Hidden Brain - Mind Reading 2.0: Our Better Angels

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

Turn on the news, and you'll be bombarded with stories of people who lie, cheat, and kill. Most of our public and economic policies take aim at these sorts of people — the wrongdoers and the profiteers. But is there a hidden cost to the rest of us when we put bad actors at the center of our thinking? Do the measures we put in place to curtail the selfish inadvertently hurt our capacity to do right by others? In the latest in our "Mind Reading 2.0" series, we revisit a 2020 episode with behavioral economist Sam Bowles. He argues that laws written to govern the lawless end up changing the behavior of the lawful — for the worse. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Every week, we'll bring you interesting research on human behavior, along with a brain teaser and a moment of joy. 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. On any given day, you can find plenty of examples of people doing bad things. The pandemic domestic violence is on the rise. It's really this morning an 80-year-old man, beaten and robbed inside a lower East Side Bodega, which could lead to such things as them draining your bank account. It's our two people have been arrested, accused of human trafficking teenagers here in Central Florida.

It makes sense that our attention is drawn to these sorts of people. From an evolutionary perspective, being alert to those who might cause us harm can help to keep us safe. Calling out these people also helps to reinforce the rules of our society. But is it possible that we've become too focused on the wrong doors amongst us? What if our focus on the bad makes it harder to see the many good people in our midst? And what happens when these biases play out not just at an individual level but are built into the structures of communities and nations. In policy-making circles, you are regarded as highly intelligent and realistic,

if you say, listen, everybody's selfish. We have to treat the citizen, the taxpayer, the employee, and so on, as if he or she was entirely selfish because otherwise maybe we're a chump or maybe we'll be taking advantage of and so on. Over the past few weeks, we've looked at how we gauge other people's intentions, why we underestimate our own likability and interpersonal settings, and how we often fail to understand our own motivations. Today, we continue our mind reading 2.0 series with a 2020 episode about how we profoundly underestimate the goodness and human nature and how this era is woven into the fabric of our societies.

break of our societies. What we lose when we focused on keeping bad people from doing bad things. Behavioral economists, sand bowls, things, this is a mistake. He worries that such policy is not only underestimate the capacity of most people to do the right thing, but can inadvertently hurt our ability to do right by others. He explores his idea in his book, The Moral Economy. Samples, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thanks very much, Shankar. A central assumption in economic Sam is that humans are motivated by rational self-interest.

The price of something goes up, I buy less of it, the price of something goes down, I buy more of it. Like many behavioral economists, you say this assumption turns our species of homo sapiens into a new one, homo-economicus. What are the traits of this other species? Well, this being homo-economicist or economic man cares only about himself or herself, and therefore evaluates actions that he'd taken simply in terms of what's in it for me. That's the basic idea of homo-economicists. So that's the self-interest part.

Now, there's another part which is that we're not only are we self-interested, we're pretty good at doing it. So we're very able to think about the consequences of our actions. And that's the part that you usually associated with the word rational. Hmm. I'm wondering how this idea has percolated beyond the boundaries of just economics, because I feel like when I watch television or read books, this idea that people are out for themselves, you see this everywhere.

I'm thinking about the TV show Succession, for example. I'm concerned you might be soft. The only way to respect you is if you try to destroy it. I'm not saying I would make a better CEO. That's unsaid It's not unsaid when you say it You know all the members of this family are fighting tooth and nail to take over Their father's media company. No one trusts each other. Everyone is out for only one thing which is personal gain So this idea that rational behavior is selfish behavior is more than just economics right now.

It's in pop culture, it's in books, it's in movies, not just in textbooks. I think that's exactly right. There is the economics of the classroom, the seminar room, and the sink tank, and that's presented in a certain way, usually fairly mathematically and so on. But then there's what I call the economics vernacular. That's the way ordinary people express economic truths. And what you'll hear a lot is you get what you pay for, or you'll hear a former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saying, there's no such thing as society. All we are is an individual. And these then become common things. So I want to talk about one last domain before we switch to some of the problems with the

model that you and others have identified. It's not just in pop culture and it's not just in business and in commerce. If you think that human beings are fundamentally motivated by self-interest, by narrow self-interest, by selfishness, then if you're a government, your job as the government is to try and restrict how people behave that you want to sort of put breaks on people's selfishness. In other words, you want to think of government as the bad cop, a force that cracks down on all the names and villains out there because that's all the people who are out there. They're all names and villains. Well, that's exactly what some governments have done.

And I think one of the really remarkable things is that in policy-making circles, you are regarded as highly intelligent and realistic, if you say, listen, everybody's selfish. We have to treat the citizen, the taxpayer, the employee, and so on, as if he or she was entirely selfish, because otherwise maybe we're a chump or maybe we'll be taking advantage of and so on. People who don't really believe it think that you should go on with this assumption of

homoeconomic, because it's prudent. There might be some people who are really like that, and if so, we'd better watch out. And therefore, we're gonna design policies and so on as if everyone was that way. David Hume, a philosopher, economist of the 18th century just before Adam Smith, he said that in designing a government, you should assume that everyone is a nave. He used that ancient word a nave and has nothing nothing in his mind but pursuing his own interest.

So given the predominance of the standard economic model, home economic is not just an economics but in politics and popular culture and other domains, it's interesting that the models have trouble explaining why people do lots of things. And the classic example that's often given is that you're on a trip to a foreign country, you go to a restaurant, you sit down at the restaurant, you have a nice meal, and at the end of the meal, you have to decide whether to tip the waiter. And you're never going to see the waiter again because you're probably not going to go back to that restaurant ever again in your life, the rational, self-interested thing to

do is to save some of your money. But many of us don't. We decide to tip that waiter anyway. And maybe some of it is habit or maybe it's guilt, maybe it just makes you feel good. Whatever the reason there's all this messy human stuff that seems to live outside the model of homo-economic as. Yes, it does. It's outside the model. And because of that, when you try to actually predict behavior, you get it wrong. The model has been systematically wrong, for example, in why do you tip people who you're never going to see again? And it happens over and over again. People pay taxes far more than they should if all they cared about was enforcement. That is, people have calculated

whether or not the expected gain to trying to cheat is actually worth it and it is, but people cheat remarkably little on their taxes. Or think about this. People often say political scientists do and we often think that, well, when you go to the ballot box, you vote your pocketbook or your wallet. They'd ever bothered you ask, well, if that's the case, why did you go to the ballot box in the first place? Why bother to go? It took you a little bit of time to get down to the polling place, and you're sure that your vote won't settle the election. So if you vote selfishly, why vote at all?

Now, these are pretty basic contradictions in a theory, and it's surprising it survived as long as it did, because it does such a bad job in explaining what people do, and it also contradicts very much our own introspection, not only about ourselves, but we see others doing acts of great generosity, often self-sacrifice, and it's surprising to me that economists didn't wonder sooner than now. I wonder if this model is really okay, because it's not doing so well in predicting a lot of behaviors which are not controversial, everybody knows they exist. These acts of generosity and self-sacrifice can be seen in many workplaces.

Think of two teachers, both teach fourth grade and both cover the syllabus. As far as the principal and the parents are concerned, both teachers have fulfilled their contracts. But one of the teachers is really inspiring. She leaves kids with the feeling they want to do more. That kind of enthusiasm and love cannot be written into a contract. Or think about what's happening with COVID-19. Millions of people are working from home, often in jobs where the quality of their work may be difficult to assess in the short term. What prompts them to go above and beyond? There's so many jobs today. It's not that they're done remotely. It's that you can't really tell if the person's doing a good job or not until much later.

A lot of those jobs are, for example, in scientific research and teaching and so on jobs with which I'm familiar personally. But a lot of them are also not well-paid jobs. I mean, think about being a waiter or a waitress in a restaurant. How does the manager know if the person is doing a good job? They're not at the table. They don't know the nuance of how the person spoke to the other one. Or think about caring for the elder, or caring for kids.

Those are very difficult jobs, and they're very difficult to do well, but most of all, they're virtually impossible for a supervisor to know is the job being well done. In those jobs, we're going to have to rely on people wanting to do a good job. We're going to talk a lot about how values, norms, and beliefs shape our economic, professional and civic lives. But I do want to lay down a caveat. It's one thing to say that feelings and values and preferences matter.

It's another thing to imagine that feelings and values and preferences matter. It's another thing to imagine that feelings and values can explain everything. So I am regularly motivated by self-interest. There are two gas stations across the street from one another in my neighborhood, and one is consistently more expensive than the other, why I don't know. When I first moved to the neighborhood, Sam, I stopped by the more expensive station, but once I noticed the price difference, I never went back. So you can take the model of homo-economic as too far, but presumably you can also take its mirror image too far as well, right?

Absolutely. And the task that has to be done is to find ways of organizing our economy and our public policy, not so that we rely solely on self-interest, and shortly not so that we rely solely on self-interest, and shortly not so that we rely solely on our regard for others, but that we can rely on both, and we should design policies so that those two aspects of our human being are working together in a synergistic or complementary way. That is what Adam Smith was talking about. His two great books were the wealth of nations, as is well known,

but also the theory of moral sentiments. But what economists took over from Smith was the affluence through competition part, and they set aside the idea that there is a culture which is required in order for that system to work. He thought that we should combine the material interests with the moral sentiments, and he thought that there is a way of doing that. So I think, yes, the idea that you can replace the self-interested system of competition on markets for profits and so on, with an entirely different system based on essentially regard for others. I mean, it's obviously false. I mean, the whole world cannot be organized as if we're just on a little for others. I mean, it's obviously false. I mean, the whole world cannot be organized

as if we're just on a little camping trip. When we come back, the consequences of imagining a world that is filled only with free loaders, delinquents and selfishness. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Sam Bowles is a behavioral economist at the Santa Fe Institute. He argues that economic models often reduce people to one dimension than narrow self-interest. These models fail to acknowledge the many

motivators that drive human behavior. Such thinking has become a staple not just in boardrooms and in commerce, but in government. If you think the world is filled with selfish slaves, you think you need a world of rules to constrain those slaves. Sam about two decades ago, the Boston Fire Department was having a problem. Administrators were worried that workers were abusing the sick leave policy and at that time workers could take an unlimited amount of sick time. So administrators changed the policy. What did they do? Well they noticed that the call ends for sick days happened to come on Fridays and Mondays and it didn't seem kind of

reasonable to them. So they told the firemen that they'd have a limited number of sick days, and if they called in more often than that, their pay would be docked. And the firemen felt that they were being distrusted. Most of them, surely, were not actually calling in sick when they were not. They were quite angry at the Fire Commissioner. This happened just before Christmas. And what happened on Christmas Day was masses of them called in.

The same happened on New Year's Day. In the meantime, the ones who were calling in sick in large numbers on Christmas and New Year's had their bonuses canceled. And the conflict went on for over a year. The amount of sick callings doubled in the year following this until the commissioner finally realized that he'd made a big mistake and he canceled the policy. I understand there were almost 7,000 more sick days taken than were taken in the previous year following the implementation of these harsh policies.

Yes, that's right. Up from around 6 over 13. And the interviews with the firemen were really poignant. I mean, they said, look, you know, we come to work when we're sick. We risk injury and so on. And this person is saying that essentially, we are selfishly calling in when we're not sick. Well, surely some of them were. It looks like some of them were. But the problem was that applying that policy across the board backfired. Now, why did it backfired? Well, presumably for the ones who really were being self-interested in calling in sick when they weren't, a policy like that would be necessary. But what about the other 95%? Well, it just had a terrible effect on their morale and their sense of obligation to the fire commissioner

and to the fire department. So that's a problem that we now face in society, which is in thinking about trying to motivate people to do things. Incentives are often suggested as a way of doing this. That is, if you do this, whatever it is, you get paid more. And we hear about incentives for kids reading books and for losing weight, even incentives for voting. And recently in Germany, somebody has proposed we should have incentives, monetary incentives having to do with social distancing because of the COVID-19

pandemic and so on. So there's almost nothing that hasn't been an example of, well, we can actually design some incentives to fix this. Now, that's a view that has dominated policy making and also jurisprudence in the whole area of law and economics and public policies committed to the idea that we can design an incentive to induce the right behavior. I'm also struck by the fact that the policy is implemented by the fire department in Boston, changed the frame around which people were thinking about what it meant to take a sick day. So when the sick time was unlimited, your thinking was, okay, I would take sick time if I was sick, if I was injured, and I would take as much time as I needed. When I'm told, you can now have only 15 days, and if you go beyond beyond that we're going to punish you.

Now I start to think, okay, I better use those 15 days. If I'm not really sick but the year is nearly up, I'm going to lose that time. I better call and sick. Unintended, of course, but the frame changes the way I'm starting to think about what it means to be sick and what it means to take sick time. That's exactly what happened or at least that's the best explanation I could have of it. But here's another in which I think the way you put it as a framing problem is exactly right. In Haifa, Israel, there were a bunch of daycare centers, about a dozen of them, and the

kids came in the morning and the parents picked them up in the evening, and as is the case, some parents came late. And they decided that they were going to impose a fine on the parents coming late. Well happily for economic science a couple of behavioral economists knew about it and so they said no way wait wait let's just do it on half of the daycare centers and not do it on the other half so we have a nice experiment. So sure enough one day the parents came dropped off their their kids, and there was a notice. It said, starting tomorrow, anyone who's picking up their kid more than 10 minutes late will be

find 10 Israeli shekels. And then they recorded. They had been recording what was happening in the week before, and then they recorded how many people came late in the daycare centers, had the fine and those where there was no fine. It was amazing what happened. In the places where there was no fine, nothing happened. They continued, there was actually a small number. In the ones in which the fine was imposed on the parents coming late, the amount of lateness doubled. Now, how can you possibly explain that?

The fine was supposed to get them to come on time to pick up their kids. Now, if you think about it, there are lots of possible interpretations of what happened, but what you just said, Shankar, about framing seems to be the most likely explanation, which is the parents framed coming late or coming early to pick up their kids as essentially a moral question. I mean, perhaps not high morals, but you ought to pick up your kid on time because your kid might be anxious because the teachers may be wanting to go home and be with their kids or there's something like that.

Okay, sometimes there's extra traffic and you're late, but it was a moral question. As soon as you put a price on it, then it's just like a commodity, it's a shirt or a beer, step right up, you wanna get some lateness, here's where you can get it, it only costs 10 Israeli shakles. So I think they turned this thing from an ethical problem

into a more or less a self-interest problem. And apparently, tennis-related shackles wasn't big enough fine to really cause them to do anything differently. Researchers have found that different parts of the brain might be involved in weighing those problems. Ethical judgments are not processed the same way as cost-benefit equations. Our brain, obviously the regions that do certain things, Processing benefits and costs is something which we're pretty good at,

and that's done in one part of the brain, and there are other things having to do with feelings, obligations, and so on. But the fact that just putting some money on the table will relocate the activity of the brain to the prefrontal cortex, which is where you process benefits and costs and so on, is really a striking finding. So it suggests that, you know, that's what we're like and we're probably not going to change, so we better accommodate that. One of the sad things you'll note about the Haifa daycare story is what happened when the daycare reversed the policy around the fine. So obviously it backfired and then administrators reversed the policy and said, okay, we're

taking away the fines. What happened afterwards then? That's an amazing thing. When they took away the fine, the lateness persisted in the schools and the daycare centers which had had the fine. The control schools, the control centers didn't, I had no effect. But now just to get this, I say it again because it's so unusual when they imposed the fine on being late, the parents came later. And when they took away the fine, they continued coming later. Well, why is that?

Well, I think the story about framing is exactly what happened. It used to be an ethical question. You should come on time. They tried to, sometimes they didn't. Once it became just a matter of step right up and purchase a little lateness if you want, that didn't change. After they took the fine away,

it still seemed to them that they had already been told, oh, this is something I can buy. And only now, I can buy it for free because for some reason they took away the price. I'm wondering whether you might have friends in the economics department who might say the problem with HIFA was not that they introduced fines, but that the fines were not big enough. That in some ways the incentive

was not strong enough. If you had actually made it instead of 10 shackles, if you had made it 200, everyone would have come on time because at that point no one thinks 15 minutes is worth 200 shackles. I think that's right. I think that objection is perfectly sound, that there is some level of monetary incentive which will lead people to conform to the rules. It just means that because they're ethical and because you start out by crowding out the ethical motivation, which was the reason why they were coming on time, most of them in the first place. So you start basically in the whole by having destroyed what Adam Smith

calls moral sentiments. Now the fact that you can make up for it by a large fine or you know, severe penalties, of course you can do that. It's not clear that we want to live in a society which has fines of enormous amounts and so on or other kinds of penalties, particularly when we can find ways of mobilizing people's desire to be a good citizen, to be good to their neighbors, to be considered of their teachers and so on. Many of us would probably agree that we'd like to live in a society that encourages our desire to be good, rather than one that assumes we're going to be bad. The question is, how do we begin to get there?

In our limb, they said, look, this is a serious problem for us. We're trashing our country and let's stop doing it. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. One of the core assumptions of economics is that we will behave in ways that serve our individual needs. In other words, we'll act in our rational self-interest.

You don't need to be an economist, however, to know that people are not purely self-interested. Most of us follow the rules even when it's unlikely that we'll get caught breaking them. We give money to charity, even when such donations do not benefit us directly. Every day people show a desire to behave generously and to help the common good. Yet very often in our private lives and in the way we structure societal rules, we fail to recognize these positive aspects of human behavior and how we could do more to foster them. Sam Bolz is a behavioral economist at the Santa Fe Institute. He makes the case that our public policy is weighted too much toward keeping bad people from doing bad things. Sam, you've actually mentioned a phrase a couple of times in our conversation and

it has to do with this idea of crowding out and crowding in. I want to spend a moment talking about this idea. People do things for lots of reasons. Sometimes they're driven by money, sometimes by pride, sometimes by habit, but when you make them focused on one or the other of these drivers, it can crowd out the other drivers. You tell a wonderful story about your own kids, you wanted to incentivize them to do some household chores, and you turn to mainstream economics for advice. Can you tell me the story of what happened and what you mean by this phrase crowding in,

crowding out? Well, the story is about me and it's even worse than you say. My kids were very helpful around the house and they did a lot. I was a single dad and they were great. And as they became teenagers, they began to want to buy clothes and a lot. I was a single dad and they were great. And as they became teenagers, they began to want to buy clothes and a lot of things like that. And I thought, well, a good way to accommodate this

is that instead of them just doing stuff around the house, cleaning dishes and helping me in lots of ways, I would issue a price list. And then they could get paid for the stuff that they used to do for free. And I of course, I thought it was a brilliant idea. And we agreed on the price list, it seemed reasonable. I posted it on the fridge.

And what happened? Nothing. They stopped work entirely. They didn't do a thing. And they were not selfish, because as I say, they've been helping me a lot, doing a lot of work. But once it was for pay, it didn't seem to be the same thing. Now, it's true that, you know, when a particular item

they wanted to buy, well, then they might do the lawn, but they ended up doing much less than before. And I had to bring the thing to a halt and say, let's go back to just us doing stuff together. Now, I wonder if your listeners are thinking, oh my God, those poor kids having an economist for a dad. And I think they're probably the lot wrong with having an economist for a dad.

And I talked to the kids about it. They didn't really have a good explanation of what happened, but looking back on it now, I think what happened was this. They actually enjoyed doing stuff together around the house and they kind of thought they should help me out. They didn't want to seem to be doing all the stuff by myself. And so it was something that they both enjoyed intrinsically and felt some obligation to do.

But when I offered to pay them for it, it made them think differently about it and it made it a matter of choice. So I think I made the mistake that Adam Smith never made, which is to treat the moral sentiments, that is the ideas of value contributing to others and so on, to treat them as if they're somehow separate from, or just additive to the incentives that come from material interests and money. Sam's incentives demotivated his daughters, but it didn't have to be this way. You can design incentives

to work with the intrinsic pride and satisfaction that people take in doing the right thing. Designed effectively, Sam says incentives can amplify or crowd in such motives. In Ireland in 2002, for example, the government wanted to reduce the number of plastic bags that people were using. They came up with an incentive, but first, made an appeal to national pride. It was preceded by a big campaign about how these bags were so ugly in Ireland. It was beautiful and there was an advertising campaign. Don't trash the emerald aisle and things like that.

And then this thing was introduced. it was a very small additional cost. And within two weeks, the use of plastic bags for shopping was almost completely eliminated. Now, think about it. That case was very much like the parents who, when find, came later, instead of shaping up and coming earlier. In Ireland, when you had to pay for using a plastic grocery bag, they stopped using them. And so we have something to learn from that case. Why is that different from the daycare case? Because the results were the opposite. Let's just think about it. If you pick up your kid at the daycare late, you're one of the very few people

who's late. The only other people who see you there being late are other parents picking up their kids late other than the teacher and your kids. So okay, no problem there. They didn't explain why they were doing the fine. They didn't provide any explanation for why they actually should try to discourage lateness. In Ireland, it was quite the opposite. You're waiting in line and the person says, do you want some plastic bags? And you have to say yes or no, and there's three or four, five, six other people there standing there, and they're looking on, and presumably from what happened with disapproval. So it's a very public thing and you have to choose to do it. Arriving late at the daycare, you didn't even know

that it was your choice because maybe it really was traffic rather than deciding to have an extra coffee with a friend. But the other thing which I'm sure was important was in Ireland, they said, look, this is a serious problem for us. We're trashing our country and let us stop doing it. And so I'd like us to learn from the cases where we have crowding in, crowding in, meaning where the the monetary side of the incentive or the side of the package enforces and increases the salience of the moral part. You know, when we think about the people who make the rules, we think of CEOs, we think

of presidents, we think of parents, you know, when these people try to shape the behavior of the people they control with sometimes with the incentives that you described, things can sometimes backfire, but I can also see this happening in the other direction, you know, when workers are suspicious that managers are trying to exploit them, they might try to get every single thing written out in a contract about overtime, about sick time, about all kinds of restrictions about who can work when and in what capacity. When citizens are worried that politicians are corrupt, they come up with all kinds of mechanisms to constrain them, term limits and campaign finance limits and various other oversight mechanisms. When you signal to a manager or an elected

representative or even to a parent that you think they're untrustworthy or corrupt, I'm wondering how do you think that changes the behavior of the people who are in charge? Well, I think that's exactly right. The signals go in both directions and it's very destructive. Now, in the case of workers who don't trust the management and owners of a company, therefore insisting on a very detailed contract, that's almost all cases self-defeating because there's no way that the contract can cover every possible eventuality. And so that's this false hope that if we could just make the contract complete, cover everything, then we wouldn't care about the other guy on the other side.

He can be as much of a jerk as we want because if we don't get what we're supposed to get, we just basically call the cops go to court. Now, that's a false hope, but imagine that you're in a situation of management in which you're finding that the people who are working under you are asking you to put everything down on paper, everything single thing. Well, you know it's not going to work, but you also know that they don't trust you. And so obviously then you would,

you would, I think an obvious reaction to that would be to adopt at least defensive and possibly also hostile reaction. Researchers and policy makers have long debated many of the ideas we've discussed today. How can we foster trust in our workplaces and in our communities? What's the best way to incentivize someone to do something they might otherwise decline to do? They're also the sorts of questions that have taken on new urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I asked Sam whether he thought the pandemic would give us a way to think afresh about incentives and about the human capacity to do the right thing, even when it's difficult to do. I think COVID-19 is going to change the way we think about economics and the way we talk about it. I think, for example, individualism and self-interest have definitely gotten a bad name over the past, over the duration of the pandemic. And I think we're going to be rethinking the value of values. That is the value of ethical values as an important part of how you organize a society.

So we need to have governments that are trusted by their people. We need people who trust the scientific advice of governments, and we need people willing to help each other. So I think we're going to learn some good lessons, which is simply relying on self-interest in markets and in relations with government. Isn't going to be a good way to organize the future. COVID tells us that we have to rely on other things, communities, neighborhoods, obligations we have to each other which are not self-interested. That's what we're seeing is fundamentally getting people through this. Now, of course, the market is very important.

For example, the market is very important in providing incentives, which will be very essential to the production and distribution of a vaccine and of other treatments, including masks and so on. Governments are essential. I'm not suggesting that the government and the government in the market are irrelevant. What I'm suggesting is that there should be the government and the government and the market are irrelevant. What I'm suggesting is that there should be a third dimension of thinking, talking, and policy making. And that's what I would call community or civil society. The things which are not governmental, but they're not, but they're not markets either. For example, think about social distancing. Is that a market phenomenon? No. Well, is it a government

phenomenon? Well, the government requires it in some places, but it could never enforce it. So what I hope we're going to learn from this is that you have to rely on people's values, such as they are, taking a realistic view of that. That's the first point. The second point is, oh, guess what? People aren't entirely selfish. Economists have to learn that lesson too. People are not entirely selfish. We actually care a lot about others. And the third is a little bit frightening. Yes, we care about others. And sometimes we care negatively. So, for example, there have been reported increases in attacks on people of Asian descent

in the course of the pandemic. And the rise of xenophobia in public statements and so on is just another reminder that one of the ways that we care about each other is that we care about their well-being, we love them, and we're willing to sacrifice for them. We also sometimes despise them and are willing to treat them badly. So then I think we have to face up to the fact that a lot of these values that we have are susceptibility to kindness and cooperation comes along in the same package with a susceptibility to zealotry and hatred of outsiders. That's a real challenge for us in terms of thinking

about how we can essentially have the better part of that without having the worse. I'm thinking that the COVID-19, along with climate change, could be the driver of a new change, change in both the economics, the content, and what we teach our students, and also how we talk about the economy and how we talk about our futures. And if I'm right, it'll involve words like community solidarity and not just self-interest in markets and obedience to governments. Sam Bowles is a behavioral economist at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of the Moral Economy, why good incentives are no substitute for good

citizens. Sam, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Bre. Thanks for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thanks for all I enjoyed the program. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For our unsung hero today, we thought we turned the mic over to a listener and bring you one of the stories from our sister podcast, My Unsung Hero.

A few years before college, Julie Ort suffered a major spinal cord injury. She was still recovering when she arrived on campus, which meant she had to walk with a leg brace and orthopedic crutches. One day early on in her freshman year she was late to her physics class. It was in a large lecture hall with stadium seating so everyone could see her as she awkwardly made her way up the stairs. I was carrying most of my books for the day because I was too slow to make it back to my dorm room in between classes. And I'd a seat five seats in on the second row and just figured I'd sit there that it would put me close enough to kind of blend in.

But as I was scooting sideways between the first and second rows, that's when all of the laws of inertia, momentum, decided to conspire against me. My backpack shifted and I began to free fall backwards. Meanwhile, my leg shot straight up in the air so that the entire class was framed between my knees as they in unison, gassed. Some of them reaching their hands out as if they might be able to catch me,

all of them with a look of absolute horror. So I just said, it's okay, I'm not hurt, I'm fine. I guess I'll just sit here. And mercifully they laughed. The instructor actually had to come over and help lift my legs over the back of the seat and swing me around to the front. And all the while I just looked at him and begged, please, please, just go on teaching. The rest of the day was a blur.

I couldn't look anyone in the eye. I just kept thinking that for the next four years, I would meet people and never know if they might have been in that class. So that night, I decided to hide in the library in the back. I found one of those study carols where you have two deaths that are facing each other, but there's this high wooden partition in between them. And I just kept my head down, reliving those god-awful 50 minutes of class where I sat there with a wall of pity to my back. There just seemed to be no way to recover for my embarrassment and shame. and shame. But at some point I looked up to see a hand, just a hand, not a person, slide two warm chocolate chip cookies across the desk toward me. So I leaned to my far right to see if maybe there was someone on the other side of the partition, and there was, was another student.

And he leaned out to meet my gaze and just shrugged and said, I was in physics class today. That was it. And then I ate those warm chocolate chip cookies. And then I ate those warm chocolate chip cookies. I often say that there's a fine line between humiliation and humility. To my unsung hero, I want you to know that what to you might have felt like an act of compassion, a moment of meeting me in my grief was something that changed me. It made me realize that even in those moments of being brought incredibly low, there are

people who just want you to take that next step forward. And that's what I did for you and for me. I don't remember your face. I didn't think to ask your name, but I have never forgotten your kindness. Thank you. Julie Ort of Highlands Ranch, Colorado. She says it took about 10 years to recover from her spinal injury and she still walks with a cane. But today she's a passionate biker and a cross-country skier. You can share your unsung hero with us. Record a voice memo on your phone

and send it to my unsung hero at hiddenbrain.org. Next week we bring you the finale of our mind-reading 2.0 series. It examines the way we communicate and miscommunicate with our loved ones. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon. you