Something You Should Know - The 2 Ways Rich People Acquire Their Wealth & Why We Act Out of Spite

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Starting point is 00:00:17 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, why you probably should be smiling right now and smiling a lot more every day. Then if you want to be rich, do what it is rich people do. I've had a chance to speak to thousands of people about this, and I've got some pretty simple advice. There's two really simple things you can do to become more successful.

Starting point is 00:00:52 One, ask for more money. Ask your boss, go to your landlord and ask for less rent. There's all sorts of ways to ask. Then something you'll want to try the next time you have a bad day. And spite the things we do to get back at someone who's treated us unfairly. Spite is when you're taking your time at the checkout just to make that next person wait. It's when you put gnomes in your garden just to irritate your neighbor. Broadly speaking, it is a behavior which we pay a personal cost or price

Starting point is 00:01:22 in order to hurt or inflict a cost on somebody else. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman

Starting point is 00:01:56 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.

Starting point is 00:02:31 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. 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. Hello, welcome to Something You Should Know, episode number 564. So if you're a new listener, you have a lot of catching up to do. Depending on what platform you listen on,

Starting point is 00:03:10 you can't go back and hear all the old episodes, but Apple lets you listen to the most recent 300, and pretty much all of the episodes are very evergreen. They hold up, and they're worth listening to, or maybe even worth listening to again. So feel free to dive into the archives and binge away. First up today, we're going to talk about smiling. People generally smile as a result of being happy.

Starting point is 00:03:38 However, it may be a good idea to smile even when you're unhappy. The simple act of smiling has been shown to relieve stress, boost your immune system, lower your blood pressure, improve your mood, make you look younger. And in one study in 2010, researchers found that genuine intense smiling is associated with a longer life. But that's not all. Smiling is contagious and makes you seem more approachable to other people. And it also makes you appear more attractive and successful. And you get all those results from smiling. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:04:22 I'm sure all of us at some point in life have fantasized and wondered about what it would be like to be wealthy, or at least to have substantially more money than we have. What would you do with that money? How would your life be different? But what we often don't think about is what are the steps involved? How do you get there? How do the people who don't have money get it? Is there a path you can take? Are there things you can do that will increase your chances of acquiring more wealth? And when you look at the people who have acquired money, do those people have something in common that the rest of us could emulate? The answer is yes, according to Lewis Schiff, Lewis's executive

Starting point is 00:05:06 director of the Business Owners Council and author of a couple of books, including Business Brilliant, Surprising Lessons from the Greatest Self-Made Business Icons. And he looks at just how wealthy people get that way. Hi, Lewis. Welcome to Something You Should Know. And let's start with how you got into this, how you decided to look at how wealthy people acquire their wealth, and really what led you to believe that there's a formula here or a path to take? I had the chance to work with a gentleman named Russ Prince in fairly modest circumstances, but it turned out that the 10 years that I was working with him, Russ was quietly becoming a coach to billionaires. See, when I met Russ, he was serving wealthy people,

Starting point is 00:05:55 and he was serving industries that serve the wealthy, like the hospitality industry, these kinds of things. But over time, and this makes all the sense in the world, over time, billionaires, people with hundreds of millions of dollars, were reaching out to him and saying, what do you know that I need to know? And so as I was chatting with him, and we have a personal relationship too, he was saying to me, I'm starting to see the secrets of wealth. I'm starting to see what these very, very wealthy people do, that it's not a mystery. It's just the way they put all these different qualities together. They just see the world differently than we do, and it comes together for them, and it creates wealth.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And he said to me, I think I can survey for this. I think I can survey different people with different net worths and find out that in their average daily way, they're actually living two different lives between the wealthy and what we call the middle class. So this survey, this business brilliant survey that you did, explain how you did that and how you put it together. So he was having his anecdotal experience. What we did is we turned that into a telephone survey. We spoke to 800 households. 400 of those households were people with a net worth of less than a to 800 households. 400 of those households were people with a net worth of less than a million dollars, and 400 of them had a net worth of greater than

Starting point is 00:07:10 a million in different groupings, 1 to 10 million, 10 to 30 million, and 30 million plus. And we asked them the same questions around things like career development and risk-taking and how they develop their social contacts. And we asked them exactly the same questions. We also asked them both, was it important to have more money? And the answer universally across both groups was yes. Then the second question was, what are you doing to go about to achieve this? And as we started to roll through the survey, it just became very apparent that our self-made wealthy group, those who had high net worth, all started out in middle-class households. Our self-made wealthy group. Those who had high net worth all started out in middle-class households.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Our self-made wealthy group were just doing it differently than the rest of the middle class. And then it just, it begged a million dollar, literally a million dollar question, which is, if you want to be successful, why don't you just do what successful people are doing? Yeah. And, but these people who are millionaires and billionaires who started out in middle-class homes, where did they get this ability, or what is this ability that allows them to see the world differently and act in a way that took them out of the middle class? And that's a tough question, because basically the answer is they see things differently, and they put things together differently, and you could stop there. You could say, well, they're just different than we are. They see it differently. They behave differently. I've had a chance to go under the onion, if you will, and discover that the truth

Starting point is 00:08:33 is they feel everything the same way that we all feel things. In other words, when they experience a profound failure or a setback along the way, it hurts them. It's just that they just have a different response to the pain. I think if you look throughout the research, there's lots of different moments when we're asking people to do something that would take them out of their comfort zone. And that's hard for people. Whereas with our self-made millionaires, they are being pulled outside of their comfort zone, but they don't know any other way to behave. By doing things like what? Because when you're outside your comfort zone, by definition, that's uncomfortable. So if you're going to do that, you want to be pretty precise about what you're doing. So what is it you're doing?

Starting point is 00:09:22 You know, we've had a chance to, I've had a chance to speak to thousands of people about this, and I've got some pretty simple advice. There's two really simple things you can do to become more successful. One, ask for more money. Ask your boss, you know, go to your landlord and ask for less rent. There's all sorts of ways to ask. And we see consistently in the data that people are uncomfortable asking. And they'll tell you all the really good reasons why. They don't want to lose their job. They don't want to appear greedy, whatever it might be. But when we survey the other side, let's say it's the HR department

Starting point is 00:09:54 or it's the landlord, we see that there's an expectation that they're going to ask. And so if you're expected to be asked for more, then you prepare for it. If the other party doesn't ask, the money is literally left on the table. That's pretty simple advice that anyone can do, but it's going to take some effort. Wait, man, before you go on to the second one, give the statistic, the two statistics of middle-class people who are willing to ask for more money versus employers who are expecting it. So in one survey that we addressed in the book by a professor named Linda Babcock, she discovered, and think about this, this survey was of Carnegie Mellon graduate students. These are educated people on their way to being part of the professional world.

Starting point is 00:10:38 And only 25% of the people surveyed were asked their first potential employer for more money when they were offered a job. Again, a long litany of reasons why they were afraid to ask, but only 25%, only one out of four asked. And if you look at, on the other side of the table, the hiring managers, the decision makers, nine out of 10 of them tell us that they're prepared to offer more money than the first offer. So that's nine out of 10 willing to offer and three out of four unwilling to ask. But they're not going to offer it unless you ask. They can't offer it unless you ask. I mean, that would be to give money away that they weren't asked to give away. Isn't that incredible? And you make the point in, you know, when I was my first jobs, when I was an employee, always afraid to ask because you have this fear that if you ask for more money, he's going to go, you know what, forget it, we're going to hire the other guy. And that never happens.

Starting point is 00:11:36 Right. And in fact, think about it again from the other point of view. They'll have to explain to their boss why they lost a candidate over $2,000, $5,000, which might be too much money for them to offer, but it's too little money for them to lose a candidate offer over. So there's going to be a process. There's going to be a negotiation. In fact, we found that women do this a lot more than men. Both men and women fail to ask, but at a much higher rate, women fail to ask. And one of the points that I make in the book is that there's traditionally this thing called the gender gap in pay. And the assumption is that employers are paying women less.

Starting point is 00:12:14 And what I'm suggesting is that women are asking for more money less often. And as a result, they are being paid less. But that's an asking gap. That's not a gender gap. We're talking today about how wealthy people acquire wealth. And my guest is Louis Schiff, executive director of the Business Owners Council and author of the book, Business Brilliant, surprising lessons from the greatest self-made business icons. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural.

Starting point is 00:12:49 It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible.

Starting point is 00:13:22 The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. 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.

Starting point is 00:14:15 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, Lewis, let's talk about negotiation, because we all have to negotiate, and you say that wealthy people negotiate differently

Starting point is 00:14:50 than a lot of the rest of us. And certainly one very common phrase you hear in discussions about negotiation is a win-win negotiation, that we're going to create a negotiation here where everybody wins, and you say that that just doesn't work. Well, we see, you know, the best example of this is you see in business school, they'll teach you win-win negotiations. They'll teach you a negotiation method that has to do with finding middle ground between yourself and the counterparty.

Starting point is 00:15:22 But they'll also teach you in another classroom, another department something called supply chain optimization, which is a fancy way of saying ground down the person you're negotiating with until you know that there's nothing left to give. Now, they never reconcile this stuff in a business school. They just send you out with these two completely conflicting messages. The one that gets picked up a lot and is popular is the one called win-win, the idea that you can find this middle ground with every other counterparty. Almost everyone who has a real background in negotiation says win-win is a possibility, but only if you're willing to cut it off if your minimum needs are not being met. And what we see when we survey these two groups, the middle class and the self-made wealthy, are that the middle class are much less willing to

Starting point is 00:16:06 walk away from a deal if it doesn't sound good. They feel like they've put the time in, they feel like they'll be embarrassed, maybe they've wasted the other guy's time, and they stay with bad deals. Whereas the self-made wealthy are prepared to walk away, even if they want it, even if they need it, even if they love it, they'll walk away. Well, I've often thought that negotiations are really just, you know, kind of a pointless game. And we pretend and we bluff and we say, you know, this is my final offer when it isn't. And, you know, wouldn't it be nice if we could just not do that? But I guess that's, you know, that's not how the human mind works. We like, I guess we like to make sure that we're getting the best deal.

Starting point is 00:16:46 Right. And on the other side of that, when you do negotiate well, and you actually do get more than you thought you'd get, you actually feel bad. There's a pretty common psychological reaction to beating the other side, if you will, that leaves you feeling guilty. And so once an experienced negotiator knows that you actually have more psychological reward from being beaten in a negotiation than you do in doing the beating, that's clearly a way for them to manipulate you and take advantage of you. Another way people seem to get taken advantage of in negotiations is because they invest a lot of time in it, and there's incentive in slowing

Starting point is 00:17:26 things down. And so people spend a lot of time in a negotiation. So they're less likely to walk away because after all, I've put all this time and effort into this. So let's just come to a deal. Right. So one of the things that is popular when you're going through the car buying process is they'll tell you to sit down and start filling out the application. And they know that by you handwriting your application and taking the time to put all that information down, you're essentially talking yourself into the deal because you're committing time and energy, you're filling it out, you're putting things on paper which looks more real. And then they give you those 10 or 15 minutes and you're one step closer into being talked into a bad deal because you've put that energy in. And they know that you don't want

Starting point is 00:18:08 to walk away from deals. And that's why they're leading you down the primrose path. The idea of, you know, it's not just what you know, it's who you know, is seems to be important to success. Having the right connections, the right network seems to be very important. Right. So this is the second piece of information that I think anybody can do. And I love it when young people in particular ask me what they can do to get one step closer to success. And this is a simple idea, but profound, which is spend more time with people who are more successful than you are. So what does that mean? It just means that it's, I always kind of liken it to any sport you might play, like something where it's one-on-one like tennis or something. You're going to want to play with someone who's a little better than you so that

Starting point is 00:18:52 your game is raised. The problem is, again, this has to do with taking you out of your comfort zone. People don't like to be the least successful person in the room. Over and over again, when we survey, would you rather be the highest paid person in your company? Or would you rather be paid even more money, but be the lowest paid person in your company? People always choose to be at the top of the pecking order. And this is what we need to address. If you want to be around people who will help you raise your game, you're going to have to accept your subordinate position in the food chain and realize that that's actually a big advantage. So go out there, get rid of your old friends. I don't mean get rid of them, but spend more time with people who are more successful. Find somebody in your office who can be a potential

Starting point is 00:19:35 mentor. Find people in your industry that have ideas and advice that they want to share with you and accept that they have something to teach you and that's why you're lucky to be spending time with them. If you do that, you will start to emulate their success. It's a very natural quality. I can go on and on and on about the positive behaviors of really, really successful people that you can get through osmosis, but it starts with you being willing to be a subordinate person in a relationship where the power is distributed in a way that's against you. Which, again, is tough for people to do because it takes them out of their comfort zone, especially if you're older and you've not been in that subordinate position. That's hard to do. Look, think about it. I mean, if you're an athlete, you want to spend time with great

Starting point is 00:20:20 athletes. But conversely, if you're a smoker who doesn't like to go to the gym, it's much more comfortable to spend time with other smokers who don't like to go to the gym. We know that if that person actually spends more time with gym rats, they are much more likely to go to the gym. Not only that, we see this going two and three generations away. We see this more in emotional things. If your friends are happy, you're more likely to be happy. And if your friends are unhappy, you're more likely to be happy. And if your friends are unhappy, you're more likely to be unhappy. If your friends' friends are happy, you're still more likely to be happy.

Starting point is 00:20:51 It literally transfers two levels down at least. So the idea of circulating with, of putting yourself in a crowd of successful people, as magical as it seems, it literally transfers through osmosis down to you because you're watching them, you're emulating them, and you're walking their walk, and it starts to make a difference. And it's not a matter of, if you can talk about this, having lots and lots of collecting business cards at functions. That's not what wealthy people do. Right. So we know from the social networking paths, if you will, of very successful people, they do two things. One is they actually know a lot about the people who are around them that are important help you find more business. Those half a dozen people, you should not have a trivial relationship with them. You should have an intimate relationship with them.

Starting point is 00:21:50 You should know how much money they made last year, and you should know how much money they want to make this year. And you should know how you can help them do that. When we look at successful people, they have a tremendous amount of data. They figuratively or even literally maintain a manila folder on about a half a dozen people where they track where they spend their weekends and what the name of their dog is and how much money they make. And they keep that network tight and deep. When it comes time to swap someone out, they don't add to it. They release somebody who's adding less value and put a new person in. Now, some people do it with two people.

Starting point is 00:22:26 Some people do it with five or six people. But the bottom line is it's not the sort of social media world, sort of collecting as many friends as you can. Another thing I think is important that you talk about is this idea that in order to be wealthy, you really have to own something. You can't just trade your time for dollars. So we see over and over again that until you put yourself in, the easiest way to put it would be in the ownership position, but there's other ways. You could be an equity partner. You could be

Starting point is 00:22:55 like a commission-based person. The more you sell or the more you do, you get paid more. The idea of getting a fixed salary and hoping that somehow, because you're good at what you do, and they pay you this much money to do it, is going to somehow lead to wealth is a false idea unless you learn how money is actually made and you take the steps to put yourself in the path of money. Which is to own something, to own a piece of something rather than just trade your time for dollars. Right. And the tricky thing for all of us for that is this research that I came across called self-determination theory. But the bottom line of it is sometimes doing the thing we love and getting paid to do it or even converting it into a whole business actually makes us feel bad. So this explains why the person who loves to cook and one day opens their own restaurant ends up hating cooking because all these things about having to make money have surrounded

Starting point is 00:23:49 the enterprise. And they never liked the money part. They liked the cooking part. And so they don't really pursue it in the way they could have. Now, there is a way to do that. I say to that chef who loves to cook, find five or six people, like we talked about social networks earlier, find five or six people, like we talked about social networks earlier, find five or six people who are really good at everything you do and continue to be a great cook, but make

Starting point is 00:24:10 sure that you are at the top of the pyramid in terms of where the value of everyone's efforts accrue. If you're the owner of the business and you're the chef, someone else can do the books, someone else can be the hostess, someone else can order their food. But you're doing what you love, but you've done it in a way that puts you in the position where you will grow in value as the value of the enterprise grows. Well, what I like about this is that we don't, or at least I haven't really thought too much about how people become wealthy. I think there's this perception that wealthy people get that way because of luck or being in the right place at the right time or having that right idea or that special skill,

Starting point is 00:24:52 but not so much that there's like a pathway to wealth that anybody can follow. And it's really interesting to hear. Louis Schiff has been my guest. He is the executive director of the Business Owners Council. He's the author of a couple of books, including Business Brilliant, Surprising Lessons from the Greatest Self-Made Business Icons. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Louis. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong?

Starting point is 00:25:26 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 Lister 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.

Starting point is 00:26:01 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. Something strange that we humans sometimes do is we act out of spite. Often we later regret acting out of spite, but when we get angry at someone,

Starting point is 00:26:46 spite can be a really powerful force that makes us do things we would otherwise not do and makes us do things that may eventually cost us something. So why do we act out of spite and can we turn that force into something more positive. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones has taken a journey into the world of spite and vengeance. He's written a book about it called Spite, The Upside of Your Dark Side. Hi Simon, welcome. Thanks Mike. So what is spite exactly? Spite is when you're taking your time at the checkout just to make that next person wait. It's when you put gnomes in your garden just to irritate your neighbor. It's when you invest in a company or even buy it, as it happened in one case, so you can fire the management.

Starting point is 00:27:35 Broadly speaking, it is a behavior in which we pay a personal cost or price in order to hurt or inflict a cost on somebody else. Is it an emotion? Emotions drive it. So I'm focused on it as a behavior, but obviously there are certain emotions that drive spite, primarily anger, feelings of injustice. And so it is what it is. Why are we talking about it? Why is this important? I kind of go back to Star Wars when Darth Vader says to Luke that you don't know the power of the dark side. Doing the research for this book, which I wrote, it made me appreciate that we don't appreciate the power of our spiteful side.

Starting point is 00:28:15 So if you look at, say, our cousins, the chimps and the bonobos, if you were to offer them, if you were to give one chimp $10 and you asked that chimp to give some of that money to another chimp, and it only offered the other chimp maybe one or $2, the chimp would take the money or the bananas or whatever it would be that you give a chimp, and they'd be happy enough with that. If you do that with people, then if we're offered an unfair split of money, then we react very differently, we will literally almost toss the money back at the other person. We'll give up free money if we don't feel we're being dealt with fairly. Now, that kind of makes sense. If we've been treated unfairly, it makes sense that we might give up some money or pay to punish the other person. And that kind of makes sense. What happens then if somebody else

Starting point is 00:28:58 has maybe gotten ahead of us fairly, they've worked fairly, they've earned more than us, and would we in that situation give up our own money to punish that person for getting ahead of us fairly they've they've worked fairly they've earned more than us and would we in that situation give up our own money to punish that person for getting ahead of us even though it was completely fair how they got ahead and again you find in these economic games one being the joy of destruction game that around 40 percent of people if they're anonymous will pay to inflict a cost on somebody else who has gotten ahead of them due to their own hard work which is which is pretty nasty and it it gets perhaps even stranger in the sense that you wouldn't think that if somebody has helped you that you would you would in any way be spiteful towards them you

Starting point is 00:29:34 think you know if someone's been unfair then that's going to be the trigger what you find is that even if somebody has helped you and being really generous, people will still in some cases spite them. This is called do-gooder derogation. And the idea here is that if somebody has been very generous, then that kind of gives them more social points than you. Other people are going to maybe like them more, are going to want to cooperate with them. And so therefore their generosity is a threat to you, and therefore you are potentially open to spiting them, which is obviously not a good thing for society. Yeah, well, you know, I can imagine like say say somebody gives you a job and that but that somebody who gave you the job owns the company and is a multi-millionaire and you're making you know 15 an hour you might feel

Starting point is 00:30:17 spiteful towards that person and yet they gave you a job we We're a paradoxical creature. But I guess it all comes back down to this. Spite seems to be wrapped up in our desire really for dominance, to raise ourselves up and to pull other people down. Because again, we're an inherently social creature. So dominance is a really important thing to us. And yet I bet if you ask people why they do things like this, it isn't that they're trying to be dominant so much as it's about the fairness and the justice part of it, yes? Yes. Again, there's a split between why we think we do things and why we might actually do things. So again, if you ask somebody generally why they're punishing somebody, they'll say that it's to make the other person act better

Starting point is 00:31:03 in the future, that they're trying to maybe deter the other person. But if you look at the experimental games that have been done, it really comes through quite strongly that people are really punishing people in order to harm them rather than just to simply make them act better. And that punishment is quite often an act of domination, which is hidden below a mask of fairness. And when people do these things to spite other people, is the satisfaction everything they'd hoped in general? Or does it usually turn out to be, well, what did I do that for? That was really stupid. Well, these things are often driven by anger.

Starting point is 00:31:41 And again, if in the experience you have a pause between somebody being treated unfairly and then deciding how to respond, then you'll find they're much less likely to be spiteful. So once they can control that emotion, then they can deal with it better. But again, in the heat of the moment, they might act in ways that they're going to later regret. But yeah, but do they typically later regret? Is spite usually regretted later? Or are there examples of people who brag about it, who were very spiteful, very vengeful, got the other guy, and, you know, were real happy they did it? Well, I guess, I mean, if you take an extreme example from literature, you have Captain Ahabab whose desire was to destroy the white whale

Starting point is 00:32:25 at all costs you can see that's being a really spiteful act and clearly the guy even though his life was being destroyed got some satisfaction from doing that and again you can see when people are maybe um trying to make spiteful bids on ebay just make the other person pay more you can see that people are feeling quite good in the afterglow of that again on reflection people might come to regret it but others not i mean it's particularly an issue where when matters of justice are involved so our brain responds really powerfully to justice so if you've been maltreated then a spiteful response is going to potentially feel really good for you both in the short term and in the long term so studies have been done in the mri scanner where somebody was treated unfairly

Starting point is 00:33:06 and then they got the chance to punish the other person. And the brain activity really strongly overlaps with what you see when a drug user is about to take a drug. So in many senses, justice is like a drug to us. I mean, we crave it and we get really powerful rewards from administrating it potentially through spite. Are there people who never have this reaction? Depends on how you measure it. So if you do questionnaires in the population, you'll find

Starting point is 00:33:31 maybe five to 10% of people say that they act spitefully. If you do experimental games, the numbers become a bit higher. So some auction bidding games have found that a third of people behaved not at all spitefully, a third behaved really spitefully, and the other third were in the middle. But I think if you look at how people behave, if you put the right person in the right situation, or maybe the wrong situation, that almost everybody will potentially behave spitefully at some point if pushed. Has anybody done a survey and asked and gotten a sense of, has everybody pretty much done something out of spite? No, the questionnaire data was only being looked at in the past decade or so. So we still don't know too much about spite, which is quite strange. Most of it comes from the profession of economics.

Starting point is 00:34:19 So we don't really know quite how spitefully people will act when they answer these questions. What's your sense? Is it a pretty universal response to life? You tend to find it. So the games that economists have developed to measure spite, they've played these all over the world, in America, in the jungles of Borneo, and levels of spite vary. And it seems to be quite strongly influenced by the role of your culture in setting norms of fairness and how people are expected to behave. So culture plays quite a strong role in how likely people are to be spiteful. Are people more or less likely to be spiteful depending on their status, where they sit on the social ladder. People who

Starting point is 00:35:08 pretty much have everything would, I would think, maybe be less spiteful, perhaps. I don't know. Is there any connection there? It's hard to say. What the research does point towards is that as your environment becomes more competitive, that you're likely to become more spiteful as potentially an adaptive response to that and there's been some really nice work done in the states about how the brain enables spite so to sum that up briefly so basically if the world becomes more competitive in in the olden days the much older days when we were evolving then certain types of food will become more scarce and harder to get. And the neurotransmitter in our brain, one of the big ones is serotonin. And we need to get tryptophan, which is an essential amino acid. We need to get

Starting point is 00:35:54 from the food in our diet in order to make serotonin in the brain. Now, if the world becomes more competitive, we've got less access to foods with tryptophan in. It turns out that once your serotonin levels drop, that makes you behave more spitefully. So therefore you have a mechanism through the world becomes more competitive and there's a knock-on effect into your brain, which makes you act more spitefully. And the way it does that is it makes you basically get more joy from punishing other people for transgressions.

Starting point is 00:36:20 And these games that you say people play, what's a spite game and how does it mimic real spite? and they've been asked to split that money with you and you can either accept what they give you in which case you keep your bit of money and the other person keeps the remainder or you can reject the offer and in that case neither of you get anything so the rejection is a spiteful response because you both lose and those studies found that basically around half of people if offered just two dollars out of the ten dollar pot would spitefully reject and say no i'd rather we both went home with nothing than you went home uh with the eight dollars and i was left with the two and you might say well that's ten dollars that's fairly small fry and does it really make

Starting point is 00:37:14 any difference uh into anyone's life um when the money's when the study's been done with much much more money on the table um you still find this same pattern of results so it's not simply because it's a small amount of money even when relatively large amounts of money are involved, people will still act spitefully towards unfairness. You started by talking about like, you know, if you gave, if a chimpanzee gives another chimpanzee two of his $10, he'd probably take it and he'd be fine. But what about other animals? Do other animals act spitefully or not? When you see spite in nature, it tends to evolve because certain conditions have been met. So basically, if you're an animal,

Starting point is 00:37:51 let's say that you're an ant, if you have a behavior in which you can harm creatures who are quite genetically unrelated to you, and that you can tell who those creatures are, and there's a fairly low personal cost to you, those creatures will act spitefully. So you can tell who those creatures are and there's a fairly low personal cost to you those creatures will act spitefully so you can see in nature um best example would be the the red fire ant so this ant has a variation in one of the genes gp9 and basically if you're a sterile work ant so you have kind of no fitness evolutionary evolutionarily to damage because you can't reproduce therefore you can't kind of suffer a fitness loss if you're one of these sterile work ants then you can smell if another queen doesn't have the same version of the gene as you do and if she doesn't then they attack and kill it so you can see spite evolving in in nature because basically you have copies of your genes

Starting point is 00:38:40 in your close relatives and if you can do something that harms you and harms somebody else, but benefits those relatives, then that can still evolve. And so what do we do with this now that we know more about spite? So what? I think it's about seeing the downsides, but also seeing the potential upsides of spite, which don't get talked about that much. And then using our understanding of spite to control how we use spite. So in terms of the upsides of spite, so you find that spite can lead to you having kind of reputational gains. So if someone punishes you and you retaliate,

Starting point is 00:39:16 other people watching tend not to think too much of you because of that. But if you watch somebody else hurt somebody else and then you punish the aggressor in that situation, so you haven't got a dog in the fight, you see else hurt somebody else, and then you punish the aggressor in that situation, so you haven't got a dog in the fight, you see somebody harm somebody else, but you punish the aggressor, then other people think that's a pretty cool thing

Starting point is 00:39:33 for you to do. They'll cooperate with you. They'll give you social brownie points, which explains, frankly, quite a lot of what we see on social media. So spite has reputational gains. Spite also seems to help us be better at competing so in one study people were asked to do some maths puzzles and people did them then they were asked

Starting point is 00:39:53 to do them again but they were told there was a prize on offer this time and what you found was that the non-spiteful people got a bit better at solving the math problems but the spiteful people got a lot better so being spiteful seems to help you be more competitive and that seems to be because spiteful people have a focus on getting ahead and are quite okay by being ahead of other people so that desire to get ahead can have benefits spite can make us potentially more creative so spiteful people tend to score higher on the personality trait of disagreeableness, and disagreeable people tend, there's some evidence, tend to be more creative when doing

Starting point is 00:40:31 things such as maths, engineering, physics. So spite can potentially aid creativity. And the final thing, which again doesn't seem intuitive, spite would seem to help us fight tyranny or fight the unfightable. So if you were trying to take on, say, a tyrannical government or a tyrannical company, then you're quite likely to lose in that situation. So you need something in you that can help you fight adversity when you know quite likely that you're going to lose. And our spiteful side seems to be useful for that. So there's a

Starting point is 00:41:04 nice quote from a theologian called Reinhold Niebuhr where he says that only a sublime madness would lead someone to fight malignant powers in high places. And so maybe spite can be that sublime madness, can allow us to fight for what is right, even when we know it's a lost battle. So it's all about managing spite, I think, rather than just playing it completely down. By your definition, spite is an action. In other words, you know how people will ruminate and think about and write an email that they never send

Starting point is 00:41:35 or they think of things they would do to get back at somebody, but they never do them. So that's not really spite, or is it? You could see it as being a spiteful intention. And then the person has been able to manage maybe the anger that's driving that intention. So I'd see that there could be a form of spiteful intentions, which either through mindfulness, taking a time out, reappraising what you think the other person is really trying to do, that you can manage that anger and then stop yourself from acting spitefully. So I understand how acting in a spiteful way

Starting point is 00:42:09 has its rewards. It can feel really good to get back at somebody who wronged you. But it also seems like, in many cases anyway, it's a lot of work. It's an awful lot of work. You're giving up something of yourself. And what if you just talk to the person? What if you just communicate with someone and try to work out your differences instead of, you know, planning this big scheme to get back at them? I think you're right about the communication issue. So again, on one of those experimental games, I was talking about the ultimatum game. If the person who felt they'd been wronged could pass a note to the other person or the other person could pass a note to them explaining their behavior,

Starting point is 00:42:49 you find that spite goes right down. So maybe then at the end of the day, we just need to kind of better understand why each of us is doing why is what we're doing, which is generally quite often for good reasons. And if we can understand where the other person is coming from, we might be able to evade destructive spiteful acts. Yeah, well, understand where the other person is coming from, we might be able to evade destructive, spiteful acts. Yeah, well, you know, road rage is a really good example of that. Because, you know, when people cut you off or do something that perhaps puts you at risk, there's a tendency for a lot of people to get back at them and do something equally as stupid because we judge people by their actions and we judge ourselves by our intentions. But if the guy that cut you off turns out to be your best friend,

Starting point is 00:43:34 all of a sudden there's a lot of forgiveness going on and there's less spiteful revenge because you know this person. Yeah, absolutely. So people, once we know the person, again, it humanizes them. So although that said, so there's some really interesting work, again, from the States about what happens when we see people acting in a way which we wouldn't approve of. So let's say somebody breaks like a social norm of behavior. There's evidence showing that when we look at that person's face, we now see it as less face-like. So the brain processes that other person's face, who's just violated a social

Starting point is 00:44:09 norm, more like an object and less like a face. And obviously, if their face is less face-like, they're more like an object to us, and that makes it easier for us to punish them. This is a mechanism called perceptual dehumanization. Wow. Isn't that interesting? And I wonder, does that also apply if you know the person? I don't know if they looked at that, but I mean, I guess the positive message there is that we have empathy. You know, we can feel others' pains, and it's a really strong mechanism for preventing us from hurting other people. But obviously, in our evolutionary history, there were times when we needed to hurt other

Starting point is 00:44:44 people, so we needed mechanisms to turn empathy off. And this seems to be one of those mechanisms. What's interesting is what you said that there isn't a whole lot of data about spite and that most of it has come from the last decade or so. And most of that has come from the world of economics. And yet spite is such a powerful force in almost everybody, whether people act on it or not. And I suspect most people probably have just the intention of being spiteful. It seems like a very powerful force that is well worth understanding. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones has been my guest,

Starting point is 00:45:24 and the name of his book is Spite, The Upside of Your Dark Side and there's a link in the show notes to that book at Amazon Thank you Simon, thanks for being on the show Absolute pleasure, thanks You know when you're having one of those days where everything seems to be going wrong and you see everything through like a negative lens

Starting point is 00:45:48 and the more you think about things, the worse they look? Well, it's possible to stop that downward mental spiral and turn things around. It's so simple, but amazingly effective. Here's what you do. Stop the negative thoughts by focusing on one positive or beautiful thing in your life. Then another. And while you're doing that, you breathe deeply. If you do it for a few minutes, that's it.

Starting point is 00:46:16 That's it. This technique was developed by Judith Orloff, MD, who says that forcing yourself to shift from negative to positive thinking is incredibly powerful. This technique takes advantage of the fact that your mind can only focus on one thing at a time. So if you just focus on something positive, you can't think about something negative. The downward spiral then stops, you become more objective about everything, and life seems more manageable. And that is Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know is the name of this podcast.

Starting point is 00:46:53 We work very hard to bring you a great-sounding podcast three times a week, and I hope you'll share it with someone you know so they too will become a fan. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Starting point is 00:47:29 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.

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Something You Should Know - The 2 Ways Rich People Acquire Their Wealth & Why We Act Out of Spite

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