Something You Should Know - How to Make The Biggest Decision of Your Life & Curiosities of The Human Mind

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Your mother probably told you not to lie – and she was right. Of course, there are the moral reasons for not lying but it seems lying is also bad for your health. This episode begins with the reasons why. http://newsinfo.nd.edu/news/32424-study-telling-fewer-lies-linked-to-better-health-relationships For most of human history, people married NOT for love. It is only recently that this idea of committing to someone because you fall in love came about and a lot of times it doesn’t work very well. While it is unlikely that we will ever go back to arranged marriages, there are some things we can learn from them according to psychiatrist George Blair-West author of the book How to Make the Biggest Decision of Your Life (https://amzn.to/3gQPTyD). Listen as he reveals what really matters in keeping a relationship together for a long time.  When you study the human mind, it is easy to come to the conclusion that it works in odd and curious ways. For example, we tend to be overconfident in our abilities a lot of the time. We often think everyone else is having more fun than we are. And we tend to like things simply because they remind us of us – like the numbers in your birthday! Listen as I discuss this with my guest David G. Myers. He is a social psychologist and professor of psychology at Hope College and author of a book How Do We Know Ourselves?: Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind  (https://amzn.to/3fqyP1Z). In just about every recipe that uses mushrooms, it tells you to brush (not wash) them before you eat them. The theory is that if you wash them, they will soak up water like a sponge and not taste right. Is that true? Listen as I explain. Source: Harold McGee author of On Food and Cooking (https://amzn.to/3UeclA2). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We’re all about helping you find ways to get more out of life… that’s why we want you to listen to Constant Wonder. Constant Wonder is a podcast that will bring more wonder and awe to your day. Listen to Constant Wonder wherever you get your podcasts! https://www.byuradio.org/constantwonder Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls & emails with Online Privacy Protection from Discover? - And it's FREE! Just activate it in the Discover App. See terms & learn more at https://Discover.com/Online You’ve earned your fun time. Go to the App Store or Google play to download Best Fiends for free. Plus, earn even more with $5 worth of in-game rewards when you reach level 5!  We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why lying, even a little bit, can be bad for your health. Then, what's the secret of long-term love? Well, there are a couple of them, but here's one. When we know that our partner, even though they know all of our shortcomings, still wants to be there and care about us, that is an incredibly powerful experience. It really is the essence of the feeling of a long

term relationship. Also, a myth about mushrooms you probably believe. And odd ways humans think, like we tend to be overconfident, we often misuse our intuition, and we have something called implicit egotism. Implicit egotism is the tendency to like what we associate with ourselves. We tend to like letters that happen to be in our names. There are an excess number of Phils in Philadelphia, of Virginias in Virginia. All this today on Something You Should Know. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best.

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Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. Thanks for spending part of your day with something you should know. I'm sure you like to think of yourself as an honest person. And there's some real wisdom in that. Because being dishonest can make you sick. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame determined that telling even white lies could bring on a cold or the flu. That's because concocting a lie and then having to cover your tracks can be hard work and it's stressful

to your system. That lowers your immunity and leaves you prone to whatever's going around. In the study, students were split into two groups. One promised to tell the whole truth for 10 weeks. That group had significantly fewer health issues than white liars. They even experienced fewer mental health complaints, such as feeling tense or melancholy, and fewer physical complaints, such as sore throat and headache. Just another good reason to always tell the truth. And that is something you should know.

When you think about the big decisions in your life, perhaps the biggest, the one that impacts you more than any other, is choosing who to marry or who to commit to, supposedly for the rest of your life, or at least for the foreseeable future. As life decisions go, it's pretty huge, and yet given the high divorce rate, it's a decision that we're not especially good at making, or so it would seem. So why is that? Well, maybe it's the process we use to make that decision, or the fact that many of us make the decision without much of a process at all. Here to discuss this and offer some advice on this very big decision

is psychiatrist Dr. George Blair West. He is author of a book called How to Make the Biggest Decision in Your Life. Hey, George, welcome. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, Mike. Well, it is interesting when you think about it, how people make that decision to spend the rest of their life with someone, and how so many of us apparently, based on the statistics, get it wrong. What is it about this that you find so interesting? You know, that's where it started for me.

With patient after patient that I was doing relationship therapy with, I would ask them this question. How did you get into this relationship? And at what point did you decide to spend the rest of your life with this person? And so often I got answers that basically if I reduce it down, were answers around, look, it just kind of happened. It slid from one level to the next level. And so often I'd heard this phrase, it seemed like a good idea at the time, which doesn't, you know, when we are making the biggest decision of our life, the point was what was behind all of these answers was that it often

was not a decision. And I think this is one of the pups that we've been sold around romantic love, is that we think that it's got a feeling to it. You know, it's about finding the one, and therefore the decision-making process is secondary. Well, doesn't it seem that whenever you talk about love or romance, that it's supposed to be magic? It's supposed to just happen. And you can't really examine it too closely, it's really quite magical. And this is the whole issue of romantic love as it sits in our modern world. And we've got to remember, this is a relatively new idea for the majority, 95% of recorded history of marriages have been arranged. This idea of romantic love defining a relationship that we find the one,

and when we find the one, this decision has to be, well, again, let's forget the word decision, this has to be right. And so people, and often their friends are saying, so is it the one? And people go, yeah, I think they are. Sometimes, you know, they can be more emphatic, you know, particularly when they're in that early stage, the honeymoon phase of a relationship where you can only see the good in your partner, you can't see anything negative. It's an incredibly dangerous time to be making a decision because I was being driven by a Pakistani driver when I was in Abu Dhabi a year or two ago,

and I grilled him because he told me how he was going back to an arranged wedding. And I said to him, you know, he said, my aunt's involved, my mother's involved. And I said to him, how do you feel about them making this decision for you? And he went, look, what would I know? I'm just a 34 year old guy. But he was, he was recognizing that there's a certain wisdom that is brought to bear on this whole process. But yeah, since the industrial revolution, romantic love has taken over, but it's literally, it really got going, particularly in the US in the mid 1900s, early to mid 1900s. But if you went back another 200 years before that, the vast majority of weddings were arranged. And of course, that brought a lot of thinking about it to the table.

And look, I'm not going to suggest we need to go back to arranged marriages, but there was an enormous amount that arranged marriages teach us. Well, you said a moment ago that when you're head over heels in love, that that's a very dangerous time and not a great time to make that decision. But when else are you going to make it? I mean, that's the time that you make that decision because you are head over heels in love. Well, yes.

And of course, the answer to that question is after that honeymoon phase is over. That phase is designed from an evolutionary point of view to get us to make babies. And while that period is in full swing, we don't want to appreciate our partner's shortcomings because that gets in the way of the unadulterated love literally. In fact, when people come to see me and they're in that honeymoon phase of their relationship, I say, look, you might want to take a break from therapy at the moment because you really want to enjoy this. This is a really fun period of life, and this is a really cool experience to have. And if we're going to be looking at that through the eyes of psychotherapy, or even just relationship counseling, we're going to pull it apart and dismantle it.

And I don't want to do that to you. The older patients tend to say, no, look, I actually have been through this a few times, and I actually want to dismantle it and see what's really happening here. But the younger ones typically skip therapy for a couple of months and they come back and see me. And I say, come back and see me when it's over and don't make any decisions during this time about your future. Because one of the things that defines, this is a work from an American called Banfield, and he looked at what defined the most successful people on the planet, whether it was financial, in the arts, but also in relationships, which is where I think it applies the most. And he said that the single most defining feature was the

capacity to look to the long-term when making a decision. And we don't use transient emotional states to make long-term decisions. It's like buying a car, the first car you look at when you're in the showroom and you fall in love with it and you've got a great salesman, that is probably not the time to choose the car. Often, I see people put more thought into buying cars. They test drive different models, they compare them, they work out which ones have the longer term benefits, reliability, warranties, and so on before they make a decision. And I rarely see that level of thinking applied to what is a way more important

decision, which is your long-term relation with a partner. But if you apply that simple test, I'll ask patients, I'll say, so how do you think they'd be as a father in five years' time? And that gets them to stop and think. If they're having a great time going out partying with somebody who hasn't had many long-term relationships, and you ask them that question, they stop and think. So it's a really powerful test is, what am I going to feel about this decision, whether it's we're talking about relationships or anything else, in 12 months, two years, and five years' time. So when people pick a partner and you ask, well, you know,

you mentioned earlier about, you know, this is the one. Well, is there one or can you make it work with almost anyone within a certain range if you take a swing at it? Mike, that is the absolutely key question here. And I want to come at it from the arranged marriage angle first, and then I want to come at it from the manufactured love angle, where there's a whole pile of research into manufacturing love. So let's break this down a little bit. When you look at arranged marriages and you look at their satisfaction levels compared to love marriages, and the most interesting studies here, there's a study done that compared arranged marriages in India with arranged marriages with Indians living in

California and with Americans in California. And they looked at the relative levels of genuine marital satisfaction, the sense of loving and caring in these three groups. And the first finding is that the highest level of marital satisfaction, the sense of love and caring was in the arranged marriage group in America. They kind of get the best of both worlds because in American arranged marriages, the children tend to be more involved. And so they get some say, in particular, they get power of veto against somebody who they definitely don't have any sort of sense of connection with. But beyond that, they're relying on the family to use a collective wisdom that goes back centuries here. And there's matchmakers in the US who work for these families who are very good at what they do,

much better than the algorithms of the dating apps, because they bring a whole other level to it, which is a human intuition and knack and a skill at this. But the finding is that the levels of love are greater in the arranged marriages. But then there's another study that was actually done a few years before this one, where they compared Indian love marriages, because there are people out there getting married for love, with Indian arranged marriages over time. And what happens is at day one, the level of love, understandably, is much higher in the love marriage. But when you come back and you look at them five years later, the levels are about the same. Level of marital satisfaction, love, caring, those parameters

are about the same. When you come back 10 years, the level of love in the arranged marriage is exceeding the level in the love marriage. So what's going on? The regression analysis would tell us that we're talking about the sense of expectation, number one, and commitment, number two. And of the two, commitment is the big one. Because in an arranged marriage, people commit to the marriage. And that commitment is almost absent in that same kind of way. I'm not saying people in love marriages don't commit, but not in this way that the arranged marriages have it. Such that in the love marriages, they expect the love to carry them through. And of course, it doesn't. When the children arrive, when other problems come along, you often feel irritation, if not downright anger towards your partner.

And a commitment is what carries you through those periods. We're talking about love, romance, and marriage with psychiatrist George Blair West. He is author of the book, How to Make the Biggest Decision of Your Life. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa

Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. So, George, what was this other research you said about manufacturing love? Now, this research has been done for a couple of decades now. This is when you put two people

in a room and you get them to undertake a range of what might be called intimacy exercises. And what they found was that when they got a group of, typically this is done on university students, they get 50 of them and they pair them off and they get them to do these intimacy exercises. These are complete strangers, right? And what they would find is that a percentage of them, it varies from study to study, but 30, 40% of them would actually start to develop relationships out of this. So at least in the first instance, record high levels of a sense

of intimacy with the other person. Now, what we're looking at here is the phenomenon that sits behind something that we often see as being about finding the one, but it's not. And that's where doctors marry nurses. I saw it all the time in my 20s and 30s. Bosses marry secretaries. I know a couple of lawyers who married their secretaries. Anybody who's working, co-workers marrying co-workers, because anybody who's working together where they experience a couple of these effectively intimacy-inducing behaviors or exercises. For example, being vulnerable. That's one of the exercises they get people to do. They share a sense of vulnerability about some aspect of themselves,

which requires inherently a degree of trust. And what happens when people start to be vulnerable with another person, it takes down the walls and people have a sense of connection. So what we found from this research, and this explains why people are marrying people around them and thinking it's the one, they think, oh yeah, I think they're the one, but no. Robert Epstein, he found that there are about 350,000 people that we could happily have a long-term relationship with if you understood these issues around manufacturing love and how to build it over time. So distill this down because obviously people listening are not going to go get into an arranged marriage.

Many people are already in relationships. So with all you know about all this research, what's the advice? What I wanted people to take away, because yeah, I agree. We're not here to tell people to get to arranged marriages, but it's the manufacturing love which came out of that arranged marriage research, which is really important. And so, what it turns into when you're working with couples is that you actually, I actually get them to start to recommit to the relationship as step one. I explain to them that love isn't what was ever going to carry them through, that they have to commit to a couple of things.

They have to commit to caring for the other person when they don't feel like caring for the other person. When a couple comes to see me, one of the things I will say to them fairly much routinely, because they'll always come in complaining about their partner. That's kind of normal. I don't have a problem with that. Except that, as I say to them, until they can switch that around, until they can start looking at themselves and what they're bringing to the relationship that is causing their partner to react negatively in some way, then they're not going to get very far in therapy and they're not going to get very far in their relationship. And I can see the transition.

And not everybody makes it, of course, but the ones who get this concept, and often it's over some sessions of therapy, they come in and they start to talk about what they're doing that they know they could do better that's pissing their partner off. It's a shift to start to look at oneself and to commit to trying to grow oneself in the relationship rather than looking to the partner to bring the happiness to the relationship. It's about shifting that locus of control. That's one of the central factors that the commitment means.

Because if people in arranged marriages were wanting to pick apart their partner with things that they, remember, they don't have the rose-colored glasses. That would be a long list of things that they could pick on. But the commitment says, look, I'm going to make this marriage work. And when we're going to make a marriage work, we start to think from the get-go around how we're going to start to bring ourself to the marriage. And so much of all personal growth begins with self-awareness. So I get that, that self-awareness is important. But still, you're in a relationship with another

person. And so there are still going to be problems, conflicts, that person's going to let you down, things go wrong. So one of the things that we've got to appreciate with our partners is that we're typically drawn to people who are complimentary to us. And this is a cause of a lot of the problems in a relationship if we don't understand this process. So we know, for example, that extroverts are very typically drawn to introverts and vice versa, because deep down they kind of know two extroverts together. We had one couple who were like this, and they were always competing for the stage. It was kind of tiring being with them because they were both out there and full on the whole time. Whereas an introvert makes a good

audience for an extrovert. And the extrovert has a sense that the introvert will slow them down and they know at some level they need that. If you have two introverts in a relationship, they end up staying home and doing nothing and not developing a social network, which is really important. Also for children, children need to have two different kinds of parents who've got different personalities. Because say, for example, you have two parents who are extroverts and you have a child who's an introvert, that child will feel that they're kind of wrong in the relationship, in the family. Whereas if they've got one extrovert and one introvert, the child can fit in, they can take cues from both parents in different ways. So this complementarity, which is so important for creating richness and a better team, because differences, you know, Dale Carnegie said that

if two people repeatedly agree, then one of them is superfluous. And so in a relationship, we want that difference. We want somebody who looks at detail and somebody else who looks at the big picture. But if we don't understand that we're being attracted to people because of their complementarity, then this so often is the basis of the conflict that they will come in to see me about. So we need to help them to understand that process. But there's one big caveat. While we can be very comfortably in a richer relationship with somebody who's got different interests and different personality, we have to have aligned personal values. And to go back to the point of your question, there are some couples that they actually don't have aligned core personal values.

And those relationships are actually almost impossible to save because they are too different on things that they feel very, very strongly about. So for example, you can have somebody who's highly religious if the other person is pretty so-so about it. But if you have two people from different religions who are very committed to that, then you've got a problem going forward. Because religion is a core value for people. If you've got somebody who's quite comfortable cheating their taxes and somebody who's scrupulously honest, this is going to be a grounds for conflict that is going to be substantial.

Is there something you see in your work that's missing from a lot of relationships, the people who walk in your door for counseling. Is there something you see that's missing that if it was just there would make such a huge difference in making a relationship work? And if so, it is what? It's having a partner who accepts us despite our shortcomings. This acceptance is what gives us that. When we know that our partner, even though they know all of our shortcomings, still wants to be there and care about us, that is an incredibly powerful, satisfying experience. And that feeling that my partner still cares about me, even though they know that I make mistakes, I make big screw-ups, that going through life with somebody who makes you feel that way is gold.

It really is the essence of the been basing long-term relationships and marriages on love. So maybe that explains why, you know, we haven't been very good at it. But also looking at the more pragmatic parts of arranged marriages and how those elements help to make marriage work is something I think everyone can learn from. George Blair West has been my guest. He is a psychiatrist and author of the book, How to Make the Biggest Decision of Your Life. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, George. Appreciate it. That's an absolute pleasure, Mike. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so.

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That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Human beings are odd in many ways. The way we think, the way we process information, the way we delude ourselves into believing things. For example, things like we often believe we're smarter than we really are. We very often use our intuition, but we sometimes misuse our intuition.

And it's pretty common to think everybody's having more fun than you are. It's all really curious stuff and something David Myers has studied. David is a social psychologist and professor of psychology at Hope College, and he is author of a book called How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. Hi, David. Welcome. Thank you, Mike. Glad to be here. So since you're the expert here and you put all this information together,

start with something you think is particularly fascinating about humans. Some new research on what I call the happy science of micro friendships. Little brief interactions that we have with people that can brighten their day and ours. And there's some really clever experiments done recently where, for example, in one case, commuters are offered a $5 gift to either do as they would normally do on their train or bus, or to sit in solitude, not talking to anybody, or to strike up a conversation with a stranger. And it's going to be awkward, but do it. And at the end of the ride, what they find is that everybody's in a happier mood, both the people who initiated the conversation and those who received it.

And other studies like this have involved getting people in true experiments to banter with a barista when buying a cup of coffee, or to give a compliment to strangers on the street or in one experiment done at a Turkish university to talk up the bus driver. And in every case, after doing these small acts of kindnesses, both the giver and the recipient feel so much better. And it's true of introverts as well as extroverts. And so it's just a practical moral to this story that micro friendships, if we could call them that, can brighten people's days. And so we can take initiative to engage in conversation, to chat up the rideshare driver, ask the checkout clerk how their day is going or compliment the restaurant server. and it'll have positive effects. Yeah, well, I mean, who hasn't done that?

I've certainly been in situations where you just kind of say hello or strike up a short conversation with a stranger waiting in line or something, and yeah, it feels good. Yes, and surprisingly, when you do this even with a stranger, the effect is bigger than people expect it will be. And it's less awkward than they expect it will be. One of the things you talk about that I think is so interesting is that with the incredible abilities of the human mind, one of its big limitations is how we pay attention.

That the human mind really can only pay attention to one thing at a time. Pickpockets use this by diverting our attention and then exploiting that because our attention is not focused where it could be if we were to apprehend the pickpocketer. That's called inattentional numbness. There's even inattentional anosmia. Did you know that word, Mike? That's called inattentional numbness. There's even inattentional anosmia. Did you know that word, Mike? That's inability to smell something, missing the smell of coffee if our attention is devoted, is directed in some other place. And so it's just part of the wonder of attention that is part of the larger wonder of our whole sensory perceptual system. Well, it's interesting.

Just think right now. You say that we can only pay attention to one thing, but people try to pay attention to multiple things, and we have sort of the sense that we can do that. I mean, I can smell the coffee and still read my book, so I am doing two things at the same time. Ah, yeah, but Mike, you're alternating, you're multitasking, and your attention switches back and forth. So if you think you can be in class and check your smartphone and listen to the lecture

at the same time, you really can't. Your attention can be in but one place at a time. And that's part of the power of attention. It's an amazing power, but it can only be in one place at a time. So what if you're trying to maybe study and listen to music at the same time? Ah, well, the music can be in the background and it can affect your mood. I mean, I'm not saying you don't process it automatically and unconsciously. But again, your conscious awareness is going to be in one place.

If it's thinking about the music, then it's not thinking about the content you're reading. If it's thinking about the content you're reading, then you're not conscious of the music. And so this idea that we can be aware of multiple things at once is really a false notion. We can flip between things, but we can't multitask. And that's why, by the way, it's so dangerous to text or be on a cell phone while driving, because that momentary diversion of your consciousness, of your attention, can make you miss something. And we have driving simulation experiments and many real-life accidents that happen when people think they can be aware of two things simultaneously. Let's talk about human intuition.

People have a sense of what it is, and they call it different things like hunches, or I had a feeling, or it just seemed right. But what is intuition? Intuition is automatic thinking. It's instantaneous, unreasoned responses. And it's, first of all, it's a big deal in human existence. So much of our life occurs automatically with implicit expertise that we acquire. Chess masters can make their moves. Drivers can make their road decisions all automatically after they've formed a habit.

And we see this in some dramatic ways, even when people who are literally blind, cannot consciously see anything, will intuitively navigate around an object in their way, indicating that they have some intuitive what's called blind sight below their awareness. And we see it in studies of our intuitive fears of different things, which may be very irrational against all evidence, like fearing flying more than driving, when in fact driving mile per mile is 500 times more dangerous. And by the way, that's an example of intuition's powers, but also of its perils, because unreasoned information can lead us astray sometimes. And while intuition feeds our creativity and guides our lives, it needs to be restrained because when unchecked,

it can lead us to make terrible decisions. Everything from stock purchasing to thinking we can detect lies, for example, that others are telling us when humans are really not very good at all at that. So what do we know intuition is good for? When is a good time to use it? What intuition is good for, we're very good at reading emotions instantaneously in others' faces within a fraction of a second, for example. If you observe a teacher's teaching for just 10 seconds, you'll get a very good sense of the energy level that they bring to their classroom. So some judgments we're pretty darn good at, but other judgments, when we use our intuition, turn out not to be very good. So, for example, interviewers using their intuition

to predict how effective a potential employee is going to be probably, in most cases, have too much confidence in their intuitive predictive ability. So the research shows, and that's why interviewers are best advised to use past behaviors and to use other means of selecting employees than just trusting their own gut. So sometimes when I'm thinking about intuition, it's like when you're driving and you don't, let's say you don't have GPS or a map or anything, and you think, well, should I turn left or should I turn right? And you, oh, use your intuition, just go with your gut. That would seem like a bad use of your intuition.

That would be a bad use of your intuition. Unless you have experience on that roadway and you have some intuitive recollection, some implicit memory of having traveled that route before. But if not, if you just think, I have a whim, I'm going to trust my gut, your gut is a pretty unreliable indicator. Talk about the wonders of walking. What's that about? Wonders of walking refers to some interesting experiments where

if people who are in conflict walk together, synchronizing their body movements as they do so, they can resolve some of their differences and tensions more than if they just sit. And this actually relates, Mike, to a larger area of research on what's called embodied cognition. What we experience in our bodies can affect what we think and in a number of experiments people have for example if put in a warm room perceived others as warmer or if sitting in a hard chair they become more harsh in their judgments of criminals. Or if their head is held high and their body is striding forward, they feel more spirited, happier. And so if indeed our bodily postures can affect what

we're experiencing, then maybe that helps explain why walking together can reduce stress and boost mood between two people who've been in conflict, can soften the boundaries between them. By the way, line dancing and martial drills and group singing would be other forms of kind of collective synchrony as people do things with their bodies together and experience some benefits. Why is everyone else having more fun than me? That's a great question. And it does seem to be the case across a whole bunch of studies, Mike, that university students, mall shoppers, online respondents, almost everybody thinks other social lives are more active than their own dull life. Others, it looks to us like they party more, they eat out more, they have more friends, their dating life is more exciting. And if you've noticed that, you're not alone. And it looks like this is partly the result of our exposure to social media. If we're just passively using Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and so forth, we see our friends posting things at their happiest, most convivial, best-looking self.

And we compare our own mundane lives at home as we look at those social media and feel a twinge of envy. It was Teddy Roosevelt who supposedly said, comparison is the thief of joy. And this is, Mike, one reason that's given for why teen and young adult depression has dramatically doubled in the last decade from about 9% reporting a major depressive episode in the last year in 2010 to 17% in 2020 in government health surveys. And we have various kinds of research that indicates that heavy exposure to social media and those social comparisons we make to others are part of what's at work here, helping us feel bad. But it seems if Teddy Roosevelt said that, and he didn't have social media,

and I remember a time before social media, I think people still thought this, that people still were envious of other people's lives long before social media. Oh, absolutely. Social comparison, as we call it, didn't begin with social media. We're all the time comparing ourselves to others and feeling relatively good or bad depending on the comparison. However, social media puts that phenomenon on steroids. And so now we're looking at others usually presenting themselves at their happiest, most beautiful times, having fun with others, and then comparing our mundane lives to that. And that could at least be a contributor

to the doubled rate of depression, which is really an unprecedented dramatic rise among teens, especially teen girls and young adults. One of the things you talk about that caught my eye when I was looking at the material is you say that death is terrifying to people except for those who are dying. So I'd like to hear your explanation for that. Death is the great enemy. I mean, we are terror struck by the very idea of our own mortality. And yet, on the other hand, we human beings have a remarkable stability to our well-being across the lifespan. And as people age, enter their later life years,

they don't get unhappier. Their life satisfaction does not go down. Even people that have been paralyzed in accidents, after adapting to that, will have a near normal level of well-being. Another example of our human resilience comes from some studies by Amelia Goranson, who looked at the blogs of terminally ill cancer patients or of people on death row and found that their words were not as terror-struck or as depressed as you would have guessed. And so she concludes that, in her words, death is more positive than people expect. Meeting the grim reaper may not be as grim as it seems. What's the overconfidence phenomenon? The overconfidence phenomenon is the tendency to be more confident than correct. And so in experiments, if people are given

factual questions like, is absinthe a liquor or a precious stone? If they are 80% confident that they're right, they will in fact actually be about 60% correct. And so this overconfidence phenomenon penetrates into our everyday life as we tend to be overconfident in the accuracy of our factual judgments when we would be well advised to have a little more intellectual humility. That idea of being overconfident must serve some evolutionary purpose that, you know, people have to feel like they know what they're doing in order to progress, even though maybe they don't, because if they just felt, oh, I don't know, I guess we wouldn't get anywhere. So that's a very good point. A certain amount of optimism about our future fuels our activity. If

we don't believe in the possibility we have to achieve something we may not even make the effort and so there may be some adaptive evolutionary wisdom to this overconfidence phenomenon but it does however tend to lead people to be overconfident when projecting for example when projects will be completed whether it's students predicting whether or not they're going to finish a course or get a good grade, or whether it's contractors projecting when they're going to finish a project, people tend to be overconfident. Talk about behavioral confirmation. I think this is something that everyone has experienced, and it's pretty significant.

So explain what it is and how it works and all. This is an interesting phenomenon that comes from social psychological experiments, for example, in which women who were interacting with men over an intercom and who were believed by the man who was talking to them to be attractive, in fact, behave warmer because of how the man treated them. And so in this, in these and other experiments, people who are led to believe they're liked, for example, also behave more warmly. They are liked more. If an interviewer expects an interviewee to be warm and expressive, that interviewee tends to be more warm and expressive. And this can affect our relationships. If we come home and greet our partner and expect them to be in a bad mood, we may treat

them in a way that puts them in a bad mood. If we expect them to be in a warm, positive mood, we might treat them more warmly and thus elicit the very behavior we expect. And so the perception of hostility can beget hostility. And we call this behavioral confirmation. The simple lesson is what we see in others can get reflected back in how they react to us. And what they see in us may influence how we respond to them. As we expect, so we shall find.

Our social beliefs reflect reality, but they also create our social reality. One more before you go. Explain implicit egotism. beliefs reflect reality, but they also create our social reality. One more before you go. Explain implicit egotism. Implicit egotism is the tendency to like what we associate with ourselves. So if you take your face and morph it into another face, so you have a blended face, you will tend to like that new face and that person, even if you don't recognize yourself. By the way, there's some concern that artificial intelligence might manipulate us politically in the future by taking our face and subtly morphing it with that of candidates they want us to like. And so without recognizing what's happening, we may come to like that candidate more.

But it extends to other things too. We tend to like letters that happen to be in our names. We tend to like numbers that are part of our birth date. People tend even to gravitate toward places and occupations that share their name. There are an excess number of Phils in Philadelphia, of Virginias in Virginia, dentists with a name like Dennis or Denise. And so this curious phenomenon, this liking things we associate with ourselves in so many different ways is called implicit egotism.

Well, it's interesting, you know, as you've talked about all these things, I've experienced many of them. And I'm sure everybody has and never really probably understood why or it's just it's just part of being human. And so it's really interesting to hear the research behind why we do these things we do and why we think the way we think. I've been speaking with David Myers. He is a social psychologist and author of the book, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Thanks for coming on, David. This was really fun. Mike, thanks so much for having me. It's been great talking with you. If you like to cook at all, you have probably been told that you're not supposed to wash mushrooms because mushrooms will absorb the water that you wash them with and make them soggy and hard to cook with. This is mentioned so often in recipes in cookbooks and online, where they often talk about how you should brush your mushrooms to get the dirt off, but not to rinse them because, oh, you don't want to rinse them. Well, years ago, a guy named Harold McGee, who wrote a great book called On Food and Cooking,

he did an experiment, and I remember interviewing him about this many years ago. He did an experiment where he weighed mushrooms, and then he soaked them in a bowl, and then he took the mushrooms out of the bowl, let them dry off briefly, and weighed them again. And the mushrooms did not absorb any water. They just don't. But again, it's mentioned in so many recipes. It's really become conventional wisdom in the world of cooking that you should brush off dirt from mushrooms and not wash them. But I will tell you, since Harold McGee told me that,

I wash my mushrooms. It's sure a lot easier than brushing the dirt off. And I don't have any problem. And that is something you should know. You know, the great thing about podcasts is you can never have too many listeners, ever. And you could help us get some by telling a friend or someone you know that you think would enjoy listening to Something You Should Know. Tell them about this podcast and suggest they give a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk

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So if you're looking for a podcast that feels like a chat with your besties, listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first

is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends,

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