive symptoms regardless of whether they felt unforgiven
Speaker 1: by others themselves, while older men reported the highest levels
Speaker 1: depression when they both forgave others and felt unforgiven by others.
Speaker 1: So they found that They also found that, while helpful,
Speaker 1: self forgiveness didn't act as the protector against depression in
Speaker 1: the case of the unforgiven mental state. So this kind
Speaker 1: of plays into the whole addags like, oh, you have
Speaker 1: to forgive yourself before you can, you know, move past
Speaker 1: some traumatic occurrence. Like there's a little truth to that,
Speaker 1: but some people are just way too good at forgiving themselves.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah. Some people are like that's the that's
Speaker 1: the easy part. Like they did that the second after
Speaker 1: it happened, right, you know, You're like, don't beat yourself up,
Speaker 1: and they're like, yeah, good advice. And then there's also
Speaker 1: some research from Ohio State University that suggests that people
Speaker 1: who have trouble metabolizing glucose in their bodies show more
Speaker 1: evidence of aggression and less willingness to forgive others. So
Speaker 1: they have this, uh, this transgression in their mind and
Speaker 1: they're just they have just more of an aggressive response
Speaker 1: to it, and that there may be a um, A
Speaker 1: body chemistry a scenario underlying it. They point out though,
Speaker 1: that the potential problem here is the number of people
Speaker 1: who have trouble metabolizing glucose, mainly individuals with diabetes, is
Speaker 1: rising rapidly. From nineteen through two thousand eight, the number
Speaker 1: of Americans with diabetes more than triple five point six
Speaker 1: million to eighteen point one million. Well, that sounds like
Speaker 1: a difficult thing to turn into a recommendation for somebody's behaviors,
Speaker 1: Like manage your internal blood sugar so that you don't
Speaker 1: have blood sugar problems and that will make you less
Speaker 1: aggressive to others. I mean, it's good to have good
Speaker 1: blood sugar in any case. Um, And here is maybe
Speaker 1: another benefit of that, Yeah, I mean potentially boosting glucose
Speaker 1: levels could reduce some you know, temporary aggressive behavior. So
Speaker 1: I don't know, if you're feeling a little unforgiving of
Speaker 1: someone half sucker, have a put a little extra honey
Speaker 1: in your tea and see how that that suits you,
Speaker 1: I guess, but sugar yourself responsible? Yes, indeed. Now out
Speaker 1: here's another one that I found pretty interesting, offering the
Speaker 1: observation that it might be true that altruism, you know,
Speaker 1: the giving, giving to others, being kind and supportive of
Speaker 1: other people, is encouraged by a feeling of awe. And
Speaker 1: so this is a May paper in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Personality and Social Psychology called AWE, the Small Self and
Speaker 1: pro Social Behavior. They found that the feeling of awe
Speaker 1: may cause people to behave more altruistically than they normally would.
Speaker 1: The paper was by Paul piff, Pia Dietz, Matthew Feinberg,
Speaker 1: and Daniel Stencado and Donker Keltner and so uh. They
Speaker 1: offer a couple of things in terms of defining AWE.
Speaker 1: Just a couple of quotes from the paper here. One
Speaker 1: is that firsthand accounts of awe felt during experiences with
Speaker 1: religion and spirituality, nature, art, and music often center upon
Speaker 1: two themes, the feeling of being diminished in the presence
Speaker 1: of something greater than the self, and the motivation to
Speaker 1: be good to others. Uh. And and they define all
Speaker 1: by saying, it's an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli
Speaker 1: that defy one's accustomed frame of reference in some domain.
Speaker 1: So you know what all is, he's thinking about the
Speaker 1: scale of the universe, looking at a sunset or watching
Speaker 1: a volcano erupt or you know, seeing things that are
Speaker 1: vast and huge and powerful and make you realize the
Speaker 1: smallness and powerlessness of yourself. Yea, so Pif and colleagues.
Speaker 1: They first got a sample of people to complete a
Speaker 1: questionnaire to see how susceptible to all they were. They
Speaker 1: played a game where they were given a number of
Speaker 1: raffle tickets and they had the opportunity to share them
Speaker 1: with other people who didn't have raffle tickets of their own.
Speaker 1: And the researchers found, first of all, a correlation between
Speaker 1: people who reported a tendency to feel awe and generosity.
Speaker 1: So if you're one of these people who is likely
Speaker 1: to have experiences of awe, you're more likely to be generous.
Speaker 1: Then they conducted four more experiments involving individual behavior tests,
Speaker 1: so people in an experimental group would be given an
Speaker 1: experience designed to induce AWE, such as watching a slow
Speaker 1: motion video of droplets of water splashing into milk, or
Speaker 1: watching a montage of large scale natural threats like tornadoes
Speaker 1: and volcanoes, or being in the presence of huge eucalyptus trees,
Speaker 1: and yeah, exactly, and the the what the koala bears?
Speaker 1: Feeling awe at the way they grip my skin? And
Speaker 1: so the control groups were subjected to neutral experiences or
Speaker 1: experiences designed to cause other emotions like maybe pride or something,
Speaker 1: and what they found was, Yes, the experience of self
Speaker 1: diminishment we call awe does seem to cause people to
Speaker 1: behave more altruistically towards others. You know, thinking back, I
Speaker 1: can definitely relate to this idea of of of awe
Speaker 1: and altruism. Uh specifically, Um, I've never been to Burning Man,
Speaker 1: but I have been to some regional burns. You know,
Speaker 1: there's kind of like offshoots of it. And at these places,
Speaker 1: the ones I've been to, there's a they have a
Speaker 1: gift economy where ideally nobody's gonna be selling this that
Speaker 1: the other you're sharing food, or there's more of a
Speaker 1: you know, an openness and just how you relate to
Speaker 1: each other. And I remember just you know, just stepping
Speaker 1: into that and then growing accustomed to this, uh, this
Speaker 1: environment where suddenly you're you're smiling and saying hi to
Speaker 1: everybody instead of you know, just sort of the head down,
Speaker 1: eyes on your your feet approach to taking public transportation
Speaker 1: in a large metropolitan area. Like it just it's it's
Speaker 1: it is kind of awesome. You find yourself realizing whoa
Speaker 1: we can People can live like this, People can interact
Speaker 1: with each other in a different way and on a
Speaker 1: smaller level, like when you when you go to help
Speaker 1: somebody and you you're closer to like their pain, either
Speaker 1: suffering or whatever's going in their life. That can also
Speaker 1: be this moment of where you're you realize, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not all about me, it's also see the whole. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you kind of do that powers attend zoom out from
Speaker 1: your own life. You know. What this study reminded me
Speaker 1: of was something I had read about in the past,
Speaker 1: known as the overview effect and literature about it, which
Speaker 1: which has to do with a commonly reported feeling that
Speaker 1: that astronauts talk about once they've been to space and
Speaker 1: seeing the Earth from above. Yeah. Yeah, the according to
Speaker 1: YESA and NASSA reports, we're talking about euphoric feelings that
Speaker 1: involved quote new insight into the meaning of life and
Speaker 1: the unity of mankind A Paulo fourteen astronaut edgar Mitchell
Speaker 1: described this sensation as the overview effect. And uh, and
Speaker 1: I and I have a nice summer of this from
Speaker 1: Discovery Space um writer and I believe I still had
Speaker 1: editor over their een O'Neil who used to used to
Speaker 1: work with he explains. He explains it as as follows. Quote.
Speaker 1: He described this and sensation gave him a profound sense
Speaker 1: of connectedness with a feeling of bliss and timelessness. He
Speaker 1: was overwhelmed by the experience. He became profoundly aware that
Speaker 1: each and every atom in the universe was connected in
Speaker 1: some way, and on seeing Earth from space, he had
Speaker 1: an understanding that all the humans, animals, and systems were
Speaker 1: a part of the same thing, a synergistic whole. It
Speaker 1: was an interconnected euphoria because the Earth is so small
Speaker 1: and and we're up above it in the spaceship. Essentially, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's hard to imagine anything more literally all
Speaker 1: inspiring than that, right, I mean that that's almost perfectly
Speaker 1: the definition of awe Uh. Realizing the smallness being diminished
Speaker 1: in the face of of incomparably vast phenomena when you're
Speaker 1: in space and you suddenly realized that Earth isn't the universe,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a tiny rock, and where these tiny
Speaker 1: creatures occupying the surface of the rock. Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: certainly see how that would be sort of the ultimate
Speaker 1: experience of awe, and how it could cause one to
Speaker 1: I don't know, to just allow all of the petty
Speaker 1: squabbles of human life too, to dissolve into this this nothingness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it. It's one of those things that interrupts
Speaker 1: the sort of me, me me narrative, that default mode
Speaker 1: network that goes on in her mind. It kind of
Speaker 1: comes back to mindfulness, you know, just getting out of
Speaker 1: your own story. And if it takes going into space
Speaker 1: to do that, if it takes helping somebody out that
Speaker 1: I'm delivering a meal or something engaging in some level
Speaker 1: of altruistic behavior, then uh, then do it. Yeah, give
Speaker 1: it a give it a try. That would be my recommendation,
Speaker 1: not only to everyone else. I'm not, you know, just
Speaker 1: speaking on a podium here, like I I want to
Speaker 1: take that on myself as a challenge for the new
Speaker 1: year in a in an unofficial way, and not until February.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a good one. Uh. I want to
Speaker 1: encourage myself to be more altruistic by standing at the
Speaker 1: lip of a volcano and active one staring into it
Speaker 1: more often, more often at least than I do now.
Speaker 1: Um So, so we've we've talked about these studies and
Speaker 1: as we said at the beginning, we I mean, we
Speaker 1: can't even come close to covering the full breadth of
Speaker 1: studies in this area. Yeah, it's ongoing. We're gonna see
Speaker 1: a countless more in the years of fall how how
Speaker 1: psychology effects and influences moral behavior. But that's sort of
Speaker 1: just a sampling of the kind of research that's out there.
Speaker 1: And so I'm wondering if we can take any of
Speaker 1: the stuff we've looked at in this episode, the findings
Speaker 1: we've found it and turn them into strategies for tricking
Speaker 1: your brain into doing good. Well. I have a little
Speaker 1: bit of advice here, and this this comes from Charles
Speaker 1: do Higgs The Power of Habit, and he points out
Speaker 1: that every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a
Speaker 1: habit loop. And there it's a three part process. So
Speaker 1: first there's a queue or trigger that tells your brain
Speaker 1: to go into automatic mode and out of behavior unfold.
Speaker 1: And then there's routine, and finally there's rewards. Something that
Speaker 1: your your brain likes, helps it remember the habit loop
Speaker 1: in the future. Uh So, habit making behavior. All this
Speaker 1: ties to a part of the brain called the basil ganglia.
Speaker 1: This is where we find emotions and memories and pattern recognition,
Speaker 1: and the basil ganglia takes behavior and turns it into
Speaker 1: an automatic routine, kind of like a hot key for
Speaker 1: the human body. This this is what happens when this
Speaker 1: cemula presents itself the macro. Yeah, and that could be
Speaker 1: and when we say action, it could be an action,
Speaker 1: but we could also be just like this is the
Speaker 1: way I think in response to something. UM Now decisions
Speaker 1: on the other hand, or maybe a different part of
Speaker 1: the brain called the prefrontal cortex. But as soon as
Speaker 1: behavior becomes automatic, the decision making part of your brain
Speaker 1: goes into a sort of sleep mode. And and and
Speaker 1: and uh and it's important to know that environment and
Speaker 1: forces as well. So like if you go on a vacation,
Speaker 1: if you travel or go just go to a different environment.
Speaker 1: Um this can mix things up because you're changing the
Speaker 1: stimuli around you. And it's one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: they aations are a great place, a great time to
Speaker 1: focus on changing a habit because you're stepping outside of
Speaker 1: your normal stimuli. I think that sounds true. I found
Speaker 1: that to be true in my life. I think life
Speaker 1: changing decisions are often made at a time when you
Speaker 1: are not under your normal circumstances. Yeah. Um, I think
Speaker 1: this is This is an interesting way of looking at it.
Speaker 1: And one thing you could take away from this is
Speaker 1: that if you're talking about making deliberate decisions to change
Speaker 1: your moral behavior, they're not going to have to be
Speaker 1: deliberate decisions forever, right, right, They would just have to
Speaker 1: be You'd have to make that deliberate decision enough times
Speaker 1: long enough to establish a habit. And then once you've
Speaker 1: established a habit, you don't have to be so deliberate
Speaker 1: about it anymore. It's just the new way you do things, right,
Speaker 1: But just remember that the old way you do things
Speaker 1: and the environment in which you do them is going
Speaker 1: to be a hurdle to overcome in making that change,
Speaker 1: because you know, whatever you're planning to do stand in
Speaker 1: the edge of volcano, or share half your sandwich will
Speaker 1: with someone who's hungry. Uh, they're still gonna be that
Speaker 1: temptation to set in front of the Xbox and play
Speaker 1: a game instead when you see that little green eye
Speaker 1: staring at you. But maybe if the game you're playing
Speaker 1: on the Xbox is so awe inspiring that it really
Speaker 1: does diminish your sense of self, it would make you
Speaker 1: more altruistic. Maybe that sounds like a good a good
Speaker 1: uh premise for a study. Well, let's see. Let's let's
Speaker 1: design a video game to hit all of these features
Speaker 1: we've talked about. So you have a game that at
Speaker 1: the you have to enter your credit card information. In
Speaker 1: the game, it gives you all inspiring scenarios where you
Speaker 1: you see amazing, cosmic, powerful events that you have no
Speaker 1: control over. And then you're you're faced with a single
Speaker 1: anecdotal case of a person who's suffering rather than the
Speaker 1: whole statistical overview of the problem. And then the game
Speaker 1: forces you to endure a ritual pain ceremony. You have
Speaker 1: to go through a communal ceremony with that her it's
Speaker 1: your body. Then the game connects you with other users
Speaker 1: who do something nice for you, and you get to
Speaker 1: experience the contagion of generosity. H Then the game asks
Speaker 1: you to report your moral behavior to your social network,
Speaker 1: but gives you uh and lets you report, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever you want, but gives you enough time that you
Speaker 1: can sit there and be deliberate and think about it
Speaker 1: so that you're honest instead of immediately defaulting to cheat mode.
Speaker 1: All right, well, you know, I think throw in a
Speaker 1: few more cut scenes and we have the next metal
Speaker 1: Gear game. A yeah, yeah, metal Gear Charity. Charitable Snake
Speaker 1: is your character and it's it's particular, particular game. Now,
Speaker 1: now what kind of charitable organization would would a Metal
Speaker 1: Gear game? I don't know. It's a complicated question. They
Speaker 1: really get into some tense uh. Like there's a lot
Speaker 1: of tense real life stuff wrapped up in some of
Speaker 1: the more recent installments, right so I haven't played them.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I would guess it would maybe maybe
Speaker 1: relate to, uh, I mean, refugee scenarios of work, foreign regions.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're all they all deal with kind of
Speaker 1: guerilla situations and international wrongdoing. So do they still have
Speaker 1: giant robots? Would you build a giant robot that feeds
Speaker 1: the hungry. I think they're still a giant robots. They
Speaker 1: tend to occur at the end of the game, and
Speaker 1: I burn out before I get so I see. So
Speaker 1: they're just kind of like the gods of metal gear
Speaker 1: that I never actually witnessed. Okay, well, uh, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier a couple of times, you know this, this
Speaker 1: is a big field, and maybe this is a field
Speaker 1: where we will have the chance to return to it
Speaker 1: in the future. There I'm sure gonna be plenty more
Speaker 1: studies coming out all the time about psychology and moral behavior,
Speaker 1: and maybe we can revisit the topic then. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: you know, on the subject of charity, supposed to be
Speaker 1: something interesting to discuss in a maybe a future listener
Speaker 1: mail topic. If there's a particular charity that's near and
Speaker 1: dear to your heart, you know, like a vetted charity
Speaker 1: of some sort, let us know about it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of fun to share these out and spread the
Speaker 1: word about about some of the causes out there in
Speaker 1: the world. Yeah, please do. And one last thing at
Speaker 1: this time of year, good luck with your New Year's resolution,
Speaker 1: whatever it is, self serving or not. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: you don't get it in January, just pick it up
Speaker 1: the next month for Chinese New Year. That's what I
Speaker 1: do in the meantime. Check out Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That's we find. All of our episodes
Speaker 1: are videos, blog post links out to social media accounts
Speaker 1: were we're on Facebook and Twitter as Blow the Mind,
Speaker 1: We're in tumbler as Stuff to Blow your Mind. Follow
Speaker 1: us on those uh on those formats if you use them,
Speaker 1: and if you want to get in touch with us,
Speaker 1: was in a feedback on this or other recent episodes?
Speaker 1: Or if you want to let us know what your
Speaker 1: favorite charity is or what your New Year's resolution is,
Speaker 1: you can email us at Blow the Mind the house,
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Well more on this and passons
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