Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why It’s Human to Seek Pain on Purpose & How Cooperation Shaped the World

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, when is the best day and time to call customer service? Then, the topic of pain. Do humans need pain? Would we experience as much pleasure without the pain? I have eaten the world's hottest pepper. It was awful. But afterwards, I felt amazing. My body was flooded with all of those feel-good chemicals. It was a really wild experience.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Also, why do women tend to apologize more than men? And cooperation. We humans are a cooperative species, even if we're careful who we cooperate with. Cooperation is fundamental to life on Earth as we know it. And the history of life on Earth is a history of cooperation. It's a history of teamwork. Cooperation is the secret to success. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Starting point is 00:02:06 Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. You know what sentence I really hate to hear? It's this sentence. Your call is very important to us. Because I know when I hear that, I'm about to sit on hold for a good long time. If you have similar frustrations with calling customer service, here is some advice from Real Simple Magazine.

Starting point is 00:02:36 If you do have to call, weekends may or may not be good. You usually have less experienced representatives working on the weekends, but call volumes are often lower. So if your question is routine and simple, then weekends might be good. If you have a more complex issue, you may want to wait until someone with more experience is on the other end of the line, and that's usually during the week. Never call on Monday morning.

Starting point is 00:03:05 That's when most call centers are experiencing a higher-than-normal call volume. Usually, midday on Tuesday or Wednesday are good times. The call centers are staffed up, and the calls are at a reasonable level, so you should get through fairly quickly. Fridays may be good. Consumers are thinking about the weekend, so call volume is down. The problem is that call centers know that,

Starting point is 00:03:31 so often the staffing is down too. All of this advice might help a little bit, and your call still might be very important. But you're still going to have to wait on hold. And that is something you should know. Nobody likes pain. Or do they? Do you?

Starting point is 00:03:54 Can you have pleasure without pain? See, this is one of these topics I've never really thought much about before until it came across my desk recently. But when you stop and think about it, in some ways, we like pain. I mean, clearly some people like it more than others, and often we don't like pain just for the sake of pain, but it is necessary in some ways. I mean, imagine if an elite athlete didn't go through the pain of training. Would they still do it? What about things like tattoos?

Starting point is 00:04:28 Is the pain of getting a tattoo part of the pleasure of having one? See, it is kind of interesting. And it's something studied by Leigh Cowart. She's a researcher and journalist, and she is author of a book called Hurt So Good, The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. Hi, Leigh. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi. Thank you so much for having me. So I have to ask right up front here, why the interest in pain? What brought you to this subject?

Starting point is 00:04:59 I used to be a ballet dancer, and ballet is a very painful artistic endeavor. And I loved it. I loved it for like 20 years. And I think it's curious that so many people do this very painful art form on purpose. So it got me thinking about other things that people do that are actually pretty aversive and unpleasant, and they do them for fun. And once you start looking around, you realize that it's very common. People put hot sauce on their food. People do polar plunges. People do road races, circus performers, all this stuff. And so I wanted to know what was going on in the body that made that fun.

Starting point is 00:05:50 I've never been a ballerina, as you might imagine. But I do things like, you know, I'll work out at the gym, and it's very painful if you, you know, go right to your limit. It hurts. But there's also a reward, an immediate reward after the fact and a long-term reward that makes the pain worthwhile. So is that a driving force in ballerinas and other pain seekers? Yes. The amazing thing about the body is that it is set up to dispense pain medication in the event that you are feeling an aversive sensation. We talk about endorphins,

Starting point is 00:06:34 and that word is short for endogenous morphine. It's morphine that comes, that your body's making. And it's somewhat different from the chemical morphine that you would get in a bottle, but it is the endorphins that your body releases make you feel better after you've experienced some pain. So when you experience some pain, your body actually releases chemicals that make you feel better. So when you have a really heavy workout, I'm a runner, so when I go for a long run and I finish, not only am I tired and feeling good from the exertion, but I'm also getting a chemical cocktail from my brain that helps me to feel better. Okay. Is there a difference though between the ballerinas of the world, the pain seekers of the world, in this sense? You would probably prefer it if you ran and it didn't hurt.

Starting point is 00:07:33 And I would probably prefer it if I went to the gym and lifted weights and it wasn't painful. But it seems like, you know, the pain is not what I'm seeking. It just happens that that's an after effect or that's a consequence versus people who actually go out and seek pain. That's a really interesting point. There's a researcher, Brock Bastion, and he studies pain and value. And in his work, he has found that pain helps us create value so that we value the outcome of something more if we worked hard to get it. So I don't know if running would be as meaningful to me if there wasn't pain and struggle involved. Now, obviously, there's a whole spectrum of this. Some people run and eat hot sauce and have these aversive experiences for fun and don't really seek out more intense types of pain, whereas other people fall in a different area of the spectrum

Starting point is 00:08:41 and may more deliberately cultivate the kind of homebrew, feel-good chemicals that come from painful stimuli. So there are people, as you just mentioned, people who like eat hot peppers. There's no real reward for that. Well, maybe there is, but it doesn't appear that it's anything more than doing it to see how much pain you can take. And that's different. To me, that's different than doing something that has a payoff to it and that that's the price you pay.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Well, I will say I have eaten the world's hottest pepper and it was awful. But afterwards, I felt amazing. I felt amazing for like two hours. My body was flooded with all of those feel good chemicals. And it was a really wild experience. So I think it's not as straightforward as some people like pain and the outcome of pain, and some people don't like the pain and just like the outcome. You know, I think it's much more complicated because we have these very complicated, messy bodies that can do all these cool things. And I think it's worthwhile to be curious about the ways that we seek sensation in order to feel differently, to feel better. Well, okay. But are there people who seek out pain for the sake of pain? Oh, sure. And there's nothing else. There's something about the pain they enjoy. So yes, there are some people who seek painful experiences for the experience of the pain itself.

Starting point is 00:10:37 And there are people who engage in painful experiences because they like the way they feel after. And then there are a lot of people who are some kind of combination of both. Pain creates meaning. Pain brings us into the present moment. And a lot of people seek that kind of clarity or that kind of quiet to only feel one thing. When you're in pain, it blocks out everything. And so even though it's aversive and might feel unpleasant, there are other things around that sensation, bodily responses, emotional responses that can really make dabbling in a little bit of consensual pain feel fun or rewarding or make you feel resilient, like you've accomplished something. It seems like a simple question, do people like pain for pain's sake? And yes, some people do. But for a lot of people, it's just more complicated than that. Well, it certainly seems to be very human that we like struggle to some extent.

Starting point is 00:11:59 That if life were easy, if there were no problems, if we never had to work hard for something and struggle for something, life would be pretty dull. I went to an ultramarathon, not as a participant, just as a watcher. And I watched people run hundreds of miles without sleeping. And I talked to these runners and I asked them, would you do this if it was easy? And most of them said, no, it wouldn't be the same if it was easy to do. And I think that there is something, I think about Sir Edmund Hillary and his reason for climbing Everest. He said, because it was there.

Starting point is 00:12:48 You know, there's this curiosity about our limits. I think that's very human and it goes back throughout human history. So incorporating pain that you consent to, that you can opt out of. Suffering that you cannot opt out of is not what I'm talking about when I write about pain on purpose. So when you're able to control your experience and dabble in something that feels bad, that opens up a kind of window into your own resiliency and your own capacity. And so when you combine that with the biochemical slurry of feel-good chemicals that can follow such an event, it makes sense that humans have been playing with pain on purpose for about as long as we've been keeping records.

Starting point is 00:13:38 We're talking about pain, why people seek it, and why people maybe need it. My guest is Leigh Cowart. She's a researcher and author of the book, Hurt So Good, The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:14:53 So, Lee, is there any evidence, do you think, or do you know, that the more you seek out pain, that, you know, if you're a ballerina and your feet hurt all the time, or you're an ultra marathoner and you're always, the more, the more marathons you do, the more pain you want. I feel like with most things, there is a spectrum and that, you know, for some people they get to a comfortable level and that's where they like it. They like this kind of dialed in pain. And maybe some people are more high sensation seeking and kind of want to continue to push it. And those are your ultramarathoners. Interestingly enough, in that paper by Dr. Rosen, he asked participants at what point was their particular aversive experience the most fun for them. And for about half of them, well, it was depending on vice, one quarter to two thirds of them. They said that they were happiest with their aversive experience when it was right at the limit of what they could tolerate. And for other people, it's not that at all. They like to dabble. They like to dial it in.

Starting point is 00:16:20 And I just think it's so neat how everyone kind of has their own threshold of engagement for these kinds of painful activities that we sometimes play with. Give me some examples. Give me an example of somebody taking it to the very limit and other people who dial it back a bit. I think spicy food is a great example. A lot of people like, you know, jalapenos, Tabasco sauce, you know, kind of a little bit of kick. And then from there, you go all the way up to the pepper heads who eat the hottest peppers in the world on a regular basis for fun. And that's fun for them. Ed Curie, the creator of the Carolina Reaper pepper, that's the spiciest pepper in the world. He eats them every day. He's a former addict and he says that the endorphin rush of peppers really helps keep him, you know, not only in his sobriety, but like excited and using his body in a way that feels good. When I went to interview him, he'd already had a pepper that day.

Starting point is 00:17:35 And I just think it's so, I've had it, but like, I couldn't do it every day. That's too much for me. It's just so neat to think that bodies have all these different calibrations for that kind of painful activity. One of the types of pain you talk about is the pain of people, you know, that do those polar plunges where they dive into like really frigid water. To me, it just seems so unpleasant and so not necessary. And it would just hurt. And I don't see the benefit of that other than once you get out and you wrap a towel around you and you start to warm up, that feels good. But that's kind of like, to me, you know, that saying of, you know, it's kind of like hitting yourself with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop.

Starting point is 00:18:27 But why do it in the first place? Why do the people who do polar plunges do them? The polar plunge is a fun one. For some people, swimming in icy water brings them immediately into the present moment. Like, you know, a shortcut to just immediate presence, a quiet brain. It's just you and the cold. And for people with very busy brains or people who are going through grief or people who have something emotional to work through, being able to bring your mind and your body unequivocally into the present moment through sensation, in this case, cold, can give someone more of a handle outside of that experience, more of a handle on their life and their feelings outside of that very intense experience. For others, polar plunging is a social event. When I did my polar

Starting point is 00:19:35 plunge, I did it with a huge group of people at Coney Island one year on New Year's Day. And there is research that demonstrates that when you do a painful activity with a group, not only does it bring you closer to the group, make you feel closer to the group, but it also increases your pain tolerance. So the experience of running into a cold ocean feels very different if you're by yourself versus in a group. And when I ran into the cold Atlantic Ocean with all of these people, it felt like a celebration. It felt like I was doing something so wild together with all of these people to like kick off the new year by just bathing in the cold brine and doing something that under normal circumstances, I never would have done. And it was fun. It was fun to do something kind of crazy that was ultimately not harmful to me. Is this why people get tattoos, do you think? Because there's clearly people get tattoos because they want to have pictures on their body,

Starting point is 00:20:52 but is pain part of the process? For so many people, yes. Tattoos are a great example because not only is there pain, but there's a certain ritual to it. A lot of people get tattoos after a breakup or in memory of a relative when they're going through something. So they have the experience of feeling the pain, of sitting still and enduring it. And then they have the reward, not only of the art on their body, but how their body actually feels because of the chemicals that were released during the pain. Tattooing can be so personal,

Starting point is 00:21:35 and it can also be like a just for fun thing, just because you're in the mood. And I just think that's such a great example of why people engage with pain because there are so many reasons that people do tattoos that people get tattoos and yet even though there are all these different reasons the experience of it is this is like it's still you and the artist and the needle. And what meaning you yourself bring to the experience of feeling that needle in your skin? Well, it almost seems as if, from listening to you, that there's kind of two ways to look at this, is that we all like challenges because it feels good when we conquer that challenge.

Starting point is 00:22:32 But this physical pain thing is a little different. It maybe runs parallel, but there are plenty of people who don't seek out physical pain, but they still like challenges in their life. I think something that is important to know about pain is that the experience of pain is created fresh by the brain every time it happens. And there's no way for an outsider to look, like there's no way to put you in a scanner and look at your brain and know how much pain you are in. There's no like pain molecule or that. It's always context dependent and it's always created by the brain. And the amount of pain that you feel has to do with your emotions, your surroundings, and your expectations. So our experience of pain is not only different from other people's experience of pain, but it's also different every time we feel it. There's a great story about a researcher who was bit by a snake on a hike and he didn't know and he collapsed. He's fine. He's fine now. But he collapsed not knowing he'd been bit by a snake because when he felt the bite, his brain said, okay, I felt something on my leg. I'm hiking. It was probably a stick. And it turns out it was one

Starting point is 00:24:06 of the most poisonous snakes in the world. And later after he recovered, he went on another hike and a twig brushed his leg and his brain remembered last time. And even though the only thing that happened was a twig scratching his leg, his body gave him 10 out of 10 pain and dropped him to the ground in agony because his brain was trying to give him the right level of pain for the situation. mine's a little wrong. And so understanding that pain is so mutable and so context dependent, really opened my eyes to understanding how so many people interface with pain so differently. Yeah. Well, you know, when you go to the dentist, you're so expecting pain that as soon as you feel it, you've, oh my God, that hurts. And yet if you had that same pain, just in everyday life, something fell on your finger in the kitchen kind of thing that was the same level of pain, you wouldn't even pay attention to it. It's just that it's like when you get a shot, you know, when you're a kid, you get a shot. If you got that same level of pain from somebody hitting your arm,

Starting point is 00:25:21 you wouldn't even give it a second thought. But because you see the needle and because of your expectation, it hurts a lot more. You're absolutely right. Expecting pain can make us more sensitive to it, can make the experience of pain more intense. Our brains are trying to keep us safe. So if your brain is expecting a threat, it's going to be like, this is my focus. I'm focused on this. We are thinking about this and it's going to be bad. Please run. You know, it's the difference between getting a shot and stubbing your toe. Well, you know, I think when people think about pain and pleasure and the people who seek out pain, you know, it's in that kind of sexual, black leather, fetishy kind of way. But clearly, it's so much more than that, that humans in some ways need pain, that we all seek out pain.

Starting point is 00:26:17 Because in many ways, having pain makes the pleasure better. Leigh Cowart has been my guest. She's a researcher and a journalist, and the name of her book is The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Leigh. Thanks for coming on and explaining this all. Thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:26:40 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,

Starting point is 00:27:08 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.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly Thank you. you get your podcasts. 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.

Starting point is 00:28:13 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,

Starting point is 00:28:36 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. I'm sure you know people who you would consider selfish. We're all probably selfish at times. Humans are wired to survive, so we do what we have to do to survive, which means we look out for ourselves.

Starting point is 00:29:10 And yet, we also need other people, and so do they. So we need to cooperate with others because we can't do everything ourselves. And in fact, our ability to cooperate with others is really unique and interesting, and something Nicola Rahini has researched. Nicola is an evolutionary biologist, a professor in evolution and behavior at University College in London, and author of the book, The Social Instinct, How Cooperation Shaped the World. Hi Nicola, welcome. Hi, thank you so much for having me on. So as I'm thinking about this, I'm wondering, are we both selfish and cooperative, or are we by nature selfish and we learn to cooperate because we can see the good that it brings?

Starting point is 00:29:59 So where are we on the selfish cooperation scale? I think there's a pervasive form of zero-sum thinking that goes a bit like this. People ought to be selfish. And if you do anything to help other people, or if you behave in an altruistic way, by doing that, somehow you're going to lose out. Actually, cooperation is fundamental to life on Earth as we know it. And the history of life on Earth is a history of cooperation. It's a history of teamwork, of collectives, of partnerships. And cooperation is often, and has often been for our species the secret to success. Interspersed in between all this cooperation, there are stories of individuals who seem to go it alone, that seem to do it on their own, that seem to find success by themselves without

Starting point is 00:31:00 cooperation. And so it seems like it works for some, but it doesn't work for everybody. Yeah. I mean, so we wouldn't expect cooperation to necessarily be universal. And we're not going to see that every species on the planet or every individual on the planet is going to cooperate to the same extent. But we do know that our species does happen to be one of the most cooperative species on the planet. And we cooperate in many, many different contexts and scenarios. But we also know that our species has the potential to be extremely uncooperative or antisocial. you're right that there is often this tension between pro-social behavior, between cooperative behavior, and then, you know, more self-interested behaviors. And understanding how those tensions are resolved is one of the big questions in evolutionary biology. When does cooperation

Starting point is 00:32:00 win out over self-interest? Well, it certainly seems that cooperation wins out because when you look at the limitations of human beings, I mean, there are so many things that we need that we cannot accomplish alone, that without cooperation, we wouldn't even be here. Yeah, that's true. And that's actually probably one of the important things for our species is to think about our ancestry, where we came from. And one of the key things that we know is that evolution demanded cooperation of our species. environments where food probably would have been quite hard to come by. It was either patchily distributed in the environment, or it had to be hunted or scavenged from other animals. Coupled with that, we have very, very large brains compared to the other great apes. And large brains are energy hungry organs that demand a very calorie rich diet. So we have this kind of double whammy, if you like, of living in a difficult environment and having these big brains that are very expensive to feed and these offspring with

Starting point is 00:33:17 big brains that are also expensive to feed. And we needed to work together to be able to do that successfully. And that's part of the reason that humans live in very cooperative family units, whereas most of the other great apes, although they do live in groups, the rearing of offspring falls more or less entirely to the mothers. And they're quite easily able to raise their offspring without any assistance because they don't have as much difficulty in finding the food that they need to be able to sustain themselves and to sustain their offspring as well. And the case for humans was really quite different, at least in the formative periods of our evolution. But in addition to cooperating with each other, we also compete with each other. And, you know, somebody has to be the tribe leader,

Starting point is 00:34:10 somebody has to be the corporate leader, somebody has to be the principal, somebody always wins or ends up on top because humans compete. And I think this is one of the sort of really interesting perspectives about cooperation is that whether you view something as being cooperation or whether you view it as being competition really just depends on the lens you're taking to look at the scenario. So there's one really nice example that I read about in the newspaper a couple of years ago, and it concerned Uber drivers and Lyft drivers who would arrive at an international airport and wait for passengers to come off the plane. And as the passengers landed, the drivers would actually turn off their app that indicates their availability. And in doing that, they would wait and they would generate surge pricing,

Starting point is 00:35:05 at which point they would turn the app back on and then they'll take passengers home. And the passengers obviously pay a little bit more to be journeyed home. Now, on the one hand, this doesn't really sound like cooperation. You're kind of price gouging or whatever you want to call it. You're doing something to, in some respects, exploit one class of individual, exploit your passengers. But on the other hand, those drivers do need to work together. They do need to cooperate to generate that surge pricing. And by switching off their app, they risk missing out on a fare altogether, potentially.

Starting point is 00:35:42 And so there is always this tension between whether we view something really as being cooperation or whether we view it as being competition, because quite often what we see is that cooperation has victims. And when we cooperate, it's a way that we improve our own position in the world, or we improve the position of our family or our group in the world. Do other species have that same thing where they cooperate but also compete? Or is it more one or the other? No, I think it's really, that's a very fundamental feature of all cooperation on Earth. Lots of cooperation that we see is done in the service of being better able to compete. And so you see individuals joining teams or forming groups,

Starting point is 00:36:34 all the better to be able to compete against other teams or other groups. And so, you know, just to give one example, if we think about the meerkats of the Kalahari, they're those cute little mammals that live in family groups in the Kalahari Desert. And they will engage in cooperative war dances against their nearest neighbours, which allows them to defend their territory. And sometimes they even make insurgences into their neighbours' territories and they try to find the pups of those neighbouring groups and kill them if they can. And again, this, you know, on the one hand, it doesn't sound particularly cooperative, but by engaging in those territorial displays and engaging in that intergroup competition, they are helping their relatives, they're helping their family members within their group to prosper. And again, it's kind of that tension between cooperation generating benefits to some individuals,

Starting point is 00:37:33 but generating costs to others. Well, when you look at professional sports, same thing. I mean, you have real superstars on the team, Michael Jordan as a basketball player, or, you know, pick your sport, pick your superstar. But they can't be a superstar without the team, the team that you can't play those games by yourself. So you need to make sure the team works well, in order for you to excel at what you're doing. That's totally true. And I actually think that's a really lovely analogy for thinking about something like cooperation inside our genome, where really the success of the whole genome, all the genes in our body working together to produce this unified individual, this organism, is really dependent on all the genes playing as a team, and no selfish individual genes trying to get an unfair advantage and trying to pursue their own

Starting point is 00:38:36 individual agenda. And there is that tension inside our bodies. Sometimes some of the genes inside our bodies do decide that they would like to be overrepresented, for example, in the sex cells, or sometimes there's cells in our bodies that decide that they are going to try and overrepresent themselves relative to the others. And when that happens, we call that's usually the start of a disease that we call cancer. So these kinds of struggles, these tensions between individuals trying to get a head up or a leg up over the others, and then the might of the collective trying to pull those selfish entities back in line, we see those kinds of same struggles happening at all levels of life,

Starting point is 00:39:20 whether it's among the genes and the cells in our body or among individuals in societies. And I think that's one of the things, for me at least, that I find really fascinating is that these same kinds of struggles can really be seen at all these different levels of evolutionary organization. But as much as there is cooperation amongst people, there are a lot of uncooperative people, people who don't play by the rules, people who, you know, want to destroy other people or beat other people or even kill other people. does that historically turn out? How does cooperative organizations and groups deal with the uncooperative? Before answering that, I think it's important to just note that even though, yes, there are some people that are less cooperative than others or more antisocial, to use that kind of terminology what we find in experimental data and what we see when we look at in the real world is that the vast majority of

Starting point is 00:40:33 people are really quite cooperative so the vast majority of people generally want to play fair they want to help other individuals in the case of societal cooperation they want to help other individuals. In the case of societal cooperation, they want to abide by the norms and the rules of the society. And, you know, we've seen that also playing out in the pandemic, where the vast majority of people adhered to the kinds of restrictions that were needed to protect themselves and to protect other people as well. So that being said, you do get cases where people try to behave selfishly. And we have a whole host of tools at our disposal to try to encourage people to cooperate. So some of those tools are things like ridicule and shaming or gossip, things that can damage the reputation or the standing of people who aren't really being

Starting point is 00:41:33 cooperative or aren't following the rules. And we know that those kinds of tools are used universally in human societies. Since human beings don't need other people as they used to in order to survive, do you see that people are becoming overall more cooperative, less cooperative, or is it just in our genes to be cooperative as we always have been? I think it's a really interesting question. And I think the answer is that it's not necessarily more or less, but I think it's just the ways in which we cooperate and the extent of the circle of people that we cooperate with that changes. So for example, in our evolutionary past, for the vast majority of our time on earth

Starting point is 00:42:26 humans would have routinely shared food that was a thing that and in many contemporary societies people still do share food in fact but not in countries where people have control over their food supply because for example they can have money in the bank, and they can very easily go to the supermarket. In societies where people have got that control, what we tend to see is much less food sharing. That sounds very obvious to us, it would be very strange for me to go to the supermarket and do my shopping and then buy a bag of groceries and leave it on my neighbor's doorstep. Like we just don't do that. But that's kind of quite a new phenomenon that we don't share in this way anymore. And we don't rely on our neighbors and our community for those kinds of daily needs that we all face. And so when the dust all settles from this, when you look back at

Starting point is 00:43:20 how humans have and have not cooperated. What conclusions can you draw? What can you say about the future? Or, you know, what do we know has worked and not worked? I think that we face a very urgent question now as a species because cooperation has brought us this far in our journey and yet all of the major problems that we now face from things like well pandemics obviously but anthropogenic climate change loss of biodiversity or all of these, what we can call global public goods problems, are problems of failed cooperation. And the big question, how can we cooperate better

Starting point is 00:44:18 at global scales, rather than at the local scales that we are so very good at. It's very natural to us to cooperate on a local scale. It's natural to us to cooperate with our friends and our family and with people that we know. It's less natural to us to take into account the concerns and the needs and the welfare of people living in completely different countries or people that aren't even born yet and yet those are the kinds of considerations that we do somehow need to find a way to to account for if we're going to resolve these global problems and in a way that's the that's the billion dollar question and I think it would would be glib of me to come on here and say that I had the answer, because I think if it was an easy, if there was an easy answer, we would be doing it already.

Starting point is 00:45:12 Well, that's an interesting point you make. And it does seem that it's just human nature, I think, to be more sympathetic and more willing to cooperate and to help people than it is groups of people or governments or a country. On the individual level, it just seems that we're more wired to help there. That's actually a really interesting quirk of human psychology, which is called the identifiable victim effect. And it's a quirk that many charities and other organisations, fundraising organisations have used to great effect to try to solicit donations. So the idea basically is that a single identifiable victim is much more effective at peaking our empathy, at generating an emotional response, and ultimately at prompting

Starting point is 00:46:08 us to donate than a statistical victim. Or when you're confronted with the actual scale of the problem, like you said, many people are much less willing to do anything about it than when they're shown just a single identifiable victim. And in part, this might be because of what you said, which is that when humans help, one of the major motivating factors why people do that is that they like to feel that they can make a difference. In philanthropy, it's called impact giving. People like to feel like they can have an impact. And I think one of the problems with statistical victims, or when you present the true scale of the problem to people, is that that possibility to have impact feels very, very remote. Because when you're confronted with the scale of the problem, you realize that it's really out of your hands to be able to do anything meaningful to resolve it.

Starting point is 00:47:08 And that's why these identifiable victims can be very effective at getting people to, you know, to donate and to take steps to try to improve the fortunes of other people. Right. Well, you can't save the world by yourself, but you could help one person, two people. I remember noticing this effect many years ago when we're having a real problem with pet overpopulation and so many dogs and cats in the shelters. But if they took one of those dogs or cats, or a couple of them, and put them on TV and said, this pet is available for adoption, they would get hundreds of people that would want to adopt that one cat. Well, why aren't all these people in the shelters adopting all kinds of cats? But it is that one image of this one cat

Starting point is 00:48:08 that you could see and make a difference that motivates all these people to want that cat. I think it's, yeah, I mean, you're so right. And it's so true. But it's probably also something to do with the fact that we haven't evolved to deal with the true scale of the problem like we haven't evolved in scenarios where we could see a million people were you know were starving or were being persecuted or something like this we evolved in scenarios where it was it was individuals that we could see and that we could respond to and that we could help. And there's another interesting way that humans like to have impact when they give that when you use online fundraising pages, sometimes people will set these up if they're going to run a marathon

Starting point is 00:48:58 or they're going to do some kind of event and they'd like to raise money for charity. And often they'll then send the page around to everyone in their social network and say, please sponsor me, I'm going to do this marathon. And usually when people have these fundraising pages, they'll have this fundraising target. So let's say their target is $1,000 or something like this. And one of the findings that has come out in the last few years is that when people get close to their fundraising target the donor who comes along when it's say 50 to reach before the fundraising target will be reached that donor will be more likely to give just a little bit more because it

Starting point is 00:49:41 helps it helps them to hit that target. And people really like feeling like, okay, I really helped you to hit your target. And so that kind of having these targets can also elicit larger donations than people might otherwise make simply because it feels so nice to be able to actually feel like you were the person who helped the person to hit the target they were going for. Well, I've never really looked at cooperation this way. You know that phrase of, you know, why can't we all just get along? But that's not how we're wired to all get along. We're wired to get along and cooperate within our group primarily, and sometimes at the expense of other groups. And it's really interesting to see how that happens. Nicola Rahini has been my guest. She is a professor of evolution and behavior at

Starting point is 00:50:33 University College in London and author of the book, The Social Instinct, How Cooperation Shaped the World. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Thanks for being here, Nicola. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to be on the show. It's a proven fact that women apologize more than men. A study in the journal Psychological Science found that over the course of 12 days, women apologized 217 times, the men just 158 times. The study concluded that men were actually just as willing as women to apologize. The difference was that men had a higher threshold for what bothers them.

Starting point is 00:51:21 We tend to apologize for something we feel might be offensive or hurtful. Men and women in general have different levels of sensitivity to those things. So, as an example, a woman might snap at a friend and then feel bad and apologize, while a man might snap at a friend and think, meh, no big deal, he'll get over it. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you know someone who would really enjoy this podcast. So please tell them about it, recommend it, and ask them to listen. I'd appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers.

Starting point is 00:51:55 Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa DeMonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame Me, we dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong, which is for listeners who didn't take

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Starting point is 00:53:04 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, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty,

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Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why It’s Human to Seek Pain on Purpose & How Cooperation Shaped the World

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