35. Dr. Tali Sharot — The Influential Mind: What the Brain Reveals About our Power to Change Others

This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Alon, a series of conversations with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time. One, to give our viewers a little bit of background of where you're from and how you got interested in science in general and experimental science, experimental psychology, and neuroscience. Well, I was born in Israel in Jerusalem and I spent most of my childhood in Israel. My father was a professor of sociology or religion. Oh, really? And he's English. And so we did good as sabbaticals in the U.S. and the UK. So I had a bit of an international upbringing, but mostly in Israel. Right? So then I did my my service in the Israeli Air Force, which one has to do if you're in Israel, at least it isn't? Yeah. And that was followed by my undergrad until the university. And I always wanted to study the brain. There was kind of a fascination. I guess it's a fascination with human behavior, understanding oneself and other people as well and to understand that. The best way to go is try to understand the brain. But funny enough at the time, which this was like the mid 90s, there wasn't a neuroscience degree in Israel at all. And I thought, well, how do I go about it? And I originally signed up to do math and chemistry. And then I went in for the first day and I saw kind of all the courses and it sounded a bit boring and I said, well, maybe I'll rethink that. Change of mind, actually, somebody asked me about when was the time that I changed the mind. So then I just decided to take psychology and economics instead without knowing anything about behavior and economics. I mean, it was quite early days for that. But we did study Daniel Kahneman and Traverski. So Kahneman's from Israel. Yes. Yes. He's the only psychologist ever win a Nobel Prize because it's in economics because he was doing behavioral economics, which at that time was not even really a thing. Yeah. So that was the beginning of that. And then once I was done with my undergrad, actually, I did work in the financial industry for a little bit before I could start my PhD, both in Israel and in New York. So I was on Wall Street for a bit and then started my PhD in neuroscience, well, psychology and neuroscience really. And that was kind of the combination between neuroscience, economics and psychology. What did you do on Wall Street? Well, it was more of a kind of a consulting. So first I worked in Tel Aviv and it was consulting two outside companies and then in Wall Street, it was inside. So it was sort of behavior and finance together. Right. And your current research is along the lines of what you're talking about in the book. Yeah. So my lab studies decision making and effects of emotion on decision making and beliefs and social influence as well on your decisions and on your beliefs. And I combine neuroscience with experimental psychology. Right. Well, I think the avenue into your book that interests me the most is this idea of how to change others, how to influence others. In two domains, one, most broadly, socially, culturally and then another individually. And I'll give you the backstory to that in a moment. But I mean, one of our activist trends for the skeptics movement is to counter creationism, counter climate denial, denial, counter the anti-vaxxers. And as you know, it appears that just giving them the facts just doesn't do it. You know, you can lay out all the data sets. You can show the studies on vaccines and you can show them the fossil record in the DNA for evolution and all that. And you know, just they don't seem to care. And in fact, it doesn't seem like people know all that much about it one way or the other. Even if you say I believe in evolution, I accept vaccines. If I ask the average person, can you explain natural selection that they can't? So I think a lot of what we just accept or don't accept is something not to do with the facts, which is what you do. So if you're at a cocktail party, you, and somebody says, you know, that climate denial, stuff is Chinese hoax, or you know, I think the scientists have exaggerated, you know, what do you say, short of just giving a data dump of how we know it's true? Yeah, it's funny because this book is basically trying to use the facts to convince you that the facts are not enough to convince anyone. But hopefully I do a little bit of what I appreciate, which is not just the facts, just the information. Exactly as you say, you know, people's beliefs are not based only on the information available to them, the data available. It's also people's desires and wishes. And that is often much stronger than the evidence in self, right? So there's confirmation bias and wishful thinking and optimism bias. And the idea of this book is that we really need to take that into account when we're trying to convey evidence. So it's not to say that evidence and data is not important. So first of all, obviously, the scientists, it's important to find out what the truth is. And but it is to say that it's not enough to convince someone of the truth. So you have to think about things like the story that you're telling, the emotion that will be elicited in another person. What type of emotion for which purpose? So I talk, for example, you know, when is fear convincing? When is it not? Does hope is hope a stronger emotion to get people to change their beliefs? What is the priors that people already have? And that is extremely important. So for whatever reason, one has a prior, for example, and climate change, you just grew up in a family where people didn't believe in climate change for wherever reason. Well, it's going to be much more difficult to convince you otherwise with evidence. So that's important as well. And so I think, you know, every chapter talks about one factor, but I'll give you one example. So one important thing is can you convince the other person that changing their beliefs is good for their own motivation, right? That's really important. So I think I think this is a huge problem was trying to go against religion, for example. And actually I had that example in the book and it was, I deleted it in one of the drafts and it was from one of people in your group where the reason people, and one of the reasons that the religion is so popular and has been throughout the ages is because it gives people hope. And I know that I just read part of your new book because it is a new book. That's the one, yeah. The new book that you say, well, what others believe, why other people believe in religion is not what the people themselves say, why they believe, right? So and I think it's exactly you have this table where people think that other people believe in religion because of comfort and hope and things like that. When you ask people themselves, they actually say that's not the reason. But I have to say, I wasn't too convinced by the table because it's really hard for people to interest. That's right, yeah. People don't know why they believe. Right, so I'm saying that and I do take into account the point that you make in your book. It's form of the attribution bias. Yeah, exactly. So, right, I mean, so going back to that, people, you know, they believe in religion and in God one reasons because it gives them hope and it gives them maybe purpose and other things. It's not about facts. How could you have any facts in? Right. And the same goes for things like vaccinations and climate change. Take vaccines, for example. So I think one of the reasons that people, some people believe this idea that if I avoid vaccines, my kid won't get autism is because it gives you a sense of control. Control is very, very important. I have a whole chapter about control there. If the evidence suggests that you're expanding someone's agency, giving them control, they're much more likely to take that information into account. But if you're saying, well, it's out of your control, you can't do anything about it, you know, we don't know why why autism exists and what the causes are and there's nothing you can do to either prevent it. People are less likely to listen and take that in. So, well, I find that, for example, talking to a creationist, evolution isn't really the issue. It's, do I have to give up belief in Jesus and Christianity or whatever to accept this Darwin guy? You know, so if you give somebody a choice between Darwin and Jesus, you know, Darwin's going to lose every time. So, how do you take that out of the conversation? I mean, do you just bluntly say, keep your religion, keep Jesus, just accept the facts or what's the approach to take? Yeah, religion is tricky. So, it depends what your goal is. Is your goal to convince people that God doesn't exist? Is your goal to take away religion from people? Or perhaps your goal is to better outcomes in other ways. So, for example, you want to reduce violence because in some cases there is some kind of a correlation between the two. So, that kind of matters. Yes, yeah, absolutely. So, like the new atheist movement, since, you know, Dawkins published the God delusion in 2006 has been toward this anti-theism. Like, let's convert people to atheism. Atheism is anything. It's like, let's get them off the God drug and then they won't fly planes into buildings and, you know, things like that. Okay, maybe I'm not sure that. I'm not sure we're able to do that. I take Darwin's approach, which was to just promote science and just let the chips fall where they may from there. People may get to atheism that way or maybe not, but at least if they accept the science, we have a better society. So I think sometimes, and I actually have an example of this in my book that I would tell you about. So sometimes you can get to the same outcome, whatever that outcome is, without actually talking about the thing that people disagree on, or the thing that they have a motivation to believe. So take vaccines, for example. I talk about a study that was conducted at UCLA, actually, where they were saying, okay, people who don't want to vaccinate their kids, showing them the evidence has been shown not to work, right? That's a common approach that Dr. Stake and it's been shown not to have much in effect. Could we take another approach? Could we get to the outcome that we want, which is to have parents vaccinate their kids, without actually talking about what we don't agree on, which is autism, could we take another route? And that route is by highlighting, in this case, it was highlighting that vaccines actually protect kids from potentially deadly diseases, measles, mumps, rebella. And that's something that the parents didn't disagree on. There was no reason for them to disagree on, but it seemed to have been forgotten in the heat of their debate. So by focusing their attention on somewhat of a positive aspect that they can actually control, you can protect your kids from these deadly diseases, by vaccinating them, that had much larger effect on people's intention to vaccinate their kids. So for example, if we want to reduce terrorism, perhaps there's another way to go about it, rather just try to convince people that the religion doesn't exist, or, sorry, that God doesn't exist in the religion, it's not something. I'm very conflicted about this. I mean, my friend Sam Harris makes a pretty good argument that religion is what's largely behind terrorist attacks. Today, anyway, I mean, if we were talking 30 years ago, we'd be talking about, you know, atheist Marxist revolutionaries blowing things up. So it's not inevitable that it would be religion-driving terrorism, but it is at the moment. But is it? Or is it more political? I mean, it's a little bit of a sidebar, I guess, from your book, essentially. It's lived in Israel. You must have some sense of what's driving the anti-Israeli anti-Zionism movement. Is it- And the Zionist movement? Or the Zionist movement. If they didn't believe in the invisible guy in the sky, and if they didn't believe both sides that each was given a deed to the same peace of land, and they each have the deed that's holy and says this is our land, if you took that out, wouldn't it mostly go away? So, I think- I hope I remember the two points I'm about to make. But the first is, let's look at the Israeli side, for example. Israelis are willing to fight for their country. And back in the day, they fought for their country before Israel became Israel in some of ways that you may say is similar to the other side. And it wasn't because of religion. It was because of a sense of ideology, you know. So it wasn't necessarily because a person believes it doesn't believe in God. You have a lot of Zionists that don't believe in God of it. In fact, the two are not related at all. And yet people will fight for their country and for, you know, the right for Jews to have their own independent country. Right. And if you go back, you know, decades ago, they would also commit terrorist attack for that. So I'm not sure whether you take religion out of the equation. I mean, you say, well, it's too religion because they're Jews, but it's not about religion of God. It's more about in identity, right, in this particular case. And then the other, and to be clear, I am not religious, but you may say, well, maybe there is this connection between religion and let's say terrorism, to some degree in some groups. But of course, there's a lot of positive aspects as well. To religion, you mean? Yes. Manning the soup kitchens, taking care of the poor. That kind of thing. Yes. Yes, yes. Social support and that's one of the things. Right. Right. And as well as hope and so on. Yeah. A free parking. That's a church. A free parking. So why did you take that part out of the books, religion? It wasn't. It was just one example. It wasn't at all. I wasn't talking about religion. It was just one example where, and I forget the quote now, so I don't want to, but it was an example of someone trying to convince people that, you know, God doesn't exist. But in a way that was obviously going against their own motivations, the likelihood of the other person listening and taking in the information would be so low, rather than starting one of the points in the book. And I think it's an obvious one that we have to start from common ground, right? Go back to that vaccination example that we had. The common ground is that the parents and the physicians want the children to be healthy, right? Or other common ground. So it's, we kind of focus and that's definitely true today, but it's true always on the differences between individual, between us and whoever it is because that's kind of what pops out. But of course, we're much more similar. Right. So I mean, it's quite amazing to me how similar we are. We bring people into the lab and you do the experiments and they're more similar than different on almost any kind of tasks that you give them to do decision making and motion memory at the end of the day. So it is always possible to find a common ground because of human nature. We just have a common nature. Yeah. And actually, so a study that we did, it's just kind of writing and writing it up. We haven't been in the app of just before I came here, was one that shows that when you listen to someone who's agreeing with you, you're actually more likely to take in their information. So the brain encodes the information coming from an agreeing partner and also the strength of the evidence coming from the agreeing partner. So you can agree with me, but you can be very confident or less confident and you know, you're giving me a lot of information. So when you're coming from a agreeing position, the brain does a really good job in encoding. But if you're going to start by disagreeing with me, the brain actually shuts down, so to speak, you know, immediately and does not do a very good job at encoding the subtleties of what information you're giving me and the strength of the signals that you're conveying with me. So if I can find a way to, when I'm talking to a climate denier, say I completely agree with you on some of your points or something like that, you know, I'm on board with you. I'm pro capitalism or I love business too or I love free markets. And then move from there to some common ground, like we both want a better environment and we want to have profits for corporations or something like that. Yes. So is there actually a way by which you can have that person support what you need in order to reduce climate change perhaps without, perhaps I don't know, perhaps without going into whether it's manmade or not. One example. So there's different reasons why people don't believe in climate change. Yeah, one point Steve Pinker makes in his new book Enlightenment now is that Al Gore's film in Inconvenia Truth was not good for the scientific popularization and acceptance because then climate becomes associated with a liberal left wing democratic movement and that cuts off half the population right there. Right. It made it political. If it's Al Gore, it's then it's some left wing conspiracy against business or something like that. And we have to decouple it from that. Absolutely. And actually, so we have another study that is about to come out and this is with some of my students as well as cast signs thing where we show we have people do a task where they need to categorize shapes. So it's a really stupid task. You learn about shapes and you have to decide whether a shape is a black or not a black based on some kind of rule. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to learn about the rules and also you see how the other person performs. Is he good to categorize the shapes into blacks or not blacks? And then in the second part, you get to choose who you want to hear from about black. So you've just seen how well people have done and you can hear from them before you make your own decision. You're going to be paid how well you do. So you really want to choose a person who's good at blacks. But also the twist here is that you also learn about the political opinions. So there's a lot of questions in between these blacks about, you know, do you support immigration and so on. And what we see is that people are more likely to turn to the politically like-minded when they need advice about blacks than the politically people with political different opinions. They're more likely to use the advice coming from the politically similar individual about blacks. And this is partially because they don't do a very good job at learning how others are how accurate other people are about blacks because they also learn about the political orientation. So knowing about someone's political orientation interferes with your ability to assess their accuracy in a domain that has nothing to do with politics. Right. So I think, you know, this kind of example that you gave about climate change is somewhat related. The information is coming from someone who's either politically similar to us or politically dissimilar to us. Right. Because even to evaluate the both ways, I mean, it also people give bonus points to people who are similar to them politically when they talk about things that are not related to politics. So it, you know, of course, we agree with climate change. but you could imagine someone would come from the party that is similar to you and start talking about something unrelated and you're more likely to believe them because you share this political similarity. - So if you're a Democrat talking to conservative women Republican, without lying and saying, well, I'm a Republican, maybe you can find some common ground, like I think America's great, I believe in free markets or something like that. - Right, exactly. - Because most Democrats do, it's really not, as polarized as it appears to be. - Right, because we just looked at similarity in political domains, but I think this will be similar in other domains, so if we have the same preferences in music or the same favorite offer or something like that. - Right, right, any kind of common ground. But before I go to my individual example, when you talk about, for example, carrots and sticks getting, say, doctors and nurses to wash their hands or restaurant employees to wash their hands and just putting those signs up, we've all seen them in every bathroom, employees wash their hands and that doesn't seem to work. But the example you used in the book was just a counter, they go, "Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep." And everybody could see, it's almost a skinerian with the rat, gets a pellet. I mean, it's really that basic. - Yeah, so this is a great example. It's a study that was conducted in a hospital in New York where they wanted to get medical staff to wash their hands every time they enter a patient's room. And first of all, they just put the camera to see how often they wash their hands. So you'd think that would have an influence, right? - Right, for watching you. - Yeah, we're watching you, but it didn't. That wasn't good enough. And so who was watching them? They actually had people in India watch them 24/7. And so then what they did is they also had this electronic board and so now anytime you wash their hands, the people watching them in India would say, well done, good job. And as well, they would see the rate of how many people in that specific day or week, how many wash their hands go up. So go up, not 90%, 95% and so on. And the results were incredible. It just went from the hand washing and that first experiment was 10%. So 10% of medical staff washed their hands. And then after this intervention went up to 90%. And they replicated it in another division, 'cause I mean it is a bit unbelievable and it replicated, started 30% in this case and again went up to 90% and stayed there. So I think this is a great example and there's a few different reasons why this specific intervention works so well. But one is this association between a reward, in this case it was positive feedback and action. - Right. - So if you kind of think about what we know from neuroscience, so we know that when you anticipate something good, a reward and this could be, you know, water or food or positive social feedback, there's a go signal that is activated in the brain in the mid brain and it goes up and it enhances the likelihood of taking an action. So I anticipate the water, I'm more likely to grab it and have a drink. - So is this literally dopamine? - It's related to dopamine, dopamine, absolutely. And then on the other hand, when I anticipate something bad, I'm more likely, let's say this looks brown and it doesn't seem very good. I'm more likely simply not to take an action. So the anticipation of a punishment actually inhibits action, which is why we often freeze. The first thing you do usually when there's something fearful, usually we freeze before we fight or fly. - Right. - Right. So this association between, instead of telling the medical staff, well, if you don't wash your hands, there's gonna be this bad thing in the future, which is disease. So threatening people with disease, with bad stuff, instead of that, they took the route of giving them rewards, positive, and giving them immediate rewards. That's the two thing, not only was it, I'm giving you positive feedback for doing something rather than just threatening you with that stuff that could happen, but it's immediate. You do it, immediate reward, strengthens the signal that just occurred, makes you more likely to wash your hands again. - So it just applied, well, so it self-help psychologists call small wins. This is the business of make your bed in the morning, clean your room, just do little stuff, and you get a little dopamine hit, and it kind of builds throughout the day. You know, I don't know how far down this rabbit, all you want to call it. - I don't know if I don't like that one. - The Jordan Peterson phenomenon, we're doing an issue on him, because he's just become the biggest thing since I don't know what, he's like the new guru. And this is what he says, you know, you gotta do, you know, stand up straight and clean your room, just little stuff. But I wonder if there is some science behind that in terms of like just immediate, positive reinforcement for a little thing, and that builds your confidence to figure out things. - For other things. - Yeah, I don't know how much you follow. - So what definitely is true, is that if I give you an immediate reward, even if it's small, even if it's a smiley face, you know, a like on Facebook, I mean, people go out of their ways. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That would strengthen that specific action that caused the reward. And so you're more likely to do it again and again. If I, if I do my bed, and then there's something positive, it could be me giving myself rewards, telling myself, well done, or, you know, feeling better. Yes, I'm more likely to do it again and again. Now, you're asking whether it will generalize to other things. Perhaps, if I do, I mean, any action can generalize. So if I wash my hands in the hospital, I'm more likely to wash it also when I'm, you know, at home, or perhaps not just washing the hands. Now I'm gonna do whatever doctors have to do, that they don't usually do. So you can generalize. And so whether tidying one's bed can generalize to doing actions that will be better at work, I guess, theoretically, that could be true. - You know, one of the causes of the decline of violence that Pinker identifies in the better angels of our nature is this sociologist, Norbert Elias, in the 1930s, who tracked his data set, the like books and manuals of etiquette in medieval Europe and early modern Europe. And just basic things like use a knife and fork. You know, don't urinate in the hallways. You know, make your bed, you know, don't touch people inappropriate. Just really basic stuff that shows, well, in a way, how gross our immediate ancestors were and the kind of stuff that we do, second nature, of just being polite and thoughtful and so forth and using a private bathroom and these sorts of things that Elias's idea is that by incorporating these mechanisms of self-control, so I'm gonna keep in check the impulses that I would normally just allow out to the point where I don't even think about those impulses anymore, like I don't wanna, I'm not gonna stab you. I'm not even gonna think about stabbing you if you piss me off at dinner or that sort of thing. And then that gets inculcated and trickles down from the aristocracy who reads these etiquette manuals down to everybody. And then over the centuries, we've all become more civilized. So this is called a civilizing process. And it's a hard thing to test. - Yeah, sounds reasonable. - It sounds reasonable, but it's along those lines of just the little things, like you use your knife and fork and be polite and then all of a sudden centuries later we're not shooting each other as much. Now violence goes down, it's one of many factors, but I just thought of that when you were talking about that. Again, it's that sort of small winds, little kind of small things we can do to alter and control the impulses that bubble up. - So then we should be very concerned about what's going on now then, 'cause that should have the reverse effect. - Yes, talk radio is just toxic. I don't know if you ever listen to conservative talk radio or a tune on Fox once in a while, just to see how bad it's getting and it's getting worse and worse. Every other word is that liberals in the left, the left, the left, it's boom, boom, boom. And on social media it's the right, the right, the right. - That's exactly what I was thinking. - It's just social media. And it's not only about politics, I mean if you look, you know, just scientific debates on Twitter get ugly every day. I mean-- - Yeah, I know. - So if that is likely to generalize-- - Yeah. - To outside of, you know, to outline as well. - Right. - We're not, it's not going in a good direction. - In the sense of encouraging the impulses to bubble up and explode out with somewhat anonymity on social media where you're allowed to do that. - Yeah. - Interesting. So my individual examples, I get a lot of letters from people. This latest one is from, I don't want to give too much information, but just a woman married, loves her husband, they have three small kids like the age of your kids, doesn't want to get divorced. He suffered some kind of injury and he sort of got hooked on not an opioid prescription drug but an a plant-based one that you can get online. And it's like a ayahuasca kind of a medicinal plant. And I don't want to say the name anyway. So you mash it up, you drink it and he's changed his life. Everything's the pain goes away. Full of energy, creativity, best he's ever felt. But then, like a few months later, he gets involved in this kind of UFO group. And now he's completely convinced like there's this government agency that is dealing with the Galactic Federation for these other planets and the aliens are here and influencing the US government. It just goes on and on and on. And so she just wrote me and said, "What do I do?" I mean, you're Mr. Skeptic and you have all the counters to the UFO people. It's like, I don't think any of our arguments are gonna work on somebody who is just so deep into it. And when you're surrounded in that bubble, if you just say, well, there's no evidence of this secret government agency. agency and the aliens are here. Where is it? Of course, they have answers to this. Well, it's secret. It's like the area 51 people. Well, we can't go there because it's secret. And we know it's real because there's no evidence for it. That's how we know they're covering it up. And it's like, I really don't know what to say to somebody like this. It's like, you know, because there's no reason. There's no backs that she could present in. I don't think. I sort of just go to a psychiatrist to get a different medication or something. I don't know. Have you ever had to deal with something like that? Or somebody just says, has delusional beliefs. And how do you talk somebody out of a delusional belief? Yeah, that's very difficult because it does sound in this case. One man, I mean, you would want to ask, why is she concerned? And if I understand the story correctly, the reason she's concerned probably is because there's a change, right? He probably did not exhibit any of this kind of these kind of beliefs or behavior before. Well, disrupting their business and family marriage, you know, just basically. Oh, because he's spending more time. Yeah, because I think there's two concerns. One is like, maybe there's some kind of cognitive decline or cognitive change or even personality change due to either the accident or the medication. And if that's true, that's kind of a bad sign in general of what's about to come. The other is, is it disruptive to their family life? I think I would go with that. Rather than trying to convince him that it's not true, or is true, just trying to highlight, you know, we want to have, you know, a better, more talk quality time. And we can have that by having, you know, less focus on that. So again, perhaps it makes sense at least try to change the outcome that is problematic for her. And going about that without necessarily trying to convince him that the UFOs exist or don't exist. Again, finding common ground, we both want to spend time with our kids, we both love having a family and focus on the positive rather than debunking your delusional. I mean, the moment you would tell somebody your beliefs or delusional conversations really over. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, focusing on how it makes her feel because he's not focusing on her or something like that. More emotional aspect to it. Yeah, you just asked me about that. So I had one at one experience, but it was this kind of experience with someone who did, I mean, she did have schizophrenia. I do know that, but I was, so this was, I was an undergraduate studying psychology in Tel Aviv University. And as one of the assignments, we had to mentor a child with a psychiatric problem and this girl had schizophrenia. And I took her in the car one day to go see a movie. And then at some point she decided that I kidnapped her. And while I'm driving on the highway, she started screaming. And I was really afraid it looked like she might open the door and just jump. So it's really, really hard. I mean, what I tried to do, I was like, here, I'll call your mom. You can talk to her and see that. But it was, you know, when you're talking to someone who's in a real delusional state, it's not something I think you could solve that easily, especially in this case, you probably medications. Right. And I get letters from people that have become atheists that are living in a, like a Midwestern town. They're all their friends, all their workmates. Everybody goes to church on Sunday. The only question is which Christian church denomination do you go to? It's not even which religion is just, yeah. And, you know, on the spouse, the kids, everybody. And now I don't believe what do I do? You know, don't, don't, don't, don't cause problems. But maybe there's a way to, again, that common ground. Like, yeah, I love my family and you and so on. But I just don't believe this thing. And hopefully if they, if your family loves you, they'll still accept you. But I've had people, you know, young men, right, or young women that, you know, my parents rejected me after I rejected religion. Yeah. Boy, you know, that's pretty hard. Yeah. Well, social influence. I mean, that's, again, there's a whole chapter of the book about social influence. One of the most important things is what do people around us believe? Right. What choices do they make? And those will influence us very, very much. A lot of the time subconsciously. Right. And it goes from everything to what you happen to eat to what you're wearing, to what you're watching, to what you're reading. Yeah. And it could definitely be beliefs that seem very unrealistic or unrelated to the evidence. Right. So, well, you know, but sort of changing social groups. I mean, which is a lot of people write us about is like, are there some meetup groups here in my town for skeptics, atheists? Yeah, that's good. That's good way to go. And part of the, again, there isn't really an atheist movement because it doesn't mean anything to be an atheist, but a humanist. You know, and so the kind of universalist, unitarians, humanist, secular, humanist, whatever, you know, the movement now is to kind of create places to go to in every city in the world. Like, this is our church. I've been to some of these. It's kind of amusing. They sing hymns to Newton. They like candles and it's like you've testimonials about how they lost their religion. It's really, it's really kind of funny. It doesn't do anything for me because I don't, I didn't get that gene, I guess, spirituality gene, but I can see, you know, the appeal to it. All my Jewish friends are all atheists, you know, but they still identify as Jewish. They like the culture, the, you know, the ceremonies, the holidays, the community, and so on. I totally get that. So it seems like we, as a species, as a social species, we need something that religion has tapped into very deeply for thousands of years, that we better be very careful if we're going to decouple people from that that that we're replacing it with something, I think. Yeah. So I think the two things that religion, it gives us probably more things, but two main things is, is first this kind of like social structure, social support. So when you look at studies of happiness, what predicts happiness, religion predicts happiness. It's a strong predictor, and the reason it's a predictor, people believe, and I think there's evidence to support this, is because of the social support. That's one of the reasons that religion. So, and actually, they, they, and I think it is that they quantify religion according, or categorize it according, do you actually go to the mom, and so on, and therefore you have a social support, and that's what enhances people's happiness. And health too, right? Yes. Health and longevity. Yes. Because maybe you have somebody that cares enough, don't forget to take your meds, don't eat the extra cheesecake, stop smoking, maybe it's as fundamental as that. Right, as direct as that, as well as anything that, that increases psychological well-being, will also increase physiological well-being, because if you're happier, stress and anxiety is reduced, and that's, that's good for our health. Right. And the second thing religious religion gives us is optimism. So, this is my first book, the optimism bias. Optimism and happiness is very much related. It's not the same thing, because optimism is thinking about the future, predictions about the future. So, you can actually, it's possible to be unhappy at the present, but be optimistic, right? But the reason the two are actually highly correlated is because optimism brings us happiness. So, even if you're in a bad state at the moment, but you believe that tomorrow will be great, that will bring you happiness at the moment. But what would be the evolutionary reason for depression then? So, I have to say I hate that question. I'll tell you when I'm sorry. Maybe it's a great question, it might be, I mean, it is, I don't think that disease necessarily has an evolutionary reason. And I think that's true. And some do. You can't tell the press people, just be optimistic. No, no, no, no, but I don't think we have depression, and it's true we have about 10% years, and why hasn't it died out? I'm not sure there's an evolutionary reason, and some people do believe there is, and there's speculations of why that is. But yeah, I don't think, to me, that's not the right questions. It's kind of like asking, well, what's evolution reason for cancer, or anything, you know, Alzheimer's. So, I don't necessarily think that's a case, but your right depression is associated with pessimism, right? pessimism is one of the symptoms of depression, and definitely depressed people don't have optimism or optimism bias. And I think it's condom is thinking fast and slow. He talks about a study on optimism with entrepreneurs. Yeah. And that it's good for entrepreneurs to be high on the optimism scale, but they can also be over-optimists, we call it the over-optimism bias, that you can be so blindly committed to your optimistic startup that you don't see, you know, most startups fail. I better cut my losses now and do a different startup and see if that succeeds. How does one know the balance between when's it time to cut and run versus keep going? Come on, keep pushing through all the obstacles. Yeah. So, the optimism, it's interesting. So, it obviously has benefits, and it has cost, right? So, the benefit of your optimistic, it's good for your well-being, less likely to be depressed, more likely to be healthy, to be happy, more likely to be healthy. So, all of being equal, people who are optimistic actually live longer, get over disease quicker, and so on. However, you're also under arresting your risk. So, you're not taking precautionary action, whether it's not wearing a helmet, not going to medical screenings or, you know, over investing. in places that you shouldn't be, and it's interesting with interpreneurs, we actually have a piece of that. So interpreneurs are more optimistic and it's both that the more optimistic tend to be interpreneurs and also once you became interpreneur, your optimism is enhanced further as if it's a mechanism that you need once you. So they start because it's sort of self-selected and then it builds on itself. Yeah, so it enhances, and the one profession that people have shown is unrelated to the opposite of optimism is lawyers, but you actually, so they tend to be more pessimistic. They're the only profession that's been shown not to be optimistic, but it's unknown whether it is a pessimist or decide to go into law, to study law, or is it the perfectly normal individuals decide to study law, and then you know, you're kind of trained to think about the worst case scenario, and that enhances your pessimism. I was thinking about that yesterday with the latest Catholic Church priestly pedophile problem, 300 of these guys. Are they self-selecting? Are they going in in the priesthood because they already have this tendency and they're going to give them opportunity, or they go in the priesthood with all these other good intentions, they're deprived of sex and the normal relationships with members of the opposite sex and so on, and then they end up becoming pedophiles. So do you know if the proportion is greater than in the general population? It's higher, but I don't think it's hugely higher. I just thought of that in terms of trying to explain how these things come about. I mean, it's a huge interesting problem. Yeah, but just going back to a point I wanted to make about, so basically you're asking about kind of what's the benefit of optimism, because obviously it has these costs and you know, even the financial collapse, 2008 has been far to be related to optimism bias of many individuals. Overoptimism. Yeah, the optimism bias over optimism. So one thing that we we found recently is that the optimism bias disappears in every individual when you get stressed. So it's not actually that people are always having optimism bias. We have an optimism bias unless we're depressed. So 80% of people have an optimism bias in relatively safe environments. So like this environment here and now, which is the environment that we're mostly in. But if people are put under threat, the optimism bias actually disappears and it can go back again. So they become more risk averse under stress or anxiety. I don't know. We didn't test risk aversion. What we did is so so the one of the reasons that we think people have an optimism bias is that we tend to learn better from unexpected positive information than unexpected negative information. So if I tell you your likelihood of I ask you about your likelihood of cancer and you say it's pretty percent and I say, oh, you know, I've just looked at your genetic makeup and actually it's only 20%. Quickly you change your minds and people have actually done that with 23 and me. So people actually gave in their, you know, genetic makeup and then they got in. I just did that. Oh, you just did that. Yeah, I was super happy to find. I don't have the genes for all the, you know, Alzheimer's and. And what about the ones that are worse than what you, you know? There were none there were none that were worse than anything that that mattered. It was like slightly, except for the slightly balding thing maybe or, you know, but the weird thing about the 23 me it's like it got about half the things that I already knew correct and other things incorrect. I mean things like, you know, the little thing you get is that people with your genetic makeup tend to have a longer second toe than big toe. No, it was the reverse, but mine is a longer second toe than big toe. It's like, okay, so but you don't. But I do. So I'm in the like 43% of people that have my genes have a longer second toe, but 57% they have a longer big toe. I mean, how accurately or how valid are these predictions you can make from this is so much of it depends on other factors going on. And I then wondered if that applied to things like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, so you know, so I don't have the two genes that they test for. Apparently there's many more that they don't test for yet, but I don't know, I think it's four different things they test for. But there's like 20 that go into the factor, go into it at least, if not, then all the biochemical factors. So I'm going to keep doing seducu fuzzles and playing chess and you know, whatever it is we can do, which is not much, I think we can do. Yeah, so it's not absolute information. It's your probability based on your genes, but of course everything else matters as well, except for there is certain genes that give you, you know, Huntington's if you have it, you're going to get Huntington's, but most of the other genes are not deterministic in that way. So of course. But to your point, yeah, of course I was pretty happy for the couple of days afterwards, like, oh boy, now you have a new estimate. Yes, yes, yes, that's right. So they did, we did this kind of study in the lab, which show the same thing, but then a few years later, people did this on kind of real genetic information and they found that people are more likely to update their relief when they get good information, just like you did. But when people get information, you know, let's say, you thought, oh, I'm not, I'm like late of Alzheimer's, no, and then you learn, oh, actually it's about 20%. They don't tend to update as much. Right. And you're right that the reason that they don't is they say, well, it's just so that they can formation, right? I do my puzzles, I do this. Right. But they go through this rationalization, mostly when information is bad. So when the information is good, you know, they're less likely to do that. So overall, the end result is that we get unexpected positive information. We incorporate that into our beliefs more than when we get unexpected bad. It's not that we don't incorporate negative information. We just do that less so. Right. And so you imagine you go through life incorporating the positive a little more than the negative, you end with this optimism bias. Right. So what we found is, and that's what we found back in in 2011. And then what we found now is that you stress people out, that goes away. So you stress people out, they start learning from negative, better. And now there's no longer any difference. So if you happen to be very, very, very stressed at the moment when you got your results, you will learn from them equally. And then you won't have an optimism bias. And we did this in two ways. First of all, we fretting people in the lab. We got undergrads into the lab and we told them you're about to give a speech on a surprise topic. And we're going to videotape you. And we're going to judge you. And they got really stressed. Right. And then we gave them a little test where you get people's beliefs about likelihood of getting disease and so on. Give them information. Some is good. Some is bad. Then get their new beliefs. Then you can calculate, you know, are they there? They have a bias. And people who were stressed because of this manipulation, they didn't have the bias. People who came in, we didn't have the stress manipulation. We did some other manipulation that doesn't stress them out. They had the bias. And then we went into firefighters in the state of Colorado who were at the, in the station. And we gave them the same test again and the test of giving them information and so on. And also measured how stressed they were. The more stressed the firefighter was, the less likely they were to have an optimism bias and more likely to learn from the negative. So at least in the study that we did back in our university at UCL, you could, you could see that you stress people out. It goes away. They're back on, they're thinking about teachers, right? Because what that means is if you're in an environment that's quite threatening, there's lions about to kind of jump all around, you want to learn from negative possible warnings, right? You don't want to discount them. But otherwise, it's actually not a bad idea to discount negative information to some degree because it keeps your mind, right? You know, at health and and your optimism there. I wonder if that could be applied to help people overcome the fear of speaking and public speaking. Most people don't want to do it. I don't know if you know the sign felled riff where he talks about how study show that a lot of people fear of public speaking is higher even than dying of dying. So if you're at a funeral, you'd rather be the corpse than the guy giving the speech. It's pretty bad. But I was thinking about this because for my skepticism, one-on-one course, I teach at Chapman, they all have to do a 18-minute TED Talk. And every semester, I have two or three that are just deadly afraid of getting up there. So I do try to practice a little bit of behavioral cognitive behavioral therapy, just desensitization, practice a little bit before class, weeks before, and kind of build up to it, practice on your roommates and stand up there and have your slides. And that seems to help. And I do think that's one of the few psychological counseling or therapy things that's really proven to work, sort of cognitive behavioral therapy. And this has come up recently with the old movement on college campuses about trigger warnings and safe spaces. And if this goes too far, then Stuart, well, Jonathan Heitz's forthcoming book is called The Coddling of the American Mind. He's worried that students coming out of been coddled their whole life. And at some point, they're going to face the real world where they're not going to be coddled. And that if we let them run to their safe spaces or we give them trigger warnings, you don't have to face this if you don't want to. Actually, it's good to face some of this, at least incrementally. Yeah, no, yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And that's, I don't know if that's entirely related to optimum, it's just related to resilience, right? To develop resilience, you have to have some experiences that you manage to overcome. And we actually, so we did this study, actually, so we had, and this is not published either, but we had people who either had a traumatic experience childhood and then those and both groups either then developed depression later in life or did not. So the resilient ones are the ones who had traumatic experience, we call them the resilient, they had traumatic experience but they didn't develop PTSD or depression. And those had the most optimism bias on our study. So it is the cause and effect, it goes both ways you see. I mean I don't know what cause and effect is here but one of my speculations is people who happen to have a huge optimism bias because of let's say genetics and then they experience traumatic events. This kind of bias can protect them. Right, right. And those are the resilient. But back to your point, I agree the way to develop resilience is you have to go from some experiences, right. I mean I think my I had a year and a half in the army as I told you in Israel and some of the experience was very very good but some of the experiences were were pretty tough and I don't want my kids to go through that but and mine wasn't as tough as you know males at the time females didn't actually have to fight and so on. So people go through much tougher experiences and I wouldn't want my kids to go out but I do think that the fact that I did go through these kind of experiences that are difficult for 18-year-olds made me stronger. Physical or psychological. Both of them you know having to I mean just things like you know you live with with 12 other females you know and maybe people do that in the dorms or whatever. You have to wake up at like five for it. You have to be there at seven until like 11 p.m. and then you run back you know there's a lot of these things and people over you can't just do whatever you want at any point in time you don't make your own decisions and so on I mean there's a lot of aspects that even if you're not at war and love people are at war though people are fighting but even experience like me where I didn't actually have to fight can be quite tough for an 18-year-old. What would your kids do then maybe sports or something like that? And sports is the other yeah that's the other thing I mean I I think that's very important that's the other thing that I did as a kid. A lot of sports. Yeah yeah. What did you play? I did a long distance running. You did? I still do but I don't compete you did? How far do you run? Marathons. Not as a kid. I didn't do marathons but as a marath as a kid it was long distance as a kid. You do marathons now for your head. My last one but was before my kids were born. Okay. It's hard to find you have to have about these free hours to run on the weekend you know and not just weekdays as well but um yeah. The likelihood of me taking away like free hours to just run. You have to give a real job. But that's okay I still run every day but I just don't do marathons. Maybe when they're older. Anti-fragile. But I agree that's and my husband and I had this discussion about sports and you know having the kids be and I think that's true getting over the physical pain. Right. Yeah but it's true I said that would be an environment that's relatively safe I guess. Well Jonathan's got a graph in his book of the number of students presenting at the their college disability centers with a psychological disorder has tripled for women from 5% to 15% and double for men from 3% to 6% since 2010 just in the last eight years. So he's worried and I think there might be something to that. There's something going on just culturally like and the moment you call it something like I have a disease I have a disorder. Okay now to me it seems like that's that's gonna make it harder to change like while I feel anxious before speaking in class. Good you should that's normal. Yeah but I don't want to do it because it makes me feel anxious. Sorry you got to do it. That's the only way to get over it you know and I just had this experience a student wrote me my class starts in two weeks you know and sent me this letter from the disability services office at Chavin University. I should I've been excused from attending class if I attend I don't have to participate you can't call on me and I'm not doing any public talks so I just wrote back and said you got to do everything that and I'll help you I'll work with you walk you through it all and you'll be so much stronger for it you can be so glad you did this she dropped the class next day. So it's like okay. So I have an example of two students both of them did not like to talk in public at all got very very very anxious. One of them nevertheless did it and this is not just a class they have to go to conferences right you know hundreds of people I mean this is what you have to do as a scientist either PhD or postdoc students she hated it it was like you know she couldn't sleep blah blah but she did it and then she did it again and she did it again and she did it again and now she's a lecturer and she's doing it every day the other person just did not do it. They're in there. They're not did not go to give lecture you know canceled talks. Well I mean you can find if it's too overwhelming you could just do something else it doesn't involve any public speaking but you're not going to but you can't do that job. Yeah so the analogy I made to my dean is you know I want to be a Navy seal but you know see I really don't like it up early and I don't like cold water and when I get tired I just want to go lay down well then you shouldn't be a Navy seal because that's not what we do. Being academic you know I don't like to do it. First class starts to learn. You know work around. A couple other fun things I liked about the book that were predictive of me. Every day I have an app with my stocks so I glance to see if it's more green than red than at the at one ten when the market closes and it's all I check to see the whole total. If there's more red than green I'd never look never never except in in late 2008 I finally said you know what I better see how much I've really lost because this is getting to and it was exactly what you predicted in the book. Yeah so we've done this this certainly recently in the lab but really the first study is by a group of behavioral economists including George Lowenston who always does great stuff and they kind of show this wonderful graph that I put in the book which shows that when the stocks go up people are more likely to log into their account to check stocks go down yeah less likely to log in to check with the exceptions when things are so so dire that you just have to know already right and you need to kind of I mean I hated that I'm that predictable it's just like exactly what exactly what I mean everyone comes to the lab I mean there's individual differences and even the checking it so I got the computer's going to look like this like and of course my father always reminding me you haven't actually made or lost any money until you sell the stock oh yeah that's right and then the other thing I haven't been able to drink Merlot since I I watched sideways which is such a great movie in Paul Giamatti is so effective in that and Hayden Church and yeah I can't believe it but I had no idea that sales actually did drop after he said I'm not drinking any fucking Merlot and then but Pino now Pino got a boost Merlot you know that because he drinks a lot because this is a great example of the social influence right I mean how can we be that's susceptible to a movie yeah I love that it's that example because it's social influence of a character that doesn't exist right I mean it gets characters it's not a real person whose preferences are not really real and yes the influence is huge and it is to be clear this is not all bad right I mean there is a reason why we're influenced by other people there's a good reason because they give us information right so we should be influenced one thing that a lot of you because this book is called the influential mind a lot of people kind of journalists are asking about influence and kind of a negative way like oh influences bad yes exactly influence itself is not bad we're now influencing each other I you know probably and it's a good thing on both sides and right and you I mean your influence I'm influenced by my kids every day I'm influenced by my students hopefully it goes by in both ways it's what it's supposed to happen it's a good thing it's why we're so such a successful species so it's not a bad thing it becomes bad when of course the intention is bad right if someone has bad intention yeah then influence could be a negative thing.