Stuff You Should Know - All We Know About Guessing

Episode Date: July 20, 2017

Guessing is a weird thing. For millennia, it could have meant the difference between life and death. Now it's not as vital, but we still do it every day, whether behind the wheel of a car, or judging what another person might be feeling. From wild guesses to the educated variety, learn everything we know about the brain and how it manages this odd, very human act. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, stuff you should know is going on tour. Do, do, do, do. What are the deeds, my friend? Okay, so starting August 8th in Toronto, that's in Canada. We're gonna be at Danforth Music Hall in Chicago.

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well then you should go to the Bell House October 22nd, 23rd, and 24th. We'll be there all three nights. And finally, we're gonna wrap it up here in Atlanta at the Buckhead Theater on November 4th for a benefit show where we are donating all of the monies to Lifeline Animal Project of Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society.

Yep, so for all this information again, visually, and for links to tickets, just go to S-Y-S-K-Live.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there in the corner.

Everybody puts Jerry in a corner, but he shouldn't, and this is stuff we should know. She's the opposite of baby. Jerry's back. She's back from the mall. Is that where she's been? Yeah, remember we said that she was at the mall, she was buying a house, she was doing all sorts of stuff.

Oh, okay. But she's back now and things are normal again. Yeah, she was at the beach and she's now eating in front of me what I ate about an hour ago. Do you wanna throw up, or do you want more? I don't, it's this weird in between. I'm drawn to the smell, but I'm also full, so I'm kinda like, boo.

Yeah. Oh man, what a life. I know, eating, who needs it, right? Me. I do too, I love eating, love it. You know what else I love? What? Really good magic, like illusions.

Well, where does, what do you mean? Cause that can mean two different things. Well, let me tell you. So I went, you mean I went to New York recently and we saw this show. It's called In and Of Itself. It's a one man stage magic, I guess you could call it that,

illusionist show by a guy named Derek Del Guardio. You can tell you say his last name. I strongly recommend anyone go see this show. It's, I think they extended it through the rest of the year. But it's, it's like kind of his life story told like through these different acts. And like just the stuff he's doing is not like, oh man, that rabbit came out of nowhere.

Nothing like that. It's all much more psychological than that. But the basis of it is that this guy must be just one of the better guessers walking around today. He's just good. He's also like a card shark. It's just a really neat show. It's really original and different.

Yeah. But just to see somebody do something to where they probably are guessing, but they're doing such an amazing job at it that it just appears to be magic. That's one of my favorite things in the world to see. Like when he talks to people and like think of a number, except obviously more fun and complex than that.

Yes, yeah. And I don't want to give any of it away. I don't want to give any bit of it away. Like for anybody who's going to go see it, everyone should go into it fresh. But yeah, just after you see it, go back and listen to this episode again and you'll be like, oh yeah, totally.

Now I think the deal a lot of times with that situation is powers of suggestion, correct? I don't know. I don't know, man. I don't know if that's what this guy's doing or not. No, he's not doing like cold readings or something like that, like John Edwards. No, no, no.

Nothing like that. But powers of suggestion in that if you, you can lead someone to think of a certain thing that they then guess that you're- I guess so, get it? Didn't even mean that. But that kind of dives into what we're talking about, which is guessing in general.

There's this whole, like science really doesn't have any idea about how we make guesses. All we know is that we are capable of making guesses and that we make guesses almost constantly and that like our brain is basically set up to guess. Like our construction of reality is a series of guesses, most of which pan out to be right, but then can also be terribly wrong,

which is what optical illusions prove, you know? Yeah, and I found this, I thought it was gonna be more interesting than it was initially when I picked this one out. So I was a little disappointed. And then we found like other supplemental stuff that kind of helped it. But in the end, it felt a little unwieldy,

but I think that's just because of the nature of the topic. Like there isn't a concise beginning, middle, and end to this kind of topic, you know? No, because again, science is pretty well stumped. Like even, and sometimes Chuck, if you'll remember, these can be our best episodes. Like unless the ones where there's just like a clear cut, completely understandable, neat explanation,

those ones are great. And then on the other end of the spectrum, like this one, the ones where science is just kind of like, maybe this is it, I don't know if this could be it, those are usually pretty good too. So this could, this one has potential. All right, that's my estimation. Well, I thought it was interesting

that in our very own House of Works article, and they started talking about the end days of yore with starting with tuk-tuk and, you know, basically up until the point where we could like, you know, measure things or prove things. Like there was a lot of, I mean, there's still a lot of guessing going on, but like guessing was a daily survival tactic.

Right, that's how we learned. Should I go this way and fall off a cliff? You know, I'm gonna take a guess, or should I eat this thing? Will it kill me? Or like in the case of Lewis and Clark, I remember Clark estimated, and you know, there's guesses, and we'll get into different types, but an estimation is kind of a guess,

even if it's informed and well-reasoned. In Clark's case, of course, he estimated, I think he was only off by about 40 miles when they got to the Pacific. Oh, really? I don't remember that. Yeah, he estimated 4,162 miles. When he was off by? He was off by 40.

I mean, that's remarkable. Yeah, it is. But it wasn't a wild guess. It was Clark being a very smart dude who probably took copious notes, not probably, he definitely took copious notes. Right. But I don't know, I just never really thought about guessing

back in those days could, you know, you could end up, a bad guess means the end of you. Yes, but if your friends were standing around watching you, guess that lizard over there wasn't poisonous, and you can just go ahead and eat it raw, and then you keel over and die, they learn from your bad guess. That's called taking one for the team.

It very much so, yeah. That's absolutely true. That's before the universal edibility test. Man, you were just, have you been going through the archives or something? No, I wrote that article back then. So I kind of, that one stuck with me. Cause you know, I mean, we're, I thought you were too.

I'm cursed with that new information in, old information that's getting squeezed out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So should we get into this? I guess, so I'm not, I don't mean to do this. I'm sorry. What, saying a guess?

Yeah. It's pretty commonplace, but it does kind of under underscore just how much we do guess in our lives, you know? Yeah, here's, all right, let's go ahead and start it with the brain then, because while you're correct in saying that they don't know the pathways necessarily of a guess,

all different kinds of, all different parts of the brain, not all the parts, but many different parts of the brain are at work, which makes a lot of sense when you think about what different kinds of guesses can entail, whether you're guessing someone's age or guessing, you know, cause that involves like, you know, recognition with your eyeballs or a memory of someone else

who was a certain age who looked like that, like your, you know, recall, there's all different parts of the brain that are lighting up whenever you're guessing something. Yeah, they think that it's a global phenomenon, right? Like, it's- Brainally global? Yes, exactly, right.

So there's like some region of your brain that specializes in the particular task at hand, the thing you're guessing about, whether it's say like volume, or like you said, someone's age, that region of the brain that has to do with, say, numbers would light up. I think it's the parietal anterior gyrus

or something like that, that lights up when you're trying to guess someone's age based on how they look. But then that's just- Yeah, they actually prove that one, I think. Right, using the Wonder Machine, right? But that's just one functional part of the whole process that the brain's going through.

They know that there's a number of different regions that are operating at any given point in time when you're making a guess, but they still can't say, well, if somebody's guessing this, this is what's gonna happen. Here's the cascade that's gonna go through the brain. We haven't reached that point yet.

Yeah, they think that if you're guessing about a visual object or subject, then your frontal lobe and occipital lobe are at work. Numerical quantities, like how many jelly beans are in that jar? That's kind of the common thing. They mention that like that still happens. Is that still a thing?

You know who is a jelly bean jar guessing champion? It's my wife. Really? It is, yes, longstanding. Her spatial reasoning is outstanding. Well, spatial reasoning and numerical quantities are a big part of trying to guess the quantity of something in a something.

Right, and so if your brain is kind of specialized in that manner, you are probably going to be better at it than somebody whose brain is not, right? So Yumi would beat me every time. My spatial reasoning is horrific, right? Yeah. But I'm really good at recognizing faces.

So I'm probably better at guessing someone's age based on their face or possibly how they're feeling based on their facial expression than she might be. Yeah, that's a whole, like I didn't even think about that being part of guessing, but the emotional thing of guessing, yeah, like someone's feelings or what they're thinking,

like that's a whole different thing than guessing jelly beans in a jar, which is different than guessing someone's age. It's like all lumped into guessing. It's really more varied than I ever considered. Right. So with, well, let's talk about the different types of guesses you might make that.

So I think what you just kind of did, Chuck, was you divided guesses into like... Buckets. Two buckets. I'm trying to decide what the buckets would be called though. So one bucket would be just kind of working knowledge and the other would be say like emotional, right? Like, so how many jelly beans are in a jar?

That'd be in the working knowledge bucket. What somebody's feeling based on your guess, based on say their facial expression, that's emotional or intellectual. Yeah, that's right. Intellectual or emotional buckets, bam. Just carved them up. But I think those are kind of like the two categories

you can put guesses into, even though you can break types of guesses down further. Yeah, and breaking them down further, you have your wild guesses. This is when you have no information, no outside input whatsoever. And you often say, this is just a wild guess. If I had to guess.

Yeah, you say something dumb like that. You're saying, here, listen to me, I can speak. It has no basis in fact or reality or anything like that. Then you have your educated guess, which is in the middle. And that's when you have a little bit of information. There's a military term that I had never heard of called swag, which stands for... Stuff we all get?

No, scientific wild ass guessing. Oh, okay. Which is like a guesstimate. But it's a military term by all accounts. Most people say it started in Vietnam with General Westmoreland. And you will hear military people say swag. And that's when, you know, I've got a little information.

I'm not just wild guessing here. This is a ballpark educated guess. Right. That's not bad. It's a little less than an estimate. That's when I have a lot more information. Yeah, not just a lot more information, but you're pretty familiar also with the topic

that you're guessing at as well, right? So Lewis and Clark, I think both of them were surveyors. So they would have had a lot of training as far as, you know, judging distance goes. They would have had some information to put together. So Clark coming up with, you know, with an estimate of how wide the continent is and just being off by 40 miles.

Like you said, that's remarkable. But if you had had one of us do it, it would have been a wild guess. Yeah. So it has to do with the training, the expertise really. And then the amount of information you have. That's what an estimate is. Yeah, and you may not even know

that you have information stored away in your brain that you're recalling when you're trying to hazard a guess on something. You might just be, you might think it's a wild guess, but you're really kind of picking out something that happened in your past, maybe. Right, or another way to look at it is intuition, which is, from what I understand,

intuition is kind of its own category, but if it's most closely related to any type of those three guesses we just mentioned, it would be an estimate. And it comes from years and years and years of training or exposure to whatever you're guessing at, to the point where your guesses don't even seem like guesses. It just seems like foreknowledge

of what you're about to do. Yeah, like I used to be really, really bad at guessing crowd sizes, but through our live shows, I've gotten pretty good at it, because when you go to these theaters, you know how many people are in there, and then you stand in front of that many people. And if you do that enough times,

I can now say when people, when I'll go to a show or something, they'll be like, how many people do you think this place holds? I used to be like, I have no idea. I know. But now I say, better on eight or 900 people. Yeah, and you're probably pretty close. Yeah.

Within 40 miles, I'll bet. And that's just because of exposure and learning. Right, and that actually brings up a really good point that you can actually get better at guessing, and we'll get into that right after this break. How about that, Chuck? Great. Music

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lacher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Chuck, you said that, um, that you got better at estimating crowd sizes by just performing

at our live shows, right? Correct. So you were terrible at it before. Very bad. But just from, from exposing yourself to it, going out on stage and exposing yourself to crowds that you could judge the size of, and everybody clapped. Except that one guy, remember that guy?

Yeah, Nelson, just pointed and laughed. Nelson of Portland. You got better at it, and when it comes to especially, but probably both, but especially intellectual guesses, intellectual bucket guesses, you can train yourself to get better at it, and part of that is making a guess, getting pretty much immediate feedback and learning from that.

Yeah, like you're wrong, this is what the answer is, it's like anything else. Exactly. If you do that enough, you're gonna get better at it. Yeah, and there was this pretty interesting, I guess that was interesting, little kind of side track that the author of the guesses article, Aliyah Hoyt, took.

Aliyah? And I have to say, no, is Aliyah? It's not Aliyah? No, it's Aliyah. There's no saying Aliyah for years. Not only is the sea silent, it's not there. Wow, it's invisible. It's invisible. So, Aliyah Hoyt, my hat's off to her

because doing supplemental research for this, there are not a lot of people who are coming up with really substantial stuff about guesses. Yeah. It's like it's barren. It's probably the least amount of research I've ever encountered in all of our almost 1000 plus episodes. Oh, wow.

So, the fact that she put this together, my hat's off to her, but a side track she takes is to teach the reader how to get better at guessing a jar full of jelly beans. Yeah, boy, that was exciting. No, I mean that. Oh, yeah? Yeah, because always, I mean, my method was always

to pick out a smaller area, like the bottom inch of the jar. Okay. Count as many as I could and estimate that and then multiply that out. That's actually a great technique. Does that work? It's not bad.

Well, I don't know. I haven't guessed jelly beans in a jar since I was probably 12. Right. But that was always my method, which has a little, there's a little bit of method to it, but it's definitely not as good as this one. Okay, so this one, it sounds a little more complex than it actually is, but if you say,

if you look at a jar and it's filled with jelly beans, you can say that jar is, the volume of that jar is, say, a quart. Okay. But then you kind of want to. You gotta get that to begin with. Sure, right. But you can learn, right?

You can just look around. Like, here's the point. If you want to get good at guessing jelly beans, it just takes a little bit of work. Yeah. Most people would walk up, say a million jelly beans, and they're off by like 900,000. They're like, while I'm terrible at guessing jelly beans,

I'm going to sleep for the rest of my life. But if you want to get good at guessing at jelly beans, all you have to do is poke around, learn a few things, and then you can basically apply those to every situation. And one of the things you would need to learn is how to judge the volume of the container to start. Correct. So that's one part, right?

Yeah, which most people would do that by comparing it to like a milk jug or a two liter bottle or something like that. Right, but in this case, to get a really accurate estimate, you would want to know specifically, say how many ounces a container held. Correct. And then another thing you would probably do

if you started researching guessing jelly beans and jar on the internet, you would run across some research that found that if you have spherical objects in a jar, they typically take up about, if you fill the thing up, they typically take up about 64% of the actual volume of the jar. Yeah, and that's if they're just randomly dumped.

Right, so if you come across a jar, and you say, and it's filled with like perfectly round, bouncy balls. Okay, perfectly round bouncy balls, right? You can say, well, those are spherical and they're taking up about 64% of the jar. So all I have to do is figure out the, basically the size of each of the ball, right?

And then divide it by 64% of the volume. Yeah. And then bam, you just guessed how many are in there and you're probably pretty close to right. Sure. So this all sounds mind numbing. I've got a little trickle of blood coming out of my ear right now.

But you can, the whole point is you can train yourself to make better guesses, to estimate better. That's the whole point. Yeah, and if it's non-spherical, by the way, like if it's peanuts or something like that, or ice cubes. But not disgusting circus peanuts. Oh man.

That conjures up so many memories. Did you like those? Well, I think I might have when I was a kid, but I haven't had one in 40 years, but I still remember the taste. Yumi just had some, she says they still hold up. And I'm like, I didn't like them then, I'm not gonna like them now.

Well, they hold up for you in a bad way. Right, yeah, exactly. And I know, I know I'm not supposed to yuck anyone's yum, but yuck. So if it's circus peanuts, let's say, that would be between 50% and 54% of the space, not 64. Yeah. So what is Yumi's method, did you ask her?

She says she just kind of knows. Oh, so she's a pre-cock. Exactly, she shakes her head once a while and lays around in a vat of liquid. Wow, that would be, see, that would scare me if that was my wife's answer, if she just like kind of walked by and said, I just know. Right, yeah.

She'd be like, well, what else do you just know? Yeah, well, she's kind of unstoppable too. You have no idea how many calves we've won at County Fairs in the last year alone. Our house is overrun with them. All right, so that's just guessing volume of a thing and a thing. That's an intellectual guessing.

Yeah. Right, but you can train yourself to guess better. What's really up for questioning is whether you can train yourself to get better at the other bucket of guessing, emotional type of guessing, right? Where you're walking around and you are interacting with other people

and you're making judgments about how they're feeling right then. Yeah. About what they're thinking right then, what their motives are, you know, how well they're actually listening to you. All of these things, right? It's part of our interaction with other people

and there's something that two researchers called X and Tux great combo that back in 1988 established this kind of field of inquiry in which they were trying to get to the bottom of what they called empathic accuracy. Yeah. Which is how accurately we can surmise what someone actually is feeling or thinking

just from interacting with them. Some people are supposedly good at it. Some people are not. And from what I saw, there's a big kind of push and pull about whether it's worth practicing or whether you should just not do that at all for the sake of your own sanity.

Right. And just say, if you tell me that you're in a good mood, I'm gonna take that at face value. And if you're actually not, then you're covering up your feelings for your own reasons. And that's on you. And that's fine. If you wanna just keep them to yourself, that's fine.

If you wanna share them, I'm here, but I'm gonna take what you're saying on face value. So bully for you. That to me is sanity. It's like going, hmm, how are you really feeling? Yeah, you can spend a lot of time. One can spend a lot of time doing that. So can I share a little bit about myself here?

Well. I know it's weird, feels gross. But for a very long time, Chuck, I thought that I was a born and bred empath that I could understand what anyone was thinking and feeling. Maybe even better than they knew how they were thinking and feeling. And I finally, finally came to the hard truth

that I was wrong almost all the time. Right. And in figuring this out, this was really jarring. And it took a little while for me to really, for this to sink in. But once I figured out that I'm actually terrible at reading, engaging other people's thoughts and feelings, it was one of the most liberating things

that's ever happened to me because I just stopped. I stopped. And I realized how much of my life I've been walking around wasting, just thinking about what people really think or do people really like me? They probably don't or do they or what did they mean by that look or whatever.

And just taking people in life on face value is so much, it's just, it occupies so much less of your mind on any given moment. It's just great. That's my prescription. Stop trying to figure out what other people are really thinking and feeling. You should have just asked me a long time ago.

I would have told you, I was like, you're terrible at that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I would have listened. You know, it took a little while, but I- Everyone has to walk through their own doors, you know what I'm saying?

That is well put, man. You're a stoic sage. So cognitive distortion is a phrase you hear pop up a lot when it comes to assessing another person's emotions. And these are these inaccurate thoughts that you have in your brain. Sometimes they leave to negative thinking or encourage that.

I think probably most times, that's probably the case. And then polarized thinking is another bucket, I guess, since we're bucketing everything today, which is, you know, everything is great or everything is terrible. And the example they give in this article is, you know, simply, I mean, it's a little boy reading a girl's face that, you know, she doesn't like me.

But that's a kid in elementary school. You can apply this to anyone walking into a room and basically reading either the room or reading a person and saying like, you know, I don't like the way that that person just looked at me. That's bad. Right. And so I don't think they like me.

And those are both of those things that work. Cognitive distortion and polarized thinking. Right. Which I think polarized thinking is a type of cognitive distortion. I think that's the umbrella term for that kind of thing, right? Yeah, that makes sense.

So, yeah, I think this is kind of where you get to why a lot of people are terrible at guessing or get their guessing wrong, especially when it comes to what other people are thinking and feeling is that your guesses, whether you realize it or not, are actually colored and come through a lens of your past history, right? Yeah.

So like if you were raised in a house where people, your family members are really critical of you and one another, if you see two people in a corner, like kind of like having a quiet conversation but laughing too, you're probably gonna think they're laughing at you, even though they may not even be paying the least bit of attention to you. Yeah, sure.

But because of the history of how you grew up, that's what you're gonna guess at, right? Whereas if somebody was raised in a house where they were instilled with a lot of confidence and like a great sense of humor, that person might just think, man, they must be talking about something hilarious. I wish I knew what the joke was.

Or they might have so much confidence and sense of humor, they might even walk up and engage them and say, what are you guys laughing at? Right, huh? And if they go, nothing, never mind. Then you may be onto something. Right, but there was this blog post and man, I wish I could remember what the site was.

I apologize site, but it was basically like stop trying to read other people's minds was the gist of it. And they actually used that example. And they went on to say like, even if the person who thinks that they're laughing at them turns out to be right, that's not the worst thing that can happen to you. Yeah, it's fine.

Who cares, you know? Sure. Like some people aren't gonna like you. Some people will. It doesn't really matter. Like if somebody doesn't like you, you gotta have a little more self-confidence in the life that just completely derail your day.

Yeah. And you have to find it within yourself. Yeah, for sure. And some people get that through years of therapy. Some people are born with it. Some people never achieve it. Yeah, I think it's, you know, even if you are born with it,

I think you can lose it from time to time. If you're not born with it, you can gain it from time to time. But it's not something I think you have every moment of every day necessarily. Yeah, boy, people with just too much confidence are so annoying. They really are.

Because everyone wants that, you know? I think that's why it's annoying. Sure. Just like, man, I wish I could be that confident about everything. I hate that guy. And then you end up in a corner talking to somebody else about how much you hate

that person with so much confidence. Totally lost on the other person. So I have another theory that's not scientific at all. It's just my personal theory that when it comes to guessing things, your own, not, well, your past experience has certainly influenced it, but your own, how you are also influences.

Like. Oh, yeah. I think a liar is more apt to think people are lying to them. Oh, precisely, yeah. No, that's absolutely, I agree. I was gonna say that's absolutely true, but I agree with you.

Yeah, because who knows? It's just a theory. Right, but I mean, it's based in some pretty ancient folk wisdom, like that whole thing about how, you know, when you're pointing a finger at somebody, three fingers pointing at you, or judge not, lest you be judged. Like when you think about people in that way,

you think that they're doing the same thing to you even when they're not. It's your own hilarious little personal hell. Yeah, and it's not always that like, you know, I think that dude's ripping me off. Maybe you've been ripped off before and that's where that's coming from. Or maybe you've ripped someone off before.

But I bet one of the two has happened. I think though, more what you're talking about is our core character traits though, like being judgmental, or being a liar, or, you know, being a BS or something like that. Like when you do notice that though, what's great is there's so much room for growth. Oh yeah.

When you realize that that like, wait a minute, I think everybody's judging me because I'm so judgmental. I need to work on being judgmental. Yeah. What's almost magical is that when you realize that and you work on not being judgmental, you stop thinking that other people are judging you and your life is just freer.

Well, there are these psychologists and all over this article that Aliyah just rocked my world with that wrote and one of them was talking about these interpretations without evidence. And her advice, which is very simple and it seems like a no brainer though, is to like maybe just focus on things you know to be true and not inventing and surmising.

Like well, what if they're talking about this and you know, you're just kind of inventing all that. Like if you concentrate on what you know to be true, then life gets a lot simpler. Right, but that same shrink also pointed out that one of the big problems with guessing and especially guessing incorrectly is that we tend to forget that we're guessing at stuff.

We take our own guesses as fact. And since they can be so horribly wrong, if you're guessing that other people are judging you even when they're not, you're gonna basically walk around feeling judged all the time because you think that that's absolutely accurate when it's not necessarily. Fascinating.

All right, you wanna take a break? I was just gonna say the same thing. All right, well, we'll take a break and we are gonna come back, talk a little bit about guessing on tests, how to win at Rock, Paper, Scissors and apes and guessing. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and we live it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we've talked in esoteric terms about guessing so far. But I think what everyone really wants to know is how do I pass a multiple choice test, right? Because that's another kind of guessing. It's, you know, guessing runs the gamut

from emotional to stuff like this. There have been different theories over the years. Like, well, first of all, back in the day, and I guess until semi-recently, or like the SAT and ACT and other standardized tests, you would be penalized for an incorrect guess. I don't remember that, do you? Yeah.

Yeah, if you guessed something wrong, it's like a quarter point deduction, I think was the deal. Sounds familiar. I think I may have blocked it out. But they don't do that anymore. So now they say guess, guess, guess, if you don't know the answer. And, you know, that has run the gamut from always guess C

because it's in the middle to this one person. I don't necessarily agree with this one, but they say just choose the same letter every time, like always guess B, and you're gonna be right one out of every five times if it's A, B, C, D, E. Right, which makes sense though. I mean, if you jump around,

you lessen your chances every time, whereas if you use the same one, you have the same chances of getting it right every time. Yeah. But this guy wrote a... He actually did a little studying. Paula Poundstone? That wasn't his name, was it?

It was William Poundstone, her brother. Yeah, and he did actual research on, he studied tests and did a statistical analysis of 100 different tests ranging from middle school, high school, college, professional exams, driver's tests, firefighters, radio operators. He studied all kinds of tests. And he has four, what he calls four ways to outsmart

multiple choice tests, and a couple of these make a lot of sense to me. The first one he said is to ignore conventional wisdom, because you kind of always have heard teachers say, like avoid answers that say never or always or none. So like all of the above or none of the above, don't choose those, and he found the opposite to be true. Yeah, he found that none of the above

or all of the above are correct 52% of the time. Yeah, so if that's all for it up as an option, and you have, first of all, we should couch this with always try and deduce the answer with intelligence. Well, yeah, Poundstone says there's nothing, none of this is meant to replace knowledge of your subject, and you get knowledge of your subject by studying ahead of time. But he's saying if you're facing a question

on a multiple choice test, and you have no idea what the answer is, there's some techniques you can use to increase the likelihood that your guess will be right. Right, so all of the above or none of the above, if you really have no idea about that, I would say pick that one. That's weird though, because later on he says, so first he says ignore conventional wisdom,

but then later on the one piece of conventional wisdom I've always heard, he says is actually true. That is that you wanna choose the longest answer on any multiple choice test, right? Yeah. Because if you are saying something's true, most of the time you have to add qualifying language to make it absolutely true,

because you don't want somebody coming back and be like, well, that's actually not quite true. So when you start adding qualifying language into an answer, it gets longer than the other ones, and the test writers probably not gonna go to the trouble of making the wrong answers similarly long. Right. So the longest answer is very frequently the correct answer.

Yeah, I thought that one was a really good piece of advice. That's the one I always heard, that's really the only one I've ever known. Oh really? Did you remember Scantron sheets? Oh yeah. Did you ever, were you ever so recklessly wild that you like made a Christmas tree out of a test?

Did you ever have the gall to do that? Oh, I never did. I feel bad because there are kids that listen to this, but I had to take a test one time that was not for school, but it was something I didn't wanna do. I won't get into the details, but I made a big snake. Wow. And it was bad and I looked back and I'm ashamed of it.

I made a mockery of their process. And I wasn't that kind of kid. I don't know what happened. I was generally a good kid and a good student. I'm surprised to hear this. I know, but I feel so bad it still really stands out in my mind as what a jerk move that was on my part. I'm not only surprised though, Chuck,

I'm a little delighted. Good. I've outed myself. Yeah. All right, so one of the other pieces of advice from Dr. Poundstone, doctor? I don't think so. I just made him a doctor.

He's no doctor. He did write a book though. It's called Rock, Breaks, Scissors, Colon. Why does everything have to have a colon now? It makes it smarter. Rock, breaks, scissors, colon, a practical guide to out-guessing and out-witting almost everybody. One of his other ones is to look at the surrounding answers

because he's found that the correct answer choices are rarely repeated consecutively. So you rarely get two Bs in a row as the answer. So if you definitely know the answer in front of it and the answer behind it, then it's probably not one of those two. So if you've just whittled down your options. Yep.

Not bad. Good advice. No, not bad at all. What else? And the last one is got eliminate the outliers. If there's anything that seems like it doesn't really fit with the rest of the stuff, you can automatically get rid of that.

And then conversely, if there are two answers that seem extremely close, they probably can be gotten rid of as well because it's the same thing basically. So if you have say five potential answers and one of them doesn't fit with the other four, get rid of that, two of them are similar, get rid of those two, you're down to two,

you got a 50-50 chance of getting it right. Yeah, I thought the example they used in here was pretty fascinating because they didn't even use the question or give the question on this SAT practice test. They just gave the answer for ABCDE haphazard is to radical. Inherent is to controversial, improvised is to startling,

methodical is to revolutionary, derivative is to gradual. And if you just look at the right-hand side, you have radical, controversial, startling, revolutionary and gradual. And obviously gradual stands out is just being different than those other words. Right, radical, controversial, startling,

revolutionary, gradual doesn't make sense. Right, so that makes, I mean, that's really a good piece of advice. And then if you look on the left-hand side, for A and C, haphazard and improvised are really close. So he says you should eliminate those two as well. Yep. I wish I would have had this kind of advice for the SAT.

Well, I'll tell you what, that's an actual SAT set of answers. So if you ever run into haphazard, radical, inherent, controversial, improvised, startling, methodical, revolutionary and derivative gradual, you want to go with D, methodical, revolutionary. And we just got you into college.

Yeah. You ever wanted to take the SAT again? Like now? No. No, that's funny. I really don't, I've never wanted to. I've been glad since the moment I finished that test that I was done.

I only took it twice. I took it once and I was like, good enough. Yeah, I took it twice. I did not score very well the first time and I scored pretty well the second time. Oh, good. And I was like, I don't want to know which one is the real me.

I said, so I'm done. Yeah, I scored blandly the first time and I was like, that's fine. That's fine. That's fine. I'll get by on my wits and real life skills. Hey, look at you. You've done great.

I've done okay. So you want to talk about rock, paper, scissors a little bit? Yeah, I thought this was awesome. Our friends over at Motherboard, and we can say that because we used to have a short-lived column on Motherboard. Yeah, from Weiss. Yep.

They have a German outfit called appropriately Motherboard Germany and they ran a post called when at rock, paper, scissors every time with math, colon, what's with the colons. And they basically got into how using game theory, you can win at rock, paper, scissors basically all the time. Yeah, they did do the research, but they got together with some researchers

at the University of Hangzhou in China. And they got 360 students to pair up and play 300 rounds each of rock, paper, scissors. And then they tracked that. Please let us stop. And they said, no, this is communist China. Do it again, again. So they charted all those out

and then summarized it with some strategies. I don't know if this would, you would win every time. No, I mean, there's always like the, what they call in rock, paper, scissors, the October surprise where somebody just pulls something out of nowhere. What? So I mean, no, he's just a kid.

A dynamite? Right, yeah. Yeah. Those are offshoots. Remember kids that would do those. Oh, really? Oh yeah. Some interesting people.

Yeah, they would add other weapons basically. Well, the Motherboard article talks about, there's this other guy who came up with a whole different variation of it. That's like 25 or 26 different possible ones. I would never remember all of them. No, how could you? But at least one guy does.

No one can remember 25 things. Yeah, right. But so, okay, there's a few things. And this falls in line with learning how to get better at guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar. If you arm yourself with a little bit of foreknowledge, you can better guess at what your opponent's

gonna come at you with in a game of rock, paper, scissors, starting with that men tend to open a game with rock. Of course they do. Yeah. That's such a man thing. Rock smash, you know? Right, so if your opponent is a man and there's pretty good chance they're gonna come out

with rock the first time, go paper. Yeah, although they do say statistically, the opening of scissors is the one that will win you the most games, but I guess that's if you're not playing a man. I guess. They can counteract themselves or contradict themselves. Statistically, more women play rock, paper, scissors,

I guess. Is that true? Here's one, I don't think so. Yeah. Here's one, I've been making a lot of this stuff up in this episode. Here's one that I thought was kind of funny. Basically, this is like the Babe Ruth move.

Say what you're going to pick before the game, like I'm gonna pick scissors next and then the person's like, they're not gonna pick scissors, but you just psyched them out and when you throw scissors, baby, they're gonna be blown away, because they threw paper

and they thought you were gonna throw rock. Yeah, it's like the Princess Bride. And what part was that? With the man sitting at the place talking about the poison drink. Oh, yeah, yeah. Remember, like trying to get the other guy to drink the poison drink?

Man, he was so great. I always said, remember, yeah, he was awesome. Yeah. Inconceivable. What is another strategy to counterattack? So if you played scissors and your opponent plays rock on the first move, then they win, obviously,

the chance that they have confidence now in that move. So you might be able to guess that they will play rock again, because the chances are pretty high that they will do so. Then you anticipate that, play paper. So basically it says play the option that wasn't played in the previous round. Right, and you can also mirror your opponent, right?

So if you just want to round, play what your opponent just played, because they probably are thinking that you're going to play with the same gesture that you won with a second ago, really throws them off. So the idea is, they're probably going to play the same thing that they just won with, and if you won, don't do that.

Right, and that'll frustrate them too. That's the rock, paper, scissors version of why you hitting yourself. Right, that's like- Or you get into that thing when you're, you both throw rock and you throw rock again, you both throw rock and you keep, that's when the psychological warfare starts.

Like who's going to break first and go with paper, and then ideally you go with scissors, and you have thus outsmarted your opponent. Right, so interesting. So we were talking, you mentioned that we were going to talk about apes, right? Yeah, I didn't fully understand this. So maybe you can help me.

I don't know that science fully understands it. Okay. But basically, so let me give you an example here, okay? We were talking about how the brain, they're trying to figure out what regions of the brain are activated to form like this cascade of thought that results in a guess, right? One of the things I ran across was one theory

of how we guess what other people are going to do is through mirror neurons, where if we see somebody doing something, our mirror neurons are activated, and it puts us in a mind of how we feel when we're doing something, and we use that past experience and that current sensation of like the example

I ran across with somebody grabbing an apple to guess what the person's going to do next, right? So you would say, well, I know most times when I grab an apple, I take a bite out of it because I'm usually hungry when I grab an apple. That's after I rub it on my shirt to give it a nice shine. Right, well, that's just showboating. If you guess the person's going to rub it on their shirt

first before taking a bite, that's showing off. But that's so your mirror neurons are the part of your brain that's triggered that sets that off, right? That gives you the basis, the foundation for making a guess of what the person's going to do next. And then it gets run through, again, that lens of your past experience, your history,

everything from how you were raised, to what you do with apples, to what you've seen other people do with apples, and you come up with a short list of possibilities of what the person's going to do with that apple. And it includes rubbing on their shirt, taking a bite, putting it away in a cupboard, throwing it at a wall. And then you're going to pare down

based on what you know about that person, like is that person a neat freak? If so, they're probably going to put that apple away in a cupboard, which who does that? Except for neat freaks. And you may be right at your guess, right? Well, they're definitely not wall throwers, at least. Right, right.

You could whittle down your guesses. Yeah, so if, and that's how you, that's how apparently it's one theory for how we make guesses, starting from brain base, going through personal history and then making the guess. And what some research found was that, that ultimately what we're doing here is called theory of mind, right?

Where we have a capability of bestowing the idea that other people have thoughts and feelings on other people, right? That we, it's so common to us that we take it for granted that we can attribute mental states to other people. But that's a pretty significant thing. And for a very long time, researchers thought that just humans were capable of that.

But they found out that no, actually some apes, at the very least just apes can do the same thing. They can attribute mental states like thoughts and feelings and emotions to other apes. And that's, that shows like a higher form of reasoning. That was basically the gist of it. Oh, okay, that makes sense. And they found that true in chimpanzees,

bonobos and orangutans. That's pretty neat. It is. And one of the, so Sasha Baron Cohen, his cousin Simon Baron Cohen is one of the leaders in theory of mind. Oh, really? Yeah, we've talked about him before, remember?

Yeah. But one of the big areas that like influences is autism. That people with autism tend to have more difficulty attributing mental states and theory of mind to other people than people who don't have autism, right? Right. But one of the ways that they find this out, and I think one of the ways that they detect autism

in young kids is by attributing false beliefs to other people. This is like an early part of human development. And apparently apes are good at it too, where you are an observer, right? And you're watching a scene. And there's a little boy named Tommy. And Tommy comes in the room and he grabs the three musketeers

off of the kitchen counter and he walks over to a chest of drawers and he puts it in one of the drawers and walks out of the room. Well, Sally comes in and the narrator says, Sally is really hungry for three musketeers. She knows it was last on the table. Where is she going to look for the three musketeers? And people with theory of mind who are able to attribute

false beliefs to other people will say, well, Sally's gonna go look on the table, even though it's not there any longer because Tommy put it in the drawer. Right. You can know that Sally can believe something that's no longer correct. If you have trouble with theory of mind,

and specifically if you're testing for autism, that child, the child with autism might say, well, Sally's gonna go look in the drawer because that's where it is. They have trouble attributing false beliefs to people. What's true is true and everybody would know that. Right. And that's one way that they test for autism

and it has to do with theory of mind. Interesting. Isn't it? Yeah. And it all has to do with guessing. It all has to do with guessing, man. You got anything else? Well, just that Tommy should not be so touchy.

Well, yeah. And like share the three musketeers. Yeah. There's a lot to go around. Do you know why three musketeers are called that? I have no idea. My friend, it used to be a Neapolitan candy that came in three different pieces,

chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. And they just went with chocolate after a while. And kept the name because why not? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, that's it about three musketeers for today. And hey, Chuck, before we go to listen or mail,

I want to give a huge congratulations from us to Steven and Jane, our buddies, the bars, on the birth of their first born child. Yeah. How about that? Congratulations, you guys. Good looking baby, too. Yeah.

Because they're not all good looking. No. No, it's true. Especially like right after birth. And because they're New Yorkers, they walked home from the hospital. Right. Like how great is that?

I'm surprised they didn't take the subway. But yes. That's what you do. They are pretty New York. It's awesome. Yeah, big congratulations. That's wonderful. Congratulations, bars.

OK, well, since we said congratulations, bars, it's time for listener mail. Yeah, this one's a little long, but it's about registering to vote in Texas. Got an email from Monica and her story goes as such. 2013, a move from Alabama to Texas, had a really horrific time trying to register to vote. Before I went to the county clerk's office,

I looked online to check what I needed, downloaded the application so I could have it filled out in advance, took my Alabama driver's license, my lease, my birth certificate, and because I am divorced, my divorce decree stipulating my legal name change. You'd probably think that would be all she needed, right? Right.

No, no. But there, I was told that the lease was not sufficient, proved residency, and that I would need to bring two pieces of official mail, like utility bill, tax bill. So I leave after spending the better part of the day waiting in line, waiting for my power and gas bill to come in order to add the other documents. A couple weeks later, with all of the documents in hand,

I took another day off work, went back to try again. This time, the clerk looks over at the divorce decree and notices my name change, wasn't to go back to my maiden name. This was a name change that was ordered by a court in Alabama and explicitly spelled out in a notarized document that the clerk was disputing its validity. When I asked what the problem was, he said,

well, that's in Alabama. If you want to, that to be your official name in Texas, you have to go through the courts, have a draw at noon in the center of town with the judge. A shootout, what's that called? A shootout. A quick draw. Now he said, you'll have to go through the courts

and have it declared here in Texas. After literally blinking at him silently with my mouth agape for a moment, I said, you're telling me that the divorce in Alabama isn't valid because it was adjudicated in Alabama and that I am going to have to go through the whole process of getting a divorce again for it to be official in Texas. Is that correct?

His reply was, well, when you put it that way, it sounds silly, but yes. So I demanded to speak with a supervisor. The clerk got the supervisor who looked over everything and asked why I didn't just go back to my maiden name, which I replied, it doesn't matter what I changed my name to. You have the official document signed by a judge and notarized and this should be all you need

because of the Constitution of the United States that all judicial rulings and contracts that are valid in one state are valid in every state. At that point, the clerk walked off, the supervisor said, okay, gave my stuff to another clerk who simply smiled, entered my application and took my check, appointed me toward the desk where I could get my picture taken.

And then she closes by saying, imagine how this would have gone if I would have been an hourly worker, had less of an understanding boss and not known about the ins and outs of the Constitution or didn't have access to all these documents. Chances are I would have been disenfranchised driving around with an expired license.

These laws are absolutely created to suppress voter registration and participation and they work spectacularly well. Man. And that is Monica's story. Thanks, Monica. And welcome to Texas too, by the way. Yeah.

If you want to get in touch with us and tell us a real life adventure that has something to do with one of our episodes, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us, I'm at Josh M. Clark and at S-Y-S-K podcast on Twitter. You can hang out with Chuck at Charles W. Chuck Bryant on Facebook or at facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.