267. Constructing the Self feat. Roy F. Baumeister

foreign brought to you by alumni FM connecting people through stories um welcome to unsilo this is uh Greg LeBlanc and I'm here with uh Roy Baumeister who uh is Professor of psychology at University of Queensland in Australia and also the author of wow just countless books I have only a couple of them with me um I think probably the most well-known recent books include ones on Willpower um rediscovering the greatest human strength another one called The Power of bad how the negativity effect rules Us and how we can rule it but of course other books

on on self-esteem you have a book on um meaning of life I mean well just to you know maybe not be too ambitious is there anything good about men that was a book I have somewhere around in my house but your most recent book I think it's kind of like it's almost like a magnum opus I think you're drawing a lot of these strands together and it's called the self-explained why and how we become who we are welcome Roy thanks for having me Greg now uh in one of your books you you uh you mentioned

that um you at one point wanted to become a philosopher and then you you got diverted into social psychology but but you've been able to address some deeply philosophical questions through your research and you know I've seen numerous overlaps when you talk about willpower I had a podcast about acracia which is or uh you know or I forget how sometimes they say uh but about a weakness of will um you you have an awful lot to say about education maybe child rearing relationships uh workplaces um do you think that you are a philosopher at the

end of the day or do you think that they're really in today's world is much of a distinction between practical philosophy and psychology well there are difference in methods uh it's like philosophers are the expert thinkers and pretty much most of what they do is thinking very carefully and reading other people's thoughts and criticizing them uh social science social psychology in particular is is much more sloppy in a sense but it's also much more immersed in the world because you have to collect data what What attracted me into this field um was that I could

tackle some of these big philosophical problems only with social science data I remember the the first one that inspired me on this was back when I was an undergraduate I did briefly major in philosophy and I read some of Sigmund Freud's work so I knew the issues of morality of what is right and wrong and where does it come from the philosophers had thought long and hired about these things and is the rule of morality embedded in the mind or is it something we learned and why do most cultures have the same ones and Freud

instead said well we couldn't look at evidence and how do children actually learn what's right and wrong and and relying on the anthropology of his time which is obviously a century ago or more but he said we can also look at societies and where their moral values come from and see what the earliest ones and I thought well that is brilliant and fascinating and so you mentioned the the meaning of Life Book and that was kind of ambitious for me but I thought well there's not much experimental data about meaning of life but once we

broaden the focus to say well what about happiness and love and work and family and religion uh there are lots of data on all those things so that was kind of exciting to me to to preserve the problems but use a different method no method is perfect including certainly in the social sciences but if we can look for convergence from lots of different methods uh that's well that's probably the best we can do at at present my unlike most social scientists I I'm kind of a generalist I sort of set out to try to figure

out what is the big picture what does human life all about how does the human mind work so instead of staying in one area which is the formula for having a highly successful career uh you work on one or two problems and sort of come up with a definitive solution um instead of those I have gone and worked in many different areas all of which again I'm trying to amass the social science data I had a book on why is there evil which is one of the classic philosophical problems but again I didn't approach it

as a philosopher I studied all the data on everything from crime records to war atrocities to laboratory studies on aggression and and tried to pull that together after that that's kind of tired reading off the bad things so I remember the hippie days from when I was young Make Love Not Wars so I just sat down and read research on sexuality for uh this was in the 90s so there were like 30 years of research in the leading journals and I just waded through read all the abstracts just trying to learn as much as I

could about it so that's so no no one would really consider me a philosopher but I do have interest in those problems and some of my friends are philosophers we like to talk about the same problems using different approaches well I think your latest book might be the most philosophical in a way because you're talking about the self and your early work was really about self-esteem and um that presupposes some notion of the self and and this idea of the self I mean this is a concept that psychologists um often find a bit difficult to

work with right um so you know is they talk about multiple selves or you know they sometimes talk about the the self as sort of a a Mindless agent of social forces and so forth I mean can we even think about psychology without a notion of the self I think it's pretty indispensable again you could work on some specific uh problems in Psychology is certainly going into the brain and studying how the brain works you don't need to have much of a sense of self in that One reviewer of one of my papers made a

great comment that if we look at which disciplines question the self versus which ones have to assume it and find it indispensable that's revealing and I I went and did that and it was long and hard to basically the ones that take more than one person uh need selves you couldn't talk about the marriage without the selves or the two people in it but the psychologists who study little mental processes like you know why does the the Mind remember the first things in a list better than the stuff in the middle well you don't need

need much self for that and so the the the cognitive and the Brain people I mean sometimes they get interested in the self too but they don't really need it the way say an economist would need selves because you know you couldn't talk about a Marketplace without buyers and sellers and they have different interests and different goals and different ways of making decisions so um psychology is kind of on the border uh some parts of it could get by without itself but the more interpersonal ones and that's one of the main conclusions in the book

you mentioned is that uh the self is there for dealing with others it's not something that emerged out of some private need of the brain uh in a sense the the animal versions of self are more like that I think one of the early things is is um the brain using a system to move the body uh you coordinate the uh the pause say for an animal to run around or uh I remember watching my daughter Master crawling and you know up till that point we put her down and she stayed there but she was

on the floor and she managed to roll over and was working out it's right right hand left knee left hand right knee alternate front and back diagonal you have to have all those things figured uh and and and move there to move the body but it's not interpersonal again that's about as far as most animals get because they live in a kind of solipsistic world uh I mean they know that there are others but they don't really understand that other Minds have different ideas from their own and if you have a dog you know the

dog doesn't really understand that petting you is boring for you or petting her is boring for you uh he thinks petting is wonderful and it's just fills the universe with with joy so once we've understood we're in a community of Minds the minds with different ideas that changes a lot and the self is there to help us participate in society okay you also mentioned the the belief in multiple selves and this is a sign psychology hasn't really come together about what the self is there are people who say there's no self that it's just an

illusion and people say there's one self and they're people who say there are multiple selves and everyone has lots of different selves uh so how do they get along well each of them has some key ideas that are worth understanding and using but the the right answer is one as the essential the self is about the creation of unity uh first in the body for walking and then with humans across time so that you you have a reputation you have credentials that go with you from from childhood into into old age people who talk about

multiple selves they don't really mean it uh they're different versions of the same self uh you know they say oh like well you're kind of a different self when you're at home uh with a family then when you're at work well that's true but if you borrowed money you still owe the money whether you're at home or at work uh and you still have the same name and you still have the relationships and uh so they may be slightly different versions with different values and traits and so on but it's it's the same you the

same thing with the people who say there's no sir no self that it's an illusion I noticed they still put their names on their books uh I'm tempted to ask them well you know next time you want to take an airplane flight go and don't take any identification with you because that would imply that there's a self there I said don't take them you just explain to them that salves are Illusions and they should just give you a seat on the airplane because it doesn't matter it's just someone's gonna fly there and see how far

that gets they're probably not past security uh but again the selves the need for them is less inside the single mind than in the social system which is why when you get on an airplane you have to prove that you're really the person who bought the ticket uh rather than someone else because it makes a difference partly for for Safety and Security issues so you know in economics we have this exercise where we start off with our Robinson Crusoe on the island right and Robinson Crusoe has to make various decisions and you know we think

of Robinson Crusoe as a self we think of Robinson Crusoe making inferences about you know the relationship between current actions and future consequences and so forth so there is some temporal notion of of a self um uh but and in Psychology also you know I guess cognitive psychology are there certain aspects of of psychology which are kind of focused on the individual's interaction with the the world but but I think your your point is that the full the complete notion of self is is one that is inevitably social right so what what is what kind

of notion does a self have if they're in in complete isolation I mean one of the interesting things you said is that when you're completely by yourself you don't think in terms of you know my book you think in terms of the the book right um so to what extent is is sort of the the the expectations that others have about you or the desire to shape those expectations um the source of this social self [Music] uh in in terms of human evolution the the two big advances are communication and cooperation these are things we

do far more capably and more successfully and far more extensively than any other animals uh including the Apes our closest relatives so those are both about relating to others by sharing information and by working together we can survive and reproduce way better or that's how natural selection works of course uh way better than other creatures um so the distinctive parts of the human self evolved to help us relate to others the south is very much about that are re preparing for this book and I think I talked about it in the in the book to

some degree there are people who've gone off and lived by themselves in isolation for uh long periods of time I had no contact with other humans and so on and uh the one of the guys who was saying well this is going to be my chance to get into myself and find myself and learn about he he took copious notes of all his thoughts on it and stuff but when he went back to write the book He said I disappeared from my own narrative there was no use for the self by by the second uh

the second year I was writing about what the birds were doing and what the temperature was but it was all about the environment there the inner stuff uh that I was was looking for there there was none of that you don't really need much of a self uh when uh if you're completely alone I mean think about it you wouldn't need a name you wouldn't need a you wouldn't have social roles you wouldn't have a reputation um there'd be no point to morality you wouldn't own things um all these things are highly important in a

kind of society that humans create but not by yourself I mean you it's your toothbrush if you had a toothbrush on how you'd get one if you lived alone uh but if you had a toothbrush it would be that toothbrush not your is it a point of having it be your toothbrushes so other people don't use it if there aren't any other people you don't need to think of it as well that's my toothbrush uh is that would never come up so even ownership which was we think of as a relationship between a person and

a thing uh really only matters in a in a social context where there are other people if I own it that means it's mine and not someone else's and I can use it when I want and anyone else should ask me for permission uh I can sell it but nobody else can uh all those only matter in a in a in a social environment with other people yeah it reminded me a lot of how we view corporate liability in the law right so you know um if somebody is uh acting and commits a tort right

we if we assign liability to the the corporation right then the corporation is going to start keeping track of the the behavior of that that individual and so you know the the coherence of the organization and the the sense of that organization being an agent only makes sense if we impose some kind of liability on all the different you know elements of that Corporation right so if if we're holding someone accountable for an action that they they took in the past then that's gonna kind of get that individual to start connecting very quickly Uh current

actions with future consequences right yes yes and I've read arguments that the limited liability Corporation was one of the great invest inventions of Western culture and partly responsible for its rise to the top of the world uh the world powers um go back what half a dozen centuries um in some ways the Middle East there cultures there were more advanced but they never got this and which means if you undertook a business venture with someone else and it failed you would lose all your your property so by forming a corporation well the corporation can lose

all its property but it doesn't take away the houses and the savings and the the jewelry of the individual members so again that's a social construction to make an a company be an artificial kind of self uh for very you know powerfully advantageous social reasons uh operating in a complicated system so so the self is in many ways it's a it's a social construction in the same way right uh well yes again it starts with the body but uh it it soon moves on Beyond it and much of what you are uh again is uh

exists only there in the social world and going back to even back when I was doing my dissertation and I I realized you know it started out interested in self-esteem but I realized it's other esteem that matters more what you think of yourself has only limited consequences uh whereas what others think of you that is you know throughout history and prehistory that is a chief determinant of even how long you're going to live and certainly how well you're going to live that's why in the book I came out people have multiple concepts of themselves they

can be their most positive self and their humble modest self and their you know potential uh different versions uh but the most important is the desired reputation it's how you want other people to view you because that sets the goals and guidelines and what you do when nobody's looking well doesn't matter nearly as much as what you do when everybody's looking and well a big part of your story is how people internalize right this external Observer I mean there's a long tradition right in philosophy about the the internalized Observer right I mean Adam Smith talks

about this you talk a bit about this right so the evolution of of morality so it's it's morality then kind of a I don't know a mnemonic or a a rule that is just a whole lot easier to follow right if if it's internalized it kind of reduces the amount of of thinking that you have to do when it comes to make making decisions um because you can imagine that you're right you're right your reputation would not be impaired if you if you did sort of immoral acts in a way that was not observable right

right right it only affects your reputation if others find out um morality is a field that psychology has been moving very fast in the last 20 years or so you know back in the late 20th century the research on it was was rather slow and guided by thinking about stages of judgment and so on um but and so my thinking about it has continued to evolve and change fairly rapidly and I don't know that I know everything I certainly don't know everything um but uh my take on it what gets people to embrace morality why

do they find it useful to do that well again we evolved to communicate and cooperate so it means your survival is essentially dependent on whether other people want to cooperate with you so you need to figure out how to behave to to keep uh Cooperative Partners in the future and to attract others and morality is kind of a blueprint for that um morality is a set of rules that if you act this way and do the right things other people will be glad to work with you and cooperate with you you know those studies uh

tomasello and lab and others where they'll they'll train a couple Apes to work together for something that they have to pull a rope at the same time so that they could get a reward and they only get it if they work together well the Apes can learn this but then what happens when the reward comes the big one Hogs it all and then pretty soon the little one doesn't doesn't want to do it anymore uh so that's what prevented their a society and culture from moving forward and producing more resources because the the cooperation is

undermined by that and with humans where we have more of a sense of it uh then we realize well if I cheat this person or betray by essentially hogging the reward myself even though I could and that's the natural thing to be tempted to do if there's food and you're the big animal uh take whatever you want but projecting into the future that will be costly farming and with humans it's even worse because not only cooperation there's also communication as in Gossip so if if you cooperate with somebody and then hog the reward and betray

them not only do you lose him or her as a future partner but that person's going to tell everybody else pretty soon nobody will will cooperate you with you so it became that much more urgent to find out how to act to maintain a good reputation uh so other people will work with you and go straight again to the survival and reproduction uh the biological criteria of success I think what puzzles Economist is right you know you give people the opportunity to say flip a coin in in secret and they're rewarded for a particular outcome

and so of course we we see a higher probability that they're gonna uh come up with the the reward generating outcome than you would expect by chance but but you don't get a hundred percent right that's that's I think you know surprising right so an economist would predict that you would have say a hundred percent heads when you allow people to to do this coin flip but but you only get like six you only get like 60 or 65 right so so so so that's support that needs explaining right the 35 percent the the rational

Economist is has a certain charm to it uh I guess that uh um and you know economists think everyone should just do what's what's best for them uh if they can get away with it you know they understand of course the the contingencies that if if you're seen to betray or cheat take care of other people that has that has costs for you um but if it's if it's private and you can get away with it uh then yes economists might expect everyone would do it um but now we are better than that we do

give people a chance we do try uh to cooperate uh with each other um there's also the question of how much people believe what they do is really secret because especially in the modern world more and more you have to realize okay Zuckerberg the Facebook I was saying that you know the days when you could act differently in different situations and get away with it are are gone uh and uh well there's still privacy and still some some areas where it's being defended but it's certainly shrinking and many people are finding things are a lot

more public than they expected when you describe a couple you describe a couple experiments where you you were monitoring the the activity of your subjects without without them knowing uh yes because because it's important to know but uh we wanted to see you know how much of a difference there was uh between between public and private you know people do clearly change their behavior deliberately when they know someone else is watching and evaluating them uh but uh whether it's completely private um I don't know it's often tempted to think so and yet uh but yeah

yes you're right there does seem to be a bit of moral Behavior even in private um or uh you know the trust game is another one I remember people looking into that and again the economists think well you shouldn't trust them at all because you could lose uh but the but the willingness to at least try the person once it's not like we're completely trusting or completely Cooperative but when thrown together with a stranger this sort of a sense well we should at least give it a try and if the other person misbehaves or acts

badly people are quite ready to pull back and and trust is gone but just getting us to the point where okay we'll give a stranger a chance that was huge compared to what other other animals do and that's what enabled the cooperation I think to get started which then proved so uh so successful now there's one version of the trust game that you described in the power of bad where the the different treatments involved telling the subjects that the initial pie belonged to them and they could split it as they wanted I mean it was

a sequence of dictator games I suppose versus saying that the the pie belonged to the the other person and they could figure out how much they wanted to take and and and this this really highlighted this concept of loss aversion and I think loss aversion is in many ways at the heart of the book um the the power of bad so I think to summarize I mean the book it's really all about how we are more sensitive to bad news Adverse Events failures negative information then the opposite uh and and you articulate kind of a

evolutionary reason for this so you know why is it that we are so sensitive to negative information I mean you talk about a couple examples where you know trust is gained in inches per year and lost in you know miles per second that there are there are lots of other examples where you know one small failure will will kill you uh but you know small success is just you know they don't they don't kill you so so this is it just because there's a there's an asymmetry in terms of of consequences well I I have

to think so when we started doing this I remember noticing the loss aversion and then there was one other area where they talked about it a little bit the uh psychology of first impression so when you meet somebody new and you learn something bad about them it has a much bigger impact on your overall impression than learning a corresponding good thing and so I said well let's look at different areas and see whether this is true you know there's no see where it is and where it isn't and that'll sort of say exactly what situations

this this bias is suited for oh they researched at searched we found lots of evidence of it but we didn't find any exceptions it just seemed to be true everywhere which was in a way disappointing because it would have made a more interesting Theory to say well you know good is stronger than bad in the future but bad is stronger than good in the past uh none of that worked out but it also added the excitement of this must be one of the basic principles of how the mind works and given how it's everywhere ubiquitous

uh made me think yeah it probably has to be something that's hardwired probably by Evolution and as we put it uh uh life has to win every day death only has to win once so if you make one fatal mistake that that could be the end and even if it doesn't quite kill you um you eat something that makes you really sick uh oh you don't want to have anything that even tastes like that again um so yes the consequences of the mistake of missing something bad are terrible so you have to be hyper vigilant

for that sort of thing in the in the jungle or the Primeval Forest missing something good or not following up on what might be good well that's that's too bad but it doesn't kill you um you know you find some mushrooms in the forest and you're hungry uh well the item they could kill you if you eat them you don't eat them well you'll be hungry for a while longer uh be hungry for a while longer but uh um again it doesn't doesn't kill you doesn't make you spend three days with a high fever vomiting

your guts out so in other words it's ecologically rational in in in in some kind of environments but it's certainly not in other environments right so in an environment where you're not confronting death on a regular basis it seems um it seems dysfunctional right so I mean you talk about ways that we can we can overcome this right yeah but again it it is functional in many ways uh like the research on working teams one bad member of the team does a lot of damage to the the team if you know you put one bad

person in a in a group that was otherwise working great and they can sort of undermine the whole ethos of it putting one good person on a bad team doesn't doesn't have anywhere near the same effect uh and so advice to managers and team Builders and so on is avoid the bad apples avoid the ones who will get in there that's more important uh than say taking a risk for someone who might might be great but might be terrible so there are many contexts in which the downside of a risk and even with the basic

money things it can I don't know all the thoughts economists have had about about loss aversion but uh um I mean it'd be great to get an extra say a large sum of money if you could double your fifty thousand dollar investment uh hundred thousand okay that that's really good but losing your fifty thousand dollar investment you know unless you're some kind of multi-millionaire that's a that's a severe blow in fact I think the even the multi-millionaires uh get upset about losing fifty thousand uh but for an ordinary person yeah losing the same amount is

is more costly than gaining the same amount as positive yeah well we spend awful lot of time in business school trying to um get people to overcome this loss aversion bias right which we call it right so you know if you think back to even this example of where you put One Bad Apple into a company and it has disproportional damage but but that's because right their co-workers respond disproportionately to the negativity of this this person right so if if all of those co-workers were you know had their their their loss aversion kind of eliminated

then this this guy couldn't do that much harm so I guess part of the question is to what extent do we just take people as given and then try to work with the the bias and to what extent do we try to change it so in in you know you you have some wonderful advice uh for people in relationships right which is the the the the the the positivity ratio right and I think this is great advice you want to make sure that you have four positives for every negatives but but I guess if you

if you were if you had a relationship with somebody who was had somehow de-biased themselves then you know you'd only need 1.1 positives for every negative right and so you know should you internally try to kind of manage the disproportionate impact I mean if you are in a relationship that has a ratio that is less than four to one can can you somehow convince yourself that the bad isn't as bad as as it seems and the good is is better than it seems people do ever extensive capacity for self-deception or self-influence uh so yes uh

people will try to do it and uh uh for better and For Worse people have done this people I mean stay in abusive relationships uh much longer than seems rational uh convincing themselves well that was they won't do it again and um was well I wasn't thinking about abusive relationships I mean you mentioned judge Justice Ginsburg who received some marital advice from her mother which was you know sometimes it's it's it's good to be a little deaf right so so that's presumably sort of a way of of changing how you you think about the the

negatives and the positives right yes if you tune them out and let things go for a while or some of these economic games things it's the same they look at uh if they're cooperating over and over and then the person defects and takes advantage of them once or uh and then do they continue do they forgive and let it go and it's sort of necessary uh to do I mean there there's a interesting gender difference on there that the women tended to think uh if the other person betrayed me once that's it they're out I

don't forgive that yeah we call that the Grim Grim trigger strategy in in Game Theory yeah okay that would be that would be a word I haven't heard but that's a term uh but it makes sense uh where's the men were more willing to let it go for a while and uh you know the men have a lot more Partnerships with other men than women do to be productive over a long period of time uh the way I put it if you work with somebody over a um a couple decades well probably at some point

they're going to be difficult and unpleasant and uh if you say that's it I'm not putting up with this then the relationship ends uh but sometimes if you can get through that and you understand maybe you're not the easiest person to get along with sometimes either and have a little more lower standards some of them are forgiving aspect then you can preserve the partnership and be productive over a longer period of time but if what I was trying to say is that the debiasing can be good or bad if you could get people over the

the negativity bias and I tell other people could entirely get over it it seems to be so so basic to how the mind works but you could certainly control it and reduce it and override some of its impulses um and whether that's a good thing or not I mean we evolved for one kind of social life and we live in a very different one um but probably getting along with people over a long period of time is if anything less important than the modern world because there's so many more people you lived in a band

of 50 people uh once someone became your enemy uh you're still stuck with living them until one of you dies well the subtitle of your book The Power of bad is is um how to how we can rule it right and I think there's two aspects to this one is you know how you internally deal with the negativity bias but but there's another aspect which is how you can leverage it to motivate people right and and this gets into you know the use of of carrots uh versus sticks and I think there's a connection here

with with the the self-esteem uh research that you did and and I think there's a dominant view in both parenting and in education that you kind of you know get more uh get more with with honey than with with vinegar right and that the carrots generally work better than than the sticks and I think you you highlight perhaps that perhaps this is this is misguided yeah yeah that seems to be not true they were very nicely controlled studies for example where they uh give children a jar and every time they got an answer right they

get a Marvel that they could keep and put in the jar and other children did the same problems just they started with a full jar of marbles and every time they got one wrong a marble was taken away well those children learned faster punishment makes you learn more than reward I understand the education establishment has ambivalence about punishment uh it can create resentment and and other things but purely in terms of learning uh if you only have one or the other uh the punishment and criticism work better than the praise and support and certainly praising

people and telling them they're doing great when they're not has to have some cost in the long run although it feels good to all concerned uh to do that so I I I mean obviously the informationally the best thing is to get both praise and criticism right my my dissertation advisor the great psychologist edwardy Jones his educational philosophy was all criticism whether the criticism is really careful and precise and thorough you didn't need to praise people I think I remember all four of the positive things he said to me during my five years in graduate

school um for four years I guess it was um but later then I worked with someone else who gave both praise and criticism I said oh my goodness I can learn a whole lot faster here to to know what you're doing right as well as what you're doing wrong I mean if the only feedback that you get away is that you know you get the page back and there's nothing written or corrected on there no notes in the margins or crossing outs if that's the absence of negative is the only positive well that you need

a pretty strong self-assurance to survive in an environment like that and even so you don't know if well was he lazy was he not into interested in this uh or did he really think that was good so so clearly both kinds of feedback are important but but it's it's clear if just to speed up learning the negative is better than the positive I think in the book we even mentioned that study with the teachers where they they uh took the teachers in the Chicago schools and half of them were offered a bonus if their kids

would score above a a certain level at the end of the year and the other half were given the bonus in advance and told if your kids don't score above that level we'll take it back so it's exactly the same performance Criterion in the kids exactly the same amount of money uh it's just framed as a positive you will get this or a negative you will lose it and the kids I mean for the teachers who had given the money in advance they learned better they scored better on the objective test the kids didn't know

anything about the incentive or or whatever it was not not part of it it was in the teachers minds but somehow the teachers did a better job when they were afraid of being punished by having money taken away uh then rewarded hope for being rewarded uh forget the same amount of money well I mean I don't really understand how you can learn if you're not kind of making making mistakes right so you know in in data science right we we all you know we we look at errors right and we're trying to you know minimize

errors but the only way to you know find out where to draw the boundary is to you know push it until you start generating errors and if you're not generating any errors then you really don't have a you don't have a model and so so I think you you highlight that you know if learning particularly when you're when you're younger when you're doing most of the learning uh that's where it's it's essential to you know run into mistakes and run into errors I know if you know you have a coach I ride horses and I

figure like if I'm not falling off once in a while then then I'm probably I'm probably not uh you know learning a whole lot because I'm staying in my my comfort zone but but people people don't like it right um you know I'm a teacher and and I know that if I start giving out low grades I'm going to have I'm gonna have to have a talk with the dean because there's going to be people with students with pitchforks uh you know out there if I if I if I start you know pointing out the

deficiencies of of student arguments in in class in front of their peers that's that's going to make it even worse for me so so why is it that so many people don't appreciate the the need for uh some some correction and and I guess the second question is don't people just recalibrate so for instance don't they see hey you know you gave me an A plus instead of an A plus plus don't they just think of that as a c right or or I mean isn't great and don't we just discount great inflation and and

just re reset our our parameters and and just view you know an A minus as a as a as a serious criticism there may be some of that one of the general patterns in Psychology and this is not my own work this is just what I've read in others is that all these Corrections for biases tend to under correct so you might know that an A plus is better than an A minus but an A minus is is okay you're not you're not as upset as if it were a c uh in the in the

olden days um I think the great inflation and the self-esteem movement all these things going together and and I think they're they're costly uh like you said if you criticize students or give bad grades you're going to have a confrontation or a call from the dean uh that you need to change well if you're being unfair that's one thing but uh but what if you're actually just grading the students on a curve and giving the top 10 A's and uh and so on the way it it used to be back you know when I was

in school these were few and far between um it's possibly better for learning uh to give people accurate feedback and tell them when when they do things wrong telling them they're doing well when they're not doesn't encourage learning and so I I think that's weakened the the Enterprise in terms of Education in in the United States I like this idea of having giving two grades where you give the the real gray and then you get the the the the fake grade I think there was a Daniel Gilbert who was doing it okay uh Mansfield I

think oh Harvey Mansfield right so um I wonder if there's evidence that people actually pay attention to the to the to the real grade um because it seems like people don't want that that kind of feedback right I mean I tell I tell my students if if if all your friends um think you're great then you should get new friends right because they're not going to be people have much use to you well you do want friends who have a positive attitude about you um I assume people do prefer more of that sort of friend

uh but uh but yes you're not learning as fast or not you know if you're not being criticized or being told that what you did is fine even when it's not fine it's essentially lowering the standards um it's an interesting thing throughout our culture The Retreat from Merit uh and the Turning against it and it's gone farther in some places than others uh I suspect it weakens the society uh on on the whole I was visiting uh in in France uh this past year and I had some very hard-working good colleagues there that I was

talking to but I said it's frustrating because there's no merit in terms of what you're paid as a professor is just how long you've held the position and so you've published 20 things a year or you publish nothing you get the same raise and uh and they would sometimes try to bring this up and say well in America shouldn't the people who produce more who do better work shouldn't they get paid more oh no no no no no no no no uh against that you can see why lots of people are against it because you

know they settle in and say well if there's no reason to work that hard but look at its incentives Just Produce better results but if people uh avoid the unpleasantness of bad news right in the classroom with respect to personal feedback it seems like they don't try to avoid it when we look at their social media news feed right so you talk about how you know if it leads if it bleeds it leads and there are these uh availability entrepreneurs I I think of them sort of as the uh uh anxiety industrial complex right which

is vying for our attention so there's this stream of bad news that that people gravitate towards so so you know why is it that people gravitate towards towards bad news why don't they carve out a bubble where they can block all the bad news and and be surrounded by um you know the good news I mean in other words why don't people engage in this Pollyanna strategy that you talk about uh which is is a way of sort of keeping the bad new bad news at Bay or at least keeping it within within proportional to

the to the to the actual amount of bad news there is they do that to some degree within their own lives I mean many people have remarked on the uh the statistical improbability that uh 90 plus of married couples say they have a very happy marriage but 50 of them end up getting divorced uh well how is that possible obviously when the bad ones get divorced they're no longer part of it but you'd think there would be plenty the future diversities but it seems like they rationalize they do what you're saying Pollyanna maybe it's not

so bad up until about the last six or eight months uh then it all comes together it's it's one thing I realized in the yeah my meaning of Life Book or looking at relationship change uh I called it the crystallization of discontent because you know you have a good day and a bad day and another good day and another bad day and and so on and you sort of well everyone has a bad day you know marriage is perfect and and so on but when the bad days become a bad year you've got to think

all right uh then it's time to think maybe about getting a divorce or breaking up but it takes a long time to get there there have to be a fair amount of those those negative ones so people will rationalize and Pollyanna eyes and and so on in there in their personal lives but in terms of what sells the news there's no question people are more interested in bad news it it grabs their attention again the mind is attuned to it and is watchful for it you want the news to tell you what's important what's going

on in the world and uh well bad things are happening that could affect you that you might know about good things okay they somehow are less urgent and if as I said if you missed one back in the Primeval Forest it it had no serious long-term consequences compared to uh Missing the snake that's gonna bites you and kill you uh yes my co-author on that book uh John he was a journalist right he was the first author um he he resonated to this stuff right away I was doing it with a scientific psychology he said

oh absolutely in in journalism everything has to be a crisis uh you know if you want to get on the first page you have to make it seem a lot uh worse than it is and you know now this is spreading through our society especially with uh the political polarization that uh you know how to pretend that the other side is really in League with the devil and exaggerating how how dangerous and destructive the other side's policies are um and the news media play into that depending on which side they're biased toward as well that's

what helps them I mean they're in a business trying to give people what they want or what they think people want well I think there's connections between the book on power bad and the book on on Willpower I think maybe one of your more famous um findings has to do with this idea of willpower and and ego depletion so you know there are techniques that that we can use uh you you say at one point that um I think you said that self-control is probably the uh most important problem plaguing Us in in the modern

society in part because we're exposed to so many Temptations and and one of The Temptations of course is to is to tap into this continuous stream of bad news and you offer a a strategy for dealing with it which is the the low bad diet right the low bad diet it's just like any other kind of diet and it requires some some self-control uh there's another example that you talked about in the book which is this guy I can't remember the Arkansas football coach who um never punts on fourth down so right now speaking we're

talking during uh playoff uh weekend um and and so you know if if this coach had to evaluate each and every pun opportunity in in isolation then he would be much more inclined presumably to punt because he would then think about the negative consequences of failure but the way in which he he avoids that is by laying out a rule ahead of time and then and then referencing the rule so it's it's almost like a an institutionalization of of a habit right because a habit is is like a rule so can you can talk a

bit about sort of well maybe in the context of the low bed diet how how can we in in general uh overcome this this weakness of Will and why do you think you know this notion of weakness of will which the philosophers have been talking about for Millennia has been so kind of understudied in the psychology literature bunch of questions are in very different directions uh the reason for understudied is more difficult to get it self-control I mean psychologists started studying self-esteem pretty early and pretty easily because you can ask people how good are you

with this do people like you are you successful and so on you um self-control it's it's not so much just what you think of yourself it's what you actually do and some people might say they have if I self-control that they don't really know what it means so they don't don't really have have a sense of that um when I was studying the self and doing my early career I went to a lot of conferences on the self and they said well we know a lot about how people think about themselves and so on and

we know how they relate to others and things like that but how the agent Works how the decision-making controlling part that was a big mystery and so that kind of tempted me to to dive in and uh see what we could could learn about that um so I think it was just a more difficult problem and and uh even just what to do with it in the laboratory that slowed down the uh the progress in that area um now what were the other parts of your question well so what are some of the some of

the techniques I mean one of the things that I found interesting was you're talking about victorians right and it was really hard to get get in you know get them to to understand the the mechanisms they were using but once they discovered them they could then you know do something about it whereas in today's world uh uh you know the the self-discovery seems to be the easiest part and then the the taking action to to overcome is seems to be the hard part is that just is it just simply that in modernity we're exposed to

way more Temptations than than we have been in historically well no the argument that was made there was was sort of a a critique by later generations of freudians who are using Freudian therapy and say it doesn't seem to work as well as it did for old Sigmund himself but he was dealing with people who were brought with very strict upbringings who then had a very strong what he called the superego which is what we would call self-control and inhibition and a variety of other things um so so his therapy worked by if if you

have a neurotic problem there's something in your unconscious that makes you react badly to this and it causes you trouble and so if they could just make that conscious then the person would see oh yes I am screwing myself up by having this reaction I gotta watch for it and change and they had enough self-discipline because of the strict upbringing that they could implement it uh what they were saying already in the late 50s and 60s so the last century was that it was easier to get people to have the Insight because the defenses weren't

so strong that this is right and this is wrong and this is the way the world is and you don't question it they could get them to see but then they didn't have the strength of character to follow through and uh and implement the changes and so they would make a change but then they would backslide and uh and so on and there may well be trade-offs that the victorians uh you know used to make fun of them for uh all their strict morality and things like that but building character the idea that if you

exert self-control on a regular basis you will become a stronger person and when adversity happens you'll be better able to stand up for it that was true and and modern work some of my own some of other people's has found the same thing that uh daily irregular exercise of self-control does make you stronger uh think of self-control Works kind of like a muscle when you use it it gets tired that's the immediate depleted willpower you go to police in effect um but uh when it recovers especially if you do it regularly as with a muscle

exercise it becomes uh Stronger I think there are a couple met analyzes of studies from multiple continents and so on saying well yes it really does seem to work even with young adults that you can you can still improve your your self-control so I've talked to philosophers who talk about character Fitness as being similar to physical fitness in that practice does does help right yeah and so so if you were trying to strengthen your your willpower I mean one approach would be to intentionally expose yourself to Temptation smaller Temptations and then increasingly larger Temptations but

but you also Advocate the notion of just architecting your life so as to minimize the the amount of of Temptation right to what extent of those two strategies complementary yes well those are interesting uh using self-control is the harder way to do it if you want to build up your strength of character then you got to expose yourself to Temptation and and overcome it take a cold shower even though you know the warm water would feel good you know force yourself to do it but uh if you know taking cold showers May indeed make you

a stronger person uh but if your goal is to change the behavior not to strengthen your character them avoiding Temptation works a lot better I mean willpower works but it's costly um and so um you want to go on a diet get rid of the fattening food out of your house so that you aren't uh you're tempted it won't build your character as this would you know looking at the ice cream and cookies and potato chips and everything every day and resisting them would probably strengthen your character but you're less likely to have the lapse

and your diet will go better now is this are these um I mean is this idea of depleting willpower I mean is it is there any domain specificity so in other words if you have are trying to resist social media you know all day uh and then and then you're confronted with you know with uh with a cigarette are you more inclined to to smoke the cigarette if you've spent all day trying to resist the siren Call of of social media or do you have sort of separate separate domains separate budgets right separate accounts of

of willpower depending on the temptation um and principle there are no separate budgets it's a what we call a domain General resource so uh if you spent the day resisting social media or trying not to say swear words in front of the children or um making yourself do extra work uh chopping wood or whatever you put yourself to do yes then you're depleted and then whatever else comes along is more likely to happen I won't say there's no I don't say there's zero special budgets but we sure don't have evidence of that yet indeed most

experiments we just did and other people did deliberately manipulated the depletion with one task and then measured something as different as they could to look for the the the general effect um people do get tired doing the same thing if it uh uh if it takes your willpower I mean one of the things we started with was in in vigilance experiments where you have to watch for something all the researchers just know that your your psychological vigilance gradually deteriorates over time keeping your attention out to watch for that signal and it wasn't just lab studies

either it was true in the Navy in World War II where you're watching for a blip that might mean a submarine that's going to mean instant death for uh for you and everybody on the ship I mean life life or death it doesn't get more important than that even so keeping your attention focused and noticing everything that ability to grades over time so there is deterioration within the same task um sometimes that gets offset by people become more automatic uh uh with things or they learn habits and and then that gets easier because the mind

is very well designed also to spare the load on the the conscious control part of it because that that's that's expensive so that's why things become automatic and we easily form habits and skills and so on uh because then it just goes smoothly automatically and you don't have to use as much nevertheless the general pattern is that uh uh depleting willpower in any sphere will interfere and reduce the odds of success and anything else that you do soon after that but is that tapping into the same budget that you use for all choices right so

you know you you reference Choice fatigue in in the book um and and you know just constantly making decisions constantly making choices even if those choices don't involve anything around Temptation right so if you have to decide what color suit to wear in the morning and you know what what type of breakfast you're going to have in the morning do those does that constant deciding make it more difficult to resist temptation um you know people who are in in the choice World they talk about they talk about rules you know if you say okay I'm

just gonna wear the same suit every day then that frees up resources to think about more important things so is the kind of I think designing rules helpful yeah President Obama made that famous I think it was right after our uh our stuff came out and then the New York Times magazine I assume he didn't read our research somebody on his staff mentioned it to him but uh yeah he said I don't want to waste any of my energy deciding what to eat or what to wear so he just had blue or gray suits and

just grabbed one each day and uh I assume at some point he told the chef what he liked to eat and then just it surprised me uh so he could conserve his energy and I know uh Zuckerberg the Facebook guy and others have picked up that same strategy they they seem to think it works it makes sense to me it's a part of evidence is that most people have a routine in the morning um you know you could make a decision about everything all Anew every morning like what do I want for breakfast should I

have a shower first or then have breakfast or breakfast and then shower and uh and all those things but a lot of people get up do the same things in the same order eat the same Foods Drive the same way to work and so on and that's good that's adaptive because it conserves your energy for the challenges of the day that are more important than uh whether I should have a shower before I fry the eggs so do we need to rehabilitate this notion of of character and character development do we need to make character

development a more explicit part of of education and a more explicit part of of child rearing maybe even a more explicit part of uh self-help well need is a strong word that psychologists have to be careful uh it would probably do some good if we've revived Notions of character and and building character and put more of it in education uh things seem to be going in the other direction and have been for half a century so I don't have a lot of faith in any imminent turnaround but there are people who are studying character and

working on character development and uh so um there are some some promising signs but uh [Music] uh so to answer your question I don't know that we need it I do think it would be good if we did it and you're at a doubt that uh we're going to be doing it in a big way anytime soon well Roy thanks so much for joining me uh this is just a whole bunch of really wonderful books incredibly well written um definitely check out the power of bad willpower self-explained and all the rest of them uh look

forward to seeing a couple more books down down the road and hopefully we can meet again sometime soon in person okay I'll be glad to do that thanks very much it's been a great interview [Music] this is on Silo brought to you by alumni FM connecting people through stories