The One You Feed - Kurt Gray

Episode Date: May 10, 2017

Photo Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office     Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Kurt Gray Kurt Gray is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his BSc from the University of Waterloo and his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. He studies the mysteries of subjective experience and asks such deep philosophical questions as: Why are humanoid robots creepy? Why do ghosts always have unfinished business? Why do grandma's cookies taste the best? And why do adult film stars seem stupid? His research suggests that these questions—and many more—are rooted in the phenomenon of mind perception. Mind perception also forms the essence of moral cognition. In science, he likes to wield Occam's razor to defend parsimony, asking whether complex phenomena can be simplified and understood through basic processes. These phenomena include moral judgment, group genesis, and psychopathology. He has been named an APS Rising Star and was awarded the Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Research.  He was also given the SPSP Theoretical Innovation Award for the article "Mind Perception Is the Essence of Morality." His work has been generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation. He recently published the book,  The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters In This Interview, Kurt Gray and I Discuss... His book, The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels and Why it Matters People who we perceive as having a mind similar to ours The uncertainty about the minds of others The two fundamentally different factors in how we see minds Agency: the capacity to act and to do Experience: the capacity to feel and to sense The moral responsibility connected to these two things Thinking doers Vulnerable feelers Didactic completion The objectification of women That child abuse often occurs with parents who view their children as having a higher agency than they are capable of having The danger of inferring intention Moral typecasting That we treat our heroes poorly The Just World theory How we rationalize our behavior That we give more sympathy to people who are at a greater distance from us The poorer you are, the more likely you are to believe in God Seeking control as a motivation How to increase self-control The implementation intention study The when and the then and how it takes away self-control entirely What the self is from the perspective of his work The analogy of particle board for the self The way people respond morally is the most essential to our perception of who they are (vs physical traits) That we perceive the world rather than understand it directly     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

God is good, but he must have had a reason for this. He did it for a good reason, because people need reasons for random things. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other

people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. floor, what's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Kurt Gray, a professor of social psychology at UNC Chapel Hill. Kurt received his PhD from Harvard University and is the author of The Mind Club, Who Thinks, What Feels, and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting.

Again, that's oneufeed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting. Again, that's oneufeed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. Hi, Kurt. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. Your book is called The Mind Club. Who thinks, what feels, and why it matters. And this is one of those that I could probably go a couple hours on, but we won't. But before we get into the book, let's start like we always do with the parable of the wolves. So there's a grandfather who's talking

with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, so it's quite relevant because I study moral decision-making, right? How we treat others in our daily lives. And so for me, that parable really means how we perceive others, whether we're kind to them or cruel, really hinges on whether we

see them as having the same kind of mind that you or I have. Take, for instance, someone who just immigrated. So I've been thinking about immigration a lot because I just immigrated. I just got my citizenship. And I'm sitting in this room with all these other immigrants. And I think many of these people may not speak English, but I think they have the same kind of mind as I do. And that means I have to treat them as I might treat my friends. I think that's an interesting way to look at it. In your book, you talk about sort of dehumanization and different ways that we make people unlike ourselves. But at a much more basic level, you know, your book is called The Mind Club. And you're saying that, you know, The mind club is those people who,

to your point, have a mind that's similar to ours and that we sort of include in that collection. And you say that basically we see people or we see minds in terms of two fundamentally different factors. What are those two factors? The title for the book that never happened that I wanted was called The Zombie Paradox, which I think is flashier, less descriptive, but a little flashier. And the idea behind that paradox is, look, you look out at other people and it seems obvious that they have a mind like you do. They look the same, you know same eyes same mouth whatever same everything but you can't actually ever know whether they do have the same mind as you do because you can't experience their experiences directly right if your wife tells you listen i love you she probably feels the same kind of love that you feel towards her but like how can you ever really know right right you can't ever really get inside the head of someone else.

You have to kind of like guess or infer that they have the same mental states that you do. And so there's many philosophers who talk about the zombie problem. It's hard for me talking to you even. I don't even know if you have a mind. You could be a zombie just programmed to recite back words that sound like they fit the things that I say. So there's really this uncertainty about the minds of others And that's why we can choose to perceive minds and others or to withhold those perceptions So let's talk about what the two fundamentally different factors are in how we perceive minds

So one factor we call agency, which is the capacity to act and to do. And the other factor is called experience, and it's about feeling and sensing. And the best way to kind of understand these is to imagine that you are making a robot. You're going to make a robot, and it's going to go out in the world and try to do stuff. And what you're going to want is that robot to be able to act upon the world. So you do stuff. And what you're going to want is that robot to be able to act upon the world. So you probably give it like hands with little robot claws and would move things around and they open doors. And you would also want that robot to sense things in the world. If it got too close to the stove, you want it to back up. If it got too close to a car,

you want to back up so it didn't get hit. And so experience is really that sensing of the world, right? Pain and pleasure and fear, these kind of emotions that drive us to do things. And agency is about acting and doing. And so those two things together are typically what we think makes a mind. Right. But you describe a lot of times where we tend to put things, things being people or robots or animals or pick your thing, that we tend to put things into one or other of those categories. And that that distinction of which category we put them in has a lot to do with our morality and how we see what's right and wrong based on those two categories? Typically, agency and experience are things that go together. So you and I have both agency and experience, whereas the table has neither. But as you

mentioned, there are things that I only have one or the other. So robots are often perceived to have lots of agency so they can drive a car, but they can't feel, right? If you think of a self-driving car, you're not like, but is the car really, does it love me the same way, right? That I like really love my fancy car. Conversely, there are some things that really only have experience and not agency. So I just had a baby a few weeks ago. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And, you know, I perceive the baby as having lots of experience, right? She cries often. She's always hungry, right? But it's not clear that she can really do anything except wildly hit herself in the

face, right? And so the kind of mind that we give an entity, whether more agency or more experience, as you mentioned, changes how we treat them in a moral sense. So with agency, we infer moral responsibility. If a car driving itself kills a bunch of children, we think that's a bad car, right? We hold it responsible. But if I gave my daughter a gun, she's three weeks old, right? And she's like, kind of, you know, here in America, now that I'm American, I think, you know, I should buy my daughter a gun. She's three weeks old, right? And she's like, kind of, you know, here in America, now that I'm American, I think, you know, I should buy my daughter a gun. So I give her a gun and, you know, someone gets shot. No one thinks she deserves a lot of responsibility, right? She's

only three weeks old because she has only experience and not agency. But conversely, we care a lot about protecting her, right? So I worry a lot about protecting her from harm. And I worry less about protecting an autonomous car from harm. And so agency gives responsibility. Experience gives protection from harm. Yeah. Another way you refer to these is that we have thinking doers. So things that think and do things.

And then we have vulnerable feelers. So the thinking doer is the robot or a CEO of a corporation or somebody very strong. And the vulnerable feeler is, to your point, a small child or a puppy, or, you know, things of that nature. And, and so you talk about how a lot of our moral outrage is really driven by, I think you call it dyadic completion? Yeah. So when we make moral judgments, you know, the prototype of morality is really pairing a very clear agent or thinking doer with a very clear victim or a vulnerable feeler, right? So prototypes sound very technical, but if you think of a prototype of a football player, you think of

a really big guy, right? And maybe not someone who's like four foot 11 and so forth. And when you think of someone immoral, what you think of is typically someone who has lots of thoughts, the thinking doer, harming a vulnerable feeler. So a ceo i think the example we use is a ceo kicking a dog but the opposite a dog kicking a ceo i don't even know how that happened right right a little nip of the ceo that's not really that immoral right so it's you know when we really get upset is when entities like corporations or presidents or CEOs harm something very vulnerable like a baby or a puppy and so forth. Yep. So help me understand how these things that we give mind to, what are some of the day-to-day ramifications of the way that we tend to see the world, these thinking

doers versus vulnerable feelers? Yeah. So, you know, as you mentioned moral outrage, that's certainly important. So, imagine that you have a child, right? And the kid does something to make you angry. So, throws up on you or keeps crying or if you have an older kid, brings something very expensive. Now, if you think that your kid is a thinking doer, right, then you're kind of justified in some sense to get angry at the kid. And so maybe you shout at the kid or say, well, how could you do this? But if you think the kid just is a vulnerable feeler and doesn't have this kind of capacity for intention, right, then you're less likely to get upset. And actually, research shows that people who kind of abuse their very young children

are those people who inflate the kind of minds they give to their kids and see much more thinking and responsibility. So, certainly very important. And conversely, if you deny thinking and doing to your colleagues, for instance, So there's work on objectification and how sometimes, particularly it's been studied when men perceive women, right? So some of the stuff I talk about in the book is like objectification. So if you are a man and you're working with a woman

and you just see her in terms of her clothing or her body, you strip away her capacity for thinking and doing and then you don't see her as worthy of a promotion, right? Because she's just a body in a skirt. Right. She's a vulnerable feeler in that case. That's right. Exactly. Yeah. I think it's really interesting because one of the things we talk about on this show often and that I talk about with some of the coaching clients I work with is that assuming intention from people is a really easy way to

get yourself into trouble. And what you're talking about here is a version of assuming that intention. It's assuming capability, maybe not as much as intention, but it really does matter when we look at why we think somebody does something. It has so much to do with how we perceive what that thing was. Absolutely. And in fact, people do perceive intention, not just the capability. So one example we talk about in the book is this idea of when there's kind of suffering, right, to kind of match this prototype of morality in our head, when there's a vulnerable feeler, we automatically infer the presence of a thinking doer. So if you walk across a street and you see a child crying there, then your first thought was like, I should help this kid. But your second thought is typically who did this to the kid? And so I think of this all the time when I'm driving. So I lived in

Boston for a long time. I'm like used to aggressive drivers, but I also get angry when I drive. And so, you know, when someone cuts you off, you don't think, oh, they must be in a hurry. I hope they get where they're going on time. Right. Your thought is like they screwed me over on purpose. They're trying to kind of mess with me or something like that. And so, right. People infer intention when they shouldn't. Here's the rest of the interview with Kurt Gray. So what is moral typecasting? So moral typecasting is, well, I guess we can just start with... I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus does tom cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No, really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What typecasting is, because the listeners will probably be familiar, right?

So typecasting is when you stick people in these enduring roles in films, right? So Leonard Nimoy, it's hard to imagine him as like the fun-loving uncle, not only because he's dead now, but also because he was Spock, right? He's like very rational. And child actors, it's often hard to think of them as like thinking doers because they're always the kind of victims of things. And so extending the kind of general typecasting into the moral domain, it works with Spock and child actors too because we typically perceive others to be enduring thinking doers. Only the kind of doers of moral deeds or only as vulnerable feelers, only the recipients, only victims. And so if you think of an orphan, right, we often think of the orphan suffering and being mistreated, but it's hard to think of the orphan as really being

responsible for evil, right? Likewise, if we think of someone like a ceo who's always doing things it's hard to think of him or her as being a victim ever right so that's really what typecasting is and lots of interesting things come out of the view of looking at the world through this view in the book you talk about psychopaths right and psychopaths are sort of the ultimate in a doer who doesn't think or feel. However, if you reflect upon the psychopath as somebody who biologically was unable to develop those things through no fault of their own, it changes the way even legally we tend to look at those people. Yeah, psychopaths are a really interesting example because our gut, right, is certainly that they are pure thinking doers, pure agents. And in movies like American Psycho, right, Christian Bale is depicted as like this rational, calculating, right, really evil guy who's just trying to get what he wants.

And so we're like, well, let's put him in jail for a long time. But at the same time, you know, as you say, psychopaths are born that way. And so imagine, you know, someone I think the example is in the book is someone's born without hands and they're just they're a terrible piano player. Right. I mean, because they just don't have the fingers to kind of articulate on the keys. Right. We don't put them in jail for being a terrible piano player because they're just born without fingers. But psychopaths just happen to be born without empathy. And yet exactly what we do is we put them in jail. And so, you know, I don't have a good answer to this, but certainly you kind of grapple with this idea of like, well, they do these terrible things, but is it really their fault?

Well, it's not clear. Yeah. I was having this conversation with somebody the other day about pedophiles and how, you know, the incidence of people who are pedophiles having been abused themselves is so high. A lot of us think of it as the worst crime. You know, to your point, you've got the vulnerable feeler, the child, and it is. And yet, if you look at it from the perspective of they were made into that by the abuse they suffered, then what do you do? What's the right answer? I think addiction is another one of these, and I'm a recovering addict, but the way you look at addiction can be very much in this way also. And those two examples perfectly illustrate

typecasting. So with a pedophile, you either think of them, and usually in pairs, right? So you either think of there's the pedophile with a child or you think the pedophile as a child being abused by someone else. And so you really get this. There's always the kind of thinking doer and vulnerable feeler. It's just the question is, is the person in question? Which one are they? And that dictates hugely how you treat them. Another interesting thing that comes out of this is that often as a result of this, we will treat our heroes poorly. Why is that?

Yeah, so it's a pretty interesting thing. So, you know, there's this idea of karma. Good people should have good things, right? Just desserts. And so what that suggests is that the more good you do, the more good you should receive from the world, but also from other people. And yet typecasting suggests that maybe it's not so simple. So when you think of people who do good all the time, you think of them as being thinking doers. And that means, because of typecasting, you tend not to think of being that sensitive to pain. So think of Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama. Maybe people think this way about Obama as well, right? So here's someone who's done a lot of good. It's hard to think of them as suffering, or it's hard to think of Mother Teresa as really being sensitive to pain,

or the Dalai Lama really being hungry or embarrassed even. And what that means is that we're more likely to discount their feelings even when those feelings are pain yep and so we ran one study where we asked people to imagine you know how much pain did mother teresa feel if you stepped on a piece of glass right people think that mother teresa barely feels any pain i'm stepping on a piece of glass because she's mother teresa right she's a saint She's got like all this kind of power teller. And they chose, although very grudgingly, they would give it to Mother Teresa because of that sense of she could bear it better. Yeah. So that's a study I ran a few years ago, and it's totally right. Like people aren't happy

to give Mother Teresa pain. They're not like, yeah, take that, Mother Teresa. Like you've done all that's good, and now I'm giving you pain. But there's a sense of like well if someone has to get hurt i guess she can take it and so oftentimes people are like well you know mother theresa devotes her life to helping the poor and so maybe she just wants to suffer pain but if you think back to your workplace or your marriage or your group of friends what this means is that the more you kind of are a mensch and help others, right, you grudgingly help others, the more likely they are to give you more suffering. Yeah, exactly. No good deed goes unpunished, I think is the saying that comes out of that. Exactly. So we're describing this moral typecasting where we see people who are suffering as vulnerable feelers.

But we also have a just world theory, right, where people think that if you're suffering, you must have done something. So how do those two work together? They sound sort of opposite. So what causes one of those to be in effect or the other? Yeah, that's a great question, because certainly they do see opposite, right? Moral typecasting suggests that, you know, when others are in pain, we sympathize with them. And just world suggests when others are in pain, we think they did something to deserve it. And it turns out what determines typecasting from just world is whether you had a hand in their suffering or whether you think you had a hand. So I ran one study a few years ago that involved torture, the fun things you can do

in the lab as a social psychologist. I couldn't actually torture people, but basically people sat in a room while they listened to someone hold their hand in ice water. And the person, you know, was like, oh my God, oh my God, it's so cold. Can we please take this out? And the expander was like, no, keep it in there. So, you know, they were clearly in some pain. And what we manipulated was whether the person had met the person who was suffering, right? Whether the participant had met the torture victim, in other words, or whether they hadn't met the torture victim. And after you meet someone, you have this sense of closeness and then you feel this kind of like responsibility for their suffering, right? You're like, I could go over to this room right now and stop it and protect them,

but I'm not doing that, right? So I'm kind of responsible. But if you don't meet them and you don't even realize that they're really next door, then there's nothing you could have done to prevent them from being tortured. And what we found was that if you feel responsible, if you met them and you could have intervened, then you think their torture is deserved, right? Because I'm not the kind of person who stands by while others are tortured, so they must have deserved it. On the other hand, if you're just hearing about it and you're not even sure if you could intervene, then you think, well, they're being tortured, they must be innocent, that poor, poor person. Yeah. You say that when people were physically, temporally, and psychologically distant from the

torture, they linked more pain to less guilt. So if we were distant from them, and then you also say we were all conscientious objectors until we pull the trigger when psychological process is then engaged to justify our behavior. Exactly. So it's easy for people when they read the New York Times or the Post or whatever, and they think, wow, that person did a bad thing and harmed that person. Like I could never do that because clearly, you know, this person is suffering and I'm not that kind of person. And yes, people who think suffering and I'm not that kind of person. And yes, people who think they're good people do bad things every day. And the reason we can do that and still live with ourselves is we rationalize our behavior and think, well,

I harmed them, but they must have deserved it. I think that's an interesting finding because you're saying that people that are distant from us, we are giving them more sympathy and all of that. And yet, you know, one of the things that people think is often a problem in getting people to, say, help end poverty is the fact that people are so physically distant from us. What's your thought on that? You know, I think both are true. And I think probably what drives it is just how salient their pain is to us. So in this study that I ran, right, the suffering of this other person was very salient. They were listening over headphones as the person was kind of moaning in pain. But when people are far away in another country or even

continent, right, we don't even confront ourselves with their pain, right? I see one more picture of a Syrian refugee and I just click close, right? I'm not even exposed to their pain most of the time. And so I think if we're really confronted with the pain as in our face as we are with someone suffering on the street right in front of us, then we would probably give just as much to Syrians, but we're not on an everyday basis. And that kind of distance allows us to be apathetic. Yeah. You make a couple other interesting points around who perceives God or who believes in God to a certain extent. And you say, the wealthy feel control and agency in their day-to-day lives and have little need for divine order. In contrast, those struggling with poverty face a number of

challenges in their day-to-day lives, and the comfort of a caring creator may serve to create order in an otherwise chaotic world. Yeah, so there's a long-standing finding in research literature that religiosity is negatively correlated with wealth. So the poor you are, the more likely you are to believe in God. As you kind of summarize, the reason for that is because God often serves as a proxy for us, right? I may not have control in my life if I'm poor, but I believe in God and I pray to God and God can do things for me. And one study we did, actually, it's not even just kind of a general feeling of lack of control, but really feeling like you're suffering in life. That really prompts these kind of perceptions of this intentional God.

So every time there's a natural disaster, what people say is that God intended it for some reason. And this seems kind of funny because you're like, well, but God's a really good guy. Why would he intend a natural disaster, right? I mean, God is good. He's defined as being good and full of love. And yet people need a way to kind of make sense of this. So they think, well, God is good, but he must have had a reason for this. He did it for a good reason, because people need reasons for random things. Right. The other thing I thought was interesting, you talk about how people were more likely to attribute mind to things if we are either lonely or if we are seeking control.

Can you help explain that a little bit more? or if we are seeking control. Can you help explain that a little bit more? Because this kind of gets to what we were just talking about in the last section there about God, because you're seeking some kind of control. Exactly, exactly. It's definitely a kind of general tendency that people have. So we often think of perceiving the minds of others as just something that happens or sometimes doesn't, but it's really kind of motivated. It's driven by what we need in an instance. So if we need social connection, for instance, if we're feeling very lonely, then what we do is we ascribe experience. We make others into vulnerable feelers. This explains why we make jokes about cat ladies, right? If you're super lonely, if you don't have a lot of people to spend your time with, well, you buy some pets who are already kind of feelers right they're like furry and don't have

a lot of um responsibility and then you see even more mind of them right like each of my cat really really loves me if i went away you know little mr muffin would be super sad because he loves me so much probably mr muffin just wants some chicken and you to go away. But you have to perceive him as really loving you because you need love in your life. And then, as you said, the other one is about feeling control. And if you lack control, you can see all sorts of agents as having more intention. So sometimes God, but also computers are a great example. If your computer isn't working, you think your computer has a mind. You're like, please just

work for me. You start talking to your computer like there must be something I can do. Please just tell me just this one time work for me. And if you have a computer that works, you like never talk to it. So clearly it's like motivated by needing control. I want to change gears here a little bit because you go into a little bit around how to have self-control. And we talk on the show a lot about behavior change, about habits. And you say that there's one especially powerful method to increase self-control, implementation intentions. Can you tell us briefly what those are? So this is not my research, but it's in the book because I'm just so impressed with how powerful these are. And I think as a general rule, social psychology tells us that self-control is very hard to have, but these things work so amazingly well. In fact, I have

a colleague here who read about the implementation intention study, and he didn't believe it. And then he started running studies on it, and now that's basically all he does because they work so powerfully. So here's the study. The study is you get college kids, and you ask them to write an essay over Christmas break. This is a terrible task for college kids, right? No one wants to write an essay over christmas break um and a thinking doer would assign anything like that to a bunch of poor helpless college kids right poor poor vintage drinking kids um so right you give them the essay You tell them to do it over Christmas. Half of them, you just say, send the essay on Christmas Day.

The other half, the other half of the college students, you give them an when and then a then. Right. And so you say, when this happens, come up with a plan for doing what you'll do then. this happens come up with a plan for doing what you'll do then right so one example be like well when we finish opening presents i will go upstairs to my room for half an hour and then i will write the essay yep that's it that simple plan so when then or if then that alone hugely increased the essay return so i think in the one condition where kids were just told, write the essay, only about a quarter of them sent it in. When they had the simple plan, when then, you got 75% of kids turning in those essays. Yeah, it does make such a difference. I talked about some of the coaching I do, and that's,

you know, I haven't called it that before, but a lot of the similar things, this idea of if you know where and when you're going to do something, you're far more likely to get it done. If you just actually say, all right, this thing I'm going to do it Saturday at 3 PM and I'm going to do it at my kitchen table. And then, um, we had Gabriella Ettingen, I never can say her name, right. But she had a similar thing, which was if you're, you know, working on goals is to work out that if then, if this happens, then I'll do this. And if that happens, then I'll do that. It's so powerful. And it's so simple. I see her. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling

questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband is Peter Golitzer, and he's the one who discovered Implementation Intentions.

Got it. Oh, interesting. So did I mangle her name? I don't want to say it because there's lots of vowels in it. You'll just leave it to me. All right, that's fair. Yeah. I get it. But why those work so well is, in fact, because they take away self-control entirely. You know, it's not up to conscious control anymore.

Like, imagine yourself as kind of a robot and you've encountered this situation right like when i walk into my house i will go upstairs to my office and work instead of going to play xbox right that's a simple one for i like playing xbox so i like tell myself this um and then it's very you're like programmed like a robot you walk into your house and then the program gets triggered in your mind like i'm in my house i will go and start working. Right. And you don't even have time to kind of really consider what should I do? And so that's the key of these things. They take self-control out of this like effortful thing and make it into kind of a program. Yep. Yep. I think it's so powerful in so many different ways. It's also, you know, we talk about breaking a bad habit is what do you do instead? Right. What, what do you put in its place? And that's just another variation on an on an implementation intention. So yeah, they are very powerful.

So let's transition as we kind of get near the end of this. The last chapter in your book was about the self. And this show has had a fair amount of Buddhist teachers and other spiritual teachers who talk about this idea of the self being not as solid as we think it is. So some people would call it an illusion, other people would say it's just a construction, and this is coming from a spiritual viewpoint. But in your book, you kind of wrap things up by talking about what it is that makes the self what is the self i guess i'll just leave it at that what is the self from the perspective of the work that you've been doing so i think there there are kind of lots of elegant analogies about what the self is one thing i mentioned in the book is it's kind of like this, you know, spider web glistening in

the sunlight. But the analogy I really like, and it's a lot less elegant, is particle board, right? That mainstay of IKEA furniture. And so I think it's a great example because particle board is real in a sense. It's like firm, it's strong, you can sit on it, right? But if you put it in water for long enough enough what happens is everything starts to dissolve right you realize that what you thought was a solid piece of wood is actually just all these little bits of piece together just like pressed pressed together through time in this kind of force so i think that's a great analogy because those little bits and pieces are memories our friends kind of shaping around perceptions our our histories, our emotions, none of those things are kind of really that strong.

But you just kind of push them all together for long enough and you get this enduring sense of self. But it doesn't really hold up to the kind of scrutiny of, well, I said water, but scrutiny of this kind of like lasting forever, right? It changes over time and so forth. And you say that when you ask people kind of what is the essence of self, there were some people who did some research about the thing that people perceive to be most essential. So if I look at you and if you were to lose your arms and dye your hair and, you know, do all these things, I would still see you as you. But the way you respond morally is the thing that if that changes in you, I no longer recognize you as you in the same way, that that's the thing that when we're looking at selves from the outside is the thing we see most

essential. Yeah, that's right. So it's some pretty interesting research done by, you know, a collaborator of mine, Nina Strominger, and this philosopher named Sean Nichols. And the most interesting study they did was looked at people suffering from dementia. People get older, sometimes their brains change, and it changes their behavior. And what they did was they took all these different dementia patients, and they asked their families, typically their kids or their spouses, is this the same person? And what they found was that when they thought they really changed was when they had a different sense of morality. So if someone used to be very kind and now they're really mean, like speaking of the wolves, right? If they have a different kind of

wolf that's kind of getting expressed, that's when they really seem different. But it's not just from kind to mean. Sometimes really mean people get really nice, right? Get really sentimental. And they think, that's not my husband anymore. I'm happy to have a new husband, don't get me wrong, right? But it's not the same guy anymore. And so it's really the sense of morality that seems to make us who we are, at least in perceptions of others. Yep. And in the book, you have several other analogies that I think are really good in there. And you also talk about how a particular philosopher, Parfit, talks about how he thinks it's memory. Memory is the thing that constructs the sense of self. But as we're running out of time, I'm just going to read something from near the end of your book and ask you if there's

anything you want to add to it, and then we'll kind of wrap up because i think this is a really profound statement and and brings together a lot of of the book being trapped in our own minds prevents us from fundamentally connecting with others and there is no way to escape our own minds we are forever a point of view even if we lose our memories meditate our desires, and quiet our constant quest for mental control, we are still a source of perception. But recognizing this fact provides the secret to transcending ourselves as much as we possibly can. By understanding that we perceive the world instead of understanding it directly, we can realize not only that the self is fragile and that free will is an illusion, but also that other minds can be more and less than they appear. Yep. I think that says it all. You're like, I wrote it as well as I could. And we totally skipped over free will because that's

like four or five episodes in itself. Those concepts are completely crazy. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book. It was lots of different things. The other thing I didn't get to bring up, but I was really excited to, was I've been waiting to find a way to bring in cognitive animal thinking,

because I've been wanting to talk about how smart crows are. But, and your book was the first chance I got to do it, but we're not gonna have time. So, but crows are very smart. That's what I'm saying. Yes, very clever. Clever corvids and their

relatives yes they're all very smart yes all right well thank you kurt so much for coming on the show i really enjoyed talking with you and we'll have uh links in the show notes to your book and to your website great thanks so much for having me on all right take care all right bye If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.