Instant Genius - There’s no such thing as Blue Monday - Sir David Spiegelhalter

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

Statistician and Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge Sir David Spiegelhalter explains the pseudoscience behind Blue Monday, the power of numbers, and how to spot a dodgy stat. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And good PR companies know this. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, the production editor of BBC Focus magazine. Dr David Spiegelhalter is a statistician and professor of the public understanding of risk

at the statistical laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He has made it his mission to expose those who misuse statistics and to teach the general public how to more accurately interpret the data, numbers and risks being reported to them. this episode of the Science Focus podcast, he speaks to BBC Focus magazine's commissioning editor Jason Goodyear about the pseudoscience behind Blue Monday, the power of numbers, and how to spot a dodgy stat. Okay, so everyone's probably heard that the third Monday in January is allegedly the most depressing day of the year. They refer to it as Blue Monday. And I understand that the idea

originally began in 2005 when a holiday company, was trying to increase its sales in January. They used a mathematical formula, which on the surface may appear to be perfectly scientific and reasonable to some people, taking into account variables such as debt, the amount of time spent relaxing stress levels, the amount of time spent sleeping,

and they calculated allegedly that this is the most depressing day of the year. The idea has taken hold, but it's left a lot of scientists kind of rolling their eyes. So what's your take on it? Oh, it's complete nonsense. These formulas, there was a guy called Cliff Arnold, who in the 2000s used to regularly produce formulas on demand from PR companies. He says that 2009 he's got the formula for the perfect Christmas toy.

2011, a formula for happiness. He did the formula for, you know, paid by walls, ice cream to do the formula for the happiest day in the year and all this stuff. So, you know, it's pseudoscience, pseudomathematics. And if you actually, you know, the units don't match, these are not sensible formulas at all. You know, broadly, you know, they'll put in things that look like they should influence how sad you are or how happy you are. But actually, there's no scientific basis for this stuff whatsoever, pure publicity.

You don't get so many now. You know, they've gone out of fashion a bit. the formula for the perfect cup of tea, the formula for this, that and the other. You don't get them so much now. But this Blue Monday thing seems to have carried on. And that's because, in a sense, there is something behind that. Seasonal effective disorder is on the NHS Choices website. It's a part of the Royal College of Psychiatrists that discusses it.

So, you know, there's some, you know, serious discussion about the fact that a proportion of people feel sadder in some sense. I feel more low, low mood during the winter months of shorter days, lower temperatures and lack of sunshine and so on. And what's interesting is that it's not a standard depression because, you know, if you look at the Royal College of Psychiatrist's website, they say, you know, it's associated with actually sleeping more and eating more. So it's not, in a sense, just a standard depression. But, you know, I think, you know, I would say myself that actually, I feel. I need a bit of a boost during the winter months. But if you, for example, talk to Norwegians, you know, up in the north of Norway, who sit there with almost, when the sun doesn't rise for weeks, if not months on end,

they say it's a fantastic time of year. They absolutely enjoy it. You know, it's very social. They go out. They do things. And no sign of this sadness at all. So it's kind of using kind of fake maths or a sort of faux scientific approach to make their claims seem plausible? Yeah, exactly. Because people like this sort of stuff, as I said,

they've gone out of fashion a bit now. For while they were replaced, or actually this still goes on, with PR-based surveys. So public relation firms will do a, quote, survey research that suits a brand's image or something like that. So I just looked recently in the Daily Mirror and December, the average grandparent now spends a total of £270 on Christmas gifts for the grandchildren and so on. And then the sun in November, 2,000 adults, out of 2,000 adults, 78% of Brits now opt to stay in the warm rather than going on a night out during this time of year. And that research was carried out by a meal kit provider. Hello, Fresh. So, you know, and there are companies. There's a polling company. I've looked.

on their current website, and they've got a whole section on PR surveys, which essentially surveys carried out on behalf of brands. But they've actually got a lot more sophisticated. They write that this was originally a tool just to get column inches in national newspapers, but they have got more sophisticated. And they say now they don't use leading questions they claim. And what they do is do it. They've got a panel of tens of thousands of people.

They'll do some questions. They claim they can do two. 2000 questionnaires in a day. And they say they write the PR to the results, not vice versa. So they do do a survey, they say, and then they'll write a story and send it to the newspapers and get it published. But really what they're doing is having the idea and then producing a survey to produce a desired result. Well, to get some stories, to get stories into the column inches. So this one on the people is great.

I love this sort of, actually, I don't love this sort of statistics. It's awful. But, you know, the recipe for a perfect night includes dinner at 6.48 p.m. Two hours in front of the TV and bed by 10.45 p.m. according to research. And, you know, the trouble is that this sort of nonsense, you know, is said as to be research and gets column inches. And, you know, how can somebody reading this? well, you hope, I think people have got the common sense to realize this is not the same kind of research as a large clinical trial costing tens of thousands, you know, millions of pounds and

taking over years to evaluate a new drug therapy, for example. Now, that's research, and that's serious statistics. But this gets called research, and these statistics gets published. So I actually think that readers can tell the difference. I don't think people are so daft. The one that I love, this one on the grandparents spending all the money on Christmas gifts, the study also found four in ten grandparents say their favourite things about Christmas season is spending time with their grandkids, while almost one in five love to give people presents. Do you like the framing of that? That means four in five don't like to give people presents. And the majority of grandparents, their favourite thing is not to spend the Christmas with their grandkids. So, you know, they do put a spin

on the findings from these surveys. So what sort of common tricks do people use when manipulating these sort of supposed algorithms or statistics in their favour? Oh, there's so many ways you can do it. An awful thing to say as a professional statistician, but I always say I can make any number look big or small, depending on what you want to find. You can frame things to look very different. The one example I use quite a lot is an advertising campaign

that was carried out in London. There were posters. and it was called a 99% campaign. It said 99% of young Londoners do not commit serious youth violence. So that's a trick, you know, looking at a, what's called a positively framed message in the sort of psychological language, so 99%. But I, you know, let's say I wanted to reverse the feeling from that story,

which is clearly meant to reassure us. There's two tricks you use if you want to reverse something like that. First of all, you switch the percentage and say that one percent of young Londoners do commit serious youth violence. So you go into a negative frame. And then the other trick is just change it from a percentage to an actual number of people. And you work out there are about a million Londoners between 15 and 25 or something like that. One percent of that is 10,000. Oh, my goodness, that's 10,000 violent young Londoners, you know, roaming the streets.

This is a dangerous city. So you can change the emotional impact of a number of a number. number, simply by reframing it in a different way. Numbers don't speak for themselves. The way in which they're packaged, the stories that are told, it changed their whole emotional impact. And good PR companies know this. What sort of steps would you recommend to somebody wants to kind of sense check a statistic or a calculation? Yeah, that's a real issue. In these days of misinformation and, you know, and misuse of statistics. I think this is such an important question.

I think you should be taught in schools. And they do learn, you do learn some things. But I think this kind of thing to look at is, how does it make me feel? You know, why am I hearings? What is this number trying to do? What's this? Why is someone telling me this story? And almost always it's because someone's got an agenda.

They want you for either, usually either they want to reassure you or to make you frightened. Pretty well all statistics are used for one of those things when they're part of a story. And so you just ask, well, why am I hearing this? What is this person trying to make me feel? Go with your gut feeling, not just to respond and click on like and send it to all your friends, but just think, well, no, how is this story being told? And then think, well, actually, is this number big? You know, really, they say, oh, 10,000 people do this. Well, actually, out of a proportion, out of the whole country, this is not very much at all, in my sense. So, you have to think about is this actually a big number. And the standard trick is also if people are saying,

oh, they're going to spend, you know, five million pounds on something. And then you say, well, hang on, there's 60 million people in the country. There's 8p each or something. You have to, you know, do a sense check on the size of the number. It's terribly important to do that because people know the tricks as to how to make numbers look big or small. And, yeah, no, it's a very good thing to train people to try to do. So, I mean, there are people that would look at this sort of thing and say, oh, it's just a bit of fun and shouldn't be taken so seriously. But do you think this sort of thing can actually harm the reputation of legitimate science? Well, I think so, indeed. I mean, these silly stories, because I think the equations, everyone recognizes that's just

nonsense. But the surveys, you know, how can you tell the difference between one of these surveys and a survey, a genuine survey done by the government, you know, that evaluates, you know, people's attitudes to something or, you know, evaluates people's behavior and so on, which are, you know, seriously done surveys done extremely well, which are used to guide government policies. For example, the crime survey for England and Wales is a survey, and that's the official crime statistics for this country, not the police reported crime, which are actually not official statistics, because frankly, they're too open. to changes in fashion of recording or whatever. So, you know, surveys are terribly important and really. So not all surveys are the same. It would be very unfortunate if people thought that all surveys could be manipulated. So a lot of your work is centred on explaining and investigating risk of various kinds.

So why do you think as humans, we're quite poor? at judging the risk of a certain action? Well, I think actually we're quite good at it, you know, in our daily lives. We're really quite good. We're quite good at crossing the road, but we still do cross the road. It's not like we're terrified of going out the door just because something will happen. Just because there are accidents doesn't mean, you know, we all change our behavior and become incredibly cautious.

So in terms of our daily lives, I think we're actually rather good at all of this. You know, humans have evolved to really sort the start. Sometimes some people are more cautious than others. Some people are completely idiotic. jumping off mountains in a wingsuit or something like that looks great fun, but it's staggeringly dangerous. So, but where the manipulation comes in, I think, is when people essentially want to make you frightened of something. And a lot of those stories that we read, you can, you know, always in the media, our coffee increases the risk of cancer. The next story says coffee decreases the risk of cancer.

The bacon sandwiches increase the risk of blah, blah, blah. And, you know, they're all the time, absolute fodder of news stories. and actually a lot of this is not terribly good science. They're probably quite reputable scientists, but it is terribly difficult to estimate the effect of a single food because we consume lots of things in our lives. So it's very difficult to get a confident estimate. We know that smoking is really harmful and drinking a lot is really harmful,

but drinking a little bit, well, it's really contested about what the effects of that is. It's extremely difficult to work that out. And yet there's a lot of people with agendas who would like to have, brighten us, you know, into saying, oh, you shouldn't drink or you should, you know, you should do X, Y, and Z. And that can detract from a small mundane things where there really is good evidence. Like, you really do need. You should have a good diet. You really should not sit around too much. You should get up and move around and get more exercise. That's very helpful. And so on. So these, which is all very, it's not very headline grabbing, the fact that what you should do is don't smoke,

don't drink too much, do quite a lot of exercise and have a decent balanced diet. That's it. That's all you need to know for a healthy lifestyle. So, you know, you can't keep on and on telling that story. And the stories that get the coverage are the latest, either, you know, this superfood, you've got to eat your kinawis, or, you know, avocados or beetroot or something like that. It's going to, you know, make you a wonderful, healthy person. And all this sort of nonsense gets the coverage because this is news, it's news. Just telling people time and time again, well, you should have a balanced diet and get off your backside and move around is not news anymore unfortunately.

And yeah, just sort of kind of carrying on from that and sort of going back to what you were saying earlier about the manipulation of numbers in the presentation of them. On the surface, it sounds quite alarming if you read eating, you know, one pack of bacon a week. It's going to double my risk of bowel cancer. Actually, it's increased by 18%. 18%. Well, that's still quite, it's like, oh, well, it sounds quite, layoff. Yeah, you know, so a couple of, a big bacon sandwich or, you know, a couple of sausages a day or

three rashes of bacon, that's a lot of processed meat. But if it is estimated that if you do eat that, your risk of bowel cancer goes up by 18%. It does, and I think I believe that, process meat probably does increase the risk of bowel cancer. But 18% increase, well, how important is that? Actually, you know, about six out of 100 of us do get bowel cancer during our lifetime. So it increases that risk by 18%. And that means it goes up to 7 in 100. Okay, so it goes from 600 to 700. That means 100 people are going to have to eat bacon sandwich every single day of their lives.

And then one of them will get bowel cancer because of that. So actually, in the great scheme of things, perhaps that isn't that important. You know, perhaps you just might be prepared to take that risk. And that's a lot of bacon. If you eat less bacon, the risk is less. So just because someone increases the risk, that's the phrase that really gets my goat. Goodness, it infuriates me. When, you know, an article or media says, oh, this X increases the risk of cancer and all something. I said, well, by how much, that's the first warning, you know, when you're listening to a story. If someone just tells you it increases the risk, the crucial thing is, by how much. And then from, from what? You know, it might double the risk, but the risk is incredibly tiny to start with. It's just twice not very much, which is still not very much. Sure.

Yeah, it's like it's the way that it's presented, it's kind of important information is missed out. Absolutely, the framing. And, you know, in our area, what we say is that they're presenting relative risks. In other words, it doubles the risk or increases it by 20% instead of the absolute risks. it mean for a thousand people? You know, if they have a thousand people who do this, a thousand people who do that, what's the difference between those two groups? That's the right way to communicate risk. That's the recommended way. It's been shown to work, to be very effective. In fact, it makes a very good story. So any risk that is not communicated using absolute

risks, you should stick your fingers in your ear and go whibble, wiggle, whibble, and not listen to it. So are there any things that people commonly tend to overestimate the risk of? Ah, yeah. Oh, yes, that's interesting. Well, people overestimate the risk of accidents, of risk. They overestimate the risk of crime, quite a lot. And so they overestimate the risks of things they're very anxious about. And it's very natural psychological reaction. So things we know we are anxious about, we think they're dangerous. A great statistician Hans Rosling, doctorate, said we've got to be really careful not to confuse what sounds frightening with what is actually dangerous. And that's what we tend to do as humans. Because we're frightening. We tell, oh, this must

be really dangerous. But no, it's not actually. And people underestimate the risk of, you know, for example, being overweight or not exercising enough and things like that, which can seriously shorten your life. What's the, what would you say, sort of following on from that? What's the riskiest common activity that people do without realizing that it's risky? Oh, that's interesting. I would say sitting on their backside watching television, I think that's probably the one I would put as the one that is the riskiest activity they do without realizing it. Because it doesn't look risky, you know, unless the roof falls on your head, you're safe.

You're sitting at home, you're on your sofa. sitting there, you're getting a pizza, you know, you're having a drink and that sort of thing, and you're sitting watching television for ages. And this is not doing you any good at all. But it doesn't seem risky, does it? It's not like you're bowling along on a high speed on a bike, which people recognise is risky. That was statistician, Dr David Spiegelhalter, talking about Blue Monday and the misuse of statistics. In the January issue of BBC Focus, which is on sale now, you can find out about the most mysterious objects in the universe. We also take a look at the science of exercise and find out how you can work out smarter, not harder.

We also take a look at the cutting-edge tech that could help spot heart attacks before they happen. Plus, researches are hoping to stretch quantum theory to its limits by putting a living thing in two places at once. And of course, there's much more inside. If you liked what you heard, then why not subscribe and leave a review. You can find us on iTunes, ACAST, Stitcher and many of your favourite podcast apps. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.

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