No Stupid Questions - 63. How Contagious Is Behavior? With Laurie Santos of “The Happiness Lab.” (Replay)

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

Why do we mirror other people’s accents? Does DJ Khaled get tired of winning? And also: life is good — so why aren’t you happy? SOURCES:Albert Bandura, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University.John Bargh, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University.Tanya Chartrand, professor of marketing at Duke University.Clay Cockrell, psychotherapist and founder of Walk and Talk Therapy.Iain Couzin, director of the department of collective behavior at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.William Irvine, professor of philosophy at Wright State University.Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton University.Stephen Kosslyn, professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard University.Cristine Legare, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.Kevin Ochsner, professor of psychology at Columbia University.Amos Tversky, professor of psychology at Stanford University. RESOURCES:"How to Escape the Hedonic Treadmill and Be Happier," by Anna Katharina Schaffner (Positive Psychology, 2016).“Revealing the Hidden Networks of Interaction in Mobile Animal Groups Allows Prediction of Complex Behavioral Contagion,” by Sara Brin Rosenthal, Colin R. Twomey, Andrew T. Hartnett, Hai Shan Wu, and Iain Couzin (PNAS, 2015).“A Calm Look at the Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience — Mirror Neurons,” by Christian Jarrett (WIRED, 2013).“The Chameleon Effect: The Perception–Behavior Link and Social Interaction,” by Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999).“Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk,” by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (The Econometric Society, 1979).“Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive Models,” by Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Ross (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1961). EXTRAS:"Why Are Rich Countries So Unhappy?" by No Stupid Questions (2022)."Do You Mind if I Borrow Your Personality?" by No Stupid Questions (2022).“Episode 2: The Unhappy Millionaire,” by The Happiness Lab (2019).The Happiness Lab.

Hi, NSQ listeners. We're off this week, so we're bringing you something special from the NSQ Archive. It's a conversation between Angela and fellow psychologist Lori Santos, who hosts a podcast called The Happiness Lab. We originally published this episode back in 2021, but we think its themes are as relevant as ever as we ring in 2024. but we think its themes are as relevant as ever as we ring in 2024. Wishing you a happy new year, and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode. Thank the Lord that you're here! I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Laurie Santos.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, why do we mirror the accents and mannerisms of the people we meet? Monkey A observes Monkey B do something different with a banana. I don't know if that's stereotyping. They do like bananas. Totally true. Also, why can happiness seem so elusive, even when things are going well? Holy schmoly, this is the best life I could possibly be living. Why am I not a 10 out of 10 on happiness?

I think you have the first question for me, correct? I do. And this comes from a listener named Sabika Shaban, who hails from Qatar and is a graduate student there. This question is as follows. I have a question about mimicking the mannerisms of people we meet, especially in our multicultural environments. Often in conversations with people with very marked accents different from my own, I find my own accent taking on nuances of theirs or interjecting typical expressions from their language culture. Is this a typically observed behavior? And on the flip side, are there many whose accents and mannerisms never change regardless of who they speak to and a reason why

some do and some don't? Lori, I love this question. I am so vibing with it. Sabika, that is me. I spent two years in Oxford and I ended up speaking almost involuntarily with this faux British posh accent. And I am from southern New Jersey, so I should not be doing that. Does this happen to you too? Oh my gosh. I moved to the UK when I was in graduate school and I too took on not just like a British accent, but the most painful British mannerisms. Like what? Like if you told me something shocking you did like, oh my gosh, Lori, I just went to the pub and I had like eight pints. I would respond to that with the phrase, you walk. And I brought that back to the US for like for like a year and my friends were like stop it'd be one thing if you just talk with a fake british accent would be bad enough but the fact that you're you walk all the time it's just terrible wait you knew this and you still did it right it wasn't an affectation that you were doing in an ironic brooklyn way yeah and i think you know

this angela about me but i grew up in newford, Massachusetts, and had what to the uninitiated would sound like a terrible Boston accent. You're from Boston. You'd know it was a New Bedford accent, just like Pachyakad, Havadiyad. Basically, I couldn't say R. To the point that I actually lost a research assistant position my freshman year in college. So I started out my freshman year working in Steve Kosslin's lab with Kevin Oxner, who's a professor at Columbia. He was doing some study where he just needed a female voice to say letters. And so I started recording these letters like A, B, C. And then I got to Q, ah. And he was like, well, you can't say ah. You have to say R. I was physically incapable of doing that except sounding like a pirate. I was like, R.

And he was like, no, it's just R. Anyway, so now you notice that in my perfect podcast speak, I can say R. But the reason I think that happened was that I ended up my freshman year being paired with a roommate from New Orleans who also had an incredibly thick, this time Southern accent. Somehow, again, perfectly unconsciously, we took on each other's vocal cadences to the point that by our senior year, this is back when your college room would have a single phone that someone would call and you wouldn't know who had picked up except by their voice. And in fact, people couldn't tell me and my roommate Catherine apart by our senior year because our voices had converged so much. You took her R's. Did she lose hers? She stopped saying y'all as much. In fact, we both picked up another expression from our Pittsburgh roommate, which was yins. I like that because you guys is apparently an offensive, gendered, presumptuous, possibly hostile sounding appellation. So my own students tell me? I think yin's and y'all are better. But the beauty is we just do this naturally. In fact,

this is an evolved part of human cognition. Researchers call this behavioral contagion. This is the kind of thing that you see in animals, you know, classic cases. If you watch fish, they tend to school around and it looks like they're all kind of copying each other's behavior. It turns out they kind of are. There's some lovely work by this guy, Ian Cousin, who does all these detailed mathematical network analyses of how fish school around. But the upshot is they're just they kind of are. There's some lovely work by this guy, Ian Cousin, who does all these detailed mathematical network analyses of how fish school around. But the upshot is they're just soaking up each other's behavior quite naturally. How do you know that they are really mimicking each other, as opposed to all responding to the same little piece of floating kelp? He does these incredibly

detailed mathy things that I'm not going to be able to pull up on the fly. He can actually do some predictive coding based on one fish's behavior about what's going to happen with the schooling. And so it really does seem to be behavioral contagion. But you don't need to look to fish. This is something that we do quite naturally. One of the most famous examples of this came from my colleague here at Yale, John Barge, and his colleague, Tanya Chartrand. They found out about this effect that they call the chameleon effect. Well-labeled because it's cases where people just chameleon-ly copy other people's behavior. What's an example? What the experimenter did, unbeknownst to the subjects, was just occasionally take on strange

movements. So she would touch her face or put her arm in a particular way or cross her legs. gone strange movements. So she would touch her face or put her arm in a particular way or cross her legs. And what you find is that they unconsciously copy all these behaviors. So as the experimenter is touching her face, they touch their face more. As she's folding her legs, they fold their legs more. Again, totally unconsciously. And their later work shows that this happens more in the high status direction. So you're more likely to unconsciously copy the high status people, maybe just because you're watching them more honestly. room with a Bobo doll, just like they saw, they will walk over and start beating it with a hammer. Whereas Bandura points out, they don't do that in a control condition where they have not seen an adult model this. So I guess the question I'm asking is, is the phenomenon that you're

describing different from modeling or basically the same? It's probably the mechanism that leads to this kind of stuff. I mean, you know this well. In cognitive science, we often don't know the basic mechanisms that lead to other stuff down the line. And there's lots of hypotheses that things like behavioral contagion lead to lots of nasty stuff. So I wanted to ask you what you thought about mirror neurons. I, as more or less an outsider to this literature, have only read articles about these specialized neurons that if I see you doing a particular action, they are lighting up in my brain as if I were doing the same action. So, A, is that an accurate description of mirror neurons? And B, what up with mirror neurons, Lori?

I'm kind of not a fan of mirror neurons I'll be totally honest there's a lot of hypo brown mirror neurons but what they actually do might not be as cool as we sometimes think basically these were discovered in monkeys in a very famous set of experiments in Italy back in the early 90s where monkeys were watching humans engaging in these actions and areas of the monkey motor cortex the spot that would fire if they were grabbing for something, when they were watching these humans grabbing for something, they tended to fire. So it seems super cool. Like, oh my gosh, the same neuron in me that fires when I reach, fires when I see you reach. Maybe neurons are the code for empathy.

Maybe these neurons are the seat of our perspective, taking all the stuff. What we know about them is they only exist in motor cortex. So it's for very specific motoric movements like grabbing and reaching. There's a couple mirror neurons in other spots. There's some that might be in attention region. So for eye gaze turning and stuff like that, but not as rich as you think. And I think there is some argument that human beings are unique in their ability to learn through observation, whereas a dog or even a chimpanzee can't do it or at least can't do it as well, which is kind of weird, right? Because the mirror neurons were mostly found in monkeys. In terms of learning by observation, animals do do that. But what they don't learn by is imitation. Like I see you behave in this very specific sequence and I copy all of those very mechanical behaviors perfectly. That's literally what monkeys don't do.

Wait, what do monkeys do? So monkey A observes monkey B do something different with a banana. I don't know if that's stereotyping. They do like bananas. Totally true. Okay, good. I'm glad that holds up. Anyway, what does happen if it's not imitation? What is it? Here's one study that looked at this. This is not with monkeys, but with chimpanzees. For our listeners out there, pet peeve of people who work with primates, monkeys, not chimpanzees. Chimpanzees actually eat monkeys, so totally different. What?

It's like saying a human is a tuna fish sandwich or something so with chimpanzees they have this task where there's a bunch of food outside of some enclosure and chimp has to use a tool to get it they give a chimp a rake basically where you could try to use a rake with the tines down like we'd normally rake leaves but if they're tiny pieces of food that works of, but not super well because the food goes through the tines. Whereas if you flip the rake over and you have that part of the rake that's flat, you can scoop the food up more effectively. So they show kids this behavior. And what you find is the kid will copy whatever the human does. Whereas if you do the same thing with chimpanzees, they don't necessarily fully copy what the human does. Whereas if you do the same thing with chimpanzees, they don't

necessarily fully copy what the human does. They realize like, oh, I can use a rake to try to get the food. And then they trial and error it. So they're kind of copying the fact that you're using this tool and you can do it. But what they're not copying is the perfect actions that go with it. It sounds smarter. Doesn't it sound a little bit more evolved, as it were? It is smarter, yeah. In fact, there's a wonderful bias that is a perhaps human unique bias. We have some evidence that you don't see it in primates or in dogs, which is called over-imitation, this idea that we imitate too much. If you see somebody doing something that's inefficient, you inadvertently copy it anyway. Have you read the studies of Christine Laguerre, this developmental psychology work on children imitating others?

Yeah, and she finds with over imitation, but part of it seems to be automatic, but part of it seems to be because this kind of behavioral contagion is our way of showing, hey, I'm in the group like you. And this gets to another way that you could think about switching accents in particular, this idea of code switching. So code switching is if you're a member of a minority group and you're in a majority group situation, you sort of switch your behavior around to match what the majority group is doing, which is sometimes considered not a great thing, but arguably, as you're pointing out, is adaptive. Totally. If I look back at my own accent switching, my New Bedford accent wasn't going to necessarily work super well in Ivy League classes. That wasn't the way these high status, higher class people talked. It's no secret that my accent switched more towards a Ivy League vernacular

English. Right. So we were both in England, which was a higher status accent, one could argue, certainly than my native South Jersey. So I start speaking a faux British accent. But if a British scholar, for whatever reason, came to southern New Jersey and had to spend a summer down the shore, they would not adopt the local vernacular, right? That would be the prediction because of status. Status is part of it for sure. But I think also just functionally getting the inside scoop and seeming like you belong and you're like an insider at that place.

So my prediction is the Brit might do it less in southern New Jersey than this southern New Jersey or would do it in the UK. But they would to a certain extent. It would still happen. And this is a reason that, again, I have lost, sadly, my New Bedford accent until I go back to New Bedford for a couple days, and then I all of a sudden sound like I've been there my whole life. I want to hear a New Bedford happiness love. I think you should do it full on and maybe you could record it there. Another time it happens, maybe you got this too when you were in the UK is when I'm drunk. Those more automatic accents come back. It's weird. I haven't been drunk since I was 18, but that is probably a

different question. So I'll have to actually get data on that and come back to you. There's an experiment we can do, Angela. Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Angela and Lori turn their attention to a different question. Why do so many successful people feel unsatisfied? All I do is win, win, win no matter what. And now, back to Angela's conversation with Lori Santos, who hosts the Happiness Lab podcast. Okay, so now I get to ask a question, right? Which is so cool. We don't normally do this on the Happiness Lab. You need another person to be hanging out with. That's true. You're welcome anytime on the Happiness Lab, Angela.

Thank you. But here's question number two. Amelia asks, why is it that so many people are restless or unsatisfied, even in terrific or satisfying circumstances? Her context is that she's in a really lovely place with lots of supportive and happy colleagues. She's exceeded all these expectations she's had for herself professionally, but still finds herself looking around at other opportunities, kind of feeling unhappy, thinking she should switch everything. And then she goes on to ask, why can't I just wait it out? Why the need for change? Maybe at some level, people don't want to be happy. What is the deal scientifically? So I will begin by saying that I

had this experience myself. I remember when I was, I think, 18 years old, writing to Dear Abby, saying how unhappy I was. There were extenuating circumstances. Mostly I was an adolescent, so that's partly your job as an adolescent to be unhappy with your circumstances. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Time out. You actually wrote to Dear Abby? Legit wrote to Dear Abby.

Yes. It was the 1980s. So I wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, licked it, sealed it, put a stamp on it and mailed it away. And what my letter said was more or less that I felt like I had a perfect life. I had just gotten into college. I was going to Harvard, so I was getting lots of praise from my Asian family. And my boyfriend at the time was somebody I thought I would spend maybe the rest of my life with. And I had a wonderful best friend and all these great things were happening to me. And there was this contrast from the objective awesomeness of my life and my angst. I was just

like, I'm not happy. Abby, what's wrong with me? What did Abby say? She said to go see a therapist. Go see a therapist are four excellent words of advice, but I was very disappointed at the time. And you know what, Lori? realize that when I'm in the state of mind where I'm so unhappy, I need to write a letter to a stranger to ask them for help, then really what I should do is go see a therapist. But there are times where you just look around at your life in any objective sense, you realize, holy schmoly, this is the best life I could possibly be living. And you have this gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, like, why am I not a 10 out of 10 on happiness? Now, I want to start our scientific discussion with this very famous idea of the hedonic treadmill, which I know you've probably already discussed on your podcast.

Am I right on that? Yeah, we had a fantastic guest on to talk about the hedonic treadmill, Clay Cockrell. He's a wealth psychologist. So he's a mental health professional for the 0.001%. First off, that's telling, right, that we have to have mental health professionals for the 0.001%. You think these people would be like, they're not so happy that they're like, no, I'm good. Yeah, they need him. And the problems he sees in his patients are just i mean if you're not in the

point zero zero one percent you kind of get a little bit schadenfreude because they're things like i don't know where to park my yacht and you're like well dude maybe if you don't have a yacht but the point is these ostensibly objectively terrific circumstances don't always feel terrific and that is the hedonic treadmill we kind of just get used to stuff so if you have something objectively awesome happen you notice and you feel that it is good and it affects your happiness for a short while, but then you kind of just get used to it. And that's the idea of the treadmill. You like keep running and running and you stay in the same place. But I think we would both agree that there is to some extent a phenomenon by which through either things that we do intentionally or unconsciously, we do come

back from either extreme, like too happy or the opposite. The flip side is that we also get used to circumstances that are pretty awful. They don't continue to affect our psychology as bad as when they first happened. So you break up or you lose a job. Those things suck for a while. And they feel like they're going to suck forever. I think that's one of the fascinating things about emotions when you're in the middle of one, like when you're anxious or lonely or extremely sad, you can't really see around the corner. Even if intellectually you realize like, oh, yeah, I've been in this kind of place before and I've seen things get better, but it doesn't feel that way in any visceral sense. But though we would agree with that, I think one of the nuances here that is important to underscore is that the returning to the set point isn't always exactly to where you were before. So the famous 1978 study of accident victims who became paraplegics, it's often described as follow them long enough, you see that they come back to where they were

before their accident. But sadly, not quite. Yes, they adapt hedonically, but not all the way back on average to where they were before. Yeah. And there's a few cases like that where hedonic adaptation isn't perfect. I think another one is in the context of unemployment. That's another case where you go down a little bit. Actually, one that's the opposite is divorce. You have a hit to your happiness when you first get divorced, but you actually pop up past baseline. This is the thing about these happiness set points. They're not perfect. Sometimes you go a teensy bit down or a teensy bit up in the good cases. But the point is that moves.

It's not like this person is going to break up with me and I'm stuck there forever. It has to move. Let's talk about coming down from the highs. People do, at least a lot of us, walk around basically shooting for the 10 out of 10. Like, why can't I be a 10 out of 10 every day? Is there something we can say about the adaptiveness of not living life at the extreme end of like everything is great? When you think about the extreme end, this reminds me not of a scientific tip, but a philosophical one. Aristotle thought that virtue was living in the middle. You know, if you're shooting to be brave, you don't want to be like the bravest dude ever, such that you're reckless, but you also don't want to be cowardly. And so there's something to be said for this with happiness, too. Happiness is going to be elusive if you're constantly analyzing, do I have it yet? Do I have it yet? Do I have it yet?

have it yet? Do I have it yet? Do I have it yet? We really want to get to a point where we're feeling grateful, noticing the good stuff in our lives, doing everything we can to savor what we have. But pushing, pushing, pushing might not necessarily be the best thing for your happiness anyway. I have long pondered this Aristotle golden mean idea in part because the things I study like self-control or grit, people always ask, can you be too self-controlled? What if you're too gritty? What's the dark side of excessive grit? And when I think about what Aristotle's saying, I'm a little confused. What is the deeper reason why something in between the extremes is, as a rule, better, not just in the case of bravery and cowardice, but as a general truth about human nature. And I wonder whether there is some cost to being at the 10 out of 10, which makes us not want to be there all the

time. Well, I think one is if you were always at a 10 out of 10 and you never change, you wouldn't notice any change. And I think this actually gets to Amelia's question. She's asking, like, why the need for change? The need for change is that we don't notice our absolute objective status. We only notice when we change from it. People who live in Southern California don't appreciate the weather because it's just perfect all the time. But when you live in the Northeast, you get enough sucky days that all of a sudden when it's sunny out, you're like, oh, my gosh, it's sunny and 80. Thank you. You know, whatever divinity you're praying to. The other thing is, I think you're totally right on the cost. Sometimes if you're pushing happiness too much, that can be costly. And I think we see that in the context of clinical disorders

like mania. Those people would report, I'm 10 out of 10 on a happiness scale, but they're gambling and wrecking their car and hurting their family and things like that. And so I think that Aristotle might not have been perfect with the middle road, but he was on to something. And the something I think he was on to that's most relevant to Amelia gets back to this idea of the power of change. When we're just consistently good, we kind of don't notice it. The consequence of that is what Danny Countman and Amos Tversky referred to as diminishing sensitivity. We can get small changes that objectively feel good, but we just don't notice them, which is sort of sad. The example I give my students is I try to be hip and there's this DJ Khaled song called All I Do Is Win. Do you

know this song? No, of course I don't. Tell me. It's like, all I do is win, win, win, no matter what. The idea is he just wins all the time. And I tell my students that is like a crappy way to live a life because if you're literally winning all the time, you don't actually notice the subtle changes. What is the optimal design then of a good life? Should you have a shitty childhood, a decent adolescence, and like, oh my God, by the time you're 85, you're living your best life? I mean, that would maximize the derivative.

That would maximize change. Maybe it's just 99 great days and one really bad one to make you appreciate the rest of the 99. What do you think? I think about this one a lot. What you want to do is maximize the change somehow. And it's optimal if that change is going in a positive direction. But you actually want it to go down sometimes because another feature of this diminishing sensitivity, I mentioned Danny Kahneman and Amos Diversity, it comes from their famous idea about prospect theory, which is this idea that we don't

evaluate prospects or things in our lives in terms of absolute values. We recognize them and represent them in terms of changes. You know, if I was like, Angela, right now, the Happiness Lab is going to give you $1 million, you'd be like, that's amazing. But if I was like, right now, the Happiness Lab is going to give you $2 million, I mean, that's better, but you're not like twice as happy. And so that is diminishing sensitivity. And that sucks. It means for you to get that extra happiness benefit from the extra million and the $2 million, you would have wanted to go back to baseline first. So it feels like two separate gains instead of one big gain. That's another reason not to obsess about being a 10. Exactly. You think going from nine to 10 is going to be just as good as going from eight to nine or seven to eight. But according to diminishing returns, like it's better, much better as it was to go from seven to eight.

That gives us some hints about how to do it better, right? So one is split your gains. You don't want two million at once. You want one million and then come back a couple months later and get another million. This is something I actually try to do. How? How do you do it? Sometimes my husband and I will have a date night and we're like, all right, we're going to see the movie we really wanted and get the dinner we really wanted and get ice cream too. And it's like, wait, let's do the nice dinner and then do the ice cream tomorrow. A really stupid way I do this is sometimes when I'm buying stuff, this is not very ecologically savvy. So maybe this is not helping with my climate change goals, but you know what it's like. You get the package of stuff that you bought on Amazon. It's not as fun as if you

got the shirt one day and then the next day you got the shoes and you're like, oh yeah. So you split your gains. I have a proposal that may or may not have as severe consequences getting two Amazon packages. You know, vacations are something that I don't know how to take very well. But according to the principles we've been discussing, rather than taking seven days off and cramming in all of your dinners out and your extra desserts and your walks around whatever city you're in with iced coffee. That would be my preferred vacation. Why don't we have seven three-day weekends? I think that that could result in a massive global gain in happiness without any obvious downside. I love it. My other tip on this, I don't know if you like Hostess cupcakes. I'm

from Philly. We have Tasty Cakes. Oh, I think Tasty Cakes are similar. But the key to the Hostess cupcake is that you get two of them. Like Hostess could have made that much chocolate cakiness in a single big cupcake. But if you got that cupcake, you just plow through it. They had the insight to break those up. And like what happens is you eat the first one you wait and then you come back to it you're kind of at baseline again you get more happiness wow you think that the hostess people really had behavioral science down they read prospect theory they're like wait a minute this is why people like the mini black and white cookies better than the one huge black and white cookie you can pause in between them and you go back to happiness baseline, no cookie. And then you're like, oh my gosh, another cookie. And then spike back up. I don't know how many people, by the way,

eat the one hostess or tasty cake. In the tasty cake version, there's no white swirly line across the top, but it's basically the same cupcake. But there's two, right? There is two. And I do think spacing out our gains could be helpful, just as you recommend. And maybe just reframing the inevitable bad days as like, I mean, here's a trivial example. Last night I made cashew, you know, the buckwheat thing. Oh, yeah. the letter because I had a friend. She's like, I'm going to call my grandmother. We're going to get this exactly right. And then I left the pot on the stove, not even thinking, and it just burned to a crisp and it was horrible and both mushy and burned at the same time, which I didn't think was physically possible. So that was a bad experience. I grieved a bit, but maybe if I reframe that as, hooray for the burned kasha, now it'll make the next non-burnt batch all that much more delicious and appreciated. Totally. And in fact, this gets back to a different form of ancient wisdom. This was exactly the strategy that the Stoics had.

So the Stoics thought you should every morning do what they called negative visualization. So the Stoics thought you should every morning do what they called negative visualization. You wake up and you say, my kasha is going to get burned. My husband's going to leave me. I'm going to lose my job. I'm going to trip and break my leg. You don't ruminate on that forever, but you do that as little kind of five, ten minute meditation. And you go to your day like, oh, my gosh, my kasha didn't burn today. So the Stoics were really into this idea that you don't necessarily have to have

the change to notice the change. You could just imagine the change. And it gives you a lot of gratitude for the stuff you have. One technique I use in some of my talks is I look out in the audience and I say, all of you people who have kids, imagine whatever the last time you saw them was, that was the last time. It's over. You're never going to see them again. And the idea is the next time you hug your kids, you're going them much more tightly you didn't have to have a horrible thing happen to them the reference point didn't have to change in a bad way for you to get the appreciation i had a shudder i just had to say laurie that was rough i mean that moment was rough but now you're gonna be so nice to your kids today even if they're annoying you'd be like but i'm so happy they're

alive yeah my daughter's gonna leave her everywhere i to be like, thank the Lord that you're here. God, OK, you have given us one thing you could do. You could wake up and think of three bad things and they are just imaginary. And then the rest of your day is going to go better. But I recall the study that you and I did wake up and think of three good things. Right. The classic gratitude exercise. These are opposite

recommendations. So should people wake up and think of three good things or should they wake up and think of three bad things? I'm going to vote for the three good things. I did this as I usually do this morning. And I actually thought about the kasha. Thank God the house didn't burn down because I did discover the pot of burning buckwheat in time to prevent a fire. Yay. And then I thought of a couple of other things. My daughter got home safely. I really love this collaborator. And built in is a contrast to the counterfactual, like my collaborator could be a jerk, but they're not. And my daughter could have not gotten home safely. So maybe the Stoics had a good idea, but I think it's improved upon by this much more positive experience of thinking about three good things.

To be fair, I think that's what the Stoics mean. They don't mean like, oh, my God, my house is going to burn down. They think you should do that because immediately afterwards you're going to think about the positive thing, too. immediately afterwards, you're going to think about the positive thing too. You're going to be grateful for your kids leaving the stuff on the floor because you had that moment of thinking about what it could be like to not have kids at all. I think naturally in the way the Stoics are talking about them, they focus on the negative side, but they're hoping you're going to get to the blessings really fast. And I think the negative side is important when you're feeling really down. Like the example of breaking your leg because I'm clumsy. This actually happens to me with reasonable frequency. Like I recently broke my knee.

You literally mean this happens to you with frequency? You injure yourself in a serious way? Yeah, this was the second time I'd broken the same kneecap when I fell on it. Oh my God, Lori! That's terrible. Yeah, I was like, woe is me. I broke my kneecap. This sucks. And then I actually went back to the Stoics because I knew I needed hardcore people who were going to help me with this. And I read a book by this current practicing Stoic, Bill Irvine, and he went through like, let's talk about some cases that you could have.

He's like, you could be a shut in. These are people who have some sort of accident happen who are fully conscious, but so paralyzed that they can't move any part of their body they have to like blink an eye to communicate with people and i was like okay well at least i don't have that i can crunch to the kitchen i can carry things with my arms i would have been in such a funk that i couldn't do the blessings with that broken knee nothing seemed good but sometimes if you get the right negative visualization you're like wait a minute i can actually be grateful for the broken knee too, because at least it's not X, Y, and Z. And I think this is a nice way to solve Amelia's problem. You don't necessarily have to get the change from your real actions. You can make your current reference points seem good just through these imaginations. Do you think that would change Amelia's set point? Do you think that if she

chronically were comparing her pretty awesome life, she says she has a lovely department, she's doing really well. If she regularly did these mental counterfactuals, that she would be enduringly happier? You know, if every morning she could have the counterfactual of like, what if I didn't have this lovely, supportive job with my interesting colleagues, as she mentions? What if my colleagues sucked? That bumps up the appreciation you have. It breaks your hedonic adaptation. So I actually do think it would be kind of a nice strategy. I think we need Amelia to agree to be a pilot subject in a study with only one subject. So, Lori, you want Amelia to wake up every day for a week and what?

Think of three bad things. Of the things she loves about her life and her job, imagine that those weren't there. I would propose the second week be that she try the three good things exercise. And after a month, we could all get together and find out which week was better. I want a third condition where she does both, where she imagines the bad thing and then thinks, oh, my gosh, I am so lucky to have these colleagues. Because I think if you just do bad, then it could be ruminating. And to be fair to the Stoics, that's not really what they meant. OK, now we need six weeks of your life, Amelia, right?

Love it. To be continued. This episode was produced by Rebecca Lee Douglas with help from Julie Canfor. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation. In the first half of the show, Angela worries that she's stereotyping monkeys by assuming they really love bananas.

And Lori assures her that it's totally true. Monkeys are so much higher in calories and sugar than the fruits, leaves, and insects monkeys do eat in the wild that they can cause health problems like diabetes. This has led some zoos to stop feeding their monkeys bananas. Later, Angela and Lori discuss Albert Bandora's Bobo doll experiment, which demonstrated how aggression is transmitted to children through imitation. Listeners should know that a Bobo doll isn't really a doll at all. It's a large, inflatable clown with a heavy rounded bottom. When it's pushed over, the clown pops back up again, making it a perfect toy for children and adults to beat up in Bandura's experiments. Finally, Angela says that the classic Philadelphia confection tasty cakes,

like Hostess cupcakes, come two to a package. A standard box of tasty cakes does include six packages of two cupcakes, but you can also purchase a single package of three cupcakes. Either way, if you have the self-restraint, you can still enjoy the happiness that comes from having more dessert later. That's it for the Fact Check. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, what does it mean to be successful? No one ever feels like they made it. There's no such thing as like, oh, I reached the pinnacle. That's next week on No Stupid Questions.

No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by James Foster and Eleanor Osborne, thanks to Ryan Dilley. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ at Freakonomics.com. To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ. Thanks for listening.

Oh my god, the perfect crossweather doesn't exist. And then you're like, oh, it's actually Angela and Lori. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything. Stitcher. The hidden side of everything.