The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work by Robert H. Frank

Episode Date: February 5, 2022

Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work by Robert H. Frank From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, bold new ideas for creating environments that promise a brighter future Psychologists have long understood that social environments profoundly shape our behavior, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. But social influence is a two-way street―our environments are themselves products of our behavior. Under the Influence explains how to unlock the latent power of social context. It reveals how our environments encourage smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sexual predation, problem drinking, and wasteful energy use. We are building bigger houses, driving heavier cars, and engaging in a host of other activities that threaten the planet―mainly because that's what friends and neighbors do. In the wake of the hottest years on record, only robust measures to curb greenhouse gases promise relief from more frequent and intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and famines. Robert Frank describes how the strongest predictor of our willingness to support climate-friendly policies, install solar panels, or buy an electric car is the number of people we know who have already done so. In the face of stakes that could not be higher, the book explains how we could redirect trillions of dollars annually in support of carbon-free energy sources, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. Most of us would agree that we need to take responsibility for our own choices, but with more supportive social environments, each of us is more likely to make choices that benefit everyone. Under the Influence shows how.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with an airgate podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in i don't know why i still have to do all these years.

I don't know why people like it. It's the most craziest thing ever. But I don't know. People run up to me and go, is it Chris Vos? So there you go. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you. Go to YouTube.com, 4chesschrisvos, all the plugs.

Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvos, all our groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter. Follow the big LinkedIn newsletter. I think it's killing over there on LinkedIn. And also our 132,000-member group on LinkedIn as well. You definitely want to check that baby out. Anyway, guys, also go to all the groups that we have everywhere. We have an amazing author on the show, of course, as always. Robert H. Frank is on the show with us.

He's talking to us about his new book that just came out in paperback version, Under the Influence, Putting Peer Pressure to Work. Sounds like my high school. So he's going to be talking to us about his book and some of the details in it. Probably not high school related, or maybe, I don't know. We're going to find out. Let's put it that way. So he is on the show with us, and he is the H.J. Lewis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Cornell's Johnson School of Management.

His Economic View column has appeared in the New York Times since 2005. He received his BS in mathematics from Georgia Tech, then taught math and science for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal. He works as an MA in statistics and a PhD in economics, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to the show, Robert. How are you? Nice to see you, Krips. I'm doing well. My God, what a bio, man. Have you spent any time out of college or no, just kidding. That's quite the bio. So give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. The only presence I have online is on Twitter.

I'm at EconNaturalist, E-C-O-N-N-A-T-U-R-A-L-I-S-T, after the 2007 book of mine called The Economic Naturalist, where we try to use simple economic reasoning to explain puzzles from everyday life. There you go. There you go. And I think we're going to show a stack of your books. And I don't think I quite got that into the queue.

Because I haven't found it yet. I'm going to keep on looking for it. There you go. And people can find a whole stack of your stuff on Amazon, wherever fine books are sold, or probably Goodreads as well. We really like Goodreads. So let's talk about what motivated you to want to write this book on top of all your other books. You know, I think the idea that we're influenced by one another is certainly not a new idea or a mysterious one.

I think mostly, though, we think of it in pejorative terms, you know, parents telling their kids, don't follow the jerks, stupid behavior you see at school, use judgment. And that's, of course, good advice. But what we know, too, is that it's also an incredibly, or at least potentially incredibly powerful force for good. And we see that maybe one of the most vivid examples was the effect of cigarette taxation that we started imposing heavily in the 1980s. You know, cigarettes are one of the most addictive habits that's known to man. If the tax makes them more expensive, most people just go right on smoking. And so it was expected that the tax wouldn't have an effect. And initially, it didn't have

much of an effect, but there are always a few at the margin who are influenced by it. So maybe some didn't start who would have. Others who were about to quit, maybe quit a little bit quicker than they might have. That meant each and every peer group of each of those people had one less smoker in it. And that made everybody else in those peer groups either less likely to take up smoking or more likely to quit if they did smoke. And what we've seen is, you know, from when I started smoking in 1959, I was 14. Most of my friends were smoking by then. My parents smoked.

Now the smoking rate among adults in the U.S. is 13%. Oh, wow. And there's nobody who looks around and says, oh, that was a big mistake. Why did we do that? But the reason we did it was not the reason we gave for doing it. The reason we gave for doing it was that studies had just come out from Japan showing that secondhand smoke exposure contributed to various ailments. That effect is very minor compared to the effect of being a smoker. The real harm you do when you smoke is to make other people around you more likely to smoke.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I call that a behavioral externality. And it's a huge harm that you cause to other people. And, you know, some people would say, well, that's their responsibility to decide whether to copy you. And I like the sentiment that motivates that thought. But what about their parents? You know, most parents don't want their kids to smoke. They invest a lot of effort in trying to dissuade them from doing so. But a certain number of them will fail, and you've contributed that if you're a smoker.

So that's on you. Yeah, I grew up in that era, the end of that era, and, you know, there were doctors smoking in hospitals. Exactly, yeah. I don't know why you have bronchitis. I don't know. It could be something. It's probably just, I don't know, eat more meat. It was an interesting time, and I remember my grandparents being really angry

when the Surgeon General started putting labels on it, too. They were pretty angry when they saw the labels. They're like, yeah, labels. I don't know about that. Yep, it's tough. It was kind of the COVID. So you talk about in your book how different variations of how peer pressure has been used over the years to do this. Yeah, I think one of the most important contemporary examples is the effect of installing solar panels on your rooftop. If people can see them from the street, they have a bigger effect than if they're out back.

But the effect is way more powerful than anybody realized if if we see a new insulation go up at time zero then four months later there'll be a copycat insulation one that wouldn't have occurred anyway it's complicated the way researchers estimate that but it's a pretty standard method. They can say that this new one occurred just because people saw the first one. So after four months, we've got two. Those two spawn additional installations of their own over the next four months. So then we've got four. So just after two years, we've got 32 rooftops with solar panels on them that wouldn't have been there except for that first installation. And that's just in the neighborhood.

The people are in contact with family and friends in distant places. That's an even bigger influence. We don't measure what's happened there. But you think your own little contribution doesn't matter. Well, it matters way more than you realize just because of the exponential impact of peer effects. Yeah. You talk in the book about smoking, bullying, tax cheating, sex predation, and problem drinking, wasteful energy use, etc., etc.,

even some of our consumption habits of buying things. I know I remember the MAD campaign back in the days when, you know, used to, I mean, you know, I mean, you held a beer in one hand and drove with the other back in those days in the 70s. And, you know, the whole campaign to like, hey, this isn't like cool anymore to kill people and drive drunk. And D.A.R.E., the D.A.R.E. campaign, which I think backfired and turned into a, D.A.R.E. to smoke this, the smells are great.

I guess that one backfired. But yeah, there's been a lot of campaigns over the years. What are some of the other aspects that you found in your book and patterns of human psychology? You know, the one I think that surprises most people, and it was one of the influential early papers in this area, showed pretty convincingly that obesity is highly contagious. And the one really nice natural experiment that I think captured the idea nicely was that when the military would post a service person to a new location and the family moved there, if the obesity rate was 1% higher in the new place than where they'd been, family members were 5% more likely to become obese during their new post.

And nobody had any idea that it was that heavily contagious. What you do depends on what people around you do, really, to a much greater extent than we imagine. We're a very social creature. So I imagine we go eat together, we barbecue together. I know there's some places like somewhere in like the northeast somewhere but it's like a whole row of like restaurants that serve gravy and i guess gravy goes on everything there like i they even put gravy on gravy and and so you know i i could

imagine if i lived in one of those zones that that would become a problem for me. I don't already have problems. Yeah. Yeah. The diet is one of the things that's most socially contagious. People talk about, oh, we really ought to be eating less meat, but people eat what they eat. They grew up in a family that put meat on the table every day. Your friends and neighbors eat meat. You feel embarrassed if you don't serve meat when they come. But if there were even the slightest push in a different direction, lots of economists have recommended a carbon tax that would make meat-based products more expensive. It would have a very small effect in the first round, the same as the tax on smoking did. But gradually, people would start substituting in non-meat dishes for meat ones. And I think we'd get used to that and then it wouldn't seem shameful any longer to have a vegetarian dinner when company came.

And you'd see over time a huge effect of that. And as far as we're told, it would be better for us individually if we all ate a little bit less meat. So that wouldn't be a bad thing to have happen. Definitely. You know, it's interesting to me. When I go to the gym, I've been going now for about five and a half months. I'm not fully skinny yet, but I'm working on it. There's one of the shows, I think it's TLC or something, and they have these shows.

I think it's the Thousand Pound Sisters or something. And they have a few shows of people that are fighting, losing weight. And it's always been interesting to me sometimes you'll when you see families maybe at the store on that show everybody in the family is overweight and sometimes they like to go well it's genetics and then you see how they consume food and you're like no you you kind of have a learned pattern of eating way too much and really unhealthy foods from your parents usually and And, you know, your whole family just does that pattern and you need to stop. We do know that a tendency to gain weight is at least

partially heritable, but what's clear is that there's been no significant genetic change in the population over the last 30 years. And yet the population's gained an enormous amount of weight during that time. So it's, it's mainly the stuff we're eating. Yeah. Absolutely. Could be that fast food. I don't know. The soft drinks.

You know, the advent of that, the quick and easy food, and I know I was really bad. I mean, that's half the reason I put on most of my weight was soft drinks and fast food and living fast and hard and, and not really spending time cooking and properly preparing. But, you know, some of that comes from the way you race and that comes from patterns and sociability. What about, I don't know if you cover this in your book, but what about times where peer pressure is both good and bad? Cause like right now in our COVID world,

we're seeing peer pressure is good in influencing people. Hey, wear masks. Everyone, you know, think about other people. And then we're also seeing peer pressure from the anti-vaxxers and people from that angle. And there's like a fight going on. Yeah, both of those are testament to the pure power of peer pressure. You know, we're divided up more now than at any time in my memory into tribes. And what you think is the thing to do depends very heavily on what the people in your

tribe think is the thing to do. And yeah, I feel bad for the people who've come away from listening to people in their tribe and believing that vaccines could kill them or maim them or cause them to become infertile. I mean, I think those people are essentially blameless for being influenced by people in their tribe. That's what happens to people. You hear people in your tribe say something and you take it to heart. Who I do hold accountable is the people who are saying those things consciously who just know they're not true. I mean, the people at Fox News all know that the virus can kill you. They have strict rules requiring everybody to be vaccinated.

And yet they go on TV every night saying, don't get vaccinated, it'll kill you. Yeah. Well, if you can wreck, it'll kill you. Yeah. Well, if you can wreck an economy, then you can regain power. Evidently, that's the whole plan. And it's sad that there's, you know, social media. I don't know if you talk about this in your book, you know, how much social media has really driven some of this craziness of peer pressure on both sides. I mean, you know, I've been with my group, the smart group, pressuring people to, hey, man, we all have to come together and let's kumbaya on. You know, this isn't a selfish thing about you.

You can, you know, you can kill other people. I mean, if this thing were traceable, there would be manslaughter charges like me running someone over because I'm reading a text on my phone. But sadly, it's not. And that's the one inherent problem people have is they don't realize that this isn't about you you can you can murder people you can kill people and i guess a lot of these people don't think and there's the people who the darwin is who who like testing the darwinism rule of of you know but i you know i there's one thing i would say i think people are responsible if you're if you're if you're someone from the Dunning-Kruger crowd or you're just dumb,

it's your responsibility to read, to get educated, to learn about science. You have a personal responsibility in this world, not just to yourself or the fact that maybe you're a parent. Like seeing some of these parents die that didn't want to take the vaccine. There's been a couple of slate recently. There was a, there was an officer who was forced to retire, I think from the New York police department, five kids.

He wouldn't take the vaccine, dies like a month or two later of COVID. And that's very real. And I mean, you think about it, you're like, you're a father of five children that that you could do i mean this thing's a gamble but you know it's your job to sit and i've read like everything i possibly can about it educating myself ask questions watch videos from the cdc i mean i consume data but you know i guess lazy people are going to be lazy people and that's why darwinism is the thing yeah that that's a harsh view, though, I think, Chris, because the world's incredibly complicated. There's no way any one person knows nearly enough to navigate it successfully. If you didn't pay attention to what others around you were saying and doing, you'd be hopelessly unable to forge your way ahead.

So you've got to do that. Of course, it's better if you listen to smart people than dumb people. But as you say, Dunning-Kruger, if you're dumb, you probably don't realize you're dumb. And then you're going to listen to dumb people. It's the people who are telling that cop that he shouldn't get vaccinated who know perfectly well that he ought to get vaccinated, that you really want to hold your deepest contempt and reserve for, that's the people who I think really deserve that. Yeah. It's really interesting to me. There really should be more liability.

And I don't know, maybe after all this, the liability attorneys will finally kick in and try and go after people. You talk about climate change, I think, and greenhouse gases in the book and everything that's coming at us these days. Yeah, and I think one of the things that surprised me most when I was giving talks when the hardback edition of the book first came out was the idea that individual action on climate might actually make a difference. I'm an economist. Economists have historically argued that individual action is a waste of time. You know, if I buy a Prius, it won't make any difference unless everybody else does. And if they all do, then we'll get the effect whether I do or not. Each individual's contribution is such a small

part of the total that it essentially makes no difference. We need collective action like investment in green energy and a whole new grid for charging electric cars, things of that sort that will really solve the problem. Investment in carbon capture and sequestration, all those things are collective actions. But individual action matters too, and it matters in two ways. I mentioned one of them. When I put solar panels on my rooftop, that influences others to do it. There's a great Google project. It's called Project Sunroof, and it shows aerial photos of your neighborhood.

Type in your address, and it'll show you pictures from the air of houses around you. And they've put red dots on all the ones that have solar panels. And it's a striking set of images. I've looked at thousands of them. The rooftops that have red dots on them are almost invariably either next to or across the street from a house that also has one. The ones that don't have dots, they're all clustered together by themselves too. So you get a huge multiplier effect from individual action. That's one thing. But the probably, I think, more important effect of that is that when you take on little projects like that, it changes who you are. You know, the economists just assume

that you come into the world with fully formed preferences, enter the marketplace ready to go. No, that's not how it works. You become who you are. That was Aristotle's view. And you become who you are by what you do. And so buying a Prius, putting solar panels on your rooftop, that makes you into more of a climate advocate if you weren't already one.

And it makes you more likely to contribute to the campaigns of politicians who will enact the policies that we need to enact. It really does make a difference. Yeah. And I suppose education, too, because those people are talking to each other. Yeah, exactly. It's one conversation at a time. Yeah, that's how change happens. And that was my hope in writing the book. I did a chapter at the end on how you communicate with people who don't agree with you, which is one of the big challenges today. And there's been some research on that. And what scholars have found is that trying to persuade fresh about whatever the issue is.

I came across this on my own once in conversations I had with opponents of Obamacare. They like the fact that the insurance companies had to insure your pre-existing conditions. That was terrific. They hated the mandate. They all hated the mandate. And you just couldn't explain why if you didn't have a mandate, they couldn't provide the first benefit. But I finally just by chance asked somebody, what do you think would happen if the government required home insurers to sell fire insurance at affordable rates to people whose homes had already burned down. And you don't need to think long about that. Most people didn't.

Their eyes would light up. God, fire insurance companies would go bankrupt in a heartbeat if they required that. Why? Because nobody would buy fire insurance until the house burned down. Well, this guy with a pre-existing condition, that's the guy whose house has already burned down. The insurance company can't sell him insurance at affordable rates and stay in business unless it gets everybody else in the pool. Now, it's lucky that with fire insurance, you don't know if your house is going

to burn down. So everybody gets in the pool of their own accord there. But if you have a pre-existing condition, you know it, the insurance company knows it and they can avoid you. So without requiring people to be in the pool, you just can't cover the people with preexisting conditions. Yeah. I had a friend a decade before the bomb and care came out when I actually was a business partner and he had so many different heart problems. A lot of it was, a lot of it was inherited stuff with heart disease in his family. But he had had so many emergency rooms and visits to the hospital. He had trouble getting insurance because of pre-existing conditions. Yeah, exactly.

And it was a nightmare for him until I imagine I wasn't friends with him when Obamacare kicked in. But, yeah, it was really tough. So, you know, yeah, it's interesting how, you know, I've been a student of social media since I've been on it since the beginning and kind of mastered it and consulted with a lot of people on it. It's interesting how it's been used to do a lot of good and, of course, been sometimes in elements of misinformation to do bad, you know, you look at, I mean, I know I've used it on social media to kind of wield the social hammer around the, the peer pressure, but also the, you might get X, X, you might get kicked out of the tribe. I know sometimes I pressure people like I'm going to have to confront you because what you're doing is ignorant, stupid and spreading disinformation and very

destructive to the human race. And so unless you knock it off and sometimes I've been friend to people and use that peer pressure and then later they'll come back to me and go, yeah, I've I've screwed up and I actually read something. Yeah, no, that's that's absolutely appropriate to do. I think when when you when you have some influence that you can wield, taking the opportunity to do it is absolutely the right way to think about it. It's interesting how it spreads. So overall, I guess it's a good thing that peer pressure is used and how we use it? It's good and bad, of course.

The fact that people are influenced to smoke by seeing others smoke, that's a bad thing. The fact that when they see people quit, that makes it easier for them to quit, that's a good thing. So it's a fact of life that if you didn't pay heavy attention to what others were doing and feel at least an inclination to be influenced by that, you'd be unfit to make your way in the world. So we have to live with that. And I think the unexploited opportunity is to try to recognize that and harness it to our advantage. I mean, we've sort of left that sitting out there idle. I would argue that, I don't know if you're familiar with the term greenfield. This is a term I've heard venture capitalists use.

So the iPhone comes along, there was nothing like it ever before. Suddenly, its appearance in the market opens up hundreds of other new markets that couldn't have existed until the iPhone came along, all these apps and things that let us do things that we never dreamed of doing. You know, once we see that peer pressure can be harnessed for good, it's a green field in the public policy domain. There are all sorts of things we can do to harness that force to our advantage. We can help clean the climate up. We can help alter the diets that we eat. We can help alter the amount of exercise we get. There's all without any kind of overt coercion of anybody. And I know we're, I mean, we're social creatures, we're tribal.

And sometimes when you see like trends and stuff, which are kind of met be a form of peer pressure, we're like, Hey, everyone's starting to do this. Maybe I should do this. Hey, everyone's starting to eat organic foods. it wouldn't be trending unless a lot of people had decided to focus on it and if they focused on it maybe i ought to focus on it too you know that's totally rational as a chain of reasoning yeah i mean i know that when the mad campaigns rolled i mean you're like hey i should definitely contribute more to the tribe society and and maybe not drink and drive and be socially responsible and and you know you you start being more you know what's interesting to me is is are the people is everyone pretty much tuned into the tribe and these sort of peer

pressure trends or are there some people who really are like i'm not doing what the group's doing i'm going the other way oh sure I think there are variations in every personality trait. So some people are just by nature followers. Others are much more independent minded. But I think everybody is a follower to at least a certain extent. Some people may be more selective about whom they follow than others. But if you didn't follow, look, there's an example I talk about in the book that makes everybody think what kind of idiot would do that. But if you think about it, are you old enough to remember the old Alan Funt candid camera episodes?

He was a psychologist who would put people in these odd situations and film them. That was a great show. So he has a film from the 70s where he puts an ad in a paper describing this terrific job, high pay, no requirements. You don't have to have had any experience or previous jobs related to it. So of course, lots of people wanted to interview for it. He would schedule interviews. So the film shows a guy arriving for his interview. He's ushered into a waiting room. There are four other guys sitting there waiting. He's told to sit down and wait for what comes

next. So he does. And the camera shows them all sitting there impassively. Then it goes to other scenes and the movie progresses. Keeps coming back. They're still sitting there. Nothing's happening. Finally, they come back one last time and zero in on the candidate's face. He doesn't know that the other four guys are confederates of Alan Funt. He looks suddenly alarmed in close-up. Then the camera pans back and we see why he's alarmed. It's that the other four have at no signal stood up and are taking off their clothing. And he seems more and more troubled and then finally he seems to shrug and he stands up and he takes off his clothes too and the scene ends they're all five of them standing there naked waiting for what comes next

he said i wouldn't do i wouldn't have done that no way but i didn't i don't need a job maybe he needed a job badly the other guys got there first if anybody knew what was going on they did he didn't so how would you say he was a fool to to follow their example i mean maybe he was maybe he wasn't yeah five people taking on the clothes that sounds like fridays at my house i'm just kidding that's thursdays so so i like how I caught that one at the end. So what's that experiment they did in the 60s where they replicated Nazism and they faked, I think it was done in New York, they faked a person who was getting shock treatment by the push of a button or a dial. Yeah, that was the Stanley Milgram experiments.

They were done at Yale. So Yale undergraduates, presumably kids from good families, not nasty people by temperament. The experimenter instructed them to push a button that would give a shock to the subject in the adjacent room. You could see him through a glass if he got a question wrong on a quiz. And they kept giving shock after shock. The shocks got more intense with each additional one. And the subject in the next room was writhing in agony after a few of these. And yet, the kids kept on giving the shocks. You watch the footage of this, you say, no way would I have done that. But most of the kids did do that. So maybe you need to wonder what you would have done in a situation like that. Here's this authority figure. The people weren't really getting shocks, but they've been trained to simulate how a person would react to an extreme shock like that. And look real, people still gave the shocks. Yeah. And you see that in some of the atrocities that have happened in this world. I'm sure the Nazis, you know, the escalating stuff that they did, some of the different patterns that we've

had, you know, when Mao took over China and the attacks on professors and schools, you know, the escalating peer pressure. a pure example of peer pressure yeah yeah yeah the and so yeah it can go both good bad and ugly and so hopefully we always learn from that use it for good what else have we touched on in your book that we want to tease out oh goodness uh the There's a chapter on the sexual revolution, which I think is of interest generally. That's always an interest to me. Yeah. Why did it suddenly become acceptable to have premarital sex in the late 60s? And I think the popular explanation is that that's when oral contraception became available. Suddenly women had an ability to control their own fertility. But there had been effective birth control long before that.

And there's a reasonable case to be made that it was primarily the fear of being thought to be an unacceptable person that was the major inhibitor of premarital sex. And that was an impression that was easy to maintain as long as few people did it. But what also changed in the mid-60s was that there was a huge imbalance in the dating pool then. And that traced back to the fall in births just before the end of World War II. There were very few births then. Right after World War II, there were a huge number of births. So when men and women were trying to pair off in 1967, the normal pattern would be 22-year-old men pairing with 20-year-old women. Typically, women pair with men who are a couple of years older than them. In that cohort in 1967, men were in short supply as a result of the plummeting birth rates in 45. Women were in

abundant supply. And so in that environment, the negotiation between the sexes tilted very heavily in favor of what men wanted and away from what women. Men wanted premarital sex. Women wanted to withhold that. The bargain shifted against women in that period. Once it shifted and enough people started having premarital sex, which was, of course, reinforced by the availability of the pill, to be sure, then it was no longer possible to say you weren't a nice person if you were having premarital sex. And that was, in fact, the major inhibition against that. Yeah. I know out of that came the rise of feminism. And, you know, now we see, in fact, I just came across a term the other day called pro-sex

feminism i didn't know that was a thing but but that's like basically says hey run around and be like guys and and genetically there were reasons why we didn't do that in the prior eons of history yeah it's it's an interesting issue a couple of feminists in that chapter who have differing views on this some argue that this is the hookup culture is a great thing for women. Others say, no, this cuts against who we are, and surveys that we've done show that we're very unhappy about it. So it's not a settled issue. Yeah, and overriding biology that's been the state of man.

I'm a single guy i've been engaged what twice i just couldn't afford the divorces so i never got married and you know i'm not rich but that night i never got tired of being happy but so i never settled down but but no i see that on my dating pool it's really interesting it's like a whole genetic date thing when i when i see what's going on right now and and how it's how it's turned out in this 60-year, three-generational experiment of feminism. And it originates from that. But yeah, there's so many people I see online now that they really think that men and women

are the same biologically. I mean, there's some feminists who have actually argued that men menstruate as well. And you're just like, well, I don't know. I'll let you know when that happens, I guess. You know, it's clear, I think, Chris, that attitudes do evolve over time. But I think there is some evidence in favor of an enduring difference in attitudes on the average. Yeah, there's all sorts of variation. There's a very interesting experiment that I quote in the book. An attractive man or woman in the two cases approached students on a

campus and asked three questions. Would you like to have dinner with me? Would you like to come with me to my apartment? Would you like to have sex with me? So an attractive man asked women on campus those three questions. An attractive man asked women those three questions. An attractive woman asked men those three questions. More men were willing to have sex with the women who asked than were willing to have dinner. Over 50% were not a single woman wanted to have sex with the stranger who asked in that survey. Is that a difference between the sexes that's coded in our genes or culturally inculcated? I mean, nobody's really sure, but it does seem to be an approximate

difference that hasn't vanished despite all the environmental and cultural changes that we've been through. Yeah. And I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, there's different variations of feminism and I'm supportive of women who want to work in the environment. But like I've, I've heard from some mothers that, you know, maybe they stay at home or maybe they work part time, you know, getting shamed with peer pressure because, oh, you're not out in the world. And why are you starting a family so young? You're what, you know, getting shamed with peer pressure because, oh, you're not out in the world, and why are you starting a family so young? You're, what, you know, a lot of that peer pressure.

And it's interesting. It's crazy. And then you have some cultures that do heavy mate guarding or heavy control of young women, and that's a form of peer pressure. So kind of interesting how our whole culture works from a tribal aspect. Maybe the biggest ticket item of all is how what our peers do influences how we spend our money. And what the biggest change in the economy has been ever since I've been an economist working on economic issues, occurred in about 1970. People debate when exactly it happened.

But before then, incomes grew at about the same rate up and down the income ladder. Maybe even the people at the bottom saw their incomes grow a little more rapidly. But ever since 1970, virtually all the income gains have gone to people at the top. The people in the middle have had virtually no significant gains. The people at the bottom have even lost ground in hourly wage terms. And what's happened is that people at the top are naturally buying bigger. Everybody does that when they get more money. So they're building bigger mansions, buying bigger cars. There's no evidence at all that the people in the middle are offended by that. They seem to like pictures of the rich and famous.

They think they'll be rich someday too. But it's the people just below the top who are influenced by what the people at the top spend. Maybe now it's the custom to have your daughter's wedding reception at home. So the guests leave that party thinking, oh, we need a ballroom that holds 200. They build bigger. Their guests leave a dinner party and say, we need a bigger house. We need a dining room that'll seat 18, not just 12. So they build bigger. And it cascades all the way down the income ladder. The median new house is about 50% larger than it was in 1970, despite the fact that the median earner in hourly terms doesn't earn any more than that. Why are we spending more?

You spend more because people like you are spending more. Why are they spending more? Because the people above them are spending more. Ultimately, it stops at the very top because the people at the top have so much more money. Wow. Yeah. You know, we see that with, oh, what is it on Instagram? Girls will go on Instagram and they see, hey, you know, so-and-so buys, you know, Louis Vuitton or whatever, Louis Vuitton, whatever the latest thing is. And when they do that, they'll, you know, people go, oh, I should buy that too. And yeah, definitely affects spending habits.

Cass Sunstein, a researcher I greatly admire, has a study about the effect of being on Facebook. The study paid people to get off Facebook for 30 days. And at the end of 30 days, they were significantly happier by conventional measures of well-being. And part of the explanation seemed to be that the portrait of others that people see online is not really an unbiased portrait. It's the highlights of their experience, the good things that happened in their life. They don't see all the things that brought people down during the week. And so everybody leaves with the impression, well, wow, I'm doing miserably compared to everybody else. And that makes them unhappy.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. They're like, yeah, I, you know, so much. I think I heard someone say one time that we're a society where everyone's happy and everyone posts these pictures of my perfect life. And when, you know, archaeologists dig it and they're like, you know, hey, they're like, We're a society where everyone's happy and everyone posts these pictures of my perfect life. And when, you know, archaeologists dig it and they're like, you know, hey, they're like, wow, these guys were, this was a society. They were happy like all the time. And we really weren't.

So there's that. It's kind of interesting. So let's, anything more we want to touch on in your book before we. I did succeed finally in sending you a picture of my stack of books. I found it in the clutter and emailed it to you. I don't know if it's any convenient way. You said I should plug my stuff. That's my attempt to do that. Let me try and show the screen.

I've been trying to convert it to a PDF, which I guess is what StreamYard wants. But I think there might be another way to accomplish that. Give us your plugs as I'm putting that together, .com so people can look you up on the interwebs. Sure. Yeah. On Twitter, which is the only place you can find me in social media, I'm at Econ, E-C-O-N, Naturalist, N-A-T-U-R-A-L-I-S-T. Okay. And let me share. I think if I share a screen here, this will take and do it. Actually, that's the wrong screen. Let's see if that will flip to this.

And will that give the screen that I want? Let's go ahead and hit share for fun and see what happens. There's, let's see. I'm not sure if that's going to. There's the screen there. Let's see if we can flip to the books here. Does that show up on the screen there? I'm seeing the same thing I've been seeing the whole hour. Streaming already is sharing your screen, it says, so I'm not sure what we're doing there, but people can go find it on the interwebs and everything else. I'm not really sure how we can get that right.

They asked for a PDF, and I've been trying to convert it to PDF, and I don't know. I can't get this done on the fly. But thank you very much for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. What a pleasure, Chris. Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed talking with you.

There you go. There you go. Thanks, Simon, for tuning in. Be sure to go check out the book, Under the Influence, Putting Peer Pressure to Work, by Robert H. Frank. You can get that wherever fine books are sold. Also go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button.

Also go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places. Thank you for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time. You like that peer pressure there at the end?