Shankar Vedantam
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. There's an old saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Nothing is certain in life except for death and taxes. But death and taxes are not the only guarantees. If we live long enough, all of us will experience great setbacks, crises that seem insurmountable, challenges that seem far bigger than we are.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I understand that to lift their mood, he would have them sing together to actually feel like they were a team doing something together.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He had the boys set an alarm for six o'clock every morning. And I'm wondering why he did this. Day and night must have made no difference in the darkness of the cave.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I understand that he had some of the stronger members of the team look out for weaker members of the team. So he was paying attention to people who might have needed a little extra help.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
At Columbia University, psychologist Adam Galinsky has studied the science of decision-making and leadership, what it takes to rise to the occasion and what happens in our minds when we don't. Adam Galinsky, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So on the 10th day, the batteries of the boys' flashlights began to run out, and Coach Eck told the boys to turn off the flashlights and be with one another in the dark. It was then that they heard something, Adam. What did they hear?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So when the divers found the boys, they had been searching for them for over a week, and everyone had been expecting the worst. The parents of the boys were already grieving. But Adam, you say the divers were shocked when they saw the boys' demeanor. How so?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Adam, in January 2012, an Italian cruise ship carrying over 3,000 passengers and 1,000 crew members was on a seven-day voyage in the Mediterranean when it began to veer close to shore. It was unclear why this was happening, but eventually the ship, which was named the Costa Concordia, hit a reef. How deep was the reef and what happened to the ship, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So an army of people soon begins to extract the boys from the cave, and divers are relaying messages from each team member to their parents. What did Coach Eck tell the parents to make sure the parents were doing okay as well during this time?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So this is a remarkable story, Adam. And of course, the story could easily have ended in tragedy. If the storm were a little worse, maybe they weren't able to climb to safety. So lots of factors could have turned this into a complete disaster. But you say there are several things that Coach Egg did right during that time that helped the situation.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
And I want you to walk me through some of the choices he made and what we can learn from them. First of all, you say he was very careful about the words he used as he was talking to the boys. How so?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So you've done some research looking at how hope can be a powerful motivator in times of crisis. You did some work with Thomas Musweiler of the London Business School. Tell me about this research and what you found, Adam.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So Kochek also helped the boys focus on a shared goal. So rather than passively wait to be rescued, he told the boys that they had to dig their way out. Now, it well may have been impossible to do this. We actually don't know how much they would have had to dig or how far they would have had to dig to break through the roof into this, you know, this paradise of orange fields.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But having a task to do in common and feeling like they were in it together, that in itself was psychologically very helpful.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Now, you can see, of course, that Coach Eck was just a remarkable human being. He happened to be someone with these superhuman capacities. But in interviews afterwards, he credits his own training as a Buddhist monk to what happened in the cave. Tell me a little bit about that training. What happened during his own childhood that prompted him to get trained as a monk?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I'm assuming that water must have flooded the generators and engines. The ship must have come to a standstill almost right away.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Now, of course, all of us are not monks, and all of us have not had practice for nine years going with one meal a day. But that's not really the point of the story. The point is when we're going through challenging times, we can all draw from our past experiences to try and get through what we're going through. Talk about a study that you conducted with Yoris Lammers.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
You had volunteers apply for a job interview, come into the lab, and then do a warm-up task. What was this warm-up task, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So that's terrifying, Adam. But I'm guessing that when something like this happens, it's the job of the captain to take immediate action and begin rescuing passengers. Did that happen?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So it's not just in some ways drawing from your experience that can make you more prepared. It's almost recalling those moments that actually give you the motivation we need to do difficult things.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So what is it about recalling a time when we were powerful or recalling a time when we felt powerless? Why does that change what we do in the present, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Most of us will never be faced with the terrifying challenge of rescuing a group of children from a cave. But in our own lives, we all encounter challenges, sometimes big, sometimes small. A sense of hope and purpose can motivate us to keep going when times get tough, and recalling prior times when we were brave can help us to act more courageously.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
When we come back, what happens when we are called to address a crisis and we have only seconds to act? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's easy to believe that courageous leaders are born courageous. They seem to embody the natural traits of heroism. In a crisis, they are cool, calm, and collected.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Adam Galinsky is the author of Inspire, The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. He says that influential leaders have skills that can be learned and improved with practice. Adam, I want to talk about a woman named Tammy Jo Schultz. She was a pilot for Southwest Airlines. And in April 2018, she was flying a plane from New York to Dallas when suddenly she felt an enormous jolt.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
How did Tammy Jo Schultz describe what happened that day?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Wow. So the debris had smashed through the cabin. I'm imagining it must have been chaos back in the cabin.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So from the passenger's perspective in the cabin, the plane is free-falling, total chaos. People thought they were going to die. But I want to play you a clip of the conversation between Tammy Jo Schultz and an air traffic controller.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So she seems remarkably calm, Adam. Meanwhile, back in the cabin, people are sending goodbye messages to their loved ones?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So as the plane heads to Philadelphia, Tammy Jo Schultz takes control of the plane. What happens as they're coming in to land, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I understand that she comes in to land, but even as she's landing, she has the presence of mind to park right next to the fire trucks that are on the tarmac?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So when rescue efforts finally started almost an hour or maybe more than an hour after the ship first hit the reef, did Captain Francesco Schettino supervise and help passengers get off the ship?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I understand that after they got on the ground, she walked back into the cabin and actually tried to look each person in the eye.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
We talked earlier about how Captain Francesco Schettino panicked when his cruise ship was sinking. By contrast, Tammy Jo Schultz really kept her head during the crisis, Adam.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
You told me earlier in the story of Coach Eck that in some ways what leaders do is magnified. So when they are upset, it has an effect on the people who are watching and observing them. When they are cheerful and optimistic, that has an effect on the people who are observing them. Here, perhaps Tammy Jo Schultz is always calm and always collected.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But as a leader here, I think it was the case that her calmness and courage under pressure, those were traits or behaviors that became infectious.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So there's something very interesting here, Adam. When many of us think of power, we think of, you know, the iron fist of lacking emotion, being stern, being authoritarian. But in all the examples of powerful leaders who were successful that we've talked about today, there also seems to be a common thread of warmth and kindness. Can you talk about that?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
It seems that almost impossible, but in a moment of crisis, they were not just being competent, but they were genuinely caring about what was happening to the people around them.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Adam calls leaders who have sharp elbows and confrontational styles wire mesh leaders. And he calls people like Tammy Jo Schultz and Coach Eck terrycloth leaders. The terms come from a series of experiments in the 1950s showing animals gravitate to objects that feel warm and inviting. As followers, he says, we can instantly tell when we are being led by a wire mesh leader or a terrycloth leader.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So Adam, after doing this work, do you feel like you are more of a terrycloth leader when it comes to your own life?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So let me just try and catch up with what's happening here. The ship has hit this reef. There's a gigantic hole in the ship. Water is flooding in. The passengers are fearing for their life. And the captain, instead of staying on board and helping the passengers, has himself gotten off the ship onto a lifeboat, but claims he did so accidentally.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
When we see others go through natural disasters or terrible illnesses, or the emotional upheavals that come from child custody battles or losing a livelihood, we think, how terrible for them. I'm so glad this didn't happen to me. But what we fail to see in these moments is that all of us are going to experience our own versions of these emergencies and tragedies.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Adam Galinsky is the author of Inspire, The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others. In my conversation with Adam, we discussed another powerful idea that is a core element of leadership in times of crisis. Leading is not about doing everything yourself. It's about enabling others.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
In our companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, we explore how one specific superpower can transform the art of leadership. That episode, titled The Power of Perspective, is available right now to subscribers of Hidden Brain Plus. This is a particularly good time to give our podcast subscription a try. We're extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Sign up in January, and you'll get 30 free days to try it out. You can sample Hidden Brain Plus by going to apple.co slash hiddenbrain and click try free. Again, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain and click try free. Adam Galinsky, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Do you have follow-up questions for Adam Galinsky about leading through a crisis? If you'd be comfortable sharing those questions with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone. Three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line leadership. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Next week in our Wellness 2.0 series, how to figure out what you want from your life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I understand that he had a conversation with a member of the Coast Guard while sitting in the lifeboat. How did that conversation unfold?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Is it true that Schettino somehow in the middle of all of this catastrophe had managed to change out of his uniform and was wearing something different when he got into the lifeboat?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So the cruise ship hits a reef. It's wrecked. It starts to sink. The captain essentially abandons ship. What happens to the passengers on board that day, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
The captain was brought to trial. He was asked why he steered his ship so close to shore in the first place.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Was Francesco Schettino held to account after the tragedy?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Having to deal with crises is an occupational hazard of being alive. What do we do in such moments? How do our minds respond when faced with catastrophe? And can we better prepare ourselves for their inevitable arrival? Today on the show and in a companion piece on Hidden Brain Plus, we examine the psychology of battling a crisis. It's part of our series Wellness 2.0.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
The story of Captain Francesco Schettino is an unsettling one. Not only because of the tragedy that resulted from one man's poor judgment, cowardice, and selfishness, but also because of the uncomfortable questions it raises. Would you have responded differently in this scenario? After the ship started to sink, would you have done the brave thing?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
All of us would like to believe that we would act courageously in the face of danger. But in reality, we also know we are human. We too are prone to cowardice and selfishness. When we come back, why we crack in times of crisis and what we can learn from those who rise to the occasion. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
In 2012, a cruise ship carrying thousands of passengers sank off the western coast of Italy, claiming the lives of 32 people on board. It wasn't just a tragedy, but a preventable tragedy. Captain Francesco Schettino had no business steering the ship over a shallow reef, and his delay and inaction after the disaster cost many lives. Psychologist Adam Galinsky studies the science of leadership.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
He says the world is full of infuriating leaders like Francesco Schettino, but there are also great ones. These inspiring leaders, as he calls them, can teach us a lot about how to endure in times of crisis. Adam, let's talk a moment about some of the things that Francesco Schettino did wrong that day.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Yes, he should not have steered his ship so close to shore, but can you lay out some of the psychological mistakes he made after the ship hit the reef?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But besides not taking responsibility for what happened, I understand he even tried to pass the buck.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
Adam, let's take a look at a very different kind of leadership. In June 2018, 12 teenage boys on a soccer team in Thailand were on a hike with their coach. The coach was a 25-year-old man named Ekapol Chantawong. commonly called Coach Eck. The team was exploring a cave. And at one point, they decided to turn back.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
But what they didn't know was that weather conditions outside the cave had changed dramatically. Can you paint me a picture of what happened, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
What happens in our minds when we face danger and what we can learn from those who prove steadfast in such moments? Techniques and strategies for responding better when life throws us crises, curveballs, and catastrophes. This week on Hidden Brain. We are all called upon from time to time to do hard and sometimes seemingly impossible things. Do we rise to the occasion or do we fall short?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So as even more water surged into the cave, the boys were forced to go deeper into the cave to get shelter. Were they able to find it, Adam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
I'm assuming they must have then retreated even deeper into the cave now as they tried to escape the water.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Rising to the Occasion
So this is completely terrifying, Adam. I can only imagine how scared the boys must have been. What did Coach Eck have the boys do as they were perched on this ledge?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In November 1971, a man showed up at a flight counter for Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland. He asked to buy a one-way ticket to Seattle. The man provided his name when he bought the ticket. Dan Cooper. He was carrying a black briefcase.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Kenji saw the school was offering a class about sexual orientation in the law. He desperately wanted to take the course, but wondered what message it would send.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Kenji eventually started to come out of the closet. He got a boyfriend, Paul, but went to great lengths to hide Paul from the world.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Today on the show, we look at how many of us go to great lengths to disguise who we are. Most of the time, it isn't because we're planning anything nefarious. It's because we want to fit in or be taken seriously. But such disguises don't just fool others. They have powerful effects on us. What happens when we pretend we are not who we are?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So eventually, Kenji, you became a law professor. And at one point, you received a piece of advice from a colleague that backed up your decision to disguise yourself in the way that you were disguising yourself. What was this advice?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So one day you came by a book that transformed your understanding of what was happening to you and what was happening around you. Can you paint me a picture of this epiphany, Kenji?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And of course, once you had the vocabulary for this, you started to see examples of this in the larger culture. Everyone knew that FDR had polio, but he goes to great lengths to disguise the fact that he has polio. Everyone knows that Margaret Thatcher is a woman and came from a blue-collar background, but she goes to great lengths not to sound overly feminine or overly blue-collar.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Who are we really and how much of our real selves can we show to the world? These are questions all of us wrestle with. Sometimes we decide to bear it all. Other times we decide to cover up. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University who studies the effects these choices have on us and on those around us. Kenji Yoshino, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Think about a hard-driving workplace. You're a new mom. Do you hesitate to put up pictures of your children on your desk? That's what Kenji would call covering. He cites studies that show that in such workplaces, women face a motherhood penalty.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I'm thinking about the famous writer and activist Helen Keller. She was blind, but she was uncomfortable about being photographed from angles that showed her protruding eye. At one point, she later had her eyes replaced with glass eyes. And in fact, sometimes, you know, journalists would comment on how beautiful her eyes were.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Kenji, take me back in time to the story of a very prominent American who went to great lengths to manage how people saw him. You've studied America's 32nd president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Tell me his story.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Are all sort of cosmetic interventions in some ways forms of covering? I mean, you know, from the very trivial about the, you know, the bald man who has a comb over or, you know, the person who is dying their hair because their hair is turning gray. Are these all examples of covering?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
When we come back, how covering complicates our understanding of what it means to belong. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He is the author of Covering, The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Kenji, by the year 2001, you had long since come out as a gay man to your parents.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
They are of Japanese ancestry. But you found yourself having a tense discussion with them about an article about you that was about to be published in the New York Times. What was this article and how did this conversation with your parents unfold?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Your mother used a Japanese term in this conversation that you didn't understand. What was this term, Kenji?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So in other words, live your life, be a gay person, but don't make it your cause.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
One of the concerns that your parents had was not just the effects that this would have on them, but the effects that it would have on you. They were worried that you were going to get hate mail.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So you told your parents that you already got hate mail, and your father was shocked and surprised by that, that you already were getting hate mail. And it struck you that in some ways this detail that may have been connected to his own experience as a young man from Japan who came to the United States in the 1950s. Tell me what went through your mind at that point, Kenji.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Once on board the aircraft and en route to Seattle, the man showed a flight attendant the contents of his briefcase. It looked like a bomb. In return for releasing passengers unharmed, he demanded $200,000 when the plane landed. He also added an odd request. He wanted four parachutes. After the plane landed in Seattle, the ransom and parachutes were delivered.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Your parents had a view of assimilation that is quite different than yours. Your dad sort of describes himself as sort of the stereotypical success story of the American dream and the value of assimilation. Tell me how your views about assimilation have come to differ from your parents, Kenji.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
When I think back to photographs I've seen of FDR, I often see him sitting behind a desk with people standing around him. And of course, he looks very presidential when he does that. But perhaps some of this was also with a view to hiding the fact that he found it difficult to stand and to walk.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
It's striking, Kenji, because I feel like the idea of assimilation, the idea of the melting pot, like we leave our identities behind, we forget that we were Irish or Jewish or gay or black, that we come to America and then we all become this new thing, which is an American. I think that's held up as being a value, an important ideal. You're pointing in some ways to the dark side of assimilation.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I understand that you have conducted surveys in corporate environments that find that covering negatively impacts individual sense of self and diminishes their commitment to their organizations.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I understand that you faced a moment a number of years ago that brought all of your complex views about assimilation into play. It had to do with a wonderful job offer from NYU. Tell me that story, Kenji.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
When we come back, techniques to uncover our true identities and help others do the same. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I'm Shankar Vedantam. Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino has spent decades thinking about how people mask their identities in order to conform to both real and imagined pressures from those around them. He's also thought a lot about how we can be more of ourselves more of the time. Kenji, you sometimes hear from people who disagree with you.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
They say, you know, you may be a gay man and feel the need to hide, but I'm straight and I feel the need to hide too. Maybe it's because I'm overweight or elderly or drink too much. Maybe I have a mental illness that's stigmatized. Maybe I'm just shy. Tell me about these encounters, Kenji.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Hmm. I'm thinking also just of behavioral things. Perhaps I'm a shy person. Perhaps I'm a sad person. And perhaps being shy and being sad are not celebrated in the workplace. I'm not going to be seen as an up-and-comer, as a promising employee if I'm seen to be retiring or depressed. And so I feel the need to cover up what I'm going through.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
What's striking about the story, of course, is that people knew that the president had a disability, that he had polio. It wasn't a secret. But yet he went to these lengths in some ways to give the impression that he was OK.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
When I think about something like addiction, for example, or the ways in which addiction has touched so many lives in this country, you know, it has touched the lives of people who are rich and poor and black and white and, you know, every socioeconomic group and every demographic group.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
But clearly there is a huge stigma about addiction today and there's a huge demand to cover up, you know, addictions in the workplace, but also in social life.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I want to play you some tape, Kenji, featuring Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Britain. In 1980, the year she gave the speech, unemployment was rising in Britain and the economy was in recession. Some of her critics urged her to execute a U-turn, reversing the changes she had made. Here's how she responded.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Kenji, what I hear you arguing is that covering in some ways is a unifying cause, perhaps even sort of a universal civil rights struggle.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
You say that there are a couple of different ways that stories of uncovering can be shared. One is what you call distinct storytelling. What is this, Kenji?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
You also talk about something called diffused storytelling. What is diffused storytelling, Kenji?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Listening to that clip, Kenji, it's hard not to notice Margaret Thatcher's distinctive speaking voice.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Or if you're talking about a family member, for example, talking about what you did on the weekend, there are ways in which we can reveal our lives to others without it being, as you say, a set piece that's delivered from a podium.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
What do you think the effects are of this kind of uncovering? You have done some research that basically finds that this kind of storytelling, both the distinct and the diffuse form, have benefits.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I understand, Kenji, some time ago you were at a supermarket and you had an exchange with the cashier. He asked you a question that had to do with your husband, but you didn't tell the cashier about your husband. Tell me that story.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He's the author of Covering the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. Along with David Glasgow, he is co-author of Say the Right Thing, How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice. Kenji, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Do you have follow-up questions about covering and identity for Kenji Yoshino? If you'd be willing to share your questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line covering. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love the ideas we explore on Hidden Brain, please consider signing up for our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
It's where you'll find bonus conversations you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, you'll be providing us with vital support to continue bringing you more episodes of the show. Please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And of course, I mean, she was known as the Iron Lady. And in some ways, that voice added to that impression.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So in this case, Margaret Thatcher wasn't hiding a physical disability. She was hiding the fact that she came from a blue-collar background. But again, it wasn't a secret that she came from a blue-collar background. People knew that she was a grocer's daughter. But in some ways, she again was giving people the illusion that she wasn't.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I want to play you another piece of tape, Kenji. This one features an actor, Ben Kingsley, talking about what it was like to be offered the lead role in the movie Gandhi, a performance for which he would ultimately receive an Academy Award. He's recounting here how it felt like to look in the mirror after he was made to look like Mahatma Gandhi.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
He didn't know at this point whether director Richard Attenborough, who had spent years trying to make the movie, was going to give him the part.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
Dan Cooper allowed the passengers to disembark, but kept the crew on board. He demanded the plane be refueled and fly to Mexico City. The plane took off a second time. The hijacker ordered the crew to stay in the cockpit. He also demanded the curtains between the coach cabin and first class be closed.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So, Kenji, actors, of course, are professionally trained to disguise themselves. Ben Kingsley was pretending to be someone he was not. But you say he wasn't just playing the role of Gandhi?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
And of course, he's not the only actor to have done so. There is a long list of actors and musicians and performers who have changed their names to have stage names that sound more charismatic, if you will, than their given names.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
All these figures were very visible. Franklin Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, and Ben Kingsley lived in the public eye. And yet, there were aspects of themselves that they played down. They were hiding, but hiding in plain sight. When we come back, the subtle ways in which we all disguise our identities and what this subterfuge costs us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I'm Shankar Vedanta. Kenji Yoshino is a legal scholar at New York University. He says that people who feel shame about their identities or fear how they will be treated by others often disguise themselves in three ways, all of which he has done himself. Kenji, let's spend a little time with your own story. You first realized you needed to disguise who you were when you were at boarding school.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
I understand that when you got to college, you directed all your energies into academic pursuits. Were you using your studies to hide your identity now?
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
With no one watching him, he opened the rear exit on the plane and leaped with his parachute and his money into a moonless night. Dan Cooper was never caught. His identity remains a mystery. Clearly, the man who showed up at the airline counter that day was not who he said he was. The story of his hijacking, while real, is the stuff of movies and novels.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So after college, you went to England on a Rhodes Scholarship, but you became depressed when you were in England. Tell me what happened, Kenji.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
At some point during your time in England, Kenji, you went to see a psychiatrist. Tell me what happened when you talked with him and how it turned out.
Hidden Brain
Dropping the Mask
So this insight helped you accept your identity as a gay man. But when you returned to the United States to go to law school, were you open about being gay?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. It was a cold day in Appalachia on January 7th, 1865. A Union soldier named Asa McCoy was on his way home, wounded from fighting in the Civil War. As he neared his cabin in Kentucky, Asa was given a message, don't return home or you will be killed. A local group of Confederate militia, known as the Logan Wildcats, planned to kill Asa.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Now, in some ways, it's worth pointing out, of course, that not getting that promotion did indeed have personal effects on Dana. It might have affected her life, her finances, maybe even her retirement plan. So it had consequences in her personal life, Fred.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I want to talk about another component of grudges, Fred. You worked with a man named Alan whose wife cheated on him. Can you tell me his story and the thoughts that constantly circled around in his mind?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
History is full of incidents that have sparked long-standing grudges, sometimes with consequences that last decades. But there also are smaller, more personal grievances that we all harbor. Perhaps you still remember some slight you experienced years ago at the hands of a friend or family member?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I can see in some ways how, at least on a short-term basis, this can make you feel better. If you're feeling very upset, if you're feeling very hurt, it does make you feel better to say, I know what the cause of my hurt is. It's this other person. This other person did this terrible thing, and that's why I'm feeling terrible. It's her fault.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So we've talked about the role that taking things personally and the blame game plays in the development of a grudge. These often lead to what you call the final stage in the grievance process, the construction of a grievance story. What do you mean by this, Fred?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Today, we explore the psychology of grudges, how long-standing animosities affect our lives, and what to do about them. This week on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I'm curious why some wrongdoings become grudges and others don't. You talk about a very powerful concept, the violation of unenforceable rules. What does this mean, Fred?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I want to talk about one unenforceable rule that you had in your life, Fred. When your mother-in-law was alive, you and your family would often go and visit her in Connecticut. I understand that she wasn't very nice to you.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So after this fight, I understand that you called a friend to complain about your mother-in-law. You wanted to tell someone else your grievance story. What did you say and what did your friend tell you?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
That's a way of saying you shouldn't allow people who have wronged you to take up too much of your attention. Sounds nice, but is it realistic? We are social creatures, after all, and our interactions and relationships with others matter. When someone is kind to us, it has the power to alter our day, maybe even change the course of our lives. When someone wrongs us, it can also have large effects.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
We've talked about the anatomy of grudges and how they form. Let's spend a moment talking about some of the consequences of holding on to our past grievances. Many studies have examined the relationship between resentment and mental health issues. One study, for example, found that holding a grudge could lead to lower self-esteem.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I feel like I can remember times in my own life, Fred, when I've been up at 3.45 in the morning, upset about what someone said to me or what someone did to me. And I'm lying in bed, tossing and turning. I can't sleep. I'm angry. And of course, it seems like the effects on sleep must be one of the effects of resentment and grievance.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Why is it that grievance and grudges cause these physiological effects? What is happening physiologically to us that cause an effect on sleep, that cause an effect on the heart, that cause an effect on high blood pressure?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
At Stanford University, Fred Luskin has spent a quarter century studying what happens when we hold on to grudges. Fred Luskin, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So the irony here, Fred, is that grudges can make us feel better in the short term. They make us feel like we're getting back at the people who've hurt us. But the people they hurt the most might be us.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
When we come back, strategies for letting go of the past. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the late 1960s, tensions were exploding in Northern Ireland. Riots were breaking out in cities like Belfast and Derry. People were sharply divided on whether to remain part of the United Kingdom or to join the Republic of Ireland.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Fred, some years ago, you met a woman named Debbie. She was having issues with her husband. And when I say issues, this was not merely conflicts about who takes out the garbage.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Catholic nationalists wanted unity with Ireland and Protestant Unionists wanted the country to stay within the United Kingdom. Decades of hostility and turmoil led to what became known as the Troubles, a violent conflict that involved bombings, shootings, and the killing of many people. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict, the majority of them civilians.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Many people were left grieving over horrific losses. In another part of the world at the time, Fred Luskin was at Stanford University in California, studying the role of forgiveness in people's lives. A man named Byron Bland reached out to Fred after reading newspaper articles about his work at Stanford.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Byron asked, was Fred willing to try his forgiveness training with mothers who had lost their children to the troubles? Their stories were unimaginably painful. One woman's son had been kidnapped on the way to work, then ushered into a shallow grave where he was shot, his body hidden for 21 years.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Another woman's son had been working at a restaurant when a gunman walked up to the takeout window and shot him seven times. He died on the spot. A third woman said her Protestant son was hanging out with his Catholic friend at a pub when a loyalist rushed in and shot both men dead. The stories went on.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
When the women were flown to California to share their stories, Fred found himself overwhelmed with horror. But he listened, and he began the training. It started with intake. He asked them to fill out questionnaires about their mental state. Then, slowly and carefully, he took them through the steps he had developed. One was along the lines of his own epiphany at Safeway.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
When you are deeply upset about something, take a moment to notice things you are not upset about.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I'm wondering whether you heard from these women or you hear from other people you work with, Fred, a sense of anger directed toward you, because these are people who are saying, you know, I've been through something terrible and the person who did this terrible thing to me, you know, really it's unforgivable. And here's Fred Luskin coming in and telling me to forgive and forget.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I mean, do you get people angry with you? Because in some ways it can feel, even though that's not what you're doing, but it can feel like you're taking, the side of the transgressor?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
What was the effect of these ideas on the women who went through the program, Fred?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
The cycle repeated itself over and over. One day, Debbie came home early from work. She discovered her husband on the couch with another woman. It was the last straw.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
It's interesting, the word forgiveness itself, I think, points our mind toward the person who has done us harm, the person who has done us wrong. When I think I forgive you, I'm thinking that my forgiveness is directed toward you. But everything that I'm hearing from you, Fred, it's that really forgiveness, in fact, is not about the other person at all. It's about ourselves.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
We talked earlier about your mother-in-law and how she would often make rude and critical comments about you. And some of this might have been because she was, you know, you could say an exceptionally tidy person or you could say an obsessively tidy person, depending on your point of view.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
But at one point, you asked yourself a question with her that also made a very big difference in the way you responded to her. What was this question, Fred?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I understand that at one point toward the end of her life, your mother-in-law had a chat with you about the way she may have treated you. Tell me about that story and what happened, Fred.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So many people have been in similar situations where they have been betrayed by a romantic partner and people really struggle with it. How was Debbie's account of what happened to her affecting her life, Fred?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
When we come back, Fred offers more techniques to get us moving when we find ourselves stuck on a grudge. Plus, we take a look at some of the physiological benefits of forgiveness. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us want to be rid of our grudges, but we find that the grievance keeps rearing its head.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Pay attention to me, it tells us. Forgiveness is for suckers. We find ourselves drawn irresistibly to rehashing the events that caused us pain. We may go back to complaining to others about how we have been wronged. Fred Luskin sometimes tells the people he is trying to help about a psychological experiment.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
The Wildcats were led by a member of the Hatfields, a family living in West Virginia who had strong ties to the Confederate Army. Asa hid out in a cave near Peter Creek, Kentucky. But it was no use. He was eventually tracked down and shot dead. The incident is said to have sparked a famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. It lasted decades.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Fred and other researchers have also found that once we are down the path of constructing a grievance story, our minds reach for more and more evidence that our state of mind is justified.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
You know, I'm thinking back to the moment you went to the grocery store, you know, against your wishes to get something your wife wanted. And of course, you're thinking about your friend Sam and you're thinking about the way in which he had hurt your feelings and the way in which, you know, it was unfair that he treated you the way he treated you.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
And then you show up at the grocery store and now the thing that you wanted is not in the grocery store. Now, that's yet another piece of evidence that the universe, in fact, is unfair because And it allowed me to tell my wife that she was unfair sending me to the supermarket that I didn't want to go to.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
One technique that you teach is to ask people to be mindful about the interventions they have tried in the past and the effectiveness of those interventions. You worked with a woman named Alice who did not get along with her in-laws. Tell me how she tried to fix the problem and how you helped her.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I understand that it was important for her to let everyone else know what a louse her husband was and how much pain he had caused her.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
And of course, the point that you're making here is that very often when we're carrying grievances around, we try the same thing over and over and over and over again. We come back to the same strategy over and over again.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
It doesn't work, but we say, okay, next time I'm really going to tell this person off and next time they're going to come to their senses and realize how much they've wronged me.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Fred walked me through a mental practice he calls Positive Emotion Refocusing Technique, or PERT for short.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Fred says there is lots of evidence that reducing hostility is good for our mental and physical health. The old saying is true, anger does the most harm to the vessel that stores it. One analysis found that far from soothing our pain, grudges have a way of increasing our experience of chronic suffering, as seen in conditions like fibromyalgia.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
You also conducted a study that looked at the effects of forgiveness on workplace productivity and well-being. Tell me about that, Fred.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
We talked earlier about unenforceable rules, the rules we want others to follow, but we cannot make them follow. Let's return to the story of you and your best friend, Sam. So you emailed him at the height of your grudge and told him how you felt. What did you say and how did he respond, Fred?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
In the course of your work and research, you came by another person named Jill, and she confided in you about her troubled relationship with her mother. But unlike in the case of Debbie's ex, Jill's mother was dead?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Fred Luskin is a psychologist and director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project. He is the author of Forgive for Good, a proven prescription for health and happiness, and Forgive for Love, the missing ingredient for a healthy and lasting relationship. Fred Luskin, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Do you have follow-up questions about grudges and forgiveness for Fred Luskin?
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
If you'd be comfortable sharing your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, grudge. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
You know, what is striking about both these stories you've just told me, Fred, is that in both Debbie's case and in Jill's case, the source of their pain is in their past, but it's almost as if this person, this other person, is standing with them, walking with them, living with them, inside their heads all the time.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So you're a scholar, you're a teacher, you're a therapist, but you're also a human being, and you yourself are not invulnerable to holding on to a grievance. I want you to tell me the story of your friend Sam and what happened to you and Sam, and maybe start with how close you were to Sam for many years of your life.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
In 1873, a McCoy family member, perhaps still seething from Asa's death, accused Floyd Hatfield of stealing his pig. A trial followed, and Floyd Hatfield was acquitted. A few years later, one of the trial witnesses was killed by two McCoys. In 1882, on election day in Kentucky, some McCoy brothers drunkenly fought and killed Ellison Hatfield, stabbing him multiple times in the back.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I understand that at one point, Fred, you heard that Sam was to be married and you did not hear about this from Sam, but from someone else.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So you were not invited to the wedding. This is someone whom you consider to be, as you said, your best friend, nearly a brother. How did that change your outlook and behavior? I understand that the people around you started to notice that you were different.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
I understand that at one point during the saga, Fred, you found yourself in a very unusual place to have an epiphany, the supermarket. Tell me what happened at the supermarket that day.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
For better and worse, people we are close to can affect us in profound ways. Sometimes these effects are fleeting, and sometimes they last for years. When we come back, the physiological and psychological effects of holding a grudge. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
When someone wrongs us, holding a grudge against them almost feels like a form of justice. But psychologist Fred Luskin says that more often than not, grudges don't hurt the targets of our anger. They hurt us. Fred, we've discussed a few ways in which people can hurt us, but sometimes it's a process that hurts us. One person you worked with was upset she did not get a job promotion.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
In retaliation, the Hatfields killed all three McCoy brothers. The feud continued into a cycle of violence that reached its peak in 1888, during what came to be known as the New Year's Night Massacre. Several members of the Hatfield gang set fire to a McCoy cabin and killed two children.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
So if I understand correctly, Fred, Dana's reaction to not being promoted was the sense that she had wasted 10 years of her life, that all this time and effort she had spent at the company going above and beyond, all of it was wasted effort.
Hidden Brain
No Hard Feelings
Let's look at one aspect of the story you just told me. So this was an employee who did not get a promotion. Another way of looking at this is to say the company has a number of different priorities. Maybe I don't fully understand all the priorities of the company. They've picked somebody else, but it's actually not about me. It's just about what the company needed to do at this time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the summer of 2022, a man named Ivan went on a vacation with two friends to Kassandra, a peninsula in Greece. During the holiday, Ivan was swimming in the ocean when a fierce riptide pulled him away from the beach. His friends alerted the Coast Guard, but he was swept out so quickly that the search operation failed to find him.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And of course, when people build models of political instability and how coups succeed and how coups fail, they're not taking into account whether someone's trousers are slippery.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
It was the one that her sons had lost. It had floated some 80 miles on the ocean, just in time to save Ivan's life. Going about our day-to-day lives, most of us act as if the world is orderly and predictable. We make plans, we set goals, we schedule events. What we don't take into account is the ever-present role of chance and randomness, blind forces that wield more power than we recognize.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So if the world is actually shaped by randomness and chance, but we manage to tell ourselves a tidy story about how it's governed by predictable rules and principles, let's talk about some of the factors inside the brain that make this shift possible. You've observed that there are biases wired into the brain that lead us to overlook the influence of small or random influences.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
One of these is the so-called magnitude bias. What is this, Brian?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
I mean, even in the story that you just told me about the Stimpsons and their vacation to Japan, as you're telling me the story, I'm recoiling at the idea that someone's vacation can decide where an atomic bomb is dropped. Surely, I tell myself, there have to be bigger causes driving this. It can't be something so trivial.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And of course, if you take the even longer view and you look at the evolution of humans in the first place, the number of chance occurrences that must have had to take place for that to happen is extraordinary.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So, in the middle of the last century, scientists in a number of fields began to recognize that contrary to our assumptions, very small influences could produce very big effects. One of the researchers who first drew attention to this reality was named Edward Lorenz. Who was he, Brian, and what was his story?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
This week on Hidden Brain, we conclude our Wellness 2.0 series with a look at how we can come to grips with the unpredictable forces that shape our world and turn them to our advantage. We hear a lot these days about separating the signal from the noise. The idea is that there's a deep order, a solid predictability we can count on if only we can screen out distracting details, meaningless static.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
One reason we don't see the hand of chaos is that we are often quick to explain things in a way that makes them seem predictable. Brian says this is because our brains are storytelling machines. Evolution has designed us to come up with explanations for the things we see and hear.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And this must be why when you watch cable television about the stock market or even about sports, you have people very, very confidently explain why the game turned out the way it did, why stock A rose yesterday and why stock B fell 15 points yesterday. It's the same phenomenon.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
There's a movie that came out in 1998 that brought the reality of these choices into sharp relief. I want to play you a clip from the trailer of Sliding Doors.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
You're a fan of this movie, Brian. Tell me how it speaks to all our lives.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
But what if those trivial, random factors actually matter? What if they matter a lot? At University College London, political scientist Brian Kloss studies these hidden forces. Brian Kloss, welcome to Hidden Brain. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian, there's a story you like to tell about a young American couple, Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson, who visited Japan almost a century ago.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So we've been talking about some of the ways in which humans overlook randomness and chance. But you say that modern humans have engineered an interconnected world that is even more subject to random occurrences. How so, Brian?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
You say that also our relentless drive for efficiency has produced very little slack in our lives, and the reduced slack itself has effects on randomness and chance. How so?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So you make a very interesting argument that for modern people, there's a big shift in terms of how predictable our lives are on a micro scale versus a macro scale. What do you mean by this, Brian?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Who were they and what were they doing in that country?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Our failure to recognize that our world is saturated with randomness comes with great costs. We expect order and predictability to prevail and then get blindsided by sudden crises. We see each disastrous development as an inexplicable one-off occurrence instead of the product of a world that was always full of chance and that has become more vulnerable to chance in the modern age.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
When we come back, how we can learn to recognize the role of randomness and how to turn these forces to our advantage. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Brian Klaas is a political scientist at University College London. He is the author of Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So, Brian, I think when we listen to these stories of chance, some of us might find these stories disturbing. And in part, I think we find it disturbing because it challenges the idea that we are actually in control of what's happening. You say that it's important to come to terms with the fact that such control might actually be impossible.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
You deal with this yourself using something that you call the snooze button effect. What is the snooze button effect?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Hmm. Now, the fact that we have little control, I think, prompts many people to say, how can I figure out a way to exercise more control? If you think about people who go down the IVF route of conception, for example, you in fact have more control than if you went the natural route of conception. And there's the illusion, I suppose, with IVF that
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
that maybe you actually do have more control over an unpredictable process. So I think one of our reactions to unpredictability and chance is to say, how can we exert more control? How do we keep all these forces at bay so that, in fact, I can chart my own course? You think that that's a mistake?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Almost two decades after the Stimsons' visit to Japan, the city of Kyoto becomes the topic of much discussion at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Why were American military leaders fixated on Kyoto, Brian?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
One of your important insights, Brian, is that we should all focus a little less on control and a little more on resilience. What do you mean by this?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
For hour after hour, Ivan struggled to stay afloat. The currents carried him farther and farther from land. Eventually, he was treading water about 15 nautical miles from the beach. It was cold. Soon, it was dark. Ivan fought to keep his head above water. The night wore on. His strength began to give out.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
How would you apply the same insight at the level of organizations or nations, Brian?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Would you say that your own life has become happier or at least less stressed as a result of focusing less on control?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Brian Klaas is a political scientist at University College London. He's the author of Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. It's been such a pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
In our companion to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus, we talk with Brian about what happens if we stop trying to make our days orderly and instead invite chaos into our lives. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, Engineering Luck. If you're not yet a subscriber to Hidden Brain Plus, this is a great time to give it a try.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
We're extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January, and you'll get 30 free days to try it out. You can sample Hidden Brain Plus by going to apple.co slash hiddenbrain and clicking Try Free. Again, just go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain and click try free. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Thanks for listening. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So Kyoto is now at the top of this target list, but our Kyoto tourist by this point has become something of an important figure. Tell me what Henry Stimson was up to at this stage.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So at one point, of course, as you just mentioned, Henry Stimson goes about the heads of the generals, speaks to President Truman, has two meetings with him, and finally convinces Truman that Kyoto should be taken off the list. What were the Japanese cities that were left on this potential bombing list, Brian?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
So besides Kokura's luck, you might also say Nagasaki had especially bad luck because, in fact, it was the removal of Kyoto from the list that brought Nagasaki onto the list in the first place. And then the cloud cover over Kokura prompted the bomb to be dropped over Nagasaki. That seems extraordinarily unfortunate, Brian.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
Just as he was about to drown, the first rays of the morning sun illuminated an object bobbing nearby. It was a ball. With his last ounce of strength, Ivan swam to it. He clung to the partly deflated ball, and it helped him keep his head above water. Hours later, he was found and pulled to safety.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
But when you tell me that the fate of tens of thousands of people was partly or perhaps even significantly determined by a vacation that two Americans took decades earlier, there's a part of me that recoils at that, Brian. There's a part of me that feels that is immoral.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
I want to talk about a very different story, Brian. This one is personal to you. Take us back in time again to a small town in Wisconsin in 1905. Something terrible happened there June of that year. Tell me the story.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
A man has swept out a sea and he is saved because a little boy kicked his ball into the ocean. Tens of thousands of people in Nagasaki are killed while their brothers and sisters in Kyoto are spared because of a sightseeing trip. Someone exists today because four children and their mother perished a century ago.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
We like to imagine that we live in an orderly universe that is occasionally upended by an unexpected event. But what if those unforeseeable occurrences are the rule, not the exception? When we come back, why we fail to recognize that we live in a world of randomness and what we should do about it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
When news of the rescue was broadcast on the news, it caught the eye of a woman in a different part of Greece. Ten days earlier, her children had been playing with a ball on a distant beach. One of them kicked the ball a bit too hard in the direction of the ocean, and it bobbed away. The boy shrugged and went on playing without their toy. Watching the news, the boy's mother recognized the ball.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
At University College London, political scientist Brian Klaas long subscribed to a view that most of us have, that history and politics are shaped by powerful people and predictable currents. Brian, as a political scientist, you studied the way power operates.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
A few years ago, you went on a research trip that made you question whether many of the assumptions and theories of your field were accurate. You visited Zambia to study a coup. What was the story you'd heard about Zambia before you went, and what did you find when you got there?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown
And I'm assuming at this point that if other people in the military hear the top commander say, there has been a coup, I surrender, they would basically fall in line.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Jason refuses to be a part of the strip search. He hands the phone back to Donna Summers and returns to the kitchen.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Donna Summers asks her fiancé to come to her workplace. Walter Nix coaches youth baseball. He's a regular churchgoer. But once in the back room, alone with the frightened teenager, he obediently follows the instructions of the voice on the phone.
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Marching To Your Own Drummer
So at the end of this period, Walter Nix finally leaves and Donna Summers comes back. He goes to his car, Walter Nix goes to his car, but he recognizes that he has done something that he shouldn't have done. What happens there, Sunita?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
So at this point now, the whole ordeal has been almost three hours long. Donna Summers was told by Officer Scott that the police were going to be on their way, and presumably the police should have gotten there within three hours.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
But all of us also remember other moments, moments of silence, of cowardice. We don't post about such moments on our social media feeds, but we do ask ourselves afterwards, why didn't I say something? Why didn't I do something? At Cornell University, psychologist Sunita Sa studies why we stay silent when we know we should speak and how to rediscover our voices. Sunita Sa, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Talk a moment about the fact that as Donna Summers picks up this call, the officer is citing various police codes and statutes. She decides to take that first step of calling Louise to the back room. And from that point on, each action is only one small step beyond the previous action. Talk about this process of gradual escalation, Sunita. You're like the frog in the proverbial hot water.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I want to discuss another aspect of compliance. Shortly after you finished medical school in the United Kingdom, you were invited to a free financial consultation. What was your life like at the time? What were the state of your finances and who was offering this financial consultations?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Sunita sank into the couch. The financial advisor, whose name was Dan, came in.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
So in other words, he has told you that he has something of a conflict of interest in the advice that he's giving you. What was your reaction at this point?
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Marching To Your Own Drummer
Sunita, I want to take you back to your days in Pittsburgh. There was an evening one day when you felt a sudden pain in your chest. Can you tell me what happened?
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Marching To Your Own Drummer
So you've come up with a term that I love called insinuation anxiety. What is insinuation anxiety, Sunita?
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Marching To Your Own Drummer
You conducted a very interesting experiment on a ferry in Long Island. Tell me about that experiment and what you found.
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Marching To Your Own Drummer
And that makes sense because you're getting a sure $5 versus getting something that's likely to be less than $5.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I mean, it's really puzzling, Sunita, because of course, as you've shown, when you haven't given anyone advice, their preference is just to take the $5. When you give people advice to take the lottery, it goes up to 20%.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
But when you tell people, take the lottery, and I am going to profit if you take the lottery, you would imagine that number should go down because now people should be suspicious of me and my motives, but the number goes up, it doubles.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Tell me about the gender patterns you noticed in running this experiment, Sunita.
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Marching To Your Own Drummer
So Sunita, you have looked at different fields, aviation and medicine, to see how often people speak up when they see a mistake. What have you found?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I want to talk about another aspect of compliance. Sometimes, you know, we're just swept along by the current, by what everyone around us is doing. You tell the story of a young Marine named Matthew who was deployed to Iraq when he was 19 years old. He's serving near Fallujah, and things are not good when he gets there.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
So at one point, he's in a unit that's basically investigating a neighborhood, and they hear an explosive device go off. It's near a mosque. Describe to me the events that happened next, Sunita.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
You know, some time ago, Sunita, we spoke with political scientist Timur Koran. He works at Duke University. And many years ago, he came up with this term called preference falsification, where he describes what happens in many societies where you have a current of some kind is running through a society. Maybe it's a
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
someone has come to power and this person is very powerful or a regime has changed. Some of the work that he did was looking at East Germany after the fall of the communists and integration with West Germany. And he finds that in many of these societies, what happens is that
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
as people sense that the tides have turned, that the current has changed, they have a very strong impulse to basically fall in line with whatever the prevailing current is. And the idea of preference falsification is I have preferences, but I'm going to, in some ways, suppress my preferences.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I'm going to falsify my preferences because my preferences are out of line with what the majority seems to want. In the classic example He describes the story of a reporter going to East Germany shortly after reunification with West Germany, and the reporter is trying to find former communists to speak with, to ask how they are faring under reunification.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
And when he gets there, all the communists tell him, you know, I never really was a communist in the first place. I was just pretending to go along with the old regime. And, you know, I always was for capitalism. I always was for the West. One of the points that Timur Koran makes is that it's really, really difficult for individuals to break out of this when this happens to them.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
It's one thing to notice it or even to smile about it when it happens to someone else in another country. Very difficult to do something when you yourself feel swept up by the tides around you.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
A great deal of our rule following is not conscious and deliberate. It's implicit and automatic. Most of the time, we are so compliant, we don't even realize we are being compliant. When we come back, how to regain a sense of agency. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Every country in the world has its national monuments to recognize and remember its heroes. These heroes are invariably people who stepped up to do dangerous, difficult, and courageous things in moments of crisis. They are the stars of our history books, our beacons of inspiration. Psychologist Sunita Sarr is the author of Defy, the power of no in a world that demands yes.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
She says one common lesson from the heroes in our history books is that they listen to their inner voices in times of crisis. Think back to that horrific case of impersonation at the McDonald's. Some employees rebelled against Officer Scott's instructions and others complied, but every one of them felt a defining inner emotion.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
So obviously, most of us don't like being tense. We don't like being stressed. But you say that this tension actually can play a very salutary role in our lives. How so?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I want to go back to the story you told me about how when you had just finished medical school in the UK and you were weighing how to manage your relatively meager savings, you met this charming financial advisor named Dan who told you that he stood to benefit if you chose his recommended investments. Did you go ahead and take Dan's advice, Sunita?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
In some ways, this points to one of the most important pieces of advice you have when people are dealing with whether to consent to something or to defy something, and that is to buy themselves time.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Sunita had worked as a doctor in the UK before moving to the United States. She knew the symptoms of a pulmonary embolism, which is a blockage in the lungs that's caused by a blood clot.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
So I feel like this happens all the time in so many different situations. You're buying a car, and the salesperson basically tries to pressure you into making a decision quickly. or you're sitting in a dentist's chair and the dentist says, you know, we need to do this and that, or here's the procedure we need to do, there's a great amount of pressure for us to act quickly.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
And of course, when we have to act quickly, it becomes much more likely that we will act in compliant ways.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
One of the other ideas that you talk about that can be helpful is to name our own emotions and to potentially talk to ourselves in the third person. Talk about this idea. What do you have in mind and why would it work?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I understand that there has been research that finds that in fact, patients are less likely to follow advice that is marred by conflicts of interest when they hear about this advice through a third party and they have some time to think about what to do.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
You cite an idea from the political scientist James March about three questions that people can ask of themselves when they feel like they're being pressured into doing something. What are these questions?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
So talk about why asking these three questions is compelling. And I noticed that one of the questions is not what should I do in this situation, but what would a person like me do in a situation like this?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
There are times in our lives when defying authority and disobeying orders can be scary. We might feel psychologically scared. We might even feel physically scared. These fears can be paralyzing. In our companion episode to this story on Hidden Brain Plus, we explore how we might deal with those fears. It turns out one of the greatest antidotes to fear is not courage, but love.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
If you're a subscriber, that episode should be available right now in your podcast feed. It's titled Defeating Fear. If you're not yet a subscriber, I invite you to check out a subscription with a free seven-day trial. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain. Your support doesn't just unlock great content.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
It unlocks a way for us to keep bringing you great content. If you're a longtime fan of the show, it's your way of showing us that you would like us to keep doing this into the future. Again, those links are apple.co slash hiddenbrain or support.hiddenbrain.org. Sunita Sa is a psychologist at Cornell University. She's the author of the book, Defy, The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Sunita, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
If you have follow-up questions for Sunita Sa and you'd be willing to share those questions with the Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line defiance. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
If you were a son or daughter of a slave-owning family in 18th century America, would you have spoken out against racial injustice? What would you have done? The question is compelling because while we all like to think we would have done the brave thing, the right thing, many of us have the sneaking suspicion we might not.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Moments later, Sunita found herself getting prepped for the scan. She turned to the tech and asked how much radiation the scan entailed. Sunita didn't need to ask the question.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I want to ask you about another story, Sunita. You have a friend named Rick who was experiencing some lower back pain and he decided that he was going to go in to get a massage. What happened?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. What would you have done? It's one of the most enduring questions in psychology. If you were a German soldier in the 1940s, would you have followed orders? If you were a member of a Hutu militia group in 1994, would you have killed your Tutsi neighbors in the unfolding genocide in Rwanda?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I understand that Rick not only left without saying anything, but he added a tip for the massage therapist on his way out.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Sunita has asked herself how she and so many other people she knows have become so compliant. In her case, she traced it back to her family upbringing.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
We fear that we might have fallen in line like everyone else and done what we were told to do. Today on the show, we explore the reasons many of us fail to stand up to unjust rules and authority. Not just to dictators or people perpetrating crimes against humanity, but to petty tyrants in the workplace, unfair rules in our cities, even mean-spirited gossip in our circle of friends.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
I understand your parents were fairly strict with you. And at one point, your dad would wake you up in the middle of the night to practice your scales. I mean, that's pretty intense.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Some time ago, Sunita noticed she was being similarly demanding of her own son.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Think about the last time you were on a plane or train or bus. Sitting nearby were two families. Both had small infants with them. One was calm and compliant. The other shrieked and screamed. Did you find yourself marveling at the good kid and annoyed by the bad kid?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
If you're a teacher, do you find yourself drawn to angelic children who follow the rules and find yourself exasperated by kids who constantly test the limits? When we come back, the psychological drivers that prompt us to fall in line and how they can lead us astray. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us need to follow rules.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
When you live in a country where people drive on the right, you cannot suddenly decide to drive on the left. Well, you can, but you'll quickly get in a crash. We expect schools and stores to be open when they say they will be open, and we expect courts and cops to come to our aid when someone breaks the law and harms us.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
But while rules do many good things in our lives, they can also turn us into unthinking automatons. At Cornell University, Sunita Sa studies the psychology of compliance and defiance. Sunita, in April 2004, an assistant manager at a Kentucky McDonald's gets a call from a police officer. Set the scene for me, Sunita. Who was this manager and what was the call about?
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Why we silence ourselves and how we can align our words and actions with our values, this week on Hidden Brain. All of us can remember moments when we stepped up to do the right thing. Maybe we helped a fellow student who was on the receiving end of hurtful barbs. Maybe we defied orders that we knew were wrong. Looking back, we remember these moments with pride.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
The officer cites various laws and criminal statutes that Louise allegedly broke. He tells Donna he has her supervisor, a woman named Lisa Siddons, on the other line.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
Donna Summers brings Louise to the back office. Officer Scott is still on the phone. A note that this next part of the story involves physical and sexual assault.
Hidden Brain
Marching To Your Own Drummer
It's cold in the back room. By this point, Louise is wearing only a McDonald's apron. When Donna Summers tells the police officer she needs to attend to the evening rush at the restaurant, he asks her to bring in someone else to watch the teenager.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. In 1906, the journalist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a novel based on his undercover reporting in Chicago's meatpacking plants. The book tells the story of a young couple, Yorgis and Ona, who immigrate to the U.S. from Lithuania along with their relatives. The optimism they feel about their new country is soon tested.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So you say that hopelessness and despair can also be contagious. So hearing expressions of these emotions can induce similar feelings in others. And you tell the story of a student named Job who one day had an outburst in your class. Who was Job and what happened?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
They don't know how to respond or assume any efforts they make will go nowhere. Other times it's because they feel overwhelmed or consumed with paralyzing guilt. Whatever the driver, when it comes to existential issues such as climate change or war, inaction can have terrible consequences. This week on Hidden Brain, we continue our New Year's series, Wellness 2.0.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
What was the effect of that outburst on the class, Sarah?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
How did you yourself respond to this? I understand that you started to feel in some ways the despair that he was experiencing and feeling somewhat burned out yourself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Like many people in the throes of despair, Sarah looked for quick ways to make herself feel better. Some of these things helped, at least in the short term.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So at one point, Sarah, you were talking with a colleague sitting at an old wooden picnic table about this feeling of being exhausted and burned out. Can you paint me a picture of this conversation and what came from it?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So in some ways, what I'm hearing you say, Sarah, is that when it comes to confronting climate change, the turn that you made in some ways was not just to say we need to talk about climate change, but we need to talk about the feelings that climate change evokes in us, because those feelings can determine whether we do something about it or do nothing about it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So as you started studying our emotional responses to big problems like climate change, you centered on several different ideas. And one of them was our tendency towards what you call busyness. This is exemplified by the story of a young woman you call Gabby. Tell me her story, Sarah.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
We look at how we come to feel disengaged and burned out, even on topics we might care about, and how we can begin to retrieve our sense of efficacy and purpose.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
But in some ways, what I'm hearing from Gabby's story is that any kind of pleasure or rest in some ways in her mind was, I am not serious enough about dealing with the concerns that I have about the world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
You say at one point she was making amends for the debt she owed the planet, which, of course, was a bottomless pit of debt. So there was no end to what she owed. And you call this combination of shame, guilt, you know, perfectionism and anxiety, the cocktail of doom, which is, I think, a very powerful way of putting what many of us feel on a daily basis.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And I can see some people saying not just, you know, I am not entitled to rest, I am not entitled to pleasure, but also saying, you know, maybe this thing that I'm doing right now, even if it is for the cause or for something I care about, it is insufficient. And so, you know, you could ask yourself, You know, what's the point of sitting in a classroom? What's the point of getting a degree?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
You know, if the world is on fire, what am I doing studying for this exam?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So we've been talking about some of the responses that people have to huge intractable problems and how these responses can sometimes be counterproductive or self-sabotaging. But you say that it's a mistake to blame the people who have these reactions.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
In fact, these emotional responses might be the logical result of the way that problems have been presented to people that in some ways we have taught people to respond in the ways in which they're responding.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
A missing ingredient for a recipe, a burned-out light bulb, a parking ticket. We make short work of these problems, briskly crossing them off our to-do lists. But modern life also seems full of issues that researchers call wicked problems, challenges so huge, complicated, and intractable that they defy our attempts to solve them.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I want to look at one of the most important pieces of media in framing the way we think about climate change. I want to play you a clip from Al Gore's 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth.
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Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So Sarah, it's been a while since I watched this film, though sound effects really were something else. What was the approach adopted by this film, and what was the effect it had on people, including your students?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Because, of course, what's happening here is not just that you're telling them that the problem is very big, but they're reminded at every step of the way that, in fact, the problem is too big for them, that they can't do anything about it. So you're telling them it's a terrible problem and you're helpless to solve it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
For some people, Sarah says, scare tactics don't produce apathy, but what she calls a martyrdom complex.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
When we come up against problems like these, we tend to respond differently. At California State Polytechnic University Humboldt, Sarah Jacquet-Ray studies how we respond to huge, overwhelming problems and how we can get better at dealing with them. Sarah Jacquet-Ray, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Over time, Sarah came to see that there was one emotion she needed to induce in her students. It wasn't despair, and it wasn't blind hope that things would magically get better.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Sarah, a lot of your work focuses on the way people respond to the threat of climate change. Many of your students care deeply about the environment. In the course of working with them, you've seen a lot of intense emotions. Can you describe what office hours were like, late night emails from students?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Modern life is full of problems that seem too big for any of us to solve. What can we do, we start to ask. The problem is so big, and I am so small. When we come back, how to make our problems smaller and ourselves bigger. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I'm Shankar Vedant. Sarah Jacquet-Ray has spent many years studying our emotional responses to big, intractable problems like climate change. Over time, she started to realize that our emotional responses to such problems can be part of the solution or part of the problem. Sarah is the author of a field guide to climate anxiety, How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Sarah, can you tell me the story of Chris Jordan? He was a photographer who made multiple trips to the Pacific Ocean to take pictures of birds who were dying from plastic waste that they had ingested.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So Chris Jordan's story doesn't end with him making these photographs and feeling depressed. He writes about how he goes back over time, over and over again to visit these birds. And over time, his emotions start to change. How did they change, Sarah?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Chris Jordan writes, It wasn't until several trips in that I began to really experience the beauty of these birds as kind of the antidote to the horror. That's been the shape of the journey for me as I slowly found my way to love these creatures, and that's really what my film is about more than anything, just how amazing and beautiful and magnificent they are.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I think the Laysan albatross is a spiritual being. They are amazing beings, and the fact that they have plastic in their stomachs is just a stupid thing. It's not the main event. When I first started, the horror was the main event. Now the horror is just something to deal with amidst the enormous beauty and grace and magnificence of these creatures.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Hmm. I'm struck by the fact that so many of the debates that we have in public settings often involve talking in binaries. So some people say we should simply celebrate everything that humans have done because we're an amazing species and we have developed science and technology. And look at the number of people we've lifted out of poverty and the number of...
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
People we can feed today who we didn't think we could feed 50 years ago. And this is a story of success and pride. And other people say, no, look at the destruction that humans have done to the planet. And it's irreversible. And we're just a terrible species. And what I'm hearing you say in some ways is that both those stories at some level are true.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
You say it's important to intentionally cultivate positive emotions as a way to constructively address big problems. How so, Sarah?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I understand that you yourself have taken up gardening recently in ways that you had not before.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Family members find jobs at a meatpacking plant, but the work is dangerous and pays little. The family suffers illness and injuries. Work is tenuous, with periodic wage cuts, poor benefits, and seasonal layoffs. The family is evicted from their home and moves to a crowded, dirty boarding house. Unable to afford a doctor, Ona dies in childbirth, as does her baby.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So when we think of really big problems, you know, climate change or war or genocide or, you know, a pandemic, we often feel helpless because we say the problem is so big, I'm so small. One of the things that you have recommended is that we start to take more pleasure, but also pride in the small things that we can do.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Can you talk about that idea that in some ways we don't have to solve the entire problem to feel like we're making a difference?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
A few years ago, your students felt a powerful connection to a video that appeared on Facebook. I'm going to play a little audio clip from the video. It features a six-year-old boy who has seen a documentary about how human activity is harming animals.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Sarah says it's easy to see hubris and human actions that damage the planet. But she says people fighting to save the planet can suffer from hubris too.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
That's Sarah Jaquette Ray of Cal Poly Humboldt. After the break, another perspective on how to regain our footing when the world feels like too much. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Often when I'm feeling down, I turn to the work of writers I love. I find comfort in favorite poems and wisdom in thinkers who grappled with problems hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Today, as a complement to our conversation with Sarah Jaquette Ray, we wanted to hear a writer's perspective on how to confront feelings of despair and futility.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Pico Ayer brings us this audio essay about a source of refuge he has turned to in difficult moments of his life.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Can you describe what happens in this viral video, Sarah?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Writer Pico Ayer. He has a new book about monasteries and the role they play in a secular age. It's called A Flame, Learning from Silence. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Now, this video in some ways went viral, but I understand that on a Facebook page that you manage, some of your students have blamed your classes for similar meltdowns that they have had. And these are college students, not six-year-olds.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you have follow-up questions for Sarah Jaquette Ray about how to persist in the face of daunting challenges, and you're comfortable sharing your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, staying engaged.
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Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Again, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain and click try free. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon!
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Some of the young people you've encountered, Sarah, feel an overwhelming sense of guilt about their role in spurring climate change and other problems. One was a young woman you call Maddie. How did she respond to what she was learning?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Some of Sarah's students said they didn't want to have children themselves. Every additional person was a burden on the planet. If humans were the cause of so much harm, did you really need more of them? Other students, Sarah says, fell into depression.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
When Jorgis and Ona's remaining son dies as well, Jorgis slides into alcoholism. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle with the aim of awakening the conscience of Americans to the desperate conditions of the working poor. He hoped to spark a movement that would reform the nation's labor laws. But the public did not respond the way he expected.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
And it's not just college students. In 2018, a climate activist named David Buckle took this attitude to its most dramatic extreme. What did he do, Sarah?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
So you use a term called eco-suicide that I had not heard before. Is that actually a term that people are using to describe this kind of anguish?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
When we come back, we probe the psychology of despair and how to fight it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Cal Poly Humboldt, Sarah Jacquet-Ray researches how people deal with complex, large-scale problems.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Over the years, she has seen many young people who have heard from an early age about the dangers of environmental destruction internalize the harms that humans have done to the planet. Sarah was initially focused on teaching students about the environment, but over time, she realized she was confronting a psychological problem whose effects go well beyond climate change.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
The emotions triggered in us by big challenges can themselves become an impediment to solving those challenges. Sarah, college students are not the only ones who experience strong emotional responses to big, intractable problems. You were chatting some time ago with your 12-year-old daughter and talking about the problems confronting the world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
How did the conversation go and what did your daughter tell you?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Readers did care about the quality of the meat they ate, but seemed indifferent to the plight of exploited workers. Journalists, activists, and leaders often get frustrated when their best effort to draw attention to a cause does not prompt people to get off their couches and take action. Sometimes this is because people feel apathetic.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
I'm hearing, you know, echoes of misanthropy and sort of self-loathing. And to hear that from a 12-year-old seems scary.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
Some time ago, Sarah, you proposed an activity to your students asking them to visualize what the future held. What was this exercise and how did they respond?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: When It's All Too Much
What was the purpose of the exercise, Sarah? What were you trying to do by having them imagine a world where their hopes and dreams came true? What was the purpose behind the exercise?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There is a reasonable assumption we make as we go through life. Groups act in their own self-interest. Merchants sell things in order to make money. Employers want to hire the best employees. Sports teams want to win matches. The assumption of self-interest is also the lens through which we understand how individuals behave.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
one evening in April 1989, a 28-year-old woman was attacked while taking a run in Central Park in New York. She was beaten, raped, and left for dead. Around 1.30 a.m., she was found unconscious by two passers-by. She was rushed to the hospital, where she remained in a coma for 12 days. Psychologist Saul Kasson remembers the news stories about the horrific crime.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The baseball star was not the only object of Saul's affections. His sixth grade teacher was up on a pedestal too.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
All were Black or Latino. Police questioned them for hours and got their confessions, including four on videotape.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
None of the boys had attorneys present. In the video confession of 16-year-old Corey Wise, he's sitting in what looks like a classroom. It's past midnight. His knees are shaking with nervous energy. A prosecutor grills him with questions.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
All five teenagers were convicted. For several years, most everyone thought they were guilty. The convictions continue to gnaw at Saul, however. And then one day, he got a call from ABC News. The producer said ABC had received a tip that the teenager's confessions were made up.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
What were some of the details, if you remember it, that actually were at odds with one another? And this is the complicated thing because sometimes, of course, you know, if you have three eyewitnesses at a scene of anything that happens, a traffic crash, they in fact are not going to agree. In fact, there's a wealth of psychological studies that show that they will not agree on all of the details.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And in fact, they might come up with important discrepancies. And in some ways, it's suspicious if five people at the scene of a traffic crash describe it perfectly.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
So there's a part of you that thinks some of these discrepancies might actually be because people forget. Memory is fallible. So it's actually not surprising that some things might clash with one another.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The judges and jurors in the trials behaved exactly like the volunteers in Saul's early jury experiments. The suspects had confessed. Case closed. It didn't matter that there was compelling evidence pointing in another direction.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul found himself dumbfounded. He loved Mrs. Avery, and he loved Mickey Mantle, and he had poured his heart and soul into the book report.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
ABC News contacted Saul because a previously convicted criminal had come forward to claim responsibility for the crime. A serial rapist named Matias Reyes said he was the one who had attacked the Central Park jogger. The samples taken from the crime scene matched his DNA.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The city eventually paid the boys $41 million for the mistake and for the suffering that they had inflicted on them. But what exactly happened during those confessions, Saul? Do we know what happened that prompted the kids to basically make the confessions they did?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
So we've looked in some ways at the strange phenomenon where some people will step forward voluntarily to say that they have committed a crime when they haven't. And perhaps they're looking for attention. Perhaps they're psychologically disturbed.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And we've looked at cases where people might come forward and confess, perhaps because they feel under pressure or they feel that this is a way that they can go home and see their families. You also talk in some ways about a more complicated psychological dimension of false confession, where these confessions are actually internalized.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Talk about this idea that in some ways this might be the most difficult idea to absorb, where someone actually comes to believe that they have committed a crime.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
It was Saul's mother who finally obtained justice. She demanded proof from Mrs. Avery that the book report was plagiarized. Mrs. Avery looked for evidence but couldn't find any, so she changed Saul's grade. But the moment of helplessness stayed with Saul. Why had he been unable to speak up? Saul grew up to become a psychologist. His area of study? How people interpret the actions of others.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
So the police basically have arrested someone. They've prosecuted the person. They found the person guilty. A new DA comes in and basically says the person's not guilty. Now, there's still someone who's been murdered, someone who's been killed. Yes. What do the cops do?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I mean, some people might look at your work and say, you know, Saul Kasten spends a lot of time trying to get people who are in prison out of prison. But there's another way to look at what you're doing, which is also to say the fact that we've put the wrong person in prison. Yes, that's a tragedy for that wrong person, for Peter.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
But it's also a tragedy for society because the real killer has not been brought to justice.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When we come back, what happens in our minds when we are induced to make false confessions and the use of police interrogation tactics in workplaces and private organizations. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. So many TV crime shows center on detectives who have an uncanny ability to spot the right suspect.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
But psychologist Saul Kassin has found that the confidence police have in their hunches is mostly unfounded. He once ran an experiment where he asked prison inmates to confess to two crimes, one they had committed and one they had not committed. How good were laypeople and police detectives in telling truth from fiction?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
In other words, we would do about as well in telling apart truth from lies if we flipped a coin. But that's not all. In the study, police were actually worse than college students at detecting deception.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul and other researchers have also examined a number of psychological factors that cause suspects to make false confessions. Some people seem to be more suggestible. This line of research was developed by a former cop turned psychologist, Geasley Goodjohnson.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Geasley Goodjohnson came up with experiments that mimicked aspects of police interrogations. He'd give volunteers a story and then ask them to recall it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When volunteers recalled something correctly, he would also sometimes tell them they were wrong.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He was especially fascinated by juries. Here were people whose conclusions about defendants had life and death stakes. To evaluate the psychological factors that shape how juries think, Saul came up with cases where some jurors might feel a defendant was guilty, while others might feel he was innocent.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The answer to both questions was yes. The studies found that some people were more suggestible than others. Children, for example, were easier to manipulate than adults. When interrogators ask leading questions, they may unintentionally change the memories of suspects and eyewitnesses.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When detectives reject what a suspect or eyewitness says, they may think they are merely testing the veracity of the statements, but they might also be causing some people to develop inaccurate memories. We think that asking questions is a neutral activity, but in fact, the questions you ask can shape the answers you get.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Another factor in false confessions, Saul cites a study by the psychologist Leonard Bickman, who found that when a stranger wearing a uniform barked instructions at people on the street, they meekly followed those instructions.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
One of the other ideas that you explore is that we are really dependent on social support. Can you talk about the idea that one of the ways in which many interrogations are constructed is to deprive us of these social supports, and these social supports in fact are integral to our maintaining our ability to function psychologically?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Could you talk a moment about the role that sleep plays in false confession, Saul? You cite some really amazing statistics on the likelihood of false confessions the longer a suspect is kept awake.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul figured ambiguous cases would shed light on how people make up their minds about guilt and innocence. He started running experiments with volunteers playing the role of jurors. He noticed there were some cases where his volunteers were totally unanimous.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul has come up with a number of experiments to see if he can induce false confessions in volunteers using only the kind of tricks and mild pressure that would be approved by university ethics committees. In one study, he asked subjects to come into his lab and complete a task on a computer.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The experimenter insists on a confession. Here is where the experimental manipulation comes in. There is another person sitting in the room with a volunteer. This person appears to be another volunteer, but is really a confederate working for Saul. For some volunteers, selected at random, this person now pipes up and tells the volunteer, I saw you hit the Alt key.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
If this experiment showed how false evidence can produce false confessions, Saul has also studied the reverse. He's looked at how false confessions can taint the evidence. In one study, Saul had a volunteer sit in a room with another person. Again, the second person was a confederate secretly working for Saul. The two people were divided by a screen.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
They could hear each other breathing and moving around. All of a sudden, the experimenter entered the room in a huff and declared that money had been stolen from an adjacent room. She separated the two people and asked the volunteer in a one-on-one conversation if the other person had ever left the room.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The experimenter accepted this and left. Then she came back a short while later and said the other person had confessed to leaving the room and taking the money. The experimenter asked the volunteer again.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
We can see why someone might lie on a resume in order to get ahead. We also know that no one would lie on their resume to make themselves look worse. When people are accused of wrongdoing, it makes perfect sense that the guilty would claim to be innocent. But every ounce of common sense tells us no innocent person would ever confess to doing something wrong.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Disturbingly, Saul has found that private companies are taking a leaf out of the police interrogation manual. Take the case of Joaquin Robles.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
A confession. When a defendant in a criminal case admitted he had done something wrong, volunteers playing the role of jurors saw these as open and shut cases. Someone says they're guilty, they're obviously guilty.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The AutoZone loss prevention manager interrogated Robles for hours and then threatened to call the police.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
What would you recommend in terms of ways to limit this, both in the criminal justice system as well as in corporations? It also seems impractical to basically suggest that police can never use pressure or a manager can never make an employee feel uncomfortable if, in fact, something horrendous has happened. What are your solutions to the problems of false confession, Saul?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I mean, I think what I'm hearing from you, Saul, is really the importance of having investigators and police in some ways think a little more like scientists, which is when you're a scientist and you have a hypothesis, yes, you want the hypothesis to be true, but they're also, the scientific method teaches you how to be skeptical of your own hypothesis.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And in fact, it goes to some lengths to try and prove your own hypothesis wrong. And this is, of course, difficult and painful to do because we're often successful in proving our hypotheses wrong.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
But in some ways, I think that's what I'm hearing you saying, which is that if you start with a very strong hypothesis and you start with a belief in your own infallibility, it becomes very hard to exercise the skepticism to say, I could be wrong.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul Kassin is a psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He's the author of Duped, Why Innocent People Confess and Why We Believe Their Confessions. Saul, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul wanted cases where volunteers disagreed with each other. Cases involving confessions, where everyone agreed with everyone else, were useless.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love Hidden Brain and want more of our work, please consider signing up for our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Your subscription provides vital support that helps us bring you more episodes of the show. It also gives you access to a catalog of bonus conversations that you cannot find anywhere else. You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free seven-day trial by going to support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co slash hiddenbrain if you use Apple Podcasts.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Those sites again are support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co slash hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
It happens so often in science as well as in life. We fail to notice something important because we are so intent on something else. It took Saul a while to realize his nuisance was telling him something important. As he continued to study juries, Saul decided he needed to better understand how police procured evidence in criminal trials. He decided to audit a law school class on evidence.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
What kind of techniques were in this manual, Saul? Just one or two examples.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
This, of course, is exactly what Mrs. Avery had done in the sixth grade.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments on blind obedience. He tested if volunteers would comply with instructions from an authority figure. The most famous experiment featured an experimenter who demanded that a volunteer subject someone else to painful electric shocks.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
In reality, no one received shocks. The experiment was designed to test if volunteers were willing to go along with crazy instructions. If the volunteer resisted, the experimenter had a series of verbal prods to keep the experiment going.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul realized he was confronting two powerful facts. Fact number one, juries believe people when they offer confessions. Fact number two, police are taught to extract confessions from people using a series of powerful psychological techniques. You don't have to assume bad intent on the part of detectives for this to be a problem.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Like the rest of us, detectives assume no one who is innocent will admit to being guilty. Saul decided to look more closely at the science of confessions. Only, he found, there was no science of confessions. When someone says they did something wrong, it seems so self-evidently obvious that they did do something wrong that no one had really studied it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
How and why people come to betray their self-interest This week on Hidden Brain. In the sixth grade, Saul Kassin received an assignment from his teacher to write a book report. It took him about a nanosecond to decide to write about his hero, Mickey Mantle.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Stahl did find one early example, though, a case study described in the early 20th century by a psychologist named Hugo Munsterberg.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Saul started looking for other cases of untrue confessions in the history books. He found quite a few. Eventually, he came up with a classification system. The first kind were voluntary false confessions, like the time in 1932 when a famous aviator's son was kidnapped.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
So a second kind of false confession is something that you've termed compliant confessions. And as you started to look at the historical record, you find quite a few examples of this, sometimes going back decades or even centuries. You tell the story about events that took place in the 17th century, for example, in Salem.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
In the Salem witch trials, some suspects who failed to confess were executed. Given the choice between making a false confession and being put to death, many chose to lie about their guilt. Of course, the Salem witch trials took place over 300 years ago. The same thing couldn't happen today, could it? Could it?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When we come back, the story of the Central Park jogger. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. A quick word before we start this next segment. We're going to be discussing two violent crimes that psychologist Saul Kassin has studied. These cases include graphic accounts of murder and rape. Around 9 p.m.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. I have a question for you. How well do you know yourself? Chances are, you'll tell me you know yourself very well. All of us like to believe this. We feel like we know ourselves better than anyone else does. Every day we make choices based on this knowledge we have of ourselves.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
If you ask them what movies they want to watch, they will tell you about the movies they aspirationally want to watch. But if instead you look at the books that people actually read or the movies they actually watch, it usually paints a different picture of their preferences.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I want to talk about some of the ways you and others have found that our digital footprints can reveal deep truths about our lives. In 2019, you ran a study that predicted people's income based on an extremely unlikely source. Tell me what you found Sandra.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I'm puzzled by how that would be the case. I mean, what does my posting about a movie that I've watched or a vacation that I've taken, how do you tell what my income is based on those postings, Sandra?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
What's fascinating about that, of course, is that most of us are not thinking, are my posts describing something that's happening in the present or something that is about the future, for example, but that difference, in fact, can reveal something about us.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
You used an interesting phrase just now, behavioral residue. What do you mean by that, Sandra?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
This week on Hidden Brain, how understanding what we do instead of listening to what we say can help us make better financial choices, improve our physical and mental health, and maybe even bridge our political divides. Philosophers tell us the highest wisdom is to know ourselves. They say this precisely because knowing ourselves is difficult, not easy.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Let's look at some of the ways in which these behavioral residues can tell us important things about our lives and the lives of other people. The researcher Yo-Yo Wu once looked at what you could learn about a person from their Facebook likes.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the study found that after observing just 10 likes from someone's Facebook profile, the model was able to judge a user's personality better than their work colleagues. After 65 likes, it knew users better than someone's friends. And after 120 likes, better than family members. I mean, that's astonishing, Sandra.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I'm also assuming that when you have intersecting lines of evidence, so this study was looking at Facebook likes, but if you were able to combine that, for example, with people's credit card purchases, if you were able to combine that with their Twitter feeds, if you were able to combine that with what they're saying about themselves, you're gradually producing a more and more accurate profile of who the person is.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I'm wondering if you can talk a moment about how these sort of in some ways mindless algorithms are painting a picture of us that's more accurate than our friends and neighbors and coworkers. And some of that is because our friends and neighbors and coworkers are bringing their own perceptions and their own biases to the equation as they're evaluating us.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. I mean, in some ways, this is like Sherlock Holmes on steroids is what these machines are doing, right? Because they're actually picking up huge amounts of data, far more than most of us are actually able to observe in the physical world.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So even our search history, what we're looking for online, can say a lot about us. Talk about this, that in some ways what we search for online can paint a very powerful picture of who we are.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It requires self-reflection, self-awareness, and a healthy dose of humility. At Columbia University, psychologist Sandra Matz studies how one aspect of our behavior can reveal surprising truths about who we are. Sandra Matz, welcome to Hidden Brains.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So we had Seth Stevens-Davidowitz on Hidden Brain some years ago, and one of the things he mentioned was that there was this negative correlation between racist searches on the internet and the likelihood that people would vote for Barack Obama.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, places with higher rates of Google searches using racist terms were less likely to vote for Barack Obama.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
In another study, Sandra, you looked at the relationship between social media updates and voting, but you were not looking at explicit data, like people saying they were going to vote for a particular politician. What were you looking for and what did you find?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And again, what's interesting here is that it's like the mismatched socks in the drawer, right? It's not a signal that people are actually thinking will say something about their political preferences. If I'm feeling upset or sad or my affect in general is negative, I don't think it's going to reveal something about my political preferences, but in fact it does.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
You know, I'm reminded of that analysis that found in the 2016 presidential election that Donald Trump won three quarters of all counties that had a Cracker Barrel restaurant, but only 22% of counties that had a Whole Foods store.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now, most people are not thinking about politics when they're shopping for groceries or dining out, but it turns out that our shopping and dining habits can reveal powerful things about us.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Sandra, you grew up in a small village in Germany which had two restaurants and no shops. Can you paint me a picture of the place where you grew up?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Most of us spend a great deal of time every day in front of various devices. We scroll and tap and like and listen. We search for answers to our most personal questions and post updates to our social media feeds. When we come back, how all this data can help us improve our lives. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
You wake up in the morning and reach for your phone. You open Instagram and leave a comment on a friend's vacation pictures. You sneeze and run a Google search about allergies. On the way to work you buy a muffin at a local cafe using your credit card. Every day we leave dozens of tiny traces of ourselves in the digital world.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
At Columbia University, Sandra Matz calls the accumulation of these traces our digital footprints. She is the author of Mindmasters, the data-driven science of predicting and changing human behavior. Sandra, you say that the traces we leave online not only paint a picture of who we are, they show marketers and political campaigns how to influence us.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Now, we've all heard a lot about the problems of digital surveillance, but fewer people know how these tools can be used for good. Let's start with the work you've done showing how psychological targeting can help people save more money.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So just to underscore the principle here, what you're doing is you're basically saying we can tell what people's personalities are by the digital footprints they're leaving behind. And if we can tailor messages in some ways to match people's personalities, those messages are far more likely to break through.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So one day I understand that your doorbell rang and it was a neighbor reporting a missing rabbit?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Our digital footprints can also reveal insights about our mental health. You and a colleague have studied whether there's a connection between depression and a person's location data.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And I suppose, you know, there's always going to be noise in the data. So someone may have lost their phone inside their sofa cushions. And so the phone basically sits at home for three weeks. It doesn't mean that they are depressed and they haven't left their home in three weeks. It just means that the phone was lost.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
But I think what you're really saying, Sandra, is that in aggregate, this data, in fact, are telling us valuable things. And at a minimum, they're basically raising a flag that warrants further investigation.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I mean, this is really no different than basically saying, let me measure your resting heart rate or your cholesterol levels. And over time, if I have enough data, it might paint me a picture of saying, you know, you're heading down a bad path. You might want to change your lifestyle.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So our digital footprints not only reveal things about our past, they can also predict things we might do in the future. You once tried to predict dropout rates among college students by studying their digital footprints. How did you do this, Sandra?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And, of course, when you put it this way, it seems to make sense now.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
If I know, for example, that a student doesn't have many friends and is not exchanging messages and, in fact, is a little bit isolated and is not spending time hanging out with other students, it's not unreasonable now to say maybe the student doesn't feel like he or she belongs at university and is at higher risk of dropping out.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
In other words, instead of a one size fits all approach, now you can actually say the individual person gets his or her own approach.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
We decide how to spend our money, who to vote for, where to go for dinner, based on what we know of our predilections and preferences. But our knowledge of ourselves is not always accurate. A host of biases and self-deceptions keep us from seeing ourselves clearly.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Sandra, you say that these digital tracking tools are increasingly being used not just to identify health issues, but to actually intervene. How so?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
You tell the story of a woman named Chukora Ali who was in a car accident that left her severely injured. She spiraled into depression. Tell me her story and what happened to her.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
What was the effect of using this bot on her mental health, Sandra?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And again, I don't think you're necessarily suggesting that, you know, a bot is necessarily an ideal replacement for a human therapist. But you're saying in a situation like this, where in fact, you know, the person cannot afford or cannot get to a human therapist, this would be a potential solution.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Many people are worried that digital tracking has increased polarization. The moment you click on one video with a political theme, the algorithms quickly paint a picture of you as liberal or conservative and start feeding you more and more of the same content. In other words, digital tracking and psychological targeting can quickly leave you inside an echo chamber.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
You say it's at least theoretically possible to use these same tools to reduce polarization?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
In other words, if I know that you are basically self-selecting into one echo chamber, you're saying, what if these platforms in some ways can encourage us to basically visit other echo chambers and in some ways broaden our worldviews?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
When I'm thinking about the concerns that major platforms might have in serving up this kind of information, I'm struck by the fact that in some ways I think, Sandra, what you're talking about is the difference between the information we want and the information that we need. So the information that I want might be information that basically confirms that my pre-existing views are correct.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
The information that I need might in fact tell me, hey, take a look at what's happening on the other side.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
How was the rabbit eventually recaptured? Was it a dramatic moment?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
In our companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus, we look at the downsides of digital surveillance. We take a closer look at the harms of tracking technologies and why the most popular intervention to protect people, giving them control over whether they attract online and whether their children attract online, may not be the best approach.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
To listen, please look for the episode titled How to Protect Yourself Online on Hidden Brain Plus. If you're not yet signed up, please visit support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, please go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain. Sandra Matz is the author of Mindmasters, the data-driven science of predicting and changing human behavior.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Sandra, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Today's story comes from Stephanie Cole. When Stephanie was a teenager, she got her very first job. It was around the winter holidays at a department store in Los Angeles.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I'm getting a sense that this was a village where everyone knew everyone's business. Very much so. Very much so. So when you were 15, Sandra, you loved riding around the village with your boyfriend on a motorcycle. What was this bike like and where would you go?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Stephanie Cole is from Bainbridge Island, Washington. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. You can find more stories like this on the My Unsung Hero podcast or on our website, hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantham. See you soon.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Sandra and her boyfriend weren't hurt, but Sandra had to spend a year's worth of tutoring money to get the bike repaired.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
When you ask people how smart they are, or how ethical they are, or how good-looking they are, for example, majorities say they are above average, which, of course, is mathematically impossible. But it isn't just about vanity.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
When you say you were punished, how so? What was the reaction of your neighbors and friends?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Yeah. Was there anything good that came from all this surveillance, Sandra?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Was there a time when you in fact got very useful advice from these people because in fact they knew you quite well?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
And in some ways, it sounds like they knew you almost better than you knew yourself.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
How many times have you gone to a restaurant you've been to before and ordered the same dish you ordered last time, only to remember after you started eating it that you didn't like it the last time? Or think about your last romantic entanglement that ended in disaster. By the time it ended, did you wonder how your past self could have gotten involved with someone so unsuitable?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Sandra's experience with the nosy neighbors in her village is what life has been like for most humans through most of human history. We've typically lived in small groups, and people in those groups have known everything there is to know about us. Today, many of us live in a different kind of village.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
It's a global village where anonymous entities, rather than our actual neighbors, have eyes on us. Not all of them have our best interests at heart. When we come back, what our digital footprints reveal about us and how this information can be used both to help us and to harm us. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Every day, as we go about our lives, we reveal aspects of ourselves to the world. If you visit a local bakery a lot, it's probably because you like pastries and baked goods. If you spend time in parks, it's because you value nature and recreation. Someone who rarely ventures outside their home except to go to work might be introverted.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
At Columbia University, computational social scientist Sandra Matz studies how the things we say and do reveal things about our thoughts, preferences, and personalities. Sandra, I want to talk about the clues we unintentionally leave behind us as we go about our lives. Let's start in the physical world.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Many years ago, you were on a date and things were going well and you ended up at your date's apartment. Tell me what you did as soon as you got to his place.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So you weren't wearing a hat and carrying around a magnifying glass, but it feels vaguely Sherlock Holmes-ian to me what you were doing in that apartment.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
I'm wondering whether your impressions of your husband, your first impressions of him when you were dating, did they turn out to be accurate, Sandra?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So the psychologist Sam Gosling has shown that people, in fact, are remarkably accurate at judging the personality of strangers when given the chance to snoop around their offices or bedrooms. Tell me about this work, Sandra.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
Over the last few decades, researchers in a variety of disciplines have discovered there is a much better way to understand people than to ask them questions. When you ask people what books they like to read, people will tell you about the novels and biographies they think they ought to like.
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
So you say there are parallels between what happened in your village or your behavior when you visited your date's place and what happens to us online. It's as if your village neighbors now have access to your Facebook messages and credit card purchases?
Hidden Brain
What Your Online Self Reveals About You
You say it takes shockingly little information to get an extremely granular picture about people, even in a big town like New York City. Now, there are millions of transactions that take place every day in New York. Finding any one person might seem like you're looking for a needle in a haystack.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the mid-1980s, Coca-Cola was feeling threatened by the growing popularity of its rival, Pepsi. Executives at Coca-Cola decided to shake things up. In April 1985, they launched a new product.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
At the time, it really didn't seem plausible that these things would dramatically upend our lives. But one of the things that I think Cliff Stoll missed was how much technology was going to change in the coming years. It wasn't an instantaneous change, but it unfolded over 5, 10, 15, 20 years. Well, and the
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The origins of this expression go back even further. Farmers believed that when something worked, it was best to leave well enough alone. Tinker with things, and you risk disaster. Today, we look at the truth of this old adage.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I mean, the interesting thing, of course, is that when we look back, I mean, it feels like the whole online revolution was the work of an instant, right? It feels like looking back now in hindsight, it feels like it all happened very quickly. But it actually took a long time. It
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
for widespread broadband service to be widely available, for us to carry around these little computers in our hands and in our pockets where we could access the internet, where we could press a button and it had our credit card information stored. All of these things took time. But looking back, it can seem like they were the work of an instant.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
We talked earlier about how Gillette, the razor company, failed to see the inflection point of a subscription model that Dollar Shave Club offered. There's another company that you talk about, Kodak. Most of us are familiar with the brand, but not as familiar with the story of a man named Antonio Perez, who joined the company in 2003. He had previously been at Hewlett Packard.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So what's striking about the Antonio Perez story, Rita, is that he had been wildly successful betting on printers while he was at HP. And in fact, as you just pointed out, it had produced billions of dollars in revenue. The very same play, five years later, 10 years later at a different company, completely different outcome. Indeed.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Another reason organizations can miss out on inflection points is timing. We can see how trying to jump on a bandwagon late, like Gillette offering a subscription service after the inflection point had passed. But you say that companies can also jump on an inflection point too early. I understand this was the case with the video rental company Blockbuster?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
When it makes sense to stay the course, and when it makes sense to change direction, this week on Hidden Brain. Imagine you're paddling a boat across a calm lake. The wind is steady. You're moving forward slowly but surely. There's no need to change course, adjust your stroke, or head back to shore.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You've described the life cycle of inflection points, and you say there are often four stages to them. Can you walk me through these four stages, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Given that you can be too early to an inflection point, but also too late to it, timing clearly matters. You say there are warning signs that an inflection point is passing you by. What are some of these signs, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But what if a storm rolls in, or your boat springs a leak, or you feel a sudden stabbing pain in your chest? Now, staying the course and sticking to your plan could be disastrous. At Columbia University, Rita McGrath studies when it makes sense to pivot and when it's wiser to stick with what's worked. Rita McGrath, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You know, I worked in the newspaper business for many years, Rita, before moving to radio and to audio. But I remember there was a point in my newspaper career where I was actually not reading the newspaper on the page, but I was reading it online online.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And at the time, I think the companies that I worked with were still sort of ambivalent about digital journalism and the idea that people would really read things in a widespread way online. But one of the things that you point out is that when you yourself or the employees at your company are not using your product, it's a warning sign. It's basically a canary in the coal mine.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yeah. And of course, if you're actually, you know, you're working at a company that makes some kind of product and you have your employees at that company who are buying products from a rival, in some ways it tells you that the people who are presumably your most loyal, who should be your most loyal customers, are in fact not your loyal customers.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Rita, you tell the story of the Gillette Company, a popular personal care brand that most people are familiar with. Give me a brief history of the origins of the company.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Sometimes sticking with what you've always done makes perfect sense. But what worked yesterday isn't always guaranteed to work tomorrow. When we come back, how to successfully spot inflection points. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. There are times in all our lives when doing the same old thing no longer works.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
The strategies that once helped you excel have now led to a plateau. The things that helped you stand out at work have become yesterday's news. Rita McGrath is the author of Seeing Around Corners, How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. She says there is a science to spotting inflection points.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Rita, in the late 1990s, a man named Ivan Seidenberg was leading Bell Atlantic Telephone Company. At this time, landlines were the norm and there was no indication that they were going anywhere. It was a hugely profitable company. But Ivan Seidenberg had a vision. What did he see?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Hmm. Hmm. Tell me a little bit about what he did when it came to selling off some of Verizon's landline assets, because he wasn't so much depriving customers of landline access, but he was saying as a company, that might be less of our future than it is today.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You say that Ivan Seidenberg did two things right. One, he was continuously adapting and two, he was able to disengage. What do you mean by this, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I'm struck by the fact that very often when we think about innovation, we're often not thinking about this aspect of innovation, which is we're always thinking about what we can build that's new. But of course, in order to build something that's new, we might have to give up something that we've been building for a long time. We might have to give up the old.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So in 2010, two entrepreneurs, Mark Levine and Michael Dubin, met at a holiday party. Mark was a product wholesaler who had a problem in one of his warehouses, and Michael was a marketer. What was the problem in the warehouse, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Besides the challenge of just noticing things that have been around for a long time and that have just simply faded away from our attention, there's also the fact that we get attached to things that we have built. We have emotional connections to the things we've built. These are our babies. These are our children. We're not willing to cast them aside.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But of course, if you don't cast some of the things that you do as a company or an organization or as a person aside, if you can't cast them aside, it's very hard to move forward.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Another example of a company that found an innovative way to ride an inflection point was Procter & Gamble. They had come up with a water purification chemical, but it was not taking off. Tell me that story, Rita.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I understand that it also had significant public relations benefits because now they were in the business not just of making money, but they were also in the business of saving lives in poor countries. And that had sort of brand benefits, if you will, that also indirectly helped the bottom line.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You say that Procter & Gamble took advantage of an inflection point because they fell in love with the problem rather than the solution. What do you mean by this, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So I understand at this point, Mark has something like 250,000 twin razors in this warehouse, and he approaches Michael, who's an online video marketer, about potentially going into business together. What was the proposal?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I'm wondering how much of the signs of inflection points that you have studied at an organizational level, Rita, how much of this applies to individuals and their own lives? Are any of these lessons applicable to us as we navigate our personal lives?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
One thing that strikes me is that when it comes to running a business or running an organization, the metrics of success are relatively clear, right? So if you're a business, you have happy employees, you have happy customers, you're making money, you're a successful business. It's very straightforward in some ways what constitutes a successful business.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It's a little bit harder with individuals, I think. It's a little harder at an individual level to say what constitutes success. And I'm wondering, from that point of view, does that make the science of inflection points a little more difficult at the personal level? Because it's not quite clear what actually constitutes success or failure. Some of that is subjective.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Some of that involves a personal sense of what matters to you, what doesn't matter to you. Do some of the things then fail to carry over because of the subjectivity, do you think?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Rita McGrath studies the science of reinvention at Columbia Business School. She's the author of Seeing Around Corners, How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. Rita McGrath, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you love Hidden Brain, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It's where you'll find episodes you won't hear anywhere else. Plus, you'll be doing your part to help cover the costs of the research, writing, and audio production that go into every episode of the show. You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free seven-day trial by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co slash hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantham.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Mark, who had the warehouse of 250,000 South Korean razors, and Michael, the video marketer, asked themselves if they could sell razors over the internet. This could save customers a trip to the store to buy Gillette's higher-priced razors. But the duo also had a brainwave about how to lock in customers long-term. They called it Dollar Shave Club.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Sounds great, right? But not everyone was happy. Consumers took to the streets to protest New Coke, pouring out the beverage in defiance. The Coca-Cola company received over 40,000 calls and letters from angry, dissatisfied customers.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So the idea was you sell a subscription to people and razors basically show up at your doorstep on a regular basis. So you don't have to go to the store. You don't have to buy it. There's a predictability about it. I understand they went to a number of bloggers to try and spread word about it and decided to get people to sign up. What was Gillette's initial response to this upstart, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So it turns out that Dollar Shave Club didn't just come up with a new business model. They also came up with a more conversational, casual style of marketing. Here's a clip from one ad.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I want to play you an ad that Gillette published around this time. This one featured the tennis champion Roger Federer shaving his face in the mirror.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So in 2019, Dollar Shave Club put out another ad. This one featured a handful of middle-aged men who didn't look at all like Roger Federer. The men were dancing in towels while they shaved their faces. The video campaign was titled, Dad Bard, and the slogan was, whatever your bard, welcome to the club. That same year, Gillette released its own ad campaign.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It was inspired by the Me Too movement and included imagery of men treating women in inappropriate ways.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So I understand that Gillette eventually pivoted to try and get into the subscription business as well and sell Razor as a service. They started a Gillette club. How did that go?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So we talked about how Gillette missed two potential inflection points, the subscription model, but also this changing tide in the kind of marketing that customers were responding to. What was the long-term effect on Gillette's market dominance, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
New Coke was a disaster. Customers boycotted it, the media mocked and criticized the move, and distributors were reluctant to sell it. Sales plateaued and a rapid decline loomed on the horizon. The company threw in the towel and switched back to its original formula. Peace and taste buds were restored. There's a saying that's often attributed to Burt Lance, a political appointee of former U.S.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But it's also the case that the market dominance they had for much of the century, much of the 20th century, that has sort of disappeared. I mean, they no longer are in quite as dominant a position as they were through much of the 20th century.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You use the term inflection point to describe situations like what happened with Gillette and Dollar Shave Club. What is an inflection point, Rita?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
When we come back, why businesses and people fail to see inflection points and what we can learn from their mistakes. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. The personal care and safety razor company Gillette had been the leader in its industry for nearly a century. When competitors came along, Gillette said, don't fix what isn't broken.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
The strategy worked until it didn't. When does it make sense to stay the course? And when does it make sense to roll with changing tides? At Columbia Business School, Rita McGrath studies this question. She studies the science of inflection points, a change that dramatically shifts the course of events. Rita, I want to talk about some of the reasons why organizations miss inflection points.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
In 1995, a man named Cliff Stoll published an article in Newsweek. It was titled, Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana. What did the article say?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yeah. So at one point in this article, he says, the truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way government works. And of course, looking back now, that prediction can seem hilarious. But from what you're saying, there's a certain truth to it.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant. It was a cold day in Appalachia on January 7th, 1865. A Union soldier named Asa McCoy was on his way home, wounded from fighting in the Civil War. As he neared his cabin in Kentucky, Asa was given a message, don't return home or you will be killed. A local group of Confederate militia, known as the Logan Wildcats, planned to kill Asa.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Now, in some ways, it's worth pointing out, of course, that not getting that promotion did indeed have personal effects on Dana. It might have affected her life, her finances, maybe even her retirement plan. So it had consequences in her personal life, Fred.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I want to talk about another component of grudges, Fred. You worked with a man named Alan whose wife cheated on him. Can you tell me his story and the thoughts that constantly circled around in his mind?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
History is full of incidents that have sparked long-standing grudges, sometimes with consequences that last decades. But there also are smaller, more personal grievances that we all harbor. Perhaps you still remember some slight you experienced years ago at the hands of a friend or family member?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I can see in some ways how, at least on a short-term basis, this can make you feel better. If you're feeling very upset, if you're feeling very hurt, it does make you feel better to say, I know what the cause of my hurt is. It's this other person. This other person did this terrible thing, and that's why I'm feeling terrible. It's her fault.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So we've talked about the role that taking things personally and the blame game plays in the development of a grudge. These often lead to what you call the final stage in the grievance process, the construction of a grievance story. What do you mean by this, Fred?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Today, we explore the psychology of grudges, how long-standing animosities affect our lives, and what to do about them. This week on Hidden Brain.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I'm curious why some wrongdoings become grudges and others don't. You talk about a very powerful concept, the violation of unenforceable rules. What does this mean, Fred?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I want to talk about one unenforceable rule that you had in your life, Fred. When your mother-in-law was alive, you and your family would often go and visit her in Connecticut. I understand that she wasn't very nice to you.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So after this fight, I understand that you called a friend to complain about your mother-in-law. You wanted to tell someone else your grievance story. What did you say and what did your friend tell you?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
That's a way of saying you shouldn't allow people who have wronged you to take up too much of your attention. Sounds nice, but is it realistic? We are social creatures, after all, and our interactions and relationships with others matter. When someone is kind to us, it has the power to alter our day, maybe even change the course of our lives. When someone wrongs us, it can also have large effects.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
We've talked about the anatomy of grudges and how they form. Let's spend a moment talking about some of the consequences of holding on to our past grievances. Many studies have examined the relationship between resentment and mental health issues. One study, for example, found that holding a grudge could lead to lower self-esteem.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I feel like I can remember times in my own life, Fred, when I've been up at 3.45 in the morning, upset about what someone said to me or what someone did to me. And I'm lying in bed, tossing and turning. I can't sleep. I'm angry. And of course, it seems like the effects on sleep must be one of the effects of resentment and grievance.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Why is it that grievance and grudges cause these physiological effects? What is happening physiologically to us that cause an effect on sleep, that cause an effect on the heart, that cause an effect on high blood pressure?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
At Stanford University, Fred Luskin has spent a quarter century studying what happens when we hold on to grudges. Fred Luskin, welcome to Hidden Brain.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So the irony here, Fred, is that grudges can make us feel better in the short term. They make us feel like we're getting back at the people who've hurt us. But the people they hurt the most might be us.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
When we come back, strategies for letting go of the past. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In the late 1960s, tensions were exploding in Northern Ireland. Riots were breaking out in cities like Belfast and Derry. People were sharply divided on whether to remain part of the United Kingdom or to join the Republic of Ireland.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Fred, some years ago, you met a woman named Debbie. She was having issues with her husband. And when I say issues, this was not merely conflicts about who takes out the garbage.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Catholic nationalists wanted unity with Ireland and Protestant Unionists wanted the country to stay within the United Kingdom. Decades of hostility and turmoil led to what became known as the Troubles, a violent conflict that involved bombings, shootings, and the killing of many people. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict, the majority of them civilians.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Many people were left grieving over horrific losses. In another part of the world at the time, Fred Luskin was at Stanford University in California, studying the role of forgiveness in people's lives. A man named Byron Bland reached out to Fred after reading newspaper articles about his work at Stanford.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Byron asked, was Fred willing to try his forgiveness training with mothers who had lost their children to the troubles? Their stories were unimaginably painful. One woman's son had been kidnapped on the way to work, then ushered into a shallow grave where he was shot, his body hidden for 21 years.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Another woman's son had been working at a restaurant when a gunman walked up to the takeout window and shot him seven times. He died on the spot. A third woman said her Protestant son was hanging out with his Catholic friend at a pub when a loyalist rushed in and shot both men dead. The stories went on.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
When the women were flown to California to share their stories, Fred found himself overwhelmed with horror. But he listened, and he began the training. It started with intake. He asked them to fill out questionnaires about their mental state. Then, slowly and carefully, he took them through the steps he had developed. One was along the lines of his own epiphany at Safeway.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
When you are deeply upset about something, take a moment to notice things you are not upset about.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I'm wondering whether you heard from these women or you hear from other people you work with, Fred, a sense of anger directed toward you, because these are people who are saying, you know, I've been through something terrible and the person who did this terrible thing to me, you know, really it's unforgivable. And here's Fred Luskin coming in and telling me to forgive and forget.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I mean, do you get people angry with you? Because in some ways it can feel, even though that's not what you're doing, but it can feel like you're taking, the side of the transgressor?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
What was the effect of these ideas on the women who went through the program, Fred?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
The cycle repeated itself over and over. One day, Debbie came home early from work. She discovered her husband on the couch with another woman. It was the last straw.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
It's interesting, the word forgiveness itself, I think, points our mind toward the person who has done us harm, the person who has done us wrong. When I think I forgive you, I'm thinking that my forgiveness is directed toward you. But everything that I'm hearing from you, Fred, it's that really forgiveness, in fact, is not about the other person at all. It's about ourselves.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
We talked earlier about your mother-in-law and how she would often make rude and critical comments about you. And some of this might have been because she was, you know, you could say an exceptionally tidy person or you could say an obsessively tidy person, depending on your point of view.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
But at one point, you asked yourself a question with her that also made a very big difference in the way you responded to her. What was this question, Fred?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I understand that at one point toward the end of her life, your mother-in-law had a chat with you about the way she may have treated you. Tell me about that story and what happened, Fred.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So many people have been in similar situations where they have been betrayed by a romantic partner and people really struggle with it. How was Debbie's account of what happened to her affecting her life, Fred?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
When we come back, Fred offers more techniques to get us moving when we find ourselves stuck on a grudge. Plus, we take a look at some of the physiological benefits of forgiveness. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us want to be rid of our grudges, but we find that the grievance keeps rearing its head.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Pay attention to me, it tells us. Forgiveness is for suckers. We find ourselves drawn irresistibly to rehashing the events that caused us pain. We may go back to complaining to others about how we have been wronged. Fred Luskin sometimes tells the people he is trying to help about a psychological experiment.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
The Wildcats were led by a member of the Hatfields, a family living in West Virginia who had strong ties to the Confederate Army. Asa hid out in a cave near Peter Creek, Kentucky. But it was no use. He was eventually tracked down and shot dead. The incident is said to have sparked a famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. It lasted decades.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Fred and other researchers have also found that once we are down the path of constructing a grievance story, our minds reach for more and more evidence that our state of mind is justified.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
You know, I'm thinking back to the moment you went to the grocery store, you know, against your wishes to get something your wife wanted. And of course, you're thinking about your friend Sam and you're thinking about the way in which he had hurt your feelings and the way in which, you know, it was unfair that he treated you the way he treated you.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
And then you show up at the grocery store and now the thing that you wanted is not in the grocery store. Now, that's yet another piece of evidence that the universe, in fact, is unfair because And it allowed me to tell my wife that she was unfair sending me to the supermarket that I didn't want to go to.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
One technique that you teach is to ask people to be mindful about the interventions they have tried in the past and the effectiveness of those interventions. You worked with a woman named Alice who did not get along with her in-laws. Tell me how she tried to fix the problem and how you helped her.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I understand that it was important for her to let everyone else know what a louse her husband was and how much pain he had caused her.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
And of course, the point that you're making here is that very often when we're carrying grievances around, we try the same thing over and over and over and over again. We come back to the same strategy over and over again.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
It doesn't work, but we say, okay, next time I'm really going to tell this person off and next time they're going to come to their senses and realize how much they've wronged me.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Fred walked me through a mental practice he calls Positive Emotion Refocusing Technique, or PERT for short.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Fred says there is lots of evidence that reducing hostility is good for our mental and physical health. The old saying is true, anger does the most harm to the vessel that stores it. One analysis found that far from soothing our pain, grudges have a way of increasing our experience of chronic suffering, as seen in conditions like fibromyalgia.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
You also conducted a study that looked at the effects of forgiveness on workplace productivity and well-being. Tell me about that, Fred.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
We talked earlier about unenforceable rules, the rules we want others to follow, but we cannot make them follow. Let's return to the story of you and your best friend, Sam. So you emailed him at the height of your grudge and told him how you felt. What did you say and how did he respond, Fred?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
In the course of your work and research, you came by another person named Jill, and she confided in you about her troubled relationship with her mother. But unlike in the case of Debbie's ex, Jill's mother was dead?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Fred Luskin is a psychologist and director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Project. He is the author of Forgive for Good, a proven prescription for health and happiness, and Forgive for Love, the missing ingredient for a healthy and lasting relationship. Fred Luskin, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Do you have follow-up questions about grudges and forgiveness for Fred Luskin?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
If you'd be comfortable sharing your question with a Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, grudge. That email address again is ideas at hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
You know, what is striking about both these stories you've just told me, Fred, is that in both Debbie's case and in Jill's case, the source of their pain is in their past, but it's almost as if this person, this other person, is standing with them, walking with them, living with them, inside their heads all the time.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So you're a scholar, you're a teacher, you're a therapist, but you're also a human being, and you yourself are not invulnerable to holding on to a grievance. I want you to tell me the story of your friend Sam and what happened to you and Sam, and maybe start with how close you were to Sam for many years of your life.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
In 1873, a McCoy family member, perhaps still seething from Asa's death, accused Floyd Hatfield of stealing his pig. A trial followed, and Floyd Hatfield was acquitted. A few years later, one of the trial witnesses was killed by two McCoys. In 1882, on election day in Kentucky, some McCoy brothers drunkenly fought and killed Ellison Hatfield, stabbing him multiple times in the back.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I understand that at one point, Fred, you heard that Sam was to be married and you did not hear about this from Sam, but from someone else.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So you were not invited to the wedding. This is someone whom you consider to be, as you said, your best friend, nearly a brother. How did that change your outlook and behavior? I understand that the people around you started to notice that you were different.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
I understand that at one point during the saga, Fred, you found yourself in a very unusual place to have an epiphany, the supermarket. Tell me what happened at the supermarket that day.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
For better and worse, people we are close to can affect us in profound ways. Sometimes these effects are fleeting, and sometimes they last for years. When we come back, the physiological and psychological effects of holding a grudge. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
When someone wrongs us, holding a grudge against them almost feels like a form of justice. But psychologist Fred Luskin says that more often than not, grudges don't hurt the targets of our anger. They hurt us. Fred, we've discussed a few ways in which people can hurt us, but sometimes it's a process that hurts us. One person you worked with was upset she did not get a job promotion.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
In retaliation, the Hatfields killed all three McCoy brothers. The feud continued into a cycle of violence that reached its peak in 1888, during what came to be known as the New Year's Night Massacre. Several members of the Hatfield gang set fire to a McCoy cabin and killed two children.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Can you tell me Dana's story and what went through her mind?
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
So if I understand correctly, Fred, Dana's reaction to not being promoted was the sense that she had wasted 10 years of her life, that all this time and effort she had spent at the company going above and beyond, all of it was wasted effort.
The Bible Recap
Day 034 (Exodus 13-15) - Year 7
Let's look at one aspect of the story you just told me. So this was an employee who did not get a promotion. Another way of looking at this is to say the company has a number of different priorities. Maybe I don't fully understand all the priorities of the company. They've picked somebody else, but it's actually not about me. It's just about what the company needed to do at this time.