Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Why Timing REALLY is Everything & How We Lie and Why

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

Sure, it’s great to want more money but if you don’t have the time to enjoy it – what’s the point? We begin this episode with a look at why spending more of your money on things that actually create more free time for you can make your life much more enjoyable. http://www.menshealth.com/guy-wisdom/buying-time-makes-you-happier While the phrase “timing is everything” is tossed around a lot, it turns out there is a lot of wisdom in it. In short, it is not just WHAT you do in your life that is important it – it is also WHEN you decide to do it. Daniel Pink, author of the book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (http://amzn.to/2Dne4Ml) reveals why timing is so important and how to time events in your life to be more successful. There is a fascinating limitation of the human brain you must know about. It seems you cannot keep track of more than 3 things at once unless this condition is met. What is it? Listen and find out. https://bit.ly/38NRywO Since you were a child you’ve heard that honesty is the best policy. However, dig as little deeper and you’ll find that most of us think a little dishonesty is probably okay. The fact is we do think dishonesty is acceptable as long as it is not too much and as long as it is not too overt. Dan Ariely, author of the book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially Ourselves (http://amzn.to/2Dg1FtE) explains the little ways we are all a bit dishonest and why we think it is perfectly fine – so maybe it is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, can money buy happiness? Well, it depends on how you spend it and what you do with it. Then, timing is everything, and it's worth paying attention to. So we see this in our measure of mood.

So our mood typically goes up in the morning, declines in the early afternoon, and then rebounds later in the day. But we also see it in performance. And simply moving the right tasks to the right time of day can make a world of difference. Also today, there's a flaw in the human brain that would make it almost impossible to enjoy a football

game if the teams didn't wear uniforms. And most of us cheat. It's just that we don't cheat too much. We think to ourselves, you could go over the speed limit a little bit. We can add a few extra receipts to our tax return. So there is this level of dishonesty that we can kind of turn a slightly blind eye and still think of ourselves as doing God's good work. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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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. Have you gotten into smart speakers yet? I really like them. We got our first Amazon Alexa smart speaker a couple of years ago. We use it a lot. We mostly listen to music with it. And now we have a couple of them and we have one outside to listen to music.

And we also use it for, you know, for things like everybody else uses them for, like setting a timer or asking questions or just having fun with it, just talking to it. Alexa, hi. Hi. Alexa, what time is it? It's 2.58 p.m. See, you can ask her anything. She'll tell you anything.

Alexa, tell me a joke. Why did the tuna cross the road? Just for the halibut. And you can listen to the radio. You can listen to podcasts. Alexa, play something you should know. Getting the latest episode of Something You Should Know. Here it is from TuneIn.

Today on Something You Should Know. Well, they're fun to play with. You can do all kinds of things with a smart speaker. And if you don't have one, they're not that expensive. And I'd suggest checking it out. First up today, let's look at the question, can money buy happiness? The short answer is yes, but it does depend on how you spend it. Scientists at the University of British Columbia gave people some hypothetical choices like,

would you rather have a pricey apartment close to work or an inexpensive apartment with a long commute would you prefer a high-paying job with long hours or a smaller paycheck but more free time in addition one group of participants was given a real choice between $50 cash and a $120 house cleaning voucher the people who were willing to give up the money in favor of more time, a shorter commute, less work, fewer chores, were happier, according to the researchers. Why? Because leisure time lets you do fun things.

Even if you have a million dollars, what good is it if you have no time to enjoy it? And it's painfully obvious that many people make the opposite choice and prioritize money over time. For example, you spend your weekends mowing the lawn and cleaning the gutters rather than hiring a handyman or a landscape service. You take the indirect airline flight to save $200, but you've lost six hours of your life.

It's worth remembering what really makes you happy when you create your budget, because maybe if you spend less on material goods to free up money for services that make your life easier, you will be happier. Now, Alexa, close the segment. And that is something you should know. Timing is everything. I'm sure you've heard that before, but perhaps we don't think about timing as much as we ought to. In other words, when we do something, it can be just as important when we do it as what we do. Someone who knows a lot about this and can explain it a lot better than me is Daniel Pink. Daniel's

written several thought-provoking and best-selling books, including Drive and To Sell is Human, and his newest book is called When? The Scientific Secrets to Perfect Timing. Hi, Daniel. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Good to be with you. As you say, you know, we say timing is everything, but you say we don't take it very seriously. And, you know, when you think about it, you're right. When we say timing is everything, it's kind of in retrospect, like, oh, see how that worked out? But what do you mean that we don't take it seriously, and what does it mean to take timing seriously? Yeah, well, you know, you're exactly right. We make all kinds of timing decisions in our life, all kinds of when decisions. So when should we get married? When

should we, even more mundane questions of like, you know, when should we exercise during the day? When should we do certain kinds of work? And we tend to make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. And that's the wrong way to do it. There's a rich body of science out there across many, many fields, giving us evidence to make systematically smarter, shrewder, when decisions in our life. And if we look at this science, we can begin to refashion how we organize our day and what we do when we can take advantage of some of the power of beginnings and midpoints and endings. We can get better at synchronizing with other people in time. We can understand the power of breaks. And what I find in general is that we're fairly, especially in a given day,

we're pretty intentional about what we do and how we do it and who we do it with. But when it comes to when we do things, we don't take it as seriously. And the science is telling us that when we do things has a huge effect on how well we do them, how we feel doing it. So give me some examples of what that means. Like when would I be better to do something? So what the research has shown is that the day typically follows a pattern of three key stages, a peak, a trough, and a rebound. A peak, a trough, and a rebound. For most of us, we proceed through the day in that order. Those of us who are strong night owls, who are what are called evening chronotypes, people who rise late, wake up late, they go in the reverse order. So we see this in our measure of mood. So our mood typically goes

up in the morning, declines in the early afternoon, and then rebounds later in the day. But we also see it in performance. And simply moving the right task to the right time of day can make a world of difference. So let's take the peak. During the peak, we are typically better at doing analytic work. That's work that requires heads down, focus, analysis, being vigilant, batting away distractions. Writing a report would be an example of that, or analyzing data. And we're better off doing that kind of work then.

During the trough, which is for most of us the early to mid-afternoon, that's not good for very much. Our performance and our mood tend to sag. That's better for doing more mundane administrative things like answering a routine email or filling out expense reports or something like that and then during the recovery which is usually in the later afternoon and early evening oh that's an intriguing time because our mood goes back up and we're less vigilant than during the peak and a combination of that sort of looseness and an elevated mood makes us makes it a pretty good time for brainstorming and other kinds of creative work. And so if we can just get our bosses or on our own to move the right tasks to the right time of day, we're going to perform better. And what the research shows is

that time of day, just time of day itself, explains 20% of the variance in human performance on these workplace tasks. That's a big deal. It doesn't mean that timing is everything, but it means it's a very, very important thing. And if we're more deliberate and intentional about making these when decisions, we're going to work better. So you mentioned at the beginning that, you know, we use our intuition at times to make these big decisions, like getting married or switching jobs. Well, how does timing, aren't some of these things better left to intuition?

Yes and no. You know, here's the thing. We can use some of this research to improve our odds. So marriage, okay, that's a good example, right? I think we should use our intuition on when we get married. But there's also data here, right? And I'm not saying that you should change when you get married based on this data, but I think it's worth knowing about. For instance, at any level of education, we know that

marriages are more successful if people get married after they finish their formal education. It doesn't matter whether your formal education ends at high school or college or graduate school. Marriages tend to have, when people get married after their formal education, their odds of divorce go down. Now, it doesn't mean that every person who gets married after their formal education, their odds of divorce go down. Now, it doesn't mean that every person who gets married after their formal education is going to stay married. It doesn't mean that every person who gets married before their formal education ends is going to get divorced. But what it means is that the odds are different. People might want to factor that into the timing of their marriage.

By the same token, there's research out of the University of Utah from Nicholas Walfinger showing that there is something of a sweet spot in when we get married. Marriages tend to be more successful when people get married between the ages of about 25 and 32. Now, again, it doesn't mean if you get married when you're 37 or 47 or 57, you're going to get a divorce. But knowing that, knowing some of these things, I think can inform a decision. I don't want anyone saying, you know what, I love you, but I don't want to get married because I'm 33. I think that's ridiculous. But I do think that some of these intuitive judgments, and particularly something as intimate as that, can be informed a little bit by the data.

Talk about the importance of breaks and how that fits into this conversation. Oh, sure. So if you think about the afternoon trough, a very dangerous time, we see student test scores go down then, we see errors in hospitals and all kinds of medical problems then. But a good antidote to all of that is taking breaks. And to my mind, the science of breaks is where the science of sleep was 15 years ago. 15 years ago, you had people who would come into an office and brag about,

oh, I didn't get any sleep last night. I pulled an all-nighter. And we thought those people were heroic. Now we know they're idiots, that they're hurting their own performance. And the reason we know that is the science of sleep, which began emerging robustly in the last 15 years. The science of breaks, I think,

is following a similar trajectory. What we're learning about breaks from the research is very powerful. We should be taking more breaks in the day, particularly in the afternoon, and we should be taking certain kinds of breaks. And this is one area, Mike, where I have completely changed my ways. I used to try to power through and never take breaks, and I had it completely wrong. I thought that amateurs took breaks and professionals don't when it's exactly the opposite. Amateurs are the ones who don't take breaks. Professionals take breaks. And what we also know about breaks is some really good evidence about how to take better breaks.

We know, for instance, that something is better than nothing. So a break doesn't have to be a one-hour break at all. A micro break of one or two minutes can be replenishing. So we know something is better than nothing. We know that social breaks are better than solo breaks, even for introverts like me. So take a break with, if you can choose who you take a break with, that can be very replenishing. We know that moving during your break is better than being stationary. So maybe if you can't go out for a walk, we know that being in nature is enormously replenishing on breaks. So if you have the opportunity to go outside, even see any kind of nature, that can help out. And we know, which I think is deeply important, is that full detachment is better than semi-detachment,

that you have to be fully detached in order to get the benefits of a break. So if you decide, say, oh, this sounds great, I'm going to go out for a nature walk, but if you do the whole thing with your nose and your Instagram feed, that's not going to be a very effective break. Well, and you point out that schools, many schools have eliminated recess, I guess because they think, you know, we have a lot of work to do, we don't have time for recess, we need to be in the classroom working, but those schools are seeing a drop in test scores, and that's huge. I think it is, and I think it goes to, you know, just our notions of it. And

again, I'm a convert on this, so I have the zeal of someone who's converted. The way I read the research is that we have to think about brakes differently, that brakes are not a deviation from performance. Brakes are part of performance. So, for instance, I mentioned, you know, in this afternoon trough, student test scores go down. This is based on some interesting research in Denmark that looked at 2 million standardized test scores and found that taking a test in the afternoon was equivalent to missing two weeks of school. All right, that's a little alarming. But what they found the remedy for that was that you can get the scores back up if you give these kids a 20 to 30 minute break right before they take the test to, you know, have a little juice or run around.

It's really interesting. And, you know, I think we have a sense of that, that if we step away from something, if we step back and kind of refresh, that we do better. I'm talking with Daniel Pink. His book is When? The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine. Erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children.

The Heresies of Rudolf Buntwine. Wherever podcasts are available. 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, Daniel, talk about the fresh start effect, the notion that we're more likely to do something if we started at the first of the month or the first of the year

or the first of the week or on our birthday. Talk about that. Yeah, this is some really interesting research done out of the University of Pennsylvania by Hank Tendai, Katie Milkman, and about that. Yeah, this is some really interesting research done out of the University of Pennsylvania by Hank Tendai, Katie Milkman, and Jason Reese. And what they found is that certain dates of the year operate, and this is their phrase, temporal landmarks. They're landmarks in time.

And these landmarks in time have two really interesting effects on our behavior. First, like a physical landmark, they sometimes get us to slow down and pay attention. Second, they end up triggering this very peculiar form of mental accounting. So when we think about a business, a business will open up a fresh ledger at the beginning of a quarter, at the beginning of a fiscal year. And these temporal landmarks get us to do the same sort of thing for ourselves, that we use these dates, New Year's Day being the most prominent, but we use these dates to open up a fresh ledger on ourselves and say, okay, old me never exercised and only ate fast food, but new me, I'm opening up a fresh ledger, I'm going to do things differently. And we're more likely to do that

and adhere to the behavior, as you say, when we do it, you know, exactly as you say, when we do it on the first of a month, rather than the 13th of a month, or we do it on the day after our birthday or the day before our birthday. And so there's, and the point here is that all days of the year are not created equal when it comes to behavior change, that certain days are more powerful ways to make that fresh start. So if we look for those kinds of temporal landmarks, the first day after you're back from a vacation, if you're a student, the first day of a semester, as you say, Mike, the day after your birthday,

even things like a Monday rather than a Thursday, you're going to have a better chance of fostering that kind of change that you seek. What do you mean by always give the bad news first? Why? So a lot of us find ourselves giving good news and bad news. I certainly do, and everybody has said, I got some good news and some bad news. And the question is, which do you give first? I always gave the good news first. Yeah, I would too. I I always gave the good news first. Yeah, I would too, yeah. I would always give the good news first. Yeah, but why would you give the good news first? This is what

I do, but I want to hear your reasons for it. Well, because then the conversation is at least starting off on a, you know, high note, and, you know, it may go down from there, but at least we're starting up and going down, rather than starting down and then feeling depressed and then not going up as high because we've got all this bad news. Exactly. I'm with you 100%. You know, for me, another reason is it's uncomfortable giving bad news. So you sometimes want to ease into it. Right.

You know, I think you want to put a cushion on, you know, it on a cushion before you deliver the hammer blow. And what the research shows is, no, that's not it at all. If you ask people, what do you want to hear first? Four to five people want to hear the bad news first. And the reason for that has to do with how endings affect our behavior. And in short, the research shows that given a choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. We prefer rising sequences to declining sequences.

And so I've completely changed my way on this. I always gave the good news first. Excuse me, then settled into the bad news. And now I always give the bad news first. I'm the king of giving the bad news first. Well, Your Majesty, that's great. Yeah, no, but I mean it. Again, this book, this research has changed the way I do things. I can tell. And as I said, in some of these things, I have the zeal of a convert. So it's like,

oh my god, I've been doing this wrong for 50 years. It's interesting, because we've talked in the past, when previous of your books came out, and I've never heard you talk this enthusiastically. Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah, you really seem to be really into this, like a convert. So talk about... Yeah, I've converted about a lot of these things, definitely. Let's talk about group timing. What does that mean? It means basically how do we synchronize with other people in time? So how do rowing teams synchronize? How do lunch deliverers synchronize? How do choral groups synchronize? And there's some interesting rules about how to group synchronize effectively,

and there's some interesting effects of synchronizing itself. So if you look at something like choral singing, choral singing, man, oh man, the benefits of choral singing are pretty remarkable. It raises pain thresholds. I mean it. It raises, not just singing, Mike, singing in groups. It raises pain thresholds. It increases our immune response. It is a mood booster. It also has this remarkable effect on giving us a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, and even getting us to do good deeds. It's stunning.

It is funny to just hear that sentence. You know, the benefits of choral singing are remarkable. Who knew? It was a big—I didn't know until I started looking into the research. Truly, that was an absolute shocker to me. I had no inkling that that was true. It's really kind of remarkable. So are there some fundamental principles to go by in group timing? Yeah, when we want to time with other people, it's helpful to have a boss. So this is why you have rowing teams with coxswains and choral groups with clear choral leaders. So synchronizing to a boss, a sense of belonging is really important in how groups synchronize.

And so belonging is fostered by shared language, shared code, other kinds of sort of mini rituals. And then what's interesting is that people tend, there's a virtuous circle of synchronization where when we synchronize with others, we're more likely to feel good and do good. But feeling good and doing good makes us even better at synchronization, which in turn makes us feel better, which in turn makes us synchronize better. And so the rules are essentially, you know, you got to have a strong boss, you got to have a sense of belonging, and you got to tap into this virtual circle where syncing makes us feel good and feeling good makes us synchronize even better.

And you say that the research, talk about the research from the NBA real quick. Oh, yeah, this is cool. So as a sports fan, I think it's cool. So it is a good study of, by Jonah Berger at Penn and Devin Pope at Chicago of NBA games. And what they did is they took like 20,000 NBA games and they looked at the score at halftime. And what they found is that teams ahead at halftime were more likely to win. Not a shocker. They have more points. But the big surprise was that teams that were down by one, down by one, were more likely to win than teams that were up by one.

That being behind by one was as good as being ahead by two. And this is part of a broader amount of research showing that at a midpoint, if we feel like we're slightly behind, we tend to kick a little harder, work a little stronger. That wasn't even what I was talking about. I was talking about the high fives and the fist bumps. Oh, okay, yeah, okay. Oh, that's about on the synchronization. Sure, yeah, this is what they did is they had people watch videotapes of NBA teams early in the season. The people watching the videotapes didn't know what these folks were studying,

but they marked down how many times they touched, these players touched. High fives, high fives, low fives, chest bumps, fist bumps, the whole array of touching. And they found that the amount of team touched was actually predictive of how well the team was going to do. And I do think that has to do with belonging, that touch becomes a part of how groups foster belonging. So if you're a sports gambler, see how often these NBA teams are touching, and they might be more likely to cover the spread.

Well, timing is everything, and our time is up, so we should make a graceful exit here. My guest has been Daniel Pink. His new book is called When? The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Daniel.

Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure. 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 bet you like to think that you are a pretty honest person. Most of us think that. But when you really think about it, I bet you there might be a few things that you fudge on. Maybe on your taxes, or maybe you tell a little white lie so you don't have to go into work today. Or maybe not. Maybe you are a

very, very honest person. But what's interesting about dishonesty to me is that we tend to be dishonest, but just a little bit. We might fudge a few deductions on our taxes, but why not fudge a lot of deductions? Why not just not file your taxes? Somehow we rationalize that a little dishonesty is probably okay. Dan Ariely is somebody who has really explored dishonesty. Dan is a professor at Duke University and author of several books, one of which is The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. So Dan, since you're the one who's researched this, what is dishonesty? I mean, how do you define it? So, I do experiments with people.

And so, for me, the definition of dishonesty is really very simple. It's whatever I can measure in my experiments. So, my basic experiment is the following. I take a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems, and I ask people to solve as many as they can in five minutes. So my basic experiment is the following. I take a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems, and I ask people to solve as many as they can in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, I ask them to take the sheet of paper, count how many questions they got correctly,

and go to the back of the room and shred that piece of paper. After that, they come to the front of the room, and they tell me that they solved an average, let's say, six questions, and I pay them $6. What the people in the experiment don't know is that I played with a shredder. So the shredder only shred the sides of the page, but not the main body of the page. And now I can jump inside the shredder and I can find out how many questions they really solved correctly. And what I find is that on average, people solve four problems and report to be six. So for me, this gap between what people actually do and what they report is the main measurement of dishonesty. And we do lots of experiments like that, and we try to change all kinds of things about the environment,

about who they cheat, about how they think about themselves. Do they look at the Bible when they do it, and so on. And we try to see what kind of things changes the magnitude of the gap between what people actually do and what they report. Well, it's interesting in that example that if people think that they're shredding the paper and you'll never know, why don't they say they answered all 20? That's a fantastic question. And what's interesting is that something stops people. And, you know, I mostly focus in the book about the dark side of dishonesty,

mostly about how people cheat. But it's true that people don't cheat enough, right? If a rational economist would look at our experiments, I would say people should cheat all the way. Turns out people don't cheat all the way. And you can think about it for yourself. I mean, just today, you probably had lots of opportunities to take some money from people. You probably had opportunities to somebody left their wallet by their desk. There were probably things at the station. There are all kinds of opportunities for us to take money away from people. And nevertheless, we don't take it. And what's interesting is that we don't think about the

cost-benefit analysis. What stops us, the vast, vast majority of us, from being immoral and dishonest is not the fear of being caught. It's our internal gauge. And I think this is both kind of the irrational part on one hand, but also the wonderful part about human nature is that we do have this wonderful tendency to be honest, only that it's not perfectly controlling our behavior, and it does leave some room for a fudge factor that gets us to be slightly dishonest. So we're sort of honest, but it's okay to be dishonest a little bit? We think to ourselves that as long as we're slightly dishonest, we're okay.

You know, you could go over the speed limit a little bit. We can add a few extra receipts to our tax return. We feel okay if we have an insurance claim to add a few things here and there. And in the same way that the people who deal with us professionally, your plumber, your mechanic, your physician, your dentist, they don't feel okay taking money away from your wallet, but recommending services you don't really need feels much more comfortable to them. So there is this level of dishonesty that is kind of, we can kind of turn a slightly blind eye and still think of ourselves as doing God's good work. I love that.

And in all your work that you do, do you ever find people who are just flat-out honest as the day is long? So this is actually very tough for us to do experimentally. So in every experiment, we find some people who don't cheat. So in this book, I describe experiments from about 30,000 people. And from these 30,000 people, we found 12 who are big cheaters, and I lost about $150 to them, right? 12 big cheaters lost $150 to them. And we found about 18,000 little cheaters,

and I lost about $32,000 to them. Now, we do have some people who don't cheat. And you can ask, who are those people? And the reality is we don't know. And in particular, we don't know if it's the same people time after time. So in every particular experiment, we find that some people don't cheat. But what we don't know is if it's people who would never cheat. And you know, you could say maybe those are the people who just came back from church, or those are people who just thought about the Ten

Commandments, or people who just did something else that primed them to be more honest at the moment. Or it could be somebody like Mother Teresa that never cheated and lies. We don't know. That's kind of something good to consider in the next phases of the studies. When people cheat in the way you describe, when the doctor orders that extra test, what is he telling himself, that he's really doing the right thing? Or, hey, I can get a little extra money this way out of this guy? I think it's much more about telling ourselves that we're doing the right thing. You know, if you're a fan of some sports team, are you a fan of a sports team of some sort?

Oh, sure. Okay. So when you go to a game and you see the referee calling a call against your team, it's very hard for you to see things in an objective way. It's very hard for you to not think the referee is evil, vicious, stupid, right? Something about the referee is wrong because your motivation is coloring your view of the world. Your desire to see your team win is coloring your view of the world.

Now imagine that it's not a sports team that you care about, but it's your financial well-being. You get to earn more money if you see reality this way to another way. Don't you think that now you would be able to see reality in a slightly biased way and with it, get more money? And that's basically what we see. And this, by the way, is very important because if we think that people who are dishonest are bad people,

then we can just kind of categorize the world into two parts, the good people and bad people. As long as we don't deal with bad people, everything is fine. But what we find is that it's not about good people and bad people, it's about good people being in bad conflicts of interest, and therefore having a biased view of the world, a view that eventually turns out to be negative. So, Dan, what do we do with this? We know that everybody probably, or most everybody probably, fudges a little bit. They're a little bit dishonest.

But so what? Knowing that, what do we do? So there's a few things to do with it on multiple levels. First of all, we should think to ourselves, what are we fudging? Perhaps without thinking too carefully. The next thing is when we go to our financial advisor, doctor, dentist, and so on, we should realize that even if they're good people and even if they have kids in the same school as we are and with the same PTA and so on, if they have a biased incentive, they might not be able to give us the right recommendations. And I should tell you that this is kind of a tremendous burden.

It's a tremendous burden to go to a mechanic, a doctor, and so on, and to feel that they might have a biased incentive and you need to protect yourself. But the truth is, we should be aware of this and we should try to protect ourselves. And then it means for companies. Companies should try and figure out what are the gray zones that people could over-interpret and overstep and how they should limit it. And finally, it's about the government. You know, in government regulations, we often think that as long as there's a big punishment overstep and how they should limit it. And finally, it's about the government. In government

regulations, we often think that as long as there's a big punishment at the end, people would behave well because they would be fearful of the punishment. But in all of my research, in all of my discussions with big cheaters, nobody thinks about the long-term ramification and nobody thinks about the punishment. So it means that lots of these attempts are basically misplaced. And because of that, we're getting much more dishonesty in the marketplace and in society than we think, than we plan to. So when these people that do big dishonest things get caught and say they're sorry, what they're really sorry is they got caught. You know, of course they're sorry that they got caught. But I think that, and this is from my discussion with dishonest people.

You know, when you look at the long sequence of people who've been dishonest, you said to yourself, I can't imagine doing all of that. But in most cases, they didn't plan on all of that long sequence of events. In most of those cases, they took one step at a time. And they took one step at a time. And they took one little step that at that moment, they could rationalize and that moment, they could feel good about themselves. And then the next step was there. And then the next step was there and so on. And if you think about it step by step, it's not justifying it, but it's much more understandable.

And I think many more of us could see ourselves, if we admitted it, taking one step at a time and quickly justifying what we have done. Do you find that people, the more they do it, the more they do it? It's a slippery slope? It is absolutely a slippery slope. And part of the reason for the slippery slope is that once rationalization kicks in, you start basically explaining why this is actually okay. And now the slippery slope becomes larger and larger. And then at some point, many of the people I've talked to get to a situation where it's too late.

They can't go back. It's very hard to change things. And at that point, they just try to protect their tracks with the hope that nothing bad would happen. And here, too, we've done some experiments, and the experiments have been something like the Catholic Confession or the Jewish Day of Atonement. When we ask the question of what happens when there's a slippery slope and people start cheating all the time, wouldn't it be the case that unless we give them an opportunity for a new page, an open blank slate, wouldn't that allow them to restart again?

And that's actually what we find. We find it slippery slope, incredibly tempting. People get to it. And if we don't offer them a way out, they just keep on cheating. But if we stop the situation and we offer people a chance for a new beginning, a chance for an open new page, they often take it and start behaving well. And I think this is actually an interesting lesson to take from religion. I think religion has basically figured out this, the importance of new pages. And we need to think about how do we implement stuff like this in regular

society. But don't you think that human beings are also interested in fairness and justice, and if somebody gets caught doing something wrong, it isn't about giving them a clean start, it's about making them pay for what they did wrong. Yeah, retribution is clearly important. For some crimes, we want people to pay because we want to feel that justice has been done, and we feel angered, and we want a sense of justice. And I'm not saying that this is a bad thing to have. But the reason we punish people is often is not just because of sense of justice, it's also because we want to deter other people from doing the same thing. And I think that aspect is just not, there's no evidence for that.

There was a recent study that looked at the death penalty, asking whether the death penalty reduces crimes, mostly the crimes that you get for the death penalty, crimes of passion and murder and so on. And there's no evidence for that. Now, the studies are not very good because it's hard to do the study well, but even something like the death penalty doesn't seem to decrease crime. And now ask yourself, if the death penalty was kind of a big punishment, right,

you can't get bigger than that, it doesn't seem to have a big effect, what are the odds that small things like, you things like nine years in prison or ten years in prison are going to deter people from committing crime? So my sense, if you look at the financial crisis, for example, if you look at Wall Street or insider trading, is that we take good people, we tempt them to be dishonest, and then we create at the back end very severe punishment. So, you know, maybe not so severe, but somewhat severe punishment. And I think this is just not something that is going to influence behavior. Instead, I think we need to try to prevent the misbehavior at the moment. We need to decrease conflicts of interest.

We need to decrease the temptation of misbehaving rather than trying to punish people at the end and hope that this would have an effect. But what about, you know, we hear, I remember the publicity about a case in Indonesia where they publicly flog people for doing things. And boy, that's a very clean country and people don't screw around. You know, I don't know when you've been last in Indonesia. I haven't been there actually for quite a while. But the results, I think, don't show up, and I haven't seen the results about Indonesia. The results don't show up that prison sentences are deterring anybody.

You know, look at something as simple as downloading illegal content on the web, MP3s, music, and so on. There have been a few really big cases in which people paid a ton of money and had all kinds of costs to pay, and nobody, nobody that I know of, from my students, cares about that, right? It's just not something we think about. Oh, think about other things. This is not in the domain of dishonesty, but lots of people text and drive.

Lots of people overeat, under-save. All of those behaviors are really about not thinking long-term. Human beings were just not designed to think long-term in small probabilities, right? So if you take people who text and drive, for example, which is the majority of people, and you say to yourself, those people don't seem to be thinking long-term.

They think about the immediate gratification of the phone vibrating. What are the odds that the same people would think about small probability of being caught down the line? I think it's just not going to happen. This is one of those topics that's really interesting to talk about, but maybe not too much for fear of what you'll find out about yourself. Dan Ariely has been my guest. He's a professor at Duke University and author of the book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty. There's a link to his book in the show notes for this episode of the program. Thanks, Dan. Did you know it is basically impossible for you to keep track of more than three items at the same time unless those items are the same color? So, for example, when you watch a football game,

the common color of the uniforms allows you to overcome that limitation because you see the team as a single set. Team sports would be incredibly difficult to watch if it weren't for the colors of the uniforms. According to a study at John Hopkins University, the ability to only keep track of three items at a time is a fundamental limitation of the human brain. Almost everyone has it, and the only way to override that limitation is with color coding. This principle works in everyday life. For example, if you wanted to take seven kids to the zoo by yourself, it would be tough to keep track of them all. But if they all wore the same color shirt, that would make it much easier. In general, if you want to keep track of multiple things or people,

make them the same color. And that is something you should know. And that's the podcast today. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. Thanks for listening to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth.

Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels

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