Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Our Hidden Power to Persuade & How Your Brain Decides What’s Beautiful

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

A lot of prescription pill bottles come with a ball of cotton inside, on top of the pills. What’s it for and should you take it out or leave it in there? This episode begins with an explanation. https://www.businessinsider.com/why-huge-cotton-ball-comes-pill-bottles-medicine-health-pharmacy-prescription-2017-5 There has likely been a time in your life when you wanted to ask someone to do something for you were reluctant and decided not to. It seems almost human nature to hate to ask people for things. Even when we do ask, we sometimes say, “Gee I hate to ask this but…” We should all try to get over that reluctance and ask anyway according to Vanessa Bohns, PhD. She is a social psychologist, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University and author of the book, You Have More Influence Than You Think: How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion, and Why It Matters (https://amzn.to/3Emj83G). Listen to what she has to say and you’ll probably feel better about asking for what you want. For this episode, I would like you get out a $1 bill because we are going to take a look at it together and you will discover how fascinating it is and what all those symbols mean. https://www.rd.com/list/dollar-bill-symbols/ What makes someone or some thing beautiful? Is beauty all about physical attractiveness or are there other elements that can create or enhance beauty? Listen to my conversation with Anjan Chatterjee, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania who has done some great research on beauty and has an excellent TED Talk on the topic which you can link to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgt8QUHQjw8 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! With HelloFresh, you get farm-fresh, pre-portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. Go to https://HelloFresh.com/50something and use code 50something for 50% off plus free shipping! Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk today! Anxious thoughts seem to happen at the worst time. It's important to try and get out of those negative thought cycles. If you’re thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It’s entirely online, so it’s convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist. Get a break from your negative thoughts with BetterHelp Visit https://BetterHelp.com/SOMETHING today to get 10% off your first month! Now, your ideas don't have to wait, now, they have everything they need to come to life. Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen - right now! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow U.S. Cellular knows how important your kid’s relationship with technology is. That’s why they’ve partnered with Screen Sanity, a non-profit dedicated to helping kids navigate the digital landscape. For a smarter start to the school year, U.S. Cellular is offering a free basic phone on new eligible lines, providing an alternative to a smartphone for children. Visit https://USCellular.com/BuiltForUS ! 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 is there cotton in your pill bottle? And what should you do with it? Then, why it doesn't hurt to ask for what you want, because people will say yes to you more often than you think. Just like it hurts to be rejected, it's actually really painful to reject someone as well. And so we kind of miss all those dynamics that make us think that it's pretty easy to say no,

when in fact it's not that easy for people to say no to us. Also, take a look at what's on the back of a $1 bill. It's fascinating. And how we determine what is and who is beautiful. And it's not just how they look. If people think of someone as being a really good person or a smart person or a trustworthy person, it seems to also affect how they perceive the person, that the person starts to appear more attractive. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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and there's that cotton ball in there that you have to get your finger in there and pull it out. You probably have some theory as to why it's there in the first place. Maybe it has to do with moisture or something. Well, would you like to know the real reason that cotton ball's in there? According to the Wall Street Journal, Bayer started putting cotton balls in their bottles of aspirin in the early 1900s,

and the reason was to keep those powdery pills in place so they wouldn't get knocked around in the bottle and break apart. If they did, that could lead to improper dosage as patients would try to piece those broken bits back together

to form a full pill. But the pills today are coated, and actually Bayer stopped putting cotton in its aspirin bottles in 1999. Other companies continue the practice, and the reason they do is because we expect it. The National Institute of Health actually recommends that you remove any cotton stuffed in your pill bottles, as that fluffy ball of cotton could draw moisture into the container. And that is something you should know. You most likely have the power to influence other people far more than you think.

You could get people to do things for you more often than you ever imagined. How do I know this? Meet Vanessa Bonds. She's a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, and she is author of a book called You Have More Influence Than You Think, How We Underestimate Our Power of of persuasion, and why it matters. Hi, Vanessa. Welcome. Thanks for coming on. Hi. Thanks so much for having me. So explain how it is we have more influence than we think.

In my research, one of the ways that I show that we underestimate our influence is that we tend to think when we ask someone to do something for us that they're more likely to say no to us than they actually are. So we've run a bunch of studies in my lab where we basically sent participants out into the world to ask people for things. So they'll ask, for example, for small favors like, will you fill out a survey for me? Can I borrow your cell phone to make a call? Or they might ask for charitable donations. And before they go out and do this, we ask them, how many people do you think are going to agree to this request that you're about to make? Then they go out and do it. They actually test out their

influence and find out that many more people, in fact, twice as many people as they imagined, actually do agree to do these things. And so they come back to the lab. They're completely sort of blown away by how much more influence they actually have than they imagined. And as they come back to the lab, they're completely sort of blown away by how much more influence they actually have than they imagined. And as you said, the question is, what do we do with that? So now we've just learned that people are more likely to agree to things than we might think. So do we go out and ask all the time? I think on the one hand, it's kind of an empowering thing to know that now we should go out and if there's something, you know, like a favor or something that's going to make everybody feel good and sort of increase the bond in your relationship, like asking someone for help, in those studies is that one reason that people say yes more than we think is that it's actually really hard to say no to somebody who's standing in front

of you asking for something. And so with that sort of knowledge, we also might want to think twice about the things that we ask. So there might be situations, for example, if I'm a boss asking someone to do something they may feel uncomfortable with, where we want to think twice about the things that we're asking for someone. So the takeaway is kind of twofold when we sort of recognize this influence. One, we want to use it more in certain situations because we have it and we should feel more confident and empowered to use it. But if we do have that influence, it also comes with a certain degree of responsibility. So we also want to think twice in certain situations

and maybe hold back from time to time. With great power comes great responsibility. Exactly. I think that's from Spider-Man. It is from Spider-Man. That's right. You said something, though, I want to go back, because this has jumped off the page at me.

Well, it's a podcast, so it jumped out the page at me, well, it's a podcast, so it jumped out the headphones at me, that people are twice as likely to say yes, twice as many people will say yes to things than we think? That's right. And we've shown that in so many studies. So at this point, we've had thousands of participants in our studies ask 15,000 people from the last time I did this calculation where I actually added up all the studies we did, 15,000 people for different kinds of requests. And they can range from, as I said, simple things like, will you fill out a survey? Can I borrow your phone? To bigger things like asking for donations. In one study, we had our participants ask another person to actually escort them three

city blocks. This was in New York City, and they were trying to find this building that was kind of hard to find. And they would ask people, you know, they would say, I'm trying to find this building, but I keep walking over there and I can't find it. Will you just take me there? And in that case as well, they thought people would be about half as likely to agree to escort them three city blocks to this building as people actually were. So we said, you have to go out and get one person to do this for you. They thought they would have to ask like six people, but they only had to ask a few people before one person would agree to do this. And so people seem much, much, much more willing to do things for us than we might imagine. But I imagine a lot of it has to do with the ask, what you look like when you ask,

how you ask, what you say. All of that has to play a role. So what's fascinating in our studies is that, those things play a small role and we actually don't see it in our studies. We don't see big differences, but we do know from other research and social influence that there are certainly things that play a role. So for example, if I ask someone and I dress kind of like them, and so they think I'm kind of similar to them, they're more likely to agree. If I'm dressed, you know, in a suit and I look really professional, they're more likely to agree because I have this sort of sense of authority. So there are these kinds of things that make people

a little bit more or less likely to agree to our requests. But actually, those differences are relatively small when you compare them to the difference of what I think is going to happen when I ask versus what actually happens when I ask. So what we find is that 90% of the participants in our studies make this error where they think they're going to be rejected more than they actually are, which is a huge effect. And the fact that on average they do this by twice as much, that they sort of overestimate the rejection by twice as much. That's a much bigger effect than sort of these little things that change the actual

amount of compliance. So we tend to focus so much on how to get someone to say yes. And we think that, you know, we have to ask in a very particular way and all these sorts of factors are going to matter a lot. Like we have to use a very specific script. But in fact, those things make tiny differences. And the ask is the biggest part. And that's partly because we're so focused on how to get someone to say yes.

And we forget that in fact, it's often really hard for people to say no. When people say yes, apparently much more often than we think they will, do they regret it? Do people say yes because they're feeling pressure or do they say yes because they really want to help because they are just more sort of pro-social than we might think, and they're more happy to help. And there's other research that shows that as well. But in fact, we also agree in the moment because it's just really hard to say no. And if you imagine that you're sort of standing there and someone comes up to you and they're like, oh, you know, my phone died. I really need to make this important call. I just borrow your phone. And you're standing there looking at this person. It's really hard to find the words to say no. And there's this sort of pretense that if I say no, it's going to insinuate something about this person that I don't

trust you. It's going to insinuate something about me that I'm not a good person or a helpful person. And so people really do sort of just feel pressured in the moment. But the interesting thing is when it's something like being helpful and you hand over that phone and that person makes a call and they're so grateful and you feel kind of good about it, we pretty quickly convince ourselves that the reason we did it, even if we did it because we were like not able to find the words to say no, we quickly convince ourselves that actually, you know, that made me feel good. That made that person feel good. And I probably just did that because I'm a really good, helpful person. So when it's something like that, where everyone sort of walks away with this warm,

fuzzy feeling of, you know, exchanging help, then people don't really feel as pressured. They reframe the situation on the other hand there are other places where we might ask someone for something and they also feel similarly pressured they feel like they can't say no they feel like they might damage the relationship and in those cases if it's not something that they actually feel good about that actually they feel just as uncomfortable doing but they just felt too uncomfortable to say no, then they do feel pressured into that. And then you can have these kind of problematic longer term effects. What about the difference, though, if any, between what you're talking about, which is going up to strangers and asking them to do something, as opposed to asking a friend to do,

you know, can you asking your neighbor to drive your kids to school because your car broke or, you know, where you're asking someone who you have a existing relationship with versus going up to a stranger and saying, will you walk me three blocks to this building I can't find? That's another great question. And we've actually done some studies to look at that. And what we've looked at is both whether friends and strangers are different in terms of how likely they are to agree, and also what we think, what our intuitions are about what a friend versus a stranger would be likely to say. And so in some studies, we had our participants either go and ask strangers to do sort of this tedious task. We gave them a jar of beans. We wanted to do something just like general bean counting, just something that was kind of silly

and tedious. And they would go up to either friends or strangers, depending on the condition they were assigned to, and say, you know, I have to get an accurate count of this jar of beans. Will you just be my second counter? And before they went out, just like before, we asked them, how many people do you think you'll have to ask before a certain number agree? And then we actually kept track of how many people they actually had to ask. And what we found is that when we asked people, their intuitions were that their friends were going to be much more likely to say yes to this request than strangers. So they thought it was going to be a really difficult task asking strangers, but that most of their friends would probably say yes. And when we looked at the data of how

many people actually agreed, it turned out that friends and strangers looked very similar. Friends were only a tiny bit more likely to say yes. In fact, much, much, much less more likely to say yes than our participants thought. So they thought there was going to be this huge difference, but it was a really tiny difference. And so what we sort of learned from that is that actually, we think that, you know, if we need something, our friends are kind of the only people we can go to. But in fact, in many cases, strangers are also quite willing to do things for us. And that might be, you know, you might not be asking strangers, obviously, to pick up your kids or drive them somewhere or something that, you know, is more sensitive like that. But in lots

of other situations, we might want to go to, you know, a stranger or a colleague we don't know as well for some help that might be the best person to ask. And we think because we don't have a close relationship with them that that's going to affect how likely they are to agree to help us out. But in fact, that doesn't play as big of a role as we tend to think. We're talking about influence and how to get people to do things for you. And my guest is Vanessa Bonds. She's author of the book, You Have More Influence Than You Think. For those who embrace the impossible, the Defender 110 is up for the adventure. This book, you have more 110 lets you go further and do more. And with seating for up to seven, everyone can enjoy the journey.

Learn more at LandRover.ca. 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. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. So Vanessa, it would seem to me that a lot of this has to do with what you're asking. The ask.

I mean, I can't ask a stranger to drive me to the airport at four o'clock in the morning or help me move, but I could ask a friend that. And I would think, because that's a pretty big ask, that most strangers would say, no, I'm not going to drive you to the airport. That's right. The context of the things that are sort of normative to ask friends and strangers are definitely different. And once we start, you know, going around asking strangers for sort of crazy things, in those cases, we might not

find these effects. But I will tell you that we have had our participants ask strangers for some crazy things. So for example, in one study, we came up with this task of asking people to vandalize library books. And so we took library books off of my, or we took books off of my bookshelf and we put these little codes on the binding so that they looked like library books. And we had our participants go into libraries and ask random strangers, hey, I'm playing a prank on my friend. They know my handwriting, but I really want to write the word pickle in this library book and pen. And so they would hand a stranger the pen, this presumed library book. And people in those cases were much more likely to agree to this request than our participants tend to

tend to think that they would be. So more than half of the people they asked actually did this, again, because they felt so awkward saying no, even to this request that was, you know, pretty unethical and something that they really encoded as something that they felt uncomfortable with and didn't want to do. So when we asked our participants to record what people said when they asked them this kind of crazy thing, the people they asked would say, I don't think we should do this. You know, I think we might get in trouble for this. And in the end, they clearly didn't want to go along with this. But at the same time, it was so uncomfortable for them to actually say no to this person that so many people agreed. So you're right that there's

certain requests that don't really make sense. You know, you wouldn't ask a stranger for a ride to the airport, most likely. But at the same time, I think the sort of sphere of things that we can ask people for and that they would say yes to is probably bigger than many of us think. How important is the why? And what I mean by that is, I remember hearing there were studies about this. I just don't remember the details. But basically, you know, if you run up to the front of the line at Starbucks and say, do you mind if I cut in here? People are going to say no. If you run up and say, I'm late for my flight or my baby's in the car, or you give a reason why you need to do this, people are much more likely to say yes.

That's right. So the studies you're referring to are some classic studies by Ellen Langer. They were done in the 70s, but they were actually recently replicated. So we know that they were pretty accurate. And this is what she found. She basically had people, as you say, cut in line. And in this case, there was a line of people waiting to use the copier. Yeah, that's what it was. It was the copier.

That's right. Right. So they would go up to people and say, hey, can I cut in line? And then they would give a why. So there were three conditions. There was one condition where they gave no why. They just said, hey, can I cut in front of you and use the copier? And another condition, they said, hey, can I cut in front of you and use the copier because I'm in a rush? So there's your why. I have a reason. It's because I'm running late for something. And then the third condition, they cut in front of people and they would say, can I cut in front of you because I need to make some copies? And what she wanted to see is how sort of mindfully people process requests. So saying because I need to make some copies is actually a totally nonsensical why, right? Everyone in that line needs to make copies. And so it just

doesn't even make sense. It's not an actual justification. And what she found though, is that it didn't matter that the people who said, can I cut in front of you because I need to make copies were just as effective at getting into that line. And it was over 90% of people let them cut, um, as the people who said, you know, because I'm in a rush who had like a legitimate excuse. And her conclusion is basically that we process these things mindlessly, that as long as someone has sort of a basic script, we just kind of go along with it. And one of the things I like to point out about that is that when we process things mindlessly, we overwhelmingly seem to process

them in a way that leads us to agree. So over 90% of people were letting people cut, even though they were kind of barely thinking about this. So we tend to think, you know, at the default that people have is no, that like, at the heart of it, people are resistant to doing things for us, and that we have to sort of overcome that resistance and get to the yes. But in fact, our default tends to be yes. Why do you think it is, since people do say yes more often than we think, why do we think they won't? What is it in the asker's, what's going on in the asker's mind that makes them think it's going to be no, when if they look back on their life and when they've asked for things, probably they got yes a lot. Why do we always go to the negative? There's a couple of reasons that people don't seem to learn from those experiences because,

you know, as you said, we all have asked people for things and had them say yes. And one reason is something called negativity bias. And that shows up in all sorts of domains of life that basically the negative looms larger than the positive. And so when we have a negative experience, it just, you know, we have a very long, intense memory for that negative experience. So every time we've asked someone for a little thing like, you know, a seat on the train or just for a small favor and they've agreed, we kind of forget that pretty quickly. But each time someone has said no, that's a lot more painful. And we tend to focus on that and remember those experiences more.

So that's one. And then the other reason is something called egocentrism. And that means that we tend to be so focused on what's going on with us and our own emotional experience that we're really bad at sort of taking the other person's perspective and recognizing what that person is feeling. So when we're asking someone for something, we're really focused on how painful it would be for us to be rejected, how awkward it is to ask. A lot of us, you know, experience a lot of awkwardness and guilt and self-consciousness when we make a request. And we forget that that other

person, you know, also is experiencing awkwardness. They find it awkward to say no. They, you know, also don't want to, you know, hurt the relationship. And that just like it hurts to be rejected, it's actually really painful to reject someone as well. And so we kind of miss all those dynamics that make us think that it's pretty easy to say no, when in fact it's not that easy for people to say no to us. One of the reasons I think people are reluctant to ask others for something is that if the person says no, then that has somehow damaged the relationship. When in fact, people say no probably more often because they just can't do

whatever it is the person's asking and then they move on and don't think about it anymore. But the asker is thinking, oh gee, now I've damaged this relationship. That's exactly right. We actually have research showing that as well, that when people get a no when they ask for something, they attribute that to something about themselves or the relationship. So, you know, they said no, because, you know, maybe they don't like me as much as I thought that they did, or maybe we're not as close as I thought that we were, or maybe this thing I'm asking for, there's something weird about it. And so we tend to attribute it to that when, in fact, most no's are more about the context.

They couldn't do it at that time. You know, something else was going on. There was just some sort of tradeoff that they couldn't make work. And so when we ask people, once you get a no, what do you think if you ask this person something else, they would say? We find that people tend to think one no means future no's. That if I get one no, that means if I go back to this person, they're just always going to kind of say no, because it's about me. It's about

our relationship. When in fact, what we find is that when someone says no to us, they actually feel pretty bad about that to the point where it makes them more likely to say yes the next time that we ask them for something. Well, you know the saying, it doesn't hurt to ask. And I've always believed that. Assuming that the ask is appropriate, what harm could it do? But I think everyone has felt that reluctance that, yeah, gosh, I really hate to ask. We often even say that. I really hate to ask. Well, why do you hate to ask? I mean, if people don't want to do something, they'll say no. But as you point out, they may say yes a lot more often than you think. My guest has been Vanessa Bonds.

She is a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Cornell. The name of her book is You Have More Influence Than You Think, How We Underestimate Our Power of Persuasion and Why It Matters. And there is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Vanessa. Thanks, Mike. This has been great. This is an ad for BetterHelp. 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. 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. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better,

more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We use the words beauty and beautiful to describe people as well as places and objects. And when we see something or someone we consider beautiful, it catches our attention. But why? Why are we so drawn to beautiful things and beautiful people? Well, here to discuss this and take us all on a journey into the world of beauty is Anjan Chatterjee.

He is Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and he did a really interesting TED Talk that's available on YouTube about how your brain decides what is beautiful. He also writes for Psychology Today on their website. Hi, Anjan, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for inviting me, Mike. So when I look at someone, or I look at a a landscape or I look at a smartphone and say, oh, it's so beautiful. What am I saying?

What does that mean for something to be beautiful? In each of those, there's probably something slightly different going on. At the core of our experience of beauty tends to be pleasure. And pleasure is a device, you can think of it as an experience that allows us to approach things. So very fundamental and elemental aspect of all mobile organisms is you approach something or you avoid something. And the question is, as organisms get more and more complex to the point of humans, what are the kinds of things that drives an approach and pleasure is one of those things. So let's take the example of faces. There are certain features that people have discovered that tends to make the apprehension of faces beautiful.

These tend to be faces that are broadly symmetric. If they're completely symmetric, which you can do digitally now, it gets a little weird. But in general, faces that are symmetric are regarded as more attractive. F faces that are averaged. And this is a curious thing, which is if you take, say, 64 or 16 or 32 faces and you average them, you take their geometric means. So you get a face that is the average of all of those features. Almost always the averaged face looks those features, almost always the average face looks more

beautiful than any of the individual faces that contributed to this. And this is something that Galton at the end of the 19th century discovered completely serendipitously and has been replicated many times. And then the final aspect of faces, we think, and this is specifically for heterosexual norms, the effects of estrogen, the kind of effects that estrogen has on women's faces, and the kinds of effects that testosterone has on men's faces in terms of affecting features are also generally regarded as beautiful. And what are those features? For estrogen, it tends to be for women with larger eyes, with narrower chins, fuller lips. For men, it tends to be the kind of classic Dick Tracy, square jaw, heavier know, the way they're dressed or are they really skinny or are they very heavy? And all of that goes into the pot to determine if someone is beautiful, whether you realize it or not.

All of that is going on in your assessment, right? Sure. You know, we also apprehend bodies the same way. You could also argue that the way someone sounds, their voice can be beautiful. People who work in radio and podcasts like you typically have very beautiful voices. And so all of these things are happening simultaneously. And our brains are very quick at apprehending all of this. Even before we're aware of our responses, our judgment that someone is beautiful, our brains are responding to this in an automatic way. But they're combining all of this information. And ultimately, this is all about mating and making babies, right?

I mean, that's the purpose of all of this. That is the purpose when it comes to facial beauty and when it comes to facial beauty and physical beauty, particularly in the young people, which is what there has been most work on. If we're talking about places, for example, landscapes, it's a different story to be told. If we're talking about objects like artwork, it's also another different story to be told. So tell those stories. Well, maybe not tell the whole story, but briefly, what's the point of that? Make the connection.

Yeah, so the connection, again, for landscapes, the evolutionary argument is that the kind of landscapes that provide both safety and nourishment are what we end up finding beautiful. Historically, it has been argued that the way African savannas look, and there's a buzzword that academics use, a phrase, prospect and refuge. Prospect means you can see vast distances, so you can tell if there are any threats coming your way. And refuge is their safety and sources of nourishment. And we tend to think of landscapes that meet those criteria as generally beautiful. This plays out a little bit in architecture as well. One thing we find is that natural kinds, natural objects like faces and

landscapes, people tend to be fairly consistent in what they find to be beautiful. But for artifacts, so artifacts would be artworks or consumer products or even the built environment, people are much more variable. And if I could just continue on this theme a little bit, we have argued that our aesthetic experiences emerge out of a combination of the sensory properties of what we're looking at, our emotional systems, and a third part of this triad has to do with our knowledge, our meaning, our personal experiences, and that's really where variability

comes in. So depending on where you've grown, what your education is, what your experiences are, that overlay on sensory properties of our brain, which are more similar than they're different, and our emotional systems, which are also more similar than they're different, the overlay of our personal experiences on top of that is what makes us different and what we might regard as beautiful. What about, it seems that all these kinds of beauty, people, landscapes, things, there's like a time, like you could be married to the most beautiful spouse in the world but after a while you don't really notice it that much if you have a beautiful view out your window

it's beautiful when you first move in but after a while yeah it's just the view out the windows and it that that beauty works as a means of attraction, but it wears off. Yeah, that's a fascinating question, which is what's the timeline of beauty? And you're absolutely right. It initially attracts you. And then we habituate to it. Whatever is provoking that kind of beauty often starts to become the new normal. It is also the case with most examples of that kind of habituation. If you go away for a while and then come back to it,

you again realize how beautiful it is, or you re-evoke those initial experiences. So the purpose of beauty is really an attraction more than it is any kind of long-lasting, pleasurable satisfaction. To a first approximation, initially there is this kind of attraction. What people will, you think of a kind of automatic reaction followed by more of a deliberation. So certain kinds of beauty, let's take artwork, for example, people will return to the same artwork over and over that they quite like. And it is something that keeps, you know, keeps giving a certain kind of pleasure. Now that's an example where you're not just staring at the same painting, you know, for hours on end. I think there is that

kind of habituation that happens regardless. Why else is this important? You know, we do seem to, at least with people anyway, we do seem to react and there's, I know, been quite a bit of research about how attractive people make more money, and they're treated better, and they don't get traffic tickets, and, you know, that we treat beautiful people differently than we treat non-beautiful people. We've been very interested in this question, and what are the consequences of exactly what you're pointing out that is sometimes referred to as the beauty is good stereotype. One thing that we have in our research been finding is that there is the opposite and unfortunate side of that. For example, people that have minor facial anomalies, so a scar or a developmental

abnormality or a birthmark, that viewers, when they're looking at faces like that, without even realizing, have an implicit bias against those faces, that the people with facial anomalies are less intelligent, less competent, less hardworking, less trustworthy, and so on. So I think beauty does have an effect in our day-to-day lives. are trying to do is to highlight and make sure that people understand those kinds of biases, so that just because that's your initial reaction, your initial response to a face of which you have no other information, it doesn't have to be your final response to them. And being aware of that as a first step ends up being important to be able to counteract that. And if I could just add one more piece to that, we're also finding that the opposite direction of beauty and good also seems to be true, which is that if people think of someone

as being a really good person or a smart person or a competent person or a trustworthy person. It seems to also affect how they perceive the person, that the person starts to appear more attractive. And I think this is also an experience that many people have. You might meet someone for the first time. You don't know anything about them. You have an initial reaction of how attractive you think they are. And as you get to know them, if you think they're a really good person, they start to look as if they're more attractive. Or if you find they're just not that pleasant to be around, they start to look less

attractive. So what's the big takeaway here, do you think? You know, like we were discussing in the beginning, you know, beauty is something I know it when I see it. But beyond that, so what? Well, I think, you know, the way in which the basic idea that beauty around us makes us feel better. I sometimes make this argument in the reverse, which is if everybody wore the same clothes, you know, clothes are primarily to cover our bodies and to keep us warm. If everybody wore the same clothes, if you think of food as being the primary function of food is to nourish us. If we just had all ate the exact same food, if we lived in houses that were perfectly functional, but they were all the same, is that the kind of life anybody would want to live in? And so I think beauty and an attention

to these kinds of aesthetics in our environment is really one of the things that makes life interesting, life worth living, and gives a kind of joy to our existence. I have heard the advice for people who are not classically beautiful, who are not drop-dead gorgeous, that what you should do is make the most of what you do have, that with the clothes you wear and with your hair and your makeup, whatever things you do have that you can make the most of, that will move you down or up the beauty scale. Does it? Probably. I mean, to the extent that cosmetics, for example, are often designed

to enhance those features that I was talking about. So eye makeup often is to highlight the eyes and make the eyes look bigger. Lipstick is, this is for women Lipstick is often used to enhance the contrast and make the lips more prominent. So often the kinds of things that people try to do are enhancing those sorts of features that we tend to respond to automatically. So I think all of that is true. As I was saying, that being a good person makes you over time appear more attractive to other people. That's also something you can do. You know, but at the same time, it would be like, I love watching basketball, for example. I'm 5'9". There's no way. I'm pretty athletic.

I was a decent track and field person, but there's no way I could ever be a fantastic basketball player. There's just certain physical limitations. And I think the same thing is true with this kind of beauty, which is there are things you can do to get better, but an average looking person is never going to be a supermodel. And we all come into our lives with a set of limitations, and that is one of them. Well, we often see, because we notice when it's not the case, like if some gorgeous person is with somebody who looks to be out of their league,

like there's no way, that we do seem to find people that tend to be in our league. Is it that we find them attractive or we tend to not look outside our league? So your observation is exactly right. There are some differences. So when, again, these are all heterosexual norms, when women or when men are asked about who they find attractive, they put physical attractiveness often at the top of their list of what they find attractive or what they're looking for in a partner. For women, and this has been shown across several cultures, attractiveness is certainly important.

Physical attractiveness is certainly important, but it's not necessarily the top of the scale. So it might be power, it might be wealth, it might be the ability to provide resources tends to predominate. And so my guess is the examples you give when sometimes we think a person is not in the same league physically, it's more often that the woman is very beautiful and the man is physically not as beautiful, would be my guess. I don't have empirical data for that, but I think that's probably true. But shy of that, I think people kind of find their own level. And so your general observation, I suspect is true, is that people pretty much sort themselves out in how they interact and pair up with each other. Well, it's interesting to get your insight into this because we think we know what's beautiful and what goes into our decision of what's beautiful, but there's a lot going on

under the surface, as you point out, that how good we think a person is can make them more or less attractive. It's really interesting. Anjan Chatterjee has been my guest. He is a professor of neurology, psychology, and architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and he has a TED Talk that you can see on YouTube about how your brain decides what's beautiful. There's a link to that TED Talk in the show notes. Have you ever looked closely at the back of a dollar bill?

It tells a really remarkable story. If you have one, pull it out and take a look. The circle, that circle on the right-hand side, that circle appears every time the president speaks, as the presidential seal. You'll also see that at every national cemetery and on most monuments to U.S. heroes. The bald eagle was selected as a symbol of victory, strength, and intelligence. In his beak, the E Pluribus Unum banner means, From Many, One. He holds in his talons an olive branch on one side that he gazes on and arrows on the other. This is to signify that he wants peace, but he's not afraid to fight to preserve peace.

Interestingly, the number 13 is prominent in many ways on the dollar bill. There are 13 stars above the eagle's head for the 13 original colonies, 13 stripes on the flag, 13 steps on the pyramid in the left circle, 13 bars on the shield, 13 leaves on the olive branch, 13 arrows, 13 fruits, and there are 13 letters in E Pluribus Unum. And that is something you should know. We can always use your help in spreading the word about this podcast. You know, word-of-mouth advertising is the best. That means the words have to come out of your mouth and tell someone else that you know, or a couple of people you know, about this podcast.

I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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.

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