David McRaney's Blog, page 15
September 21, 2020
YANSS 189 – Why we must use social science to fight misinformation, partisanship, conspiratorial thinking, and general confusion when we finally have a vaccine for COVID-19
In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we sit down with four experts on vaccines, epidemiology, psychology, and science communication to try and understand how we created so much confusion about COVID-19, and how we can avoid doing so again when a vaccine is ready for widespread, public distribution.
Also in the show, you will also hear from Dr. Paul Offit about exactly what it will take to make that vaccine and when it will likely arrive.
A recent poll showed that more than one-third of U.S. citizens would not get a COVID-19 vaccine if it was offered right now, for free.
Since this is a show about the psychology of reasoning, decision making, sand judgment, at first, when I was gathering interviews for this episode, I thought this was another example of the tribal signaling, as detailed in our episode about anti-maskers.
In short, I thought, as with masks, vaccinating or refusing to vaccine was going to be another badge of loyalty, or a symbol of shame, depending on who you consider “us” and who you consider “them,” and unaware that this is what is motivating those attitudes, people would search for reasons, which they would communicate with justification and rationalizations, tailored so that they seem reasonable to the people who share their values.
But as I gathered interviews about what might lead to this particular vaccine hesitancy, it quickly became clear that this behavior was driven by something completely different. So that’s one thing we are going to talk about in this episode.
Another thing we are going to talk about is just how impactful the anti-maskers have been, but not in the way you might think. The widespread refusal to wear masks has lead those people who are now responsible for creating and distributing a vaccine to ask for help from science communicators and experts in persuasion and social science, when it comes time to encourage people to vaccinate. In this episode, you will hear from two such people who are consulting with those institutions, and you will hear what they told those institutions when they asked, “How do we avoid what happened with masks when it comes to the vaccine?”
And third, you will hear to from a social scientist who, years ago, discovered the most effective way to persuade people who are hesitant to vaccinate their children, including those people we might label as anti-vaxxers.
[image error]Dr. Paul Offit
From his official bio, “Paul Offit is a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases and an expert on vaccines, immunology, and virology. He is the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine that has been credited with saving hundreds of lives every day.” Offit is a professor of vaccinology and pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Offit has published more than 160 papers in medical and scientific journals. He is the author of ten books on science and medicine.
TWITTER: @drpauloffit
[image error]Dr. Joe Hanson
Dr. Joe Hanson, is a science writer, biologist, and YouTube educator. He is the creator and host of It’s Okay To Be Smart, an award-winning science education show from PBS Digital Studios that celebrates curiosity and the pleasure of finding things out. His science writing has been published by WIRED, Nautilus, Scientific American and Texas Monthly.
TWITTER: @DrJoeHanson
[image error]Dr. Jay Van Bavel
From “neurons to social networks,” Jay Van Bavel studies how collective concerns like morals, group identity, and political beliefs affect human brains. His team at the Social Evaluation and Perception Lab studies these issues using social neuroscience, and approach that uses neuroimaging, lesion patients, and linguistic analysis of social media to examine how humans in groups affect the beliefs and perceptions of other humans in groups.
TWITTER: @jayvanbavel
[image error]Avnika Amin
Avnika Amin is an Epidemiology PHD candidate at Emory University and co-author of the paper “Association of Moral Values with Vaccine Hesitancy” which explored the connection between Moral Foundations Theory and how to best persuade anti-vaxxers to vaccinate.
TWITTER: @vivaciousvax
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
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Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response
The Vaccine Testing and Approval Process
Why face masks became political in the US
Crisis & Emergency Risk Communication (CERC)
9 Drugmakers Sign Safety Pledge In Rush To Develop Coronavirus Vaccine
Prepare to wear masks and socially distance even after getting COVID-19 vaccine
Trump contradicts CDC chief on when vaccine will be widely available
YANSS 088 – How to bridge the political divide with better moral arguments
Related Papers:
Association of moral values with vaccine hesitancy The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgmentFrom Gulf to Bridge: When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?The clinical development process for a novel preventive vaccine: An overview
Music: Espanto, Espanto, and Caravan Palace
YANSS 188 – Why we are so terrible at figuring out what it takes to makes us happy
In this episode we welcome Yale psychologist Laurie Santos who discusses her new podcast — The Happiness Lab — which explores how wrong and misguided we can be when we pursue those things that we think will make us happy (or avoid those things that we think will make us sad).
Based on the psychology course she teaches at Yale — “Psychology and the Good Life,” the most popular class in the university’s 300-year history — The Happiness Lab is a scientific tour of the latest research into what does and does not make us happy, and sad, and miserable, and content, and depressed, and joyous, and fulfilled.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first purchase.
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Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
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You will learn that the pursuit of happiness, like a lot of what we talk about You Are Not So Smart, is scrambled up by same misplaced confidence that gets us into trouble in other domains: We don’t know what would make us happy, but we also don’t know that we don’t know that, which would be a manageable problem except for the fact that we also believe that we do know what would make us happy. So, when we poll people and get their opinions on how to create a policy or how to design…anything, people will say what they think they want, and when we make those things, it makes everyone sad.
In the episode, we discuss why ATMs make us lonely, why you should talk to strangers on the subway, and how winning the lottery would be the worst thing that could ever happen to you, and so much more.
Links and Sources
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YANSS 187 – How to use brain science to escape the ‘event horizon of the black hole of anxiety’ and rid yourself of bad habits
In this sprawling, strange, and mind-bending episode, Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist and addiction psychiatrist, discusses the biological origins of our bad habits and how we can change them using new techniques derived from his lab’s research.
Well, he tries to talk about that, but I keep interrupting him to try and solve the great mysteries of consciousness and the self. For instance, if you want to hear a neuroscientist quote Einstein — “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” — then go from talking about worms and cigarettes to warning you to be careful with your brain or “you can go over the event horizon of the black hole of anxiety,” and the only way out is to add more information to the system to it can propel itself away from the worry black hole — this is the episode for you.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
Visit DrJud.com to learn more about Dr. Brewer’s research and apps, and use code YANSS20 for 20% off any of the DrJud habit change programs.
Brewer is the author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love — Why We Get Hooked and how We Can Break Bad Habits — and his TED Talk on how to change a bad habit has more than 12 million views. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. He has held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness.
We talk about so many things in the show, from mindfulness to meditation to psychedelics to why we get stuck browsing the Netflix menu until we run out of time to watch a movie before bed — and lots more. It’s a free association smorgasbord of thinking stuff that will rattle your head.
Links and Sources
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The Apps ( use code YANSS20 for 20% off )
YANSS 186 – What therapy is, what it isn’t, and the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion
In Lori Gottlieb‘s new book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, she opens with a quote from James Baldwin that reads, “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
It’s a book about therapy, what is is, what it isn’t, and how people do and do not change their behaviors. It’s intimate and human, gut-wrenching and inspiring, and full of science and drama and an honesty and candor that you rarely find in books like this.
It’s also a true story, about Gottlieb’s decision, as a therapist, to go see a therapist herself after a traumatic life event sends her reeling.
It’s also an autobiography, telling the story of how she became a therapist and what she learned about herself in therapy, later in life after she had a thriving practice. It’s also about the arc of change that five people experience while in therapy.
It’s a big book, 58 chapters long — so you get an deep, intimate look into the lives of those patients as they get what they need from therapy.
One is John, a belligerent asshole who wants to be a better husband and father. Another is Julie, a woman trying to come to terms with a terminal illness. Charlotte is a 20-something with alcohol and relationship issues who is trying to define herself. Rita is a woman close to 70 with depression who is dealing with a lifetime of regret concerning her children. And Lori, the author, was blindsided by an awful revelation from the man she expected to marry, which leads to a breakup that scrambles her plans, her sense of self, and alters her feelings of security, while causing her to fixate on her mortality and loneliness and so much more.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is doing really well in the publishing world. It’s been on the New York Times Bestsellers list for several months and will soon be a television show on ABC starring Eva Longoria. For me though, the most interesting part of the book is when Gottlieb explains the transtheoretical model of change — a much-researched scientific foundation used by therapists that explains how people go about realizing they want to change their behavior — and how to guide them though it.
In the episode, I talk to her about that, how people go from resisting change to embracing the behaviors required to alter their own thoughts and feelings when stuck in destructive, unhealthy loops. You’ll also learn the difference between idiot compassion and wise compassion, and we cover the misconceptions people tend to have about therapy and therapists, because more than anything else, her book is about pulling back the curtain and showing what therapy really is.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud – Omny – Patreon
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episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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July 31, 2020
YANSS 185 – Why the reason some people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic has little to do with the masks themselves
In this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, we sit down with four experts on human behavior to try and understand how wearing masks, during the COVID-19 pandemic, became politicized.
In the show, we take a take a deep dive into tribal psychology, which, in essence, says that humans are motivated reasoners who alter their thinking, feeling, and behaving when thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways might upset their peers.
At times, since belonging goals are so vital to our survival, we value signaling that we are good members of our tribes much more than we value being correct, and in those circumstances we will choose to be wrong — if signaling we believe wrong things seems like it will keep us in good standing with our peers.
This is not entirely irrational. A human alone in this world faces a lot of difficulty, but being alone in the world before modern times was almost certainly a death sentence. So, we carry with us an innate drive to form groups, join groups, remain in those groups, and oppose other groups. To do that effectively, we must signal who is US and who is THEM.
We’ve covered that before on the show with two episodes on tribal psychology:
How does all this apply to masks? Well, as you will hear, we sometimes act as if we disagree on certain fact-based issues, and we produce reasons for why we disagree, but it is just an act, and the reasons are justification and rationalizations produced for public consumption. In other words, it’s performative, but it doesn’t feel performative.
With masks, like many modern wedge issues, we only disagree because the issue has become political, which means feeling one way or the other carries social rewards and social costs. Masks have unfortunately entered that domain, moving out of the realm of facts and scientific evidence and into the realm of tribal signaling. They have become an overt symbol of who you trust, and so wearing one or not has become a badge of loyalty or a symbol of shame, depending on who you consider US and who you consider THEM.
[image error]Dr. Shana Gadarian
Dr. Shana Gadarian is a political psychologist and professor of political science at Syracuse University. In 2015, she co-authored a book titled Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World. Her research focuses on how citizens learn and form attitudes when politics is threatening, whether threats come from terrorism, public health outbreaks, or media and elite rhetoric.
TWITTER: @sgadarian
[image error]Dr. Liliana Mason
Dr. Lilliana Mason is a professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland where she researches partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.
TWITTER: @lilymasonphd
[image error]Dr. Dan Kahan
Dr. Dan Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School were he studies risk perception, criminal law, science communication, and the application of decision science to law and policymaking. Today he is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, an team of scholars “who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values on perceptions of risk and related facts.”
TWITTER: cult_cognition
[image error]Dr. Joe Hanson
Dr. Joe Hanson, is a science writer, biologist, and YouTube educator. He is the creator and host of It’s Okay To Be Smart, an award-winning science education show from PBS Digital Studios that celebrates curiosity and the pleasure of finding things out. His science writing has been published by WIRED, Nautilus, Scientific American and Texas Monthly.
TWITTER: @DrJoeHanson
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
Behavioral economist Peter Atwater discusses tribal moods
Kahan paper on politically motivated reasoning
Political Polarization in the American Public
Related Papers:
Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political BeliefsSocial Categorization and Similarity in Intergroup BehaviourAbout the impact of automaticity in the Minimal Group Paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasksSeeing “us vs. them”: Minimal group effects on the neural encoding of facesCultural Variation in the Minimal Group EffectScience Curiosity and Political Information Processing‘Ordinary science intelligence’: a science-comprehension measure for study of risk and science communication, with notes on evolution and climate changeClimate-Science Communication and the Measurement ProblemMotivated numeracy and enlightened self-governmentIdeology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflectionCultural Variation in the Minimal Group EffectThe Politically Motivated Reasoning ParadigmRationality and Belief in Human Evolution
Music: Mogwai and Caravan Palace
YANSS 185 – Why the reason behind why some people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic has little to do with the masks themselves
In this episode, we sit down with four experts on human behavior to try and understand how wearing masks, during the COVID-19 pandemic, became politicized.
In the show, we take a take a deep dive into tribal psychology, which, in essence, says that humans are motivated reasoners who alter their thinking, feelings, and behaving when thinking, feeling, and behaving in certain ways might upset their peers.
At times, since belonging goals are so vital to our survival, we value signaling that we are good members of our tribes much more than we value being correct, and in those circumstances we will choose to be wrong if signaling we believe wrong things seems like it will keep us in good standing with our peers.
This is not entirely irrational. A human alone in this world faces a lot of difficulty, but being alone in the world before modern times was almost certainly a death sentence. So, we carry with us an innate drive to form groups, join groups, remain in those groups, and oppose other groups. To do that effectively, we must signal who is US and who is THEM.
How does all this apply to masks? Well, as you will hear, we sometimes act as if we disagree on certain fact-based issues, and we produce reasons for why we disagree, but it is just an act, and the reasons are justification and rationalizations produced for public consumption. In other words, it’s performative, but it doesn’t feel performative.
With masks, like many modern wedge issues, we only disagree because the issue has become political, which means feeling one way or the other carries social rewards and social costs. Masks have unfortunately entered that domain, moving out of the realm of facts and scientific evidence and into the realm of tribal signaling. They have become an overt symbol of who you trust, and so wearing one or not has become a badge of loyalty or a symbol of shame, depending on who you consider US and who you consider THEM.
[image error]Dr. Shana Gadarian
Dr. Shana Gadarian is a political psychologist and professor of political science at Syracuse University. In 2015, she co-authored a book titled Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World. Her research focuses on how citizens learn and form attitudes when politics is threatening, whether threats come from terrorism, public health outbreaks, or media and elite rhetoric.
TWITTER: @sgadarian
[image error]Dr. Liliana Mason
Dr. Lilliana Mason is a professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland where she researches partisan identity, partisan bias, social sorting, and American social polarization. She is the author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and National Public Radio.
TWITTER: @lilymasonphd
[image error]Dr. Dan Kahan
Dr. Dan Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale Law School were he studies risk perception, criminal law, science communication, and the application of decision science to law and policymaking. Today he is a member of the Cultural Cognition Project, an team of scholars “who use empirical methods to examine the impact of group values on perceptions of risk and related facts.”
TWITTER: cult_cognition
[image error]Dr. Joe Hanson
Dr. Joe Hanson, is a science writer, biologist, and YouTube educator. He is the creator and host of It’s Okay To Be Smart, an award-winning science education show from PBS Digital Studios that celebrates curiosity and the pleasure of finding things out. His science writing has been published by WIRED, Nautilus, Scientific American and Texas Monthly.
TWITTER: @DrJoeHanson
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
[image error]
This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
[image error]
Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
Behavioral economist Peter Atwater discusses tribal moods
Kahan paper on politically motivated reasoning
Political Polarization in the American Public
Related Papers:
Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political BeliefsSocial Categorization and Similarity in Intergroup BehaviourAbout the impact of automaticity in the Minimal Group Paradigm: evidence from affective priming tasksSeeing “us vs. them”: Minimal group effects on the neural encoding of facesCultural Variation in the Minimal Group EffectScience Curiosity and Political Information Processing‘Ordinary science intelligence’: a science-comprehension measure for study of risk and science communication, with notes on evolution and climate changeClimate-Science Communication and the Measurement ProblemMotivated numeracy and enlightened self-governmentIdeology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflectionCultural Variation in the Minimal Group EffectThe Politically Motivated Reasoning ParadigmRationality and Belief in Human Evolution
Music: Mogwai and Caravan Palace
YANSS 184 – How to improve your relationships by systematically de-biasing your brain
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral economist and disaster avoidance expert who works with businesses and organizations to help them de-bias themselves.
In the show, we will go through a few of the most-common cognitive biases and learn how to de-bias ourselves within our personal lives to improve relationships and our overall wellbeing.
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Tsipursky is the bestselling author of several books, The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide, and, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters. His latest book is The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
Gleb Tsipursky’s Website
Gleb Tsipursky’s Twitter
July 30, 2020
YANSS 183 – A roundtable discussion of Black Lives Matter with the members of the Association of Black Psychologists
This episode is a roundtable discussion with members of the Association of Black Psychologists exploring Black Lives Matter and the related social movements related place right now in The United States at the time of this recording
[image error]Dr. Marva Robinson
Dr. Marva Robinson, is the Midwestern regional representative for the Association of Black Psychologists, and a clinical psychologist with a practice in St. Louis Missouri. She worked with the people of Ferguson, Missouri, to help psychological trauma following the events during and after the 2014 protests there.
[image error]Dr. Kira Hudson Banks
Dr. Kira Hudson Banks is a psychologist at St. Louis University where she studies discrimination, mental health, diversity in higher education, and intergroup relations. Banks has been working to support individuals and groups to understand themselves, others, and systems of oppression for more than 20 years. Her work is rooted in Black Psychology, and focuses on racial identity and the need for creating more hospitable environments.
[image error]Satira S. Streeter
Dr. Satira S. Streeter is a clinical psychologist and the founder and executive director of Ascensions Psychological and Community Services in Washington D.C. Streeter works with disadvantaged women and families and has specialized in teaching and implementing techniques effective for this population. In 2004, Dr. Streeter founded Ascensions to serve the needs of families in the most poverty stricken area of Washington, DC.
[image error]Dr. Sean Utsey
Dr. Sean Utsey, is a professor of psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University and chair of African American Studies. His research interests is the psychology of the African-American experience, focusing on the understanding how race-related stress impacts the physical, psychological and social well-being of African-Americans and how trauma is manifested in the victims of racial violence.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
[image error]
This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
[image error]
There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first
purchase.
[image error]
Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
YANSS 182 – Why we find A/B testing icky when it comes to policies, practices, medicine, and social media
In 1835, at a tavern in Bavaria, a group of 120 people once met to drink from a randomized assortment of glass vials.
Before shuffling them, they divided the vials into two sets. One contained distilled water from a recent snowfall and the other a solution made by collecting 100 drops of that water and dropping into the pool a grain of salt, and then diluting a drop of the result into another 100 drops, again and again, 30 times in all.
They did this to test out a new idea in medicine called homeopathy, but it was the way they did it that changed things forever. By testing options A and B at the same time, but without telling sick people which option they would be getting, they not only debunked a questionable medical practice, they invented modern science and medicine.
About 200 years later a company in California tried something similar. A group of 700,000 people gathered inside a virtual tavern to share news and photos and stories both happy and sad. The company then used some trickery so that some people randomly encountered more happy things and others more sad things.
They did this to test out a new idea in networking called emotional contagion, but it was the way they did it that changed how many people felt about gathering online. By testing options A and B at the same time, but without telling people which option they would be getting, they not only learned if a computer program could make its users more happy or more sad, they created a backlash that resulted in a large-scale, world-wide panic.
Though we always learn something new when we perform an A/B test, we don’t always support the pursuit of that knowledge, which is strange, because without A/B testing we have to live with whatever option the world delivers to us, be it through chance or design. Should we use cancer drug A or B? Should we try gun control policy A or B? Should we try education technique A or B? It seems like our reaction to these questions would be to support testing A on half the people, B on the other, and then to look at which one works best and go with that moving forward, but as you will learn in this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, new research shows that a significant portion of the public does not feel this way, enough to cause doctors and lawmakers and educators to avoid A/B testing altogether.
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Back at the tavern, they called the (barely) salt water in the vials a C30-solution because it was made using homeopathic techniques that rely on the C scale. C is short for centesimal, which means a division into hundredths. The scale was named and created by the inventor of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann who believed that if something caused an illness, then giving that thing to someone who was already sick would cure them. This hair-of-the-dog concept is, of course, not true, but people believed it was sound medical advice going back to the Greeks and beyond.
In the late 1700s, the time when Hahnemann became a physician, this idea had come under some scrutiny, because it killed people. Got a tummy ache? Here, take this concoction of fermented oatmeal, snake venom, and rancid meat so your stomach aches even more. It will cause vomiting and diarrhea and blood yawns, but once you are done writhing in agony, you’ll be all better. Unless you die. But if you do die, well, hey, it’s 1781. We tried our best.
Hahnemann thought that, sure, this ancient idea of similia similibus curantur, or “what makes a man ill also cures him,” caused too much harm. His innovation? Dilute the bad thing until it doesn’t do anything bad. And with that, he had invented homeopathy, which roughly translates to “kind-of like suffering, but not.”
Homeopathy became very popular in the we-have-no-idea-what-we-are-doing era of medicine. Why? Because doctors didn’t wash their hands, prescribed cocaine to children for toothaches, and used a bevy of techniques that today would land you a prison sentence even if the patient survived. In a medical environment where doing nothing at all would actually be the better option, homeopathy did indeed save lives. So, based on those results, not knowing any better, the first homeopathic schools opened in 1835, and by the turn of the century there were dozens of colleges and more than 15,000 homeopaths, each accepting cash that was covered with more molecules of medical value than could be found in the water they peddled in exchange.
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Although homeopathy had its heyday, and although it is still practiced today by people who like their medicine based on ideas that predate the discovery of vitamins and vaccines, it was almost immediately criticized and ridiculed by the medical community of the 1800s.
It’s easy to see why. If you dilute something to one part in one hundred, like a single grain of salt, you get a C2-dilution. But Hahnemann said you needed to dilute things to C30, and at that point you would have to give out more than a billion doses per second to the entire human race for the length of time it took the Earth to cool into a livable planet before a single person would likely receive a single molecule of whatever it was that you diluted.
And it is this fact that lead 120 people to meet in a Tavern in Bavaria in 1835 at an event organized by “a society of truth-loving men” living in Nuremberg. They were lead by Friedrich Wilhelm von Hoven, who was the head of local hospitals there, and who was also not a big fan of homeopathy. He had written a scathing review of the practice, explaining that homeopathic remedies had zero effect on people’s health, and added that whatever it was that people experienced would be the same thing they would experience without taking anything at all. All they had was a belief that they had received a cure, he wrote, and apparently, sometimes, that was all a patient needed. Johann Jacob Reuter, a popular, local homeopath, objected to all this, and so to settle the dispute the town decided to put the stuff his conceptions to the test.
More than 100 citizens, some with illnesses and some with just curiosity, met the doctors and the truth-loving men at the tavern. The experimenters numbered 100 vials, split them into two lots, filled half with snow water and the other with the C30 homeopathic solution created by Reuter, and shuffled them. The vials were then distributed, but no one knew who got what. Independent observers recorded which vials had which solution, who had received which, and then sealed and protected the information so the recipients and the doctors couldn’t affect the results with beliefs. Three weeks later, everyone gathered again. First, people reported whether they had experienced anything. Then the sealed information was opened, and everyone learned what everyone drank. Only eight people reported any effects, and among them, half had taken the plain water and half the solution. The truth-loving men concluded homeopathy was bunk
As the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine later reported, “The organizers concluded that the symptoms or changes which the homeopaths claimed to observe as an effect of their medicines were the fruit of imagination, self-deception and preconceived opinion.”
And with that, as noted earlier, in many ways, modern medicine was born. They had unknowingly invented the double-blind trial, randomized control groups, randomization, placebos, and many other aspects of experimental design that we use to this day. And once we figured out that we could do this, we were able to put all sorts of things to the test — medical procedures, drugs, education techniques, financial decisions, public policies, folk remedies, martial arts techniques and farming practices, and on and on and on. Instead of making a choice between A or B and living with it, or deciding to stick with tradition or choose a new path, or trying a new medicine or doing nothing at all, we could try out both choices to see which lead to the preferred outcome, and then make an evidence-based judgment how to approach the problem we were trying to solve. Once we did this, a whole lot of things that seemed to work turned out to have no effect, or to have a worse effect than their alternatives. A whole lot of practices and policies turned out to be based on superstition or wishful thinking or to be politically motivated or in some other way emotionally motivated.
So you might think that, in general, as an idea, as a practice, the A/B test would be beloved, supported, and encouraged as a way to test out policies and practices and drugs and treatments, which brings us to that company in California 200 years later.
In 2014, Facebook wanted to know if Facebook was making people sad. There was a lot of conjecture at the time that it was. After all, this was, on one hand, a highlight reel of the lives of friends and family, showing only the best-looking selfies, and best aspects of their lives. On the other hand, people were sharing a lot of outrage and political discontent, arguing about the issues of the day, and passing around memes that were often more infuriating than funny. Of all the strange changes to our daily lives and social interactions that came with widespread adoption of the platform, people wondered if it was injecting us with depression.
Facebook asked researchers at Cornell to look into it, and they did what 200 years of science said they should do. They created an A/B test, or what science calls a randomized experiment, or what medicine called a randomized controlled trial. They set aside 700,000 users, and for one week Group A saw more positive items than usual, Group B saw more negative items than usual, and a control saw what everyone else outside the experiment was seeing.
In the end, the researchers concluded that Facebook did affect our emotions like so many of us thought it might. The effects were small, but real: if people saw more negative news, it made them more sad than a control. Same for positive news. But the strongest emotions emerged when the study was revealed to the public, because the public felt angry, creeped-out, and in some new, Black-Mirror-kind-of-way, violated.
The Atlantic called it “Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment.” The headline in the New York Times read, “Facebook Tinkers with Users’ Emotions.” There were protests, and there were calls from lawyers, activists, and lawmakers to investigate. People called it intrusive, spooky, and scandalous. Facebook defended itself, and then everyone argued what we should do about all this. As The Guardian reported, “Clay Johnson, the co-founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008, said: ‘The Facebook ‘transmission of anger’ experiment is terrifying.’ He asked: ‘Could the CIA incite revolution in Sudan by pressuring Facebook to promote discontent? Should that be legal? Could Mark Zuckerberg swing an election by promoting Upworthy [a website aggregating viral content] posts two weeks beforehand? Should that be legal?'”
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Bioethics researcher Michelle Meyer, and her colleagues started to wonder why people reacted so poorly, considering that Facebook and other institutions, including hospitals, governments, and schools, are always testing their products, policies, and practices, just not in an A/B experimental design. Instead, they usually just change how things work, what drugs we take, or how their products function — and then we go on living taking what is offered. As she put it, Facebook had already manipulated our behavior by inventing Facebook, and then again and again each time it updated how Facebook works. But as long as the changes were universal, we didn’t freak out. Why is it, Meyer and her team asked, that making those changes random causes a backlash?
It’s an important question because, as Meyer and her team point out, “A/B tests, have long been the ‘gold standard’ for evaluating drugs and other medical interventions and are increasingly used to evaluate business products and services, government programs, education and health policies, and global aid.'”
In this episode you will learn what they found, and why they concluded that, “rigorously evaluating policies or treatments via pragmatic randomized trials may provoke greater objection than simply implementing those same policies or treatments untested.” In other words, we would rather live with an untested option A, or an untested option B, than live in a world where A and B are being tested at the same time. Meyer and her team call this the A/B effect, and you will learn all about it in this episode.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
Objecting to experiments that compare two unobjectionable policies or treatments
Inventing the randomized double-blind trial: the Nuremberg salt test of 1835
Homeopathic Pharmacy: Theory and Practice
Our Aversion to A/B Testing on Humans Is Dangerous
Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment
Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science
Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions
YANSS 181 – The psychology behind why people defend the norms they secretly despise
Have you ever been in a classroom or a business meeting or a conference and had a question or been confused by the presentation, and when the person running the show asked, “Does anyone have any questions?” or, “Does anyone not understand?” or, “Is anyone confused?” you looked around, saw no one else raising their hands, and then chose to pass on the opportunity to clear up your confusion?
If so, then, first of all, you are a normal, fully functioning human being with a normal, fully functioning brain, because not only is this common and predictable, there’s a psychological term for why most people don’t speak up in situations like these. It’s called pluralistic ignorance.
In a “Does anyone have any questions?” scenario like this, each confused individual waits to see if anyone else raises their hands, not wanting to be singled out as the only person falling behind. When no one does, each then assumes they must be the only person who has no idea what is going on and decides to remain silent. After a few seconds, the speaker moves on, and the result is a shared, inaccurate view of reality in which everyone thinks that everyone else has no questions. The speaker thinks the room is following along just fine, and everyone begins living a lie.
There are several ways to define pluralistic ignorance, and that’s because it’s kind of a brain twister when you try to put it into words. Psychologist Deborah Prentice says, it’s “a phenomenon in which you feel like you’re different from everyone else, but in fact you are exactly the same. It’s a kind of illusory deviance, a sense that you are not with the majority that everyone in the majority can have simultaneously.”
And this phenomenon scales up to the level of norms. When people are unhappy with a norm, but aren’t sure if they are alone in that thinking, when they don’t know what the majority opinion truly is, they play it safe and adhere to the norms of the day, but since we can’t read each other’s minds, we assume that others are following norms because they actually believe in them. Everyone in the group, at the same time, gets stuck following a norm that no one wants to follow.
The false belief that the majority supports an unpopular norm slows down the process of ending it and sways policy makers, employers, advertisers, and the rest of society to act as though they live in a world that isn’t really there. And When change is on the horizon, pluralistic ignorance keeps people on the fringe, the sort of people whose beliefs and attitudes will be phased out by that change, clinging to their outdated worldviews for longer than they would otherwise. It also keeps their opponents feeling less supported than they truly are while pushing people in the middle to favor the status quo. In the end, a make-believe status quo changes the way everyone acts and thinks. As sociologists Hubert J. O’Gorman and Stephen L. Garry once put it, in situations like these, people often “unintentionally serve as cultural carriers of cognitive error.”
Pluralistic ignorance has been blamed for everything from excessive drinking on college campuses to the persistence of racial segregation well into the 1970s. So, how do you deal with such a strange and mind-twisting phenomenon? Well, for some norms, the solution is simple, though it can take a lot of organization and effort. You must ask everyone what they really think and feel, and then you broadcast that to everyone in some way. You must make the private public. You must make it safe to say what is really on your mind — or you simply reveal that it was safe to do so all along.
Many scientists bring up the parable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In the story by Hans Christian Andersen, a vain emperor hires two tailors who tell him they’ve made a suit of clothes so fine that it appears invisible to people who are unfit for their job or are very dumb. The trick, of course, is that the tailors haven’t made anything at all. All the emperor’s lackeys and subjects act as if his clothes were beautiful and amazing out of fear of appearing stupid or unfit, until finally a child points out that the emperor is walking around naked. At that point, everyone sighs in relief and feels safe to say what they were thinking all along. Stories with similar plots go back to antiquity, so the idea has been with us for a long time. The takeaway is usually: if someone has the courage to speak up, then the spell will be broken.
But there is an exception. A dark, terrible exception. When almost everyone in a group privately disagrees with a norm, or a decision, or an idea, or a practice, or a plan…but everyone also thinks they are alone in that disagreement, they may go along with what they think is the consensus, which leads a group of people to prepare to act in a way that no one actually wants to act. When one person speaks up, instead of breaking the spell, the crowd will sometimes shout that person down.
That’s what happened in 1978 at Jonestown, when Jim Jones asked 700 people to kill 300 of their children and then themselves. One person, Christine Miller, stood up and plead for everyone to choose another option. She defied her leader, and her community. Instead of joining her in revolt, the people around her engaged in what psychologists call false enforcement. By shouting at her, they signaled they were willing to die to show their loyalty to the group, even though in so doing they destroyed the very group to which they were signaling their allegiance.
False enforcement is one of our most twisted predilections, a sort of algorithmic mental malfunction that can cause pluralistic ignorance to turn deadly, and in this episode, you will learn how prevalent it is out here among our everyday lives, and what we can do about it.
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
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This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Psychology of Human Behavior taught by David W. Martin. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world and what motivates us to think, feel, and behave differently from one another. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.
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Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.
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Deborah Prentice is a professor of psychology and provost at Princeton University. Her work focuses on “how people are guided by norms and constrained by norms; how they respond when they feel out of step,” and how they determine what the norms of their groups and communities are; and how they react… to those who violate social norms.”
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Robb Willer is a professor of sociology, psychology, and organizational behavior and the director of the Polarization and Social Change Laboratory at Stanford University. He studies the social forces that bring people together, divide them, and shape their political attitudes.
Links and Sources
Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Spotify – Patreon – Soundcloud – Omny
Pluralistic Ignorance and Alcohol Use on Campus: Some Consequences of Misperceiving the Social Norm
The False Enforcement of Unpopular Norms
Christine Miller: A Voice of Independence
IMAGE CREDIT: Emperor’s New Clothes: Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 – 1859)
IMAGE CREDIT: Christine Miller: San Diego State University
IMAGE CREDIT: Jonestown: NBC News Archives
MUSIC CREDIT: Mogwai, Drew Garraway, Snabish
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