Episode 43: The Nature of Nudges

Very bad wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues and signs and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm out of, I'd say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes. World needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door. Look, ladies, on his phone, a new attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? I'm very bad men. I'm a very good man. Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamler Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, I'm struggling with this. Is it gif, or is it gif? So there's a big nerd debate about this. And the guy who originated the file format, here we're talking about the little animated pictures of cats and stuff that Matt Welch has made part of the very bad wizards podcast. There's a big nerd debate, and it's either, so the guy who invented that format swears up and down that it's pronounced gif. But I don't think that he's the final arbiter of this. Like, I actually think it's gif. It's too close to gif for me to actually care what that guy says. So you're like the derida. He's not. He has no say. He has no voice. That's fine. But I think in this case, first of all, g i often is soft. It's a soft g for g i magic. It's not mag gik, right? It's like I'm mad at you. Well, like giraffe, right? But just like the giraffe. It's so close to gif. But second of all, by the way, I'm David Pizarro from Cornell University. Yeah, you are. I think you just leave it up to the guy, given that it could go either way. And it's the other thing that fucks me up is that the peanut butter that's called gif is spelled with a j. So I have a very clear in my head notion of what gif is supposed to look like when it's spelled out. And it's with a j. You know, I didn't think of that, but now I'm starting to come. I'm starting to see your words. It's right. A strongly worded letter to the guy. All right, today's episode. Well, so I wanted to do pretty much a whole episode on the crisis in Ukraine. I thought that down. Well, your boy Vlad Emir Putin, he's starting a lot of trouble right now. And there's deep questions about what it is that we should do. And, you know, unfortunately, I don't think either of us know enough about it or virtually anything about it. I'm certainly aware of this person named Putin that you mentioned. And you're now aware that there is a country called Ukraine. Some of the best friends are Ukrainian. I was watching Jeopardy the other day. And this is what I do now, you know, with my injury. And there was geography categories of the ones I do the worst on. There was one question. It was like borders. This country is bordering the something, something river and this country and this country, you know, and someone immediately got the answer. I had never heard of any of the things or places that they were talking about. Like, any of the, I never heard the river. I never heard of any of the countries. The countries that were the world. It might as well have been middle earth. If you would just ask me, is it a real country? I guess you're no. I would have had a 50/50 chance of getting out. You know, I blame the Soviet Union for disbanding. Because when we were growing up, it was very easy. Everything was the USSR, you know. And now we have to learn all these other countries. So first they do that. First they fuck up our geography. And now they're starting trouble in Ukraine. It's a problem. So according to, I know some politicians, Obama needs to step up and do something about it. I tend to think that that's wrong, but I'm not basing that on any, I'm not geopolitical knowledge. Maybe I can segue into this, this flash episode by saying, maybe what he should do is apply subtle psychological techniques to Putin. And therefore influence him to do the right thing. That is a great segue. Yeah, so explain what the topic is. So this sort of, this came out of our discussion with Paul Bloom when we were mentioning the power of reason. And one of the things that we mentioned was one of the studies done by my good friend Jonathan Lovav and a couple of his co-authors, Dan Ziger, the lead author, on Israeli judges and their decisions about parole. This is a paper that made quite a bit of impact, but in a nutshell, what that paper shows is that when these judges are making parole decisions, they're pretty drastically affected by whether they make that parole decision before they get a chance to take a break and have a snack. This is one of the findings that Paul Bloom sort of brushes aside. And it's weird because having looked at the data, it's hugely significant. It's like you go from having a 65% chance of being paroled right after they've had their breakfast and they're early in the day to having a 0% chance of being paroled. It's not like normal social psychology where it's just like, you know, you have to massage the statistics and give them happy ending in order to like get anything. No, I know. There were a lot of objections raised, but as far as I know, this finding stands. It is not as if the prisoners are somehow non-randomly assigned to time of day. It's not as if the really bad prisoners get presented first. It's not as if the bad attorneys forget to make appointments until later. It really does seem to be just the mere presence of the breaks. Now, these aren't decisions about culpability. These are criminals already. So it's not, they're not guilty or not guilty decisions, but they are decisions about whether or not somebody should stay in prison or be released. In some ways, it really is. It's as momentous. Especially to the guy. To the person, right? Imagine if you learned that that had an influence on your decision. I'd be like, throw the judge a power bar. Yeah, you've seen some muffins. Like they do for if you're ever on a thesis committee and they're like, no, why they bring the muffins or the donuts or. I remember at Yale, they started banning. Apparently, there was an arms race and people were being beaten like champagne and shit. They had a squash. Bring like some really good single mile scotch here. So the nature of these subtle influences, so there can be a debate as we sort of had with Paul about whether or not, so how important and pervasive these are. But what I think is pretty clear is that a lot of these things can be manipulated. So nobody here in this is arguing that we should manipulate judges by not giving them food or giving them food. But there are lots of findings where it becomes sort of the natural next step to ask whether or not these tactics should be used to influence people. And that's what I want to talk to you about today because the field of behavioral economics and judgment decision-making as it's growing in popularity and power, it's becoming increasingly a real option to use some of these subtle, what some dictator and cast on steam have term nudges. Coming increasingly, a popular alternative to say, well, if we want to manipulate people, let's use some of these manipulations that we glean from the psychology literature and the behavioral science literature to try to influence people one way or another. And full disclosure, I work with a team, B.E. works out of Toronto, where we do this for a living. So we're a consulting company and we that's that's what we do. We meet with corporate clients and we tell them how they can use psychology to make more money. And sometimes I feel dirty about it, but I want to know whether I should. So yeah, that's the topic for today. Before we leave this study, there's a couple interesting questions that just this finding itself raises, it shouldn't matter what order you're being presented for parole. That shouldn't make any difference in terms of the judgment of whether you're granted. Right. I don't know what normative theory would say, Alex. Well, they deserved it because, you know, he went to 1130, they had it at anything to eat for two and a half hours. And so he had a common. The question is what you do about that. And one thing you could do is really codify the law, put it into categories, take it out of the hands of these parole boards and just make it something like you add up their points based on some sort of system. You know, then it just doesn't matter what they've eaten. All they have to do is make the necessary calculations. You probably wouldn't even need a hearing. Of course, the other alternative is to keep it up to the discretion of a board within general guidelines, which seems to be what we have now. And there has been There's been a movement in criminal justice. Well, there's movements on both sides. It's a big debate of how much discretion judges and juries should have. And I'm definitely on the side of giving judges and parole boards as much discretion as possible, but these kinds of findings fuck with me because if they're so much less likely to grant somebody parole after they have an eaten for two hours. And there's got to be so many other of these biases. It's disturbing, right? Because you can take care of one, but you don't know what seems like a hydra. Like, you never know what, at an individual level, for instance, if the judge didn't get enough sleep, right? I mean, these presumably, these effects are due to fatigue of some sort. Right. I love the quote that they end with says, yeah, right, justice is whether judge for breakfast might be an appropriate caricature for human decision making in general, which that should really bother people. Right. That should really bother people. You should especially bother people like me who want, who don't believe that a predetermined categories are the way to go when it comes to justice, who really think you need human beings taking every particular case, because cases are unique and taking all the factors from a particular case and making a judgment based on that. I mean, I'm so firmly in that camp, but when it comes to things like this and God only knows what race the person is, how the size of the person, the, you know, the looks of the person, all of these things have got to have a big effect. There's a couple of things like, so one, you don't have to think that these, these small influences have a long lasting or enduring effect on something like attitudes, right? It's, it doesn't need to be demonstrated that judges change their view of the penal code or something because of this. All that matters is that it, that it affect them temporarily, but briefly in a subtle way and then it can have these huge, huge implications, right? These huge effects. And, and so, so that's, and that's enough right there to make us scared. It does seem like there might be ways to address a situation like that. Like, so maybe you don't, you, you have to set it up so that the person comes twice at two different times of the day or that they, you know, that they only make their decisions at the end of the day. They don't make their decisions right at the time when they have the hearing or something. Right, you know, one of the interesting things about this paper and I've talked to Jonathan LeBabe about this is that it's unclear which of the decisions is the normatively correct one. So, so the implication here given all of the research on say decision fatigue and say information overload is that the inferior decision is made when you don't have the appropriate sort of cognitive resources to think about the cases. But, but it's not entirely clear that what's maybe in fact the fatigue judges are, are closer to, to accurate and not, and I was just reading a paper today about the influence of disgust on judgments of punishment. And it turns out that if, if a crime, these are, these are just scenarios presented to, to individuals. But when you give people a description of a crime that was committed, if it has disgusting things as part of the crime, people are actually closer to what the model penal code says you ought to do than if it doesn't. So imagine these two pairs of cases. The model penal code I guess gives guidelines for how much punishment is deserved by certain kinds of criminal violations. So one is a person stabs someone in the neck and in the arm and there's lots of blood spreading everywhere. And another one is a person pulls out a gun and attempts to shoot someone but misses. And I don't know if those two examples are the exact right ones, but imagine that both of those, the law says are equivalent in terms of what punishment you should dull out. And it turns out that, that, that the presence of something disgusting like blood spreading everywhere actually makes people more severe in their punishment judgments, which makes sense. But it turns out that they are actually closer to the model penal code's recommendations. It's the people in the dry, non-disgusting situations that are undershooting. May I see what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. It might be that these emotions that we would sort of automatically assume might be biases that they might actually be the thing that are, there might be tools for us to accurately calculate what the proper judgment is. And as soon as I read that, I thought, the timelower is going to love this fine because you often argue that that discussed might play an important role in sort of energizing, energizing intuitions about injustice. Here's a problem with that, with this whole, with that whole approach is the model pital code is not something that, you know, itself could be overly harsh. No, true. True. But that's, that's one of the few that actually has some sort of normative comparison. Right. Right. So, so yeah, it could very well be, it could very well be that the intuitions that gave rise to the model pital code are, are a result of over sort of, but no matter where you stand on the degree and I, I want to do a whole episode on how much emotions should matter in, in criminal justice, no matter where you stand on that issue, you should think that it shouldn't matter how, how hungry you are. No, absolutely, right. So, if you're right, if you get closer to the right answer, it's completely by fucking accident. And that's not a real example. And that's not fair. Right. It's not fair. It's just not fair. So, even I would say that and I normally have no patience for this kind of, everything has to be systematic and consistent. Right. So, this is why I like this. This is, I'm going to say something nice about social psychology and all this research is the more we know about these kinds of things, the more we can address them. And this seems like one that if people put their heads together, they could address. And they could have a level without, you know, taking away the discretionary power of a hearing board, without taking away discretionary power. So, you can get all the benefits of the discretion that you give to human beings rather than some sort of, you know, codified system of law. And you can eliminate as many of these biases as possible. It doesn't, it seems like that's something that's a third alternative that's the best. Right. So, I'm going to talk about this because on the one hand, I get it, like I do want there to be sort of the power to make, to make exceptions that take into, you know, no fucking algorithm can take into account, you know, all the nuances of a situation. But at the same time, I'm struck by the feeling that most of these biases are working against people and that if you can cut down on errors by establishing clear rules and constraining the, the, say in this case, the judge's ability to go outside of them then, because who knows how many of these biases there are. It's like whack em'le. You'll, you'll, we take care of this bias and then a new bias comes up. Right. Right. And so it may very well be that you implement a power bar, you know, like during, during deliberations, policy, which is a feed power bias. Which leads to another question is, you know, if we're willing to do that, then, it does seem like a natural, the natural reaction is to therefore implement some sort of policy to change, to, to remove this bias. And even more interesting question is whether or not these findings should, should allow the government, say in terms of making public policy to, to use these kinds of tactics in favor of getting people to act as they ought to act. Now, what if I want to make people less likely to eat fatty foods, right? So I implement it more likely to give blood or, right, right, right. Yeah. Well, let's take a very quick break and we'll talk about that in a second. I love him. I do. I love him. Look at some of us. Let me tell you a little bit about Tyler Durden. Tyler was a night person. While the rest of us were sleeping, he worked. He had one part time job as a projectionist. She, a movie doesn't come all on one big reel. It comes on a few. So someone has to be there to switch the projector to the exact moment that one reel ends in the next one begins. If you look for it, you can see these little dots come into the upper right hand corner of the screen. In the industry, we call them cigarette burns. That's the f*** for a changeover. He flips the projector's, moving keeps right on going and nobody in the audience has any idea. Why would anyone want this shit job? Because it affords them other interesting opportunities. I'd like some single friends of the family, though. So when the snooty cat and the courageous dog with his celebrity voice is neat for the first time in reel three, that's the end of the story. when you'll catch a flash of Tyler's contribution to the film. Nobody knows if they saw it, if they did. Nice. Thank God. Welcome back to very bad wizards. OK, now we're going to get into some nitty gritty about the problem of psychological manipulation and behavioral economics and everything that that entails. But before we get to that, I wanted to say-- Timeline, I want to say, we really appreciate all the support you guys have been giving us. There's a couple of ways if you're a new listener and you like us enough to want to support us. You can go to our web page at verybad wizards.com. And under the support tab, you'll find a couple of ways. One, you can donate via PayPal directly. Or two, you can click on the Amazon link and their instructions there. Do your regular shopping through Amazon. You won't get charged anymore, but we'll get a little bit of what you buy. And you can follow us on Twitter at Tamler@Peas and at very bad wizards. That account is generally run by Matt Welsh. Matt Welsh also runs our extremely popular Tumblr page. I think it's definitely the most well-liked and uncontroversial, but popular thing about the podcast. Uncontroversially popular. Probably we'll outlast the actual podcast. The podcast has almost a side effect of the Tumblr page, even though it's causally in the wrong. It's a necessary evil of the Tumblr page. I think that's right. And nobody-- Maybe the accusing Matt Welsh of being drunk, which is one of our recent iTunes videos. I assume they're accusing you because I'm always so sober. And I thought and in alcohol content. I hope they're accusing you. If they're not, it means I am not as good at holding my liquor as I thought. You definitely are not. So speaking of iTunes, on iTunes, you can rate us, which we love. But also, you can check out our old episodes. And one of the things that Dave and I are going to do from now on is just recommend an old episode from our archives to listen to that we particularly like. Now, just because we like it, that doesn't mean that other people will like it. In fact, we're very bad at predicting, which is going to be our most popular one. That is true. But for what it's worth, here are some of our favorites. So Dave, what's your recommendation for this week? So what are my favorites, even though it's one of Tamler's least favorite, is the one episode 29 on performance enhancing drugs, 10-year pills, and hyperbolic chambers, which was an allusion to your common mispronunciation. Maybe that's why I don't like that. Maybe that's why people think you'd drink a lot. I still think she might have been referring to you. I think you might sound drunker than I do. I generally have the good old. So mine is episode 17. I really like this episode. It's called Learning About Bushman by Studying Freshman. It's about the main topic is a paper by Joe Henrik and at all, I guess, that talk about how most psychology and behavioral economics, most of that work is done studying undergraduate college students in the United States. And that is a very weird population. It's not representative of the psychology of humans around the world. And it's also an episode that I don't remember what we were fighting about, but we were fighting. You and I were arguing a lot about that episode before it. And then for some reason, it's one of my favorites. It just came out really well. Yeah, that's right. And we were arguing quite a bit. So I don't think we're going to argue too much today, although who knows. But for this segment, at least what I wanted to talk about was, since this is a short episode, it really is. I'm cheating a little bit because it's a topic that's been on my mind because I feel dirty for some of the behavioral economics consulting work that I've been doing. And the question is really, as well as some of the trick, well, no, I never feel guilty about that. As Walter Cinnett Armstrong told me the other day, guilt is a useless emotion. He said, I'm good. I'll keep that in mind in my interactions with him. So now that we know a lot about how to influence and persuade, and we have decades of research, not just from behavioral economics, but social psychology, we know a whole lot about how to influence individuals. The government through its communications could influence us. Corporations can influence us pretty easily through using this consumer psychology or judgment decision-making research and have for a while. And they have been doing for a while. The UK has this nudge unit dedicated to sort of altering the behavior of the people of the UK by using these psychological nudges, these tricks from behavioral economics. And I think it's a question that's been bugging me a little bit because I want to know how guilty to feel. What level of manipulation, psychological manipulation is ethically appropriate? And I don't know what the answer is. But let me give you some examples. So one is, I think that everybody agrees that if you are right to see the consumer, that it's wrong. So I just want to anchor on that. If you just lie to people and say like this, this will make you lose 50 pounds in one month. And that's why you sell, but that's just wrong. But that's not what the science of nudging is all about. But then you have-- let's call this a gray-- what I think is a gray area, but it's something in between land, where you have the classic unconscious sort of manipulations. And that's what the little clip from the fight club is alluding to. So you flash something subconsciously below the threshold of awareness. So the consumer never knows whether they're being manipulated or not. Now, it used to be thought that this didn't work, but there is some evidence that at least in some cases it works. So here, the consumer never even knows that they've been manipulated. They have no knowledge that there's even been an attempt at manipulation. And then finally, you have just a-- That's not the nudging either, right? I mean, that's not what Sunstein and Taylor are. No, that's not what they're recommending, right? What they're recommending is just presenting the right information. So you give everybody access to the information. They know that they're being targeted. They know that there's an attempt made to persuade them. But you use some sort of changing the context in which the information is given, change the comparison condition, and you alter their behavior. So a good example of this is presenting a decoy price option. So you have two options that you're trying to sell a consumer, a cheap one, an expensive one, a better one, and a worse one. And you can alter which one they go for by simply presenting a third decoy option. It's a third option that should make absolutely no difference when you're comparing the first two. Now, here, you've given people the same exact information as before. It's just that you're using sort of this psychological conjuring, this sort of manipulation or to convince people framing, right? Framing, right? Exactly. You framed the information right. So I want to know, is you in this last level? What do you think? All right. Well, I'm glad you asked me because I'm a philosopher. I'm an ethicist. And this is what I do, right? Exactly. I don't know why I'm a closer man is doing that bullshit, fucking New York Times thing. And they didn't even ask me. So as is my want, I've come up with a theory. I've come up with a theory of conditions. Is it necessary, insufficient? That's right. Done some conceptual analysis. No. I've come up with a theory because we've talked about this a little bit before. Pretty smart for a drunk. So there's two things. There's two factors you have to consider. Two moral vectors, I guess. In vectors, is that right? Vectors, valences. It's something with a V. [LAUGHTER] Anyway, it's something with a V. So the first is what the benefits of the particular manipulation or framing or whatever you want to call it. How is it going to benefit society? Right. So that's the first vector or some V work. The second is the effect on our autonomy. So the more manipulative it is, the worse. The greater the threat or the attack, I guess, on your autonomy, the greater the worse it is. And then the other is the greater the benefit to society or to the consumer or to the citizen or whoever, than the better it is. And you just have to-- these two things go against each other. And you just have to weigh the two against each other and try to come to some conclusion about whether one of them outweighs the other. Now, last thing I'll say about this, right? So what does it mean by autonomy here? Because we're not talking about free will. They're not attacking our ability to do otherwise in the strong metaphysical sense. But I think there is a sense of autonomy that we're really concerned about in these cases. And I think it's this. I think it's what the person would want to do upon reflection, what they would endorse upon reflection, the choice that they would make upon reflection. The more you're taking them away from that, the greater the threat to their autonomy. the more you might be nudging them towards that, the less the threat to the autonomy, you might even say that it's actually a kind of a positive, it's actually making them freer. Philosophers call this whatever matches their higher order or their entire. - So you can-- - So you can-- - Frank, for a thing. - So let's take the Oregon Donation of the Amsterdam. - Although quickly, there's a clear case in which people do this to themselves, they may be wrong about it, but people are more than willing to try hypnosis in order to stop smoking cigarettes, for instance. They're more than willing to bypass their own autonomy, like listen to subliminal tapes in order to-- - That's because they're second order of desire. - Exactly, it's an example of what-- - It's not strong. - Right, it's an example in support of your claim that we're sometimes willing to bypass our own autonomy in order to meet our higher order desires. - So let's take the Oregon Donation example. The idea is there are certain countries where filling out your form to get your driver's license and they say if you die in a car accident, do you wanna donate your Oregon? For some countries, the default option, the option that you just, if you don't say anything, will be the option you take is that you donate your Oregon's. And for some, the option, you actually have to check a box in order to donate your Oregon. - Right, right. - And it has a-- - So in the US, you have to check a box. And in the US, you have to check a box. And this has a huge effect, right? And there are cool stats and I looked this up. - Yeah, no, it's as strong as effect as you can get. - And Dan Ariely, your boy, does this. He takes similar countries and he sort of compares them. So like Austria and Germany, right? Two just countries filled with just evil people, right? But that's not like one is worse than another, right? - There are some Germans who I love and they know who they are. - Yeah, I know. - I love Germans, they're great now. But the point is, there was all part of one big Prussian Jew-hating empire, right? So Austria has an opt that you have to opt out of donating your Oregon's. And Germany has, you have to opt into donating your Oregon's. Austria, 99.8% of the people donate their Oregon's. Germany, 12% of people donate their Oregon's. Belgium and the Netherlands, again, two countries that nobody knows the difference between other than you can go to Amsterdam and Smok Pah. - Well, I know Jean-Claude Van Damens from one of them is from one. - Right. 98% for Belgium because they have, yet they have the default option being donate your Oregon's. Netherlands 28% because they don't, right? Sweden and Denmark, 85% for Sweden. Because the default is donate, Denmark 4%. So it's a huge difference. It makes all the difference in the world right here. So what do you think about that case? - So actually, part of it depends on what's going on. Right, so one version of what's going on might be that people aren't paying attention to the information. So nobody's paying attention. And therefore, they gloss over the thing. They don't check, they don't bother to act. And so because they haven't processed the information appropriately and so they just move on to the next question, noting only that they don't need to do anything. And they get opted in. That's one version of what could be happening. The other version is that somehow it's communicating a norm that you know what, we all do this. And communicating that norm says, well, I guess I'll do it too. I won't change it. And that in some way, philosophers like this, it's something that's quite agricient sort of communication, right? - Yeah, I agree. - Shout out to Colin again. So in that case, it's less disturbing. What I wouldn't want is for it to be a case of deception. You don't want it to be the case of the credit card company who puts a big ol' and big ol' numbers. They put 3% APR. And then really tiny numbers, they put, after six months, it's 21%. Right, you don't want it to be a case of that. I would be, and what, I don't know actually, I'm embarrassed to not know, but I don't know if there have been any studies done on whether people, after the fact, if they're asked, you know, did you choose this? Did you know about this? In the US, you get a big ol' sticker on your license that says, I'm an organ donor, or at least in some states. - And that can help you, like if you're McLeven. - That's right, you're an organ. - That's right. So it's crucial to me that people aren't being deceived. - But see, here's the interesting, so these are two separate questions, right? So what if? So we're assuming that this is just good for society if more people donate their organ. So I think that's pretty much a given, right? So the issue is, to what extent this is a threat to autonomy, right? And so here's the question, right? The way I framed it at the beginning, what would matter would be, what these people would wanna do upon reflection? - Yeah. - Now, it could be that what they wanna do upon reflection is donate their organ. So it might be right that you have to trick people into, in this case, 'cause they're at the DMV, they don't wanna fucking be there. They're not thinking about being more of the, they're thinking about getting the fuck out of there. And so it might be that you have to trick people into doing what they would wanna do upon reflection when they're really thinking about it. - Yeah, but that's okay. - That's kind of what my distinction gets at, because if people upon reflection would wanna do it, you, all you would have to do is just present the information in this sort of tricky default, like opt-in way. What I don't want, what I'm afraid of is that there are plenty of people who upon reflection would not want to do that. - Right. - If what you're saying is that even if those people don't wanna donate their organs, that that gets outweighed by the greater good to society that being an organ donor gets, then I'm, no, I gotta say, I don't think it's a trade-off. Like I don't wanna bypass autonomy. If someone wants to be an asshole and be selfish, I wanna let them do it. - But here's the interesting thing about this case, right? You are letting them do it, right? - That's right. - The opt-out is not forcing them. Like they could easily check the box. - It's not like you're hypnotizing them or something like that. - If they have a religious objection or whatever, they can have like, I just don't, like I don't want anyone benefiting from my death. - Right. - They could have that, whatever it is, they can just check the box. - It reminds me a little bit of the rebate programs, right? So psychologists have, - And behavioral economists have known for quite some time that, that even if you give people, if you say like $50 rebate, mail-in rebate, people will look at that and they'll say, "Oh, they'll take, mentally, they'll take $50 off the cost of the product that they're trying to buy." And they will never turn in that rebate. The law only requires that all of the information be present when people are making the decision. So people know that they can have to mail it in. They just make this error of optimism. They just think that they think, "Oh, I'm gonna totally turn it in." And they don't at all. - How many rebates do you think you've had? And how many of you turned in? - I've maybe mailed in one thing in my life. And for the life of me, I don't even remember if I got a rebate back. But like, that's the other thing. I have no recollection. I mean, the losses that they have to give it back, but they can easily make it so that you could just like, register over email and they'd like electronically deposit, but they don't because the law doesn't require that of them. And they make back fully giving them all of the information and the ability to opt out. - It's not enough. - It's not enough. - It's not enough. And so-- - So it really matters then what people would want to do. I think that if you want to decide about this organ donation thing, which seems to me like in the end, kind of an O-brainer, but for me to be confident in that judgment, you would need to take a poll of people who come out of there and ask them and give them some time and say, okay, what would you want to do and make it to get their actual judgment? And if their judgment is that they're fine with doing it and that matches up even close to what the actual numbers are with the opt-in version, or I mean with the, you know, the version where it's the default physician, then I'm totally fine with it. But if there's a big difference, then I agree there does seem something problematic about it. But what is that? - Because it's like benefit society, it can't hurt them, they're dead. - Well, I mean, I think that one of the problems is that in isolation, this case seems fine, but really what's at the heart of it is that somebody might be manipulating you into doing something that is not for the benefit of society and who's to decide what is and what isn't. You know, and this is always a bit of a concern of mine with these psychological studies on persuasion. When we show that manipulating disgust changes people's attitudes in the sort of conservative political direction, now these aren't very powerful or long lasting, I don't think at least. But I don't have to say that just 'cause people have a lot of blue and long lasting. When I speak to liberal audiences, they just want to know how to manipulate, how do they get, say, conservatives to go to be more liberal? It's offensive when people are trying to use it to do something that you don't agree with. And there's a lot of stuff that's up in the air, it's up for debate. And I don't want to have a position that is something like this, which I think you might have, but correct me if I'm wrong, which is, it's a big problem. - Okay, so long as I agree with the end goal. - You think I might have that? - Yeah, I think that you somehow endorse the manipulation is okay as long as it meets my goals, but it's not okay if it's in the service of something that I am in disagreement with. - Well, no, I actually don't have that because I'm like in favor of totalitarian regime. (laughing) - No, but when you say something is good for society, right? - I don't know, I said that that is sort of a concern. Well, you're right, right, right. So I did say that, right? I also said that organ donation was good for society, but in my theory, this is the problem with theories. (laughing) That-- - You're the one who was all excited about that. (laughing) It was a theory, it's like a theory boner for a second. - I did, you haven't had that one since grad school. (laughing) I got this justice thing licked. - I did three things. - You know, this is something I need to see at the psychiatrist that's like, I don't want it to put forth a theory. In the first place is just problematic, it's troubling. (laughing) - Trying to put more of the ankle thing it fucks with your head, but anyway. So, so, wait, what were we talking about? - Whether it's good, whether-- - Oh, yeah, right, right. So, like, what's good for society? I totally agree that's the troubling part. And this is how all took, you know, I think a lot of totalitarian societies start out with the idea that they're doing what's best for the people and coercing them into doing what's best for them, right? - Before you know that, you're getting cained for chewing bubble gum. (laughing) - Well, I think that I like that, at your point. So, no, no, no, but this is actually Isaiah Berlin, right? This was his point when he's talking about the so-called positive freedom versus negative freedom, negative freedom being lack of interference, positive freedom being. I'm free to do what's best, but often, we don't wanna do what's best for us. And so, the idea that coercion into doing what some government or some other people think is best for us is making us more free. There's something extra and something about that, right? And I agree completely with you that that's troubling, that that's a problem. I totally respect somebody, and I guess I have a lot of family that it's like this 'cause I think Orthodox Jews don't allow organ donation. - So, but so, yeah, some people are opposed to it. I would hope that people who are extra opposed to organ donation are the ones who read that extra carefully. They read, it would be nice to show that those are the people least likely to be influenced by the opt-in versus opt-in. - Yeah, it would be. It would be nice to know that they weren't being tricked into doing something that was against their personal convictions. And it may well be, it's not like we've done a ton of research on this, it may well be that someone has shown that, or may not, but I do think that's important. If we're trying to decide whether to switch our, I mean, my intuition is that this is something we should do. Given those statistics that this is something we should do and we should do it fast because like people are dying because we have a default option that shouldn't be the default option. So my intuition is we should do it and we should do it fast, but I do think. - My opinion means necessary. And like a fender bender should just turn into a fatal car accident. - I'm just, I'm not gonna call myself Herman Gurling right now. (laughing) - Okay, getting out of the life and death situation, there is one example that I wanna give 'cause it's actually, I think probably relevant to, you may have given it some thought. And that is in the consumer, as they say, in the consumer space. - Do they say that? - They do, they do. - They said that, but. - The people say that. So lately it's been in the news a bit if you're tech nerd. iOS games, right on your iPad and your iPhone, or on Android or whatever, where they're in app purchases for games. So the Simpsons tapped out, you build your own community, and you could do it all without paying any money. But in order to get to that next level, it's like it's easy if you just buy some donuts to help Homer build, and that costs you $5 a pack. - And there's a ton of kids games like this. Basically, people have taken all the lessons that we've learned from the psychology of learning, and all the lessons we've learned from the addiction of gambling. And they've ported it into these iOS games. And people are spending thousands of dollars a month on these in-app purchases and games. - I'm like Candy Crush, or. - Yeah, exactly. - Yeah. - And that is just, that is perfectly taking like the stupid part of human psychology, and just juicing it. - Right. And someone who has spent $75,000 and Candy Crush, I fully support Apple. - You're still on level 20. - I'm still on level three. - All right. - There's a clear case. - Yeah. - It's interesting, 'cause I've been there. I'm not that bad actually, and what I do is I just delete the games. I've probably deleted Candy Crush from my computer. I touch my wife's, my iPhone, at least two times each, and maybe more. Like I get it, and then I figure, okay, I'm good now. I can handle it again. But if I come, and then I delete it, I realize. - If you could sign up for the inability to ever install it again onto your device, would you do that? - Absolutely. I would do that in a separate way. I want those apps, those apps, the ultimate device apps. - Yeah, yeah. - But when Google had a little app that you had to do math problems in order to not email people when you go to Google. - Google. - That's what that was. That was awesome. I used to have that. I don't know why I got rid of it. - Because you would never be able to email anyone. (laughing) - But that's an interesting question because I know that psychology. I don't know if you've been there, but like, and it's not the money because I haven't spent very much money all joking inside. It's the time. It's like, but I get this psychology of, I'm doing this, but I don't want to be doing this. I even know, not even the back of my mind, and the close to the very front of my mind, that I don't want to be doing this anymore. And it's making me do something that's making me do it. It's saying about these games that, and I am very addictive when it comes to these things, which is why I have to play so many external constraints on my mind. - Right. - But I'm not, but I dread, I dread like my kid doing something like that, right? And getting super, super duper addicted to it. - You know what's worse is when your kid is totally fine with it, but you're more of it. So you have to be deleting games from your own child's eye touch. - She's like, "Fuck you dad." It's like not my fault that you can't control yourself. But she just like, she grew up with it, so she just accepts it. So sad. - I guess I have a bit of a libertarian streak where I want more, I want there to be a market for pre-commitment devices. - Yeah. - Like what you say, like that to me would be the ideal solution, 'cause as you say, it's even in the front of your mind, you're not being deceived really. You're being manipulated by these games in a way that you know full well. It's not unconscious. It's not, you know, it is much like drug addiction in that sense, where you know that you don't want the drug, but you have to have it. So what I want is like rehab programs for these sorts of things. I want there to be a market for the kinds of apps, for the kinds of messages to consumers, or the things that would combat the other. - Yeah, I mean, like with drugs, I've always thought this, that like the thing that saved me from being a drug addict is that everybody thinks I'm a narc anytime I ask. (laughing) When I was younger, you know, still do. - You're a drug. - But they had just like, no, get away from me, narc. What now it has? - Yeah, it has. - And people don't call it Mary Jane anymore. - So that way. (laughing) - That kid's gonna get some reaper. - I couldn't be an addict. You can't be an addict if you can't get any drugs in the first place, right? So with these games, I'm like a celebrity. I'm like a celebrity that can have any drug they want at any point, prices, no object, accesses, no object, life. - Can you imagine if porn, internet porn had been around when you were 13? We would have been a waste of a life. My habits are off to like functioning teenage boys. - I know, I know. I'm so glad I don't have a boy. - That you know of. - But I know. - I think we syrup up. - All right, well tune in next time for "Vanue Beggars." (upbeat music) - Who are you? Who are you? I'm very bad man. - I'm a very good man. Good man. (upbeat music) - They think they're false and with no more brains than you have. - Wait for our attention. Come on, man. (upbeat music) - Anybody can have a brain. (upbeat music) - You're a very bad man. And I'm a good man! Just a very bad wizard.