Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Getting Beyond Revenge & How We Misthink Money

Episode Date: July 25, 2020

Has anyone ever told you that you couldn’t sing or carry a tune? Kids are often told that and it can really embarrass them and leave a lasting impression. The truth is just about anyone can sing and sing well. So forget what you were told and listen to my explanation. https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2015/02/cant-sing-keep-at-it/ The ability to forgive is wonderful. But while people can forgive, we also have the ability (and often the desire) to seek revenge when someone has harmed us. Psychologist Michael McCullough author of the book, Beyond Revenge (http://amzn.to/2BgFwNI) talks with me about how to best deal with someone who has hurt you and he explores whether or not you can make a case for revenge in some circumstances. There is a good chance you have a favorite coffee mug. Lots of people do. And I think you will find it either odd or comforting just how attached people get to their coffee mug and what they feel if someone else uses it or – God forbid – it breaks! https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minding-the-body/201602/6-reasons-were-emotionally-attached-our-favorite-mugs All your life you deal with money. And how well you deal with it and understand it will have a huge impact on you. Jeff Kreisler author of the book, Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter (http://amzn.to/2nMsCiQ) uncovers some of the mysteries of money like why you enjoy spending money on some things but hate spending money on others; how you decide what the value of things are; why you will spend more on vacation than you will at home for the very same things and more. This Week's Sponsors -Netgear. Go to https://www.netgear.com/bestwifi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, has anyone ever told you you can't sing or you sing off

key? Well, they're wrong, and I'll tell you why. Then, being able to forgive someone who's hurt you is wonderful, but is revenge ever a better choice? I wanted revenge to get a fair hearing. It does really important things for people who don't have access to justice, who feel like certain mistreatments slip through the cracks and they don't get their day in court, so to speak.

Also, do you have a favorite coffee mug? It's amazing how so many people get so attached to one. Plus understanding how money and credit work can save you a lot of grief. When you pay for something, it stimulates the same region of the brain as physical pain. What credit cards do, and many other financial technology does, is reduces that pain. It reduces our awareness that we're even spending. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast,

it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. I spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Like so many people, I love music. I like listening to music. I've enjoyed playing music when I was a teenager. I played drums in a band, but I was never much of a singer. I never pursued that part of it at all. And I thought about it, and one of the. But I was never much of a singer. I never pursued that part of it at all.

And I thought about it, and one of the reasons why I've never thought of myself as somebody who could sing very well is somebody told me once when I was fairly young that I couldn't sing very well. And I guess it stuck with me. And perhaps you've been told that, you know, you can't carry a tune or you're singing a little flat or something. Well, if so, don't worry. Just keep practicing. It turns out that singing isn't so much a talent as it is a skill. Researchers took three groups of people, kindergartners, sixth graders, and college-aged adults, and had them listen to music and then sing it back.

Now, the three groups were scored using similar procedures for measuring singing accuracy. The study showed considerable improvement in accuracy from kindergarten to late elementary school, when most children are receiving regular music instruction in school. But in the adult group, the gains were reversed to the point that the college students performed at the same level as kindergartners, suggesting that use-it-or-lose-it theory. While singing on key is likely easier for some people than others, it's also a skill that can be taught and developed, and much of it has to do with using the voice regularly. The voice is very much like a musical instrument. The more you practice it, the better you get. Now, telling a

child that he or she can't sing can have devastating effects on their self-esteem and cause them to stop singing. Many people can vividly recall, as do I, being told that they were tone deaf or couldn't carry a tune, and that was the beginning of the end of their music career. And that is something you should know. When people harm you, when people do you wrong, you basically have two choices. You can forgive them, or you can seek revenge and attempt to harm them back. And of course, we've all been taught that forgiveness is the more mature, kind, and sensible thing to do. But then again, revenge can be sweet. Sometimes getting someone back

can feel good, at least temporarily. But if everyone was vengeful and always looking to pay people back for the wrong they've done, what kind of world would this be? Michael McCullough is a psychologist who spent a lot of time researching forgiveness and revenge. He's written a couple of books on the subject, including Beyond Revenge, The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. So Michael, what is the human inclination? Do you think humans have more of an instinct for revenge or an instinct to forgive? We've got both.

Humans come into this world both with an instinct to seek revenge and with an ability to forgive. And the real difference, Mike, between the situations in which we're inclined to use revenge and the situations in which we're inclined to forgive is all about the environment. It's all about the situation. It's all about the type of person that you're trying to forgive or trying to seek revenge against and what they mean to you at that point in time. So, for example, sometimes we find it really hard to forgive, okay? And you can think perhaps in your own life or whatever, times when it's really difficult. But there are also times when we forgive really easily.

And I've wanted to try to understand that. Why is it that sometimes people seem to forgive with less work than they do in other cases? And what I've discovered is that people forgive really easily when a couple of things happen. And again, I think this is the way that this instinct was designed to operate. People forgive when they feel that the offenders who hurt them are safe, that is, they're no longer a threat to them. When they perceive those people to be valuable,

which is to say, I have a stake in repairing this relationship. This relationship has worth to me as I look down into the future. And when they perceive those people to be worthy of care, which is to say, you feel sorry for them. You feel like they're people who deserve, you feel like the people who hurt you have also done their share of suffering and so forth. So value, safety, and careworthiness, as I like to call them, are the three ingredients that activate the forgiveness instinct. And when we are able to put those three ingredients in place,

forgiveness gets a lot easier. Now, granted, there are times when we don't get those three ingredients, right? The person who hurt you isn't sorry. They're still a threat to you. Perhaps they're dead or you'll never see them again. They don't care about you and you don't see any way this relationship is going to have any value for you in the future, even if you could see them again. Now, granted, in those situations, forgiveness is really hard. And I think we were designed so that in situations like that, it's really hard. Because those are precisely the people for whom forgiving is not necessarily in our best interest. When you look at the research, when the dust all settles from this, are you able to say,

because we have been told that, you know, generally speaking, it's better to forgive? Or in fact, is revenge ever better? Well, we live in societies, thankfully, in which revenge is really not okay, right? We have police forces, we have systems of justice and so forth that are supposed to take care of our interests for us. We're supposed to have workplaces in which if we have a grievance or if somebody does something wrong to us, we can go to a boss or a supervisor and make sure that the grievance gets dealt with in a good way. So we don't want any revenge, really. The less revenge we have as a society, the better. So in the long run, while revenge feels satisfying, and it truly does, the people who are seeking revenge and they feel like they're justified in doing so.

They do get satisfaction out of that. But the satisfaction is really short-lived. So what we want to be doing is trying to figure out how we can design those workplaces, how we can design our communities, how we can design even our nations, so that when people are harmed by somebody, they can get the ingredients they need to forgive rather than harboring resentment. And there's wonderful things going on all over the world right now that people are putting in place in these settings in which they operate

in order to make forgiveness easier and to make revenge uh... to operable uh... make revenge left desirable as an outcome so for example one of the most exciting things going on worldwide right now if the movement called restorative justice the idea of restorative justice is that when somebody is victimized by a crime, oftentimes what they really want, if you ask them, is a decent apology, an explanation for why the offender broke into their house and stole everything, or stole their car, or cheated them out of money or something, and some attempt to compensate them. So they want to be made whole from the damages they experienced, and they also want to know that the offender was sorry. And you see this in survey after survey of

crime victims. So what restorative justice is about, and there are about 1,500 of these programs worldwide, they're mostly informal community programs that work alongside the standard criminal justice system. Restorative justice takes offenders who are willing to participate and victims who are willing to participate and tries to find an opportunity for them to sit down and discuss the crime and for the victim to receive an apology and to work out some sort of plans for how the victim can be made whole by the offender once the criminal justice system has had its way with the offender. These restorative justice programs reduce people's desires for revenge by about 400 percent and increase their desire to forgive by about 250%.

They're absolutely incredible the way they work. People end up really satisfied with their experiences, both victims and offenders, and everybody leaves feeling like this took them a long way toward healing in the aftermath of these crimes. And that example right there illustrates how forgiveness without the justice, forgiveness just one way forgiveness, is really hard. Forgiveness without justice is nigh impossible. And that's one of the important lessons that I really want people to get out of this book. We have to be thinking about how to design our families, our places of work, the communities in which we live, so that when people have real grievances, and some of these grievances might seem trivial to us as witnesses, but when

they have grievances, they know how they can get those grievances addressed through a process that's transparent, and they know that the grievances addressed through a process that's transparent, and they know that the grievances will be taken seriously by people in power. So much of people's dissatisfaction with their jobs, if you look at surveys, has to do with the feeling that the systems are unjust, and that when people hurt each other or take advantage of each other in the workplace, there aren't formal processes for seeing that justice gets done. This is a big grievance that workers other in the workplace. There aren't formal processes for seeing that justice gets done. This is a big grievance that workers have in the workplace. So anything you

can do as a supervisor to give people assurances that you are looking out for their interests, two things happen when you can do that. One is that workers end up much more satisfied with their jobs, and they feel safe where they work. And you reduce dissatisfaction in the workplace. So this is really at the heart of good leadership, showing people how they can come into your workplace and be assured that when grievances arise with their coworkers, that they have a clear path for getting those grievances redressed. I'm speaking with Michael McCullough. He is a psychologist and author of the book Beyond Revenge,

The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a 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 Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman,

the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker, John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly

about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Michael, we've been talking about this for several minutes now, and I have not heard you say what I often hear other people say who talk on the subject of forgiveness, and that is that you forgive not for the other person, but you forgive someone for yourself

because to harbor resentment is such a waste of your time and mental energy, and it is better to forgive to set yourself free, and it has less to do with the person who did you harm. Well, I think that's true. What's most interesting to me, and the reason that I felt like it was important to write Beyond Revenge, is because I wanted revenge to get a fair hearing. It does really important things for people who don't have access to justice, who feel like in the cracks of life, certain mistreatments slip through the cracks and they don't get their day in court, so to speak. And this can be really trivial things. You know, the things in the workplace that aren't illegal but still hurt people's feelings, for example. When we don't give people proper access to justice

or to formal procedures for dealing with those grievances, the workplace suffers. We end up with workplaces that don't work as well. Families suffer. In neighborhoods in which people don't trust the police to deal with their problems, violence goes out of control. And you can see this in lots of American inner cities. So yes, seeking revenge has long-term costs for health and mental health, and that's absolutely true. But the story I wanted to tell is that it's possible to change society, change our neighborhoods, change our places of work in ways that will make it easier for people to forgive

so that they don't need to figure out how to do it on their own. And so they will more easily feel... So that they won't feel that there's any need to seek it on their own. And so they will more easily feel, so that they won't feel that there's any need to seek revenge on their own. But it does seem that so many times in life, we're in a position where something's happened to us and we have to decide to forgive or not, where justice isn't possible. There is no justice. Right. And that's always going to be true. What we want to do as we move forward is bring justice to more and more of the cracks of life. And I'll just give you one example. Over the last 800 years, the homicide rate in Western Europe

has dropped from about 100 people per 100,000 per year to about 1 per 100,000 per year. We've seen huge drops in the homicide rate. And what most experts attribute this drop to is the fact that people no longer have to use revenge to seek justice when somebody has harmed them. Instead, throughout the Western world, and here in the States as well, we use the criminal justice system. In fact, we have to use the criminal justice system to deal with our grievances when people break the law and harm us. But it wasn't always that way. So it's hard for us to see some of these things when we just look at what's going on in 2008. But over several hundreds of years,

incredible things have happened in Western civilization that have brought more and more revenge under control and made societies safer places to live. So justice marches on, right? And we find ourselves in a really interesting place where we're still trying to make a world in which we can deal with people's grievances in ways like that, so that they don't have to have the burden of revenge that they take on themselves.

But those kind of situations that you're talking about, those involve crimes. Those are criminal things. For the most part, most of us are not, when we feel revenge, it's not because some criminal act has happened. It's much more, you know, we've been slighted, we've been insulted, someone has hurt our feelings, someone has done something mean or destroyed some property. But, you know, it's not necessarily something that rises to the level of a criminal offense. Right. And lots of times justice won't come down to being criminal.

People feel that justice has been served when the person who's harmed them offers an apology, offers to compensate them, offers to undo the damage they've caused. But so often in life, people do things that harm us without even knowing it. I mean, I've had people say things, I'm sure you have too, that somebody said something that hurts your feelings, and they don't even know they said it, and it probably doesn't rise to the level of bringing it up, but, you know, it hurts your feelings.

And so you're not going to get an apology unless you make an issue out of it. And maybe it's not worth making an issue out of it, but it hurts your feelings. Yeah, these are tricky negotiations, right? I mean, as adults, we sometimes have to take some of these injustices on the chin. And we do. If the relationships are important to us and they have long-term value, again, we're naturally inclined to take a few of these blows on the chin. But in the service of rehabilitating these relationships, sometimes we as the victims have to go an often get them to acknowledge that their actions harmed us and and we can we can establish some some reconciliation on the basis of those initial conversations

but you're absolutely right a lot of times we get harmed in life and we have we encounter victims we encounter offenders who aren't sorry or who don't even know they've done anything wrong. And those are more difficult to handle, but they can often be handled productively, especially if the relationship is important to both people. But oftentimes in discussions on forgiveness, I've heard people talk about the importance of forgiving someone within your heart, that you don't have to forgive them and tell them they're forgiven.

And in cases where people have passed away or they're not in your life anymore or they've, you know, they're moved across the world, you can't tell them they're forgiven. And maybe you don't even need to tell them they're forgiven. You just have to forgive them inside of you. Yes. It's certainly true that forgiveness can be a private matter, and you end up feeling better about the situation because you've gone through this private process. However, I don't think forgiveness exists.

Our ability to forgive doesn't exist solely for this purpose. I think forgiveness exists to repair relationships. So the fact that we're able to do it in the first place is because restored relationships are incredibly important to human beings. And as a species, relationships with non-relatives have been very, very important for us in getting to where we are as a civilization. We cooperate with non-relatives on a scale are really unique and really special to us as a species. And forgiveness is a big part of that.

And I think that forgiveness has to be genuine. You can't forgive someone because someone tells you to forgive them. It has to really come from your heart. And sometimes you can't forgive. Sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean you have to seek revenge, but it does seem that sometimes some things are unforgivable. It's pretty interesting. Michael McCullough has been my guest.

He is a psychologist and author of the book Beyond Revenge, The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. There's a link to his book in the show notes for this episode. Hey, everyone. of the forgiveness instinct. There's a link to his book in the show notes for this episode. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. 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. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle.

On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. I suspect there are very few people who have not had issues with money at some point in their life. Money is just one of those subjects. It is so important, it's so emotional, it's so fraught with danger and temptation

that it's hard to imagine going through life and not having some problems with money at some point. Jeff Kreisler and Dan Ariely have taken a long, hard look at how we relate to our money and what we do with it. They've authored a book called Dollars and Cents, How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. And Jeff Kreisler joins me. Hey, Jeff, welcome. Thanks for having me. So what do you think the big problem is with money? I mean, money has an objective value.

A dollar is a dollar, but some people seem to put a lot more value on money than others and a lot more value on the things that money can buy. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the ways that we look for value cues to make financial decisions when we don't know what the right way to go is, and one of them is something called relativity. And it's the idea, I'm sure everyone has heard, when things are comparative and relative, like a $100 sweater that's marked down to 60 is more attractive than a $60 sweater, even though it's the same thing, because compared to 100, relative to 100, it's a great deal. Yeah, why is that?

It's just the way we look at things, I guess. It is. And it's because on its own, if you were to walk up to a sweater and try to assess in your mind, like, what is that worth? How much can I pay? You can't judge on it on its own, right? How do you know a $60? Am I going to wear 10 times? Like, what does it say about me? But if you have then a hundred dollar sweater, even if it's not an actual hundred dollar sweater, but it's this idea of it, You can compare it to that suddenly $100 sweater, and suddenly it looks like a good deal. And that's like the easy way out. It's the easy

decision to make. And because it's so hard to think about money, we go for that easy decision. One of the things that fascinates me about this particular part of money is this assessing value. I mean, you mentioned the $60 sweater, and we look at a sweater, there's no way that I can assess whether this sweater is actually worth $60. I wouldn't even know where to begin to determine that. But people will pay $60 for something because they think something else. And brand names are a good example. I mean, women will pay a lot more money for a brand name handbag, for example, than a no-name handbag, even though the no-name handbag will hold their stuff just as well. But they'll pay more because they value more the name brand handbag. Right.

There are emotions that are connected to spending. And we shouldn't – no women are in this conversation, but men do plenty of the equivalent spending, overspending on their own items because of the name attached to it. I think what it does is it triggers emotions. I mean the thing – the revelation for me when I started working on this book was just how much emotions play into financial decision-making. When I learned about economics and finance, it was straightforward. It was you're a rational economic actor with perfect information. And like it was numbers. There didn't seem like emotion was in at all. But really, emotion is. Whether that emotion is uncertainty, I don't know how to define what this is worth. Or it's like, whatever is that, you know, $400 handbag feeling of like, oh my gosh, I have something, I'm proud of it, and I've made it.

These things and how we feel about the money really dictate the decisions we make. Our honeymoon is an example in the book, and we overspent on our honeymoon, but it was hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime experience. But when you do it regularly and you make that expensive handbag or expensive big- tv decision uh it's not as wise yeah i listening to you talk i think you've just nailed it in the sense that it is very emotional and yet we try to attach these objective uh markers to it that well i you know somebody over spends on their honeymoon and others would say well i would i would never do that well no one asked you i mean that it's not your decision and yet we judge things and we say well i wouldn't do that but you would overspend on something else and that's fine and i would overspend on

something else and it's all emotional it seems like that's the driver absolutely and i think in our book and in the work that that my co-author and I are doing separately and talks and everything, my overall message is I don't want to be a Susie Orman that says there are strict rules to how you spend money. What we're trying to do is show people here's what's happening. Here are the decisions you're making. Here's why you're making these mistakes. And go forward. Sometimes do the bad decision. Get a $7 latte. That's okay as long

as you're the one on some level at some point conscious of that decision. It does seem that the whole subject of money is all disrupted when you throw in the topic of credit. When you can buy stuff for free, sort of, that changes everything. That's a great question about credit cards, and I paid particular attention to them. Why credit cards have this effect on us and have us overspend is because they reduce what's called the pain of paying. And that's the concept that when you pay for something, it stimulates the same region of the brain as physical pain.

And typically, in evolutionary purposes, pain serves a purpose. It makes us pay attention to what's happening. You put your hand on a stove, it's hot, you look at it, and you take your hand off. But we can only pay attention and adjust our decisions and change our situation if we feel that pain. What credit cards do, and many other financial financial technology does is reduces that pain. It reduces our awareness that we're even spending. But when you put your credit card down at the end of a meal, you're not actually paying. You're just signing something that says, I'll promise I'll pay later. And so we're not paying attention to it, that there's a time gap between it.

And it's almost like they're casino chips, right? The same sort of concept. When you have a $5 casino chip, you don't think it's $5. It's just a little play thing, just like this little plastic thing that's a car, does it? And our concern is that when you think about technological advances, stuff like Apple Pay and Amazon OneClick and all these things that make spending easier, they make it so we pay less attention. I know that you don't necessarily, you know, like Susie Orman offer rules on how to spend your money. But if you're in credit card debt, do you think that that all of a sudden should become your first priority?

Get rid of that before you do anything else. Well, I think some of that goes back to a question of math. If you're in credit card debt and you're incurring 15% interest rates, you're going to want to knock that down because even if you have your money in a CD or investing and you're gaining less, it's not wise. So some of that is a math decision. And it's also emotional. I mean, when people clear off credit card debt, like it's a dopamine rush. It's a good feeling to not have that negative sense there. So there's a lot of reasons to stay out of credit card debt. It's not easy to do. And I don't profess to be an expert in how to get out of credit card debt, but I would prioritize it. Yeah. But it does seem too, because in my younger days, I had a lot of credit card debt. But there's also a very nice, warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you know you have money in the bank. And so maybe you want to, you know, should I pay off the credit cards or should I stick

some money in the bank? So it's, again, it's all so emotional. Right. And it's interesting you mentioned the money in the bank because there's something called mental accounting when we think about money differently depending on sort of where it is or how it's categorized. When really, your money is the same no matter where it is, what the source is. Is it from your paycheck or a bonus or a lottery ticket? Is it in your checking account, your savings account, your retirement? Or is it negatively in your credit card balance? That money is all the same.

It's all one group. Unless we go to the ATM, we take out money, we see a balance. That's what we think we have for money to spend. Now, that's a human failing. Same time, that's sort of an opportunity. If you want to save more money, you could have your job, if they do direct deposit, put a little bit less in your checking account and put some in a savings account or even pay it towards your credit card. And then you'll think you have less discretionary spending because of that little tendency of ours to put things into categories. Is there any evidence or have you ever looked at whether or not people and their money behavior tends to reflect their parents' money behavior?

They handle money the way they saw their parents do it? Or what determines how we deal with money? Well, there's a study in Oklahoma, and I believe another state has undertaken it, where they selected a random group of people across all demographics, and there were people expecting kids and when their kids were born, the state gave them a small college savings fund, just put, I think it was like 50, a hundred dollars. And then they would send them monthly statements. And they came back four years later and they also had a control group that didn't get

it. And those that had this just small amount of money in college savings, their kids had better social and cognitive skills. And the reasoning or the belief behind it – and I can't speak authoritatively on the scientific process here. But the belief is that parents get these statements every month about a college like future and so they start thinking about their kids college future and they start doing things that like help that kid develop towards that like that's a goal that's something they can think is possible whereas many people don't so they read to them more they do play games and more etc and that is just sort of one example of how we do learn anything, whether it's finances or otherwise, from our situation, from our family, from sort of what cultural cues there

are. You know, you look at our culture, and I mentioned we obsess about money, we obsess about spending, right? We can compete with our neighbor's new car or bigger house or, you know, new clothes, but we don't have any idea how our neighbors are saving for retirement or otherwise. We just don't talk about that. And if somehow we were able to culturally change that, so like I knew Bob next door, his 401K is robust, and maybe he could then tell me how he did it. We could talk about that, but we don't. So our financial environment, whether it's within our home, our neighborhood, or just the culture at large, does affect our

knowledge and our decision-making about financing. You say that we tend to be more comfortable overpaying for something if we've overpaid for it in the past and that it's easier to spend more money on vacation than not. And talk about those kinds of things. Well, as far as, you know, repeat overspending, that is, goes back to this idea that it's hard to make these decisions about what to spend. And what tends to happen is at some point, let's use that $5 latte example again. At some point, we decide, hey, you know what? Paying for this $5 latte is a good choice, right?

I'm going to do it today. Then the next day we go there. And rather than thinking, is this a good choice? You're like, you know, I did that yesterday. I obviously thought about it. I'm obviously a really smart person. I obviously did the right thing. I'll just do it again.

And it's sort of self-hurting, what we call. We look at the evidence of our own decision and just assume it's right. And then it begins a process. You just stop questioning that. Same thing for any sort of repeat financial decision. You make it that one time and then you use that decision as a sort of data point for future decisions. It's sort of why that coffee example, if someone is worried about their coffee spending, we don't say think about it every day. We say, you know, once every six months, stop and think, do I want to do this or not? Because that decision will be what you do

for the following six months till you stop again. The question about spending more on vacation than at home, it goes back to this emotional element, the idea also of mental accounts. When we go on a being spent, right? It's already out the door. So it's sort of play money. When we're at home and we're making the same decision, like let's say on vacation, there's a $27 turkey sandwich, which I've come across, but you never do that at home because that money that you're spending, that's the hard-earned money I got from my job, or that's the money that could be going to my kids buying books in college. It's in a different category, but we're on vacation. We don't think about those things. And again, we should, because that money, that $27 is the same no matter where it's from, no matter where it's being spent. There's been a lot of talk lately in the last few years,

people have said, if you want to be happy, spend your money on experiences, not things. I take exception to that because I don't think it's a blanket rule. What do you think? I agree with you that it shouldn't be a blanket rule, but there are studies that show that experiences can have a more lasting effect, a more lasting sort of happiness and pleasure level. You know, is it a one-to-one relation? You know? Don't buy the $5,000 couch, go on the $5,000 trip. Sometimes there's a correlation, but the idea is that when you have an experience, you get to get pleasure from it, not just while you're having the experience, but the anticipation leading up to it and the memories after it. And so there's, there's a long time to have it, whereas things like that couch, eventually, you get used to it, it doesn't, you know, the

marginal return of pleasure sort of, it reduces over time. That's very roughly speaking, the general idea behind it. You know, and there are studies about like employee motivation, you're, you're more able to get, you know, if you're rewarding people with a bonus, that's like a trip to Hawaii. Um, that's say it's $10,000 trip to Hawaii, as opposed to a $10,000 bonus. They're going to be happier about that trip to Hawaii in part, because you've made that decision for them. Like it's something they maybe wouldn't have chosen to do, but they get this experience and they get to go and share it with their family. And it just it offers a broader opportunity for to get pleasure. But again, going back to what you're saying as a blanket statement, it's not true all the time. Sometimes, you know, there are things you need or if you're a type of person that really values a couch, so be it. Make that decision. Lastly, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think that people, if they understood this about money and the way they deal with money, that it would give them some new insight or make them feel better or anything that we haven't

talked about that you think is really important? Well, there's this idea that we tend to pay for effort. Again, when we can't figure out what something's worth, we'll look at the effort that went into it and base our decision on the worth of and the value depending on that effort. For instance, people are more likely to pay a locksmith who fumbles around and breaks a lock and has to go back and forth to his or her truck and spends an hour opening a door. They'll pay that person more than a locksmith that opens the door in a minute, even though what we end up doing is we're paying for incompetence. But we see that effort.

And the opposite can happen too, particularly like online services. You don't know what effort goes into something. You don't see it. You push a button and something gets delivered. So we don't really value it. So I think being aware that there is the appearance of effort or the lack of the appearance of effort can affect how we value something is important. And, you know, be aware of those people, be wary of those services that make a real showing of transparency. That's really interesting. I've never thought about that before, but you're so right.

I mean, of course you would pay that guy, the fumbler, because he's trying so hard and look at all he's sweating and oh my God. And then that other guy that comes in and he goes, pop, earlocks open. You go, geez, I could have done that. Well, understanding how we look at money, how we spend money, how we save money, how we relate to money is not only interesting, but it's important to understand

because it can have a real impact on how we do with money throughout our lives. I've been talking with Jeff Kreisler. He is co-author of the book Dollars and Cents, How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. There's a link to the book in the show notes for this episode of the podcast. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for your time. Do you have a favorite coffee mug? A lot of people do.

I do. I actually have a couple of favorite coffee mugs. And if you do have a favorite mug, it's not that unusual. The Heinz Soup Company did a survey and found that nearly 60% of people said they have an emotional attachment to a favorite mug. About 40% said their special mug was irreplaceable, and about one-third said they would be devastated if it broke. So why all the fuss over a coffee mug?

Well, part of it seems to be something called the endowment effect, where we tend to overvalue our own possessions. In the survey, one-sixth of participants admitted that they would sulk if someone else dared use their mug. Mugs are common gifts, souvenirs, and keepsakes, so we often associate them with a beloved person, place, or time. Plus, they're part of a daily ritual. So for all those reasons, and probably other reasons as well,

it's completely normal to cherish your mug. And it also explains why other people hate it when you use theirs. And that is Something You Should Know. And that's the podcast today. And before you know it, there'll be another one. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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