Making Sense with Sam Harris - #359 — Getting Used to It

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Cass Sunstein about habituation and its consequences. They discuss habituation to positive and negative experiences, marriage, happiness, meaning, variety, doing good vs feeling good, midlife crises, kids, wealth and happiness, things vs experience, the “illusory truth effect,” misinformation and social media, echo chambers and extremism, what governments can do to respond to misinformation, free speech on college campuses, the 2024 Presidential election, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Cass Sunstein. Cass is the most cited legal scholar in the U.S. and from 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since then, he's served in various capacities in the U.S. government and advised many nations, as well as the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Health Organization. He is a professor at Harvard Law School and the co-author

of several interesting books, Nudge, Noise, and his latest, which he wrote with Talisha Roth, is Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There. And today, Cass and I speak about the book. We talk about habituation and its consequences, the way we habituate to positive and negative experiences. We discuss things like marriage and happiness and meaning and variety, doing good versus feeling good, midlife crises, having kids, wealth and happiness, things versus experience. And we pivot to topics of more political relevance. We talk about the illusory truth effect, misinformation and social media, echo chambers and extremism, what governments can do to respond to misinformation, free speech on college campuses, the 2024 presidential election, and other topics. And now I bring you Cass Sunstein.

I am here with Cass Sunstein. Cass, thanks for joining me again. Thanks for having me. Great pleasure. So there's a lot to talk about, some of which is contained in your new book, so I think we'll start there. The book which you wrote with Tali Sharot is Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There, which is focused on this fascinating problem. And I mean, in some ways, it's a problem. I guess in other ways, it's an advantage. But the problem of habituation and what to do about it. I mean, we habituate to both good and bad things, and you'd think that habituating to bad things would be good, but certainly not always. How do you think about this? First, what is habituation? Okay, so suppose you're going into the ocean,

and in the first seconds, it's horrible. It's really cold, and you're thinking, why am I going into the ocean to freeze myself? And then after a few seconds, it's cold, and you're thinking, why am I going into the ocean to freeze myself? And then after a few seconds, it's cold, and then a little while later, it's okay, and then a little while later, come on in, the water's fine. Many things are like that, meaning we have showed diminishing sensitivity to stimuli. So if you go into a room and there's some smell, maybe someone's smoking, maybe there's a dog who had a moment, you will smell the smell and think this is really stinky. And then after 20 minutes, chances are you won't notice it. Right now, there may be a noise in the room where you are, and you're not noticing it because

you've habituated to it. And that's kind of how our species is. And in fact, that's how all living creatures are. The more we're exposed to things, the less sensitive we are to them. Yeah. So just neurologically speaking, we have these internal models of how our perceptual state should be, is expected to be. It's just a predictive coding routine, both with respect to perception and our behavioral engagement with the world. And when things conform to our predictions, our responses to them, their salience becomes inhibited and things just begin to fade. And we tend to notice errors and prediction errors. And again, this can be to positive or negative stimuli. On the face of it, habituation to negative things sounds like it would be good. What's

the potential problem with that? Well, it's good in many ways. I can't fly. I don't have wings. And I also can't make the Olympic basketball team. And neither of those is making me suffer. Not anymore? Never could I make the Olympic basketball team. And I never thought, oh my gosh, surprise, I'm not going to make it. never thought, oh my gosh, surprise, I'm not going to make it. I habituated early to the fact that I can't fly and I can't do what Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and LeBron James can do.

So to habituate to something that just you can't do has many advantages. It means you're not having a surprise signal that deflates and demoralizes you every moment that your winglessness attaches you to the ground. But with respect to something bad, it may be that there's something that can be changed and that is kind of not good in the world or in your life that you habituate yourself to, that you live with and don't even, you know, form a sour face. You just think it is what it is. My nominee for the worst phrase in the English language, it's terrible, but it's the phrase of the habituating creature. It is what it is. And if you're living with, let's say, someone who's really mean at the workplace, you might get used to it. so after a couple of weeks you don't notice it so much, but still the person is really mean. Or if you're in a town that has dirty water or a high

level of crime, or let's say corruption, something that is bad for you and bad for the community, the fact that it's a little like cold water whose coldness you don't notice after a while, that means it's going to stay there when it may not be inevitable. Yeah, well, there are some things that I fear we're habituating to in our politics and public life that I will bring up in a while with you because you're an expert on those topics. But before we get there, so having written this book, are you doing anything differently in your life or is it born of anything you have been doing differently in your life so as to increase the sense of novelty and accentuate your pleasures and minimize your pains? How are you applying this to your actual experience?

Well, the most immediate thing is I'm on book tour, and the book produced a book tour, and that's new for me. And incredibly painful? No, I'm loving it, and I get to talk to you, so thank you. It's a fantastic stroke of luck that people want to hear about this or are willing to hear about this. So that's an experience that doesn't have habituation in it. But in terms of my own life, I look at my children and my dogs, since I've been working on this book, with a sense of discovery and amazement. And while I adored my children and my dogs, too,

since the day I first got to see all four of them, and my bigger daughter, so five of them. The fact that I can see them as a miracle rather than just part of life is occasioned by the book. So Julia Roberts, the actor, is a hero of the book. She said in an interview pretty recently while we were in the midst of writing the book that her favorite day, her best day is when she makes food for her kids. She makes the breakfast and she has lunch with her husband and she stops herself and says, it's boring. But then she adds, because of my job, I go away. I come back to my family life and it's surrounded by pixie dust. It re-sparkles. And that notion of re-sparkling with respect to, you know, I get to have a place to live that's nice enough, and I get my job as mostly teaching,

I see these things with more a sense of amazement than, you know, that's life, partly because of the book. Hmm. Yeah, one of your experts in the book, Esther Perel, sounds like she's recommending that people actually strategically take some separation from one another, you know, romantically so as to kind of revivify the connection. I mean, whether it's a night or a weekend or, you know, a business trip or whatever it is, there's something about, you know, there's the obvious cliche, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but she's claiming that it does, and we sort of ignore that at our peril.

She has something very specific to say, and I should say that I met Esther Peril because we were, peril because we were, I was at a wedding and to see her at a wedding is pretty remarkable because she writes about marriage and some of the- It's like seeing the Grim Reaper at a wedding. That's right. A little ominous. She's a very nice and upbeat person. And at the dinner, we talked a bit about marriage and her focus is on the deadening of romantic sparks. And so her great line is, fire needs air. And that's because people habituate to everything, including an amazing person you get to live with. So she says when members of couples are most attracted to each other, and this is based on her experience, it's often they see each other across a crowded

room talking to somebody else. And that's because that disabituates you. The person isn't just the person you live with. The person is, in some respects, a stranger. And then you think, my gosh, that's amazing. And this is true of general things in life, good things, which may be there's no air between us and them, and that makes us like them. They can be comfortable and pleasant, but they don't have a sense of sparkle. There's no pixie dust around them. How do you apply these insights, if you do, to your conception of your own life, your career at this point, and whatever goals you have, or explicit or implicit. I mean, there's certainly some wisdom to be extracted here with respect to how we think about human flourishing and the relationship of things like wealth and

success to that, you know, ambition. If you could go back in time and talk to your whatever 20-year-old self, at some point where you probably were not as informed as you are now, what would you say about the importance of wealth and success and having a career that not only brought you those two things, but something that was more in line with a vocation, something that was directly tapping you into meaning. I will have properly introduced you before we started talking here, but you have many, many irons in the fire. You, I think, are often described as the most cited legal scholar in the country. And you've served in government.

You have been a creature of the university. You have written and co-written a number of books on diverse topics that would seem to be just you following your intellectual interests into fun spaces. So you're doing a lot, and you have experienced a lot of success. You have been surrounded by successful, powerful people. What lessons can you draw about all that? Well, I think I'd be very cautious talking to my younger self on the ground that my younger self would have a perspective that I lack, and I might kind of screw him up. But if he would listen to me, and since he is me, he probably would, though with a sense of the surreal science fictional

quality of it. I'd say follow the path you think best. You probably will make some not terrible choices. But I guess I'd add something I know, which is that there are three things that people really care about. One is that they're happy, meaning that the days are smile-producing rather than tear-producing, that they're enjoying days, they're not feeling scared or anxious. But that's not the only thing. People also want to have a sense of meaning. So if you have a day where you're scowling a fair bit and not smiling a whole lot, but you're doing something that you consider valuable and honorable and makes you feel you're contributing, that might be not a very happy day, but it might be a super meaningful day. day, but it might be a super meaningful day. And the idea of trying to seek both happiness and meaning is one I think my younger self didn't get that well. I think my younger self probably was a little low on the meaning side and a little higher on the happiness side. That person happened to luck into meaning, but it wasn't sought. Maybe there's a lesson there.

to luck into meaning, but it wasn't sought. Maybe there's a lesson there. But there's a third thing, which I think your question gets at, which recent data puts in a big font, which is that people need psychological richness too, meaning variety in their life. So if you have someone who has a really happy life and it's full of meaning, if it's the same thing over and over again, both the happiness and the meaning are going to get less colorful over time. So if you spend 10 years, let's say, doing cancer research, which is incredibly meaningful, you may think I'm going to do 11 and 12 and 13 and 14 years also on that. But it may be that the sense of amazement that you have that you get to do it diminishes and even evaporates. And so people will sacrifice happiness and meaning for the sake of variety.

And I've been lucky to have a fair bit of variety that even now I have some role in government as well as some role as an academic. And so on Monday, I might be trying to figure out something about the Constitution. And on Thursday, I might be able to participate in the process. We're trying to solve some very concrete problem. And one's theoretical and abstract, and the other is intensely, in the next two days, how we're going to handle this. And they're very different mindsets, and I'm smiling because the skill set is so different. But it may be that I'm thrilled

to do both because I get to do both. Yeah, I'm struck by the distinction between the good we do in the world and the way it feels to do such good or to do anything. And those are often not at all coupled to one another, which is to say you could write a very large check to an organization that's saving lives in the most efficient way possible. And your experience of writing that check could be one of just total distraction and a lack of salience, right? You just, you know, you've decided to write the check, you know, in the abstract, you support this organization, but you're just dashing off this philanthropy as you go about your day and you never really take the time to reflect on the place you now occupy in a causal chain of goodness that really is saving lots of lives.

Whereas maybe in that same day, and I kind of speak from experience now, having compared these things in my life a lot, you might be on a walk and someone's got a flat tire on their bicycle and you help them fix it, right? And so it's a 10-minute exchange with a stranger, which is wholly positive. But when you look at what gladdens your mind at the end of the day, it's going to be the fixed bicycle tire and that exchange much more than the check to the organization that might have actually saved thousands of lives. And I'm obviously not suggesting we should make a choice between those things because we're not forced to, but it would be nice if the most meaningful things we did were almost by definition the most rewarding things we did.

I mean, that's the kind of circle of incentives you wish you could achieve psychologically, I think. It's a great point. So what I'm thinking is the relationship between what you said and habituation. So making out a check isn't something that sends a surprise signal to the human mind. So it's something that people do, make out a check. So if you make out a check to pay your electricity bill, that's the same act as making out a check, let's say, that will transform some number of lives. And the act doesn't make you think, oh my gosh. And everything depends in terms of our brain's alertness on whether there's a surprise signal

or not. If you go and help some stranger who's having a struggle with a bicycle or a struggle getting into a building or something, that's probably the only time you did that, that day or maybe that week. Yeah, or that decade. Or that decade. And so the surprise signal is just a jolt of the best way. So if someone says something that really amazes you, that either hurts your feelings a lot, or that makes you feel great, then that's big in terms of your head. Not like you're going to get conceited,

but you're going to get rewarded. And that's part of it. It's also part of it is that there's the personal, of course, we're wired to react to. So if you just send some check, piece of paper that goes to 17 people, let's say you'll never meet, that's not going to generate the same reaction as if you do something with one human being who looks you in the eye and says, you know, thanks, or I'm glad you're here. Do you have any thoughts specific to midlife? I mean, if you're talking not to your 20-year-old self, but to your mid-career self, or let's say your 40, 45-year-old self? Is there anything that would have been important to communicate at that point? Well, of course, I'm much younger than 40. So when I think of my 40-year-old self,

I think that's really an old guy, and I hope he can still run. I'm still waiting to see you in the NBA. But I do know something about midlife crisis, because we studied it for purposes of the book. There are midlife crises all over the world, not everywhere, but in many nations. It's kind of shocking, its generality. And it happens at different ages, but it's the same phenomenon. And we have a theory of what accounts for the midlife crisis. It's that once you are, let's say, 40, it may be that life is really good, but nothing's changing. It's gray. So you have

maybe a partner or maybe a community. It's the same. You have a job. It's good. It's steady. You have a place where you're living. That's kind of where you live. And this is a little like, I'm going to phrase it very strongly, but a little like being dead in terms of the mind. When you're 20, you can fall in love tomorrow. You can have your heart broken that night. You can learn something that's going to completely reorient where you're going. You can think, now I'm going to go to a place, maybe in the United States, maybe elsewhere that

I've never been before. And my gosh, what would it be like to see Los Angeles? Whereas if you're 40 or 50, the chance that you've seen Los Angeles is higher, and the idea that Los Angeles is going to make you amaze, the very prospect of Los Angeles, that's just lower. So for people in midlife crises, it's often like you're in a world where you have what you want, and there might be happiness, there might be meaning, I hope so, but psychological richness might not be present. People who are older, by the way, when their kids have left maybe, they're not sure where they're going to live. They might take up a hobby. They might retire and do something different. They might stay in their job and do something different. No good life crisis anymore. The

world is their oyster. Hmm. Well, how much of that has to do with kids? You just sounded like you were celebrating the empty nester phase. Well, there are a couple of things to say. So it turns out that taking care of small kids, people do take a happiness hit. They might have a meaning boost, but happiness goes down. And one thing about taking care of kids is there are lots of surprises, and so habituation is less likely. Keep in mind, habituation is diminished sensitivity to a stimuli that stays constant or changes very slowly. I have an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old, and

there are lots of surprises. They're not like two-year-olds and four-year-olds, so it's not, you know, it's not like that, but there are lots of surprises. For people who have empty nest, there are, along one dimension, more surprises for many, meaning you can do whatever you want now. You can travel. You can go to Munich if you want, if you have the resources. And if you don't have the resources, you can take a little vacation an hour away maybe and see a town that's charming and that you've never seen before. And the fact of going and changing is in some ways more available to the empty nesters than to the nested. How does this relate to the connection

between wealth and happiness? How do you think about that? And there's a dichotomy, which at some point you discuss in your book, of experiences versus things, being the things that one might get with wealth. What is wealth good for when we're talking about human flourishing beyond obviously the basics of just not being poor and having to deal with acute financial stress continuously?

Okay. We know a lot about this, more probably than humanity ever has. So as you say, being really poor is very bad. Everything gets worse. Weakens that have stress in them are worse if you're poor. Something involving health is worse if you're poor. Everything is worse, basically, population-wide if you're poor. The recent data suggests that more money is just better. It's not hugely better, but it's definitely better, both in terms of how well people evaluate their lives, asking how happy are you, and in terms of measured experience. It keeps getting better up to, of measured experience, it keeps getting better up to, there may be a ceiling, but up to very large sums, people get happier. Not a whole lot, but definitely happier with more money, except the bottom 20%. So the bottom 20% in terms of happiness, they are not going to do better

when they are earning $200,000 versus when they're earning $90,000. They do do better, up to $70,000, by the way. But after that, if you're in the bottom 20% in terms of happiness, the difference between $220,000 and $80,000 is basically zero. And what's going on with them? We don't know exactly. But the most plausible account is if you're suffering from, let's say, anxiety or bereavement or depression, to have 80,000 versus 10,000, that's good. But to have 80,000 versus 200,000 doesn't matter a whole lot. So wealth matters less to well-being over 70,000 than one might think, but it is definitely a positive. Having said that, suppose you have a pot of money you just get, some number of dollars, let's say $500. Do you want to spend that on getting a product, maybe a new laptop, maybe a television? a product, maybe a new laptop, maybe a television, or do you want to spend it on an experience,

maybe a night or two in some place? Experiences tend to produce more happiness than products. And it's a little startling because a product, if you get a new TV, you can have that forever. If you have one or two nights away, you just have that for one or two nights. The reason appears to be that people habituate to products. So I have a new and better TV now. This is actually an autobiographical statement. I do. Then I did it two years ago. But is my life better, even in terms of TV watching, than it was with the old pretty good TV? Not much. I habituate to the new, better TV. With the experience, you have it, if it's short-term particularly.

It's a boost for you, and you remember it. People don't habituate to experiences that are short-term for sure, and they remember them. So you think of products as the gift that keeps on giving. It's less true than intuition suggests. And you think of experience as ephemeral. That's also less true than intuition suggests. Experiences are actually the gift that keep on giving. Yeah. I guess there are probably some material objects that bridge those two things. I'm thinking of something like having a great gym or something, like something you use a lot, which actually changes you as a person on some level and gives you a new sense of well-being or competence. Let's say you get into cycling, getting the bike that allows

you to get into cycling is probably more than just a product. It becomes a new hobby. And so there's maybe corner conditions where it looked like exceptions here. Completely. I'm thinking as you talk that I actually joined a gym in DC, which I dearly love. I didn't take up a new sport. I do my usual sport, which is squash. But my first days visiting that gym, it's a nice gym, were over the moon. I was in love with the gym. I wanted to marry the gym.

And now I just really like the gym, but I don't have the feeling of astonishment. And that's what the book is about. That's about habituation. And our conversation will make me more amazed at the gym next time I go, which I hope is tomorrow, by virtue of the fact that I've reminded myself that I get to go to a gym. Well, again, the book is called Look Again, The Power of Noticing What Was Always There, which you wrote with Talisha Roth. And she's quite a celebrated neuroscientist at, I believe, both at MIT and University College London.

So I want to just take a bridge from where we were to some other concerns, which some of what you actually do, you do touch on some of this in the book. There's a section on misinformation and I think conspiracy thinking. But one thing I'm worried that we're getting habituated to is total dysfunction and toxic partisanship in our politics and just a failure to have a fact-based discussion about anything of consequence, given that our entire population appears to be siloed into incompatible data sets with respect to... I mean, most of this is happening on social media, but I guess it's even a bigger problem than that, just in terms of the kinds of information sources that the various echo chambers consider to be sources of information. And there's a very perverse effect here where when you look at what a government can do to respond to misinformation and conspiracy thinking,

there's a kind of paradox because many of the most inflammatory pieces of misinformation, many of the most inflammatory and polarizing conspiracy theories relate to the government's very efforts to respond to misinformation and conspiracy thinking. social media organization trying to get them to dampen down some crackpot thesis that may well be getting people killed, let's say during a pandemic, that is now exhibit A in the Orwellian overreach of our government that suggests that the pandemic itself was entirely fake to some people and just a pretext to seize control of the levers of power. Give me your view of our current state of polarization and discombobulation and what are we going to do about it? Great. So let's talk about the habituation part. There's something called the illusory truth of fact, and I'm going to illustrate it right now. I'm not sure if you heard, Sam, that recently Tom Brady announced he was going to run for governor.

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