No Stupid Questions

Oh, you read The Lucifer Effect.

So Zimbardo will say it happened. He was there. And by the way, when this was unfolding, right? So there's day one of the prison and there's day two. And I think by day two, there were kids who were having nervous breakdowns. Now day three, now day four. And these like sadistic acts are becoming ever more extreme. So it didn't make it to day seven. It ended on day six.

So Zimbardo likes to point out that it wasn't his conscience that stopped the prisoner experiment. It was his girlfriend's. So his girlfriend, who I believe was a PhD student in psychology at the time, goes down to the basement and sees what's going on and immediately says, this has to stop. And he listened to her. He later married her. And she later became the world's foremost researcher on burnout. And we've talked about her and you'll recognize her name, Christina Maslach.

So I think Zimbardo, as he would put it, is more interested in bad barrels than bad apples because he thinks that the prisoner scenario that he created, and also Abu Ghraib, and also Nazi Germany, that there are these evil situations.

I read this book when I was a teenager that my sister had on her shelf. I can picture it vividly. It had a forest green cover with a Picasso painting of a woman sleeping. It was called Why Some Must Sleep and Others Must Watch.

The name of the book is actually Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, a line from Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet. Its author is the famed sleep researcher William DeMent, who died in 2020 at 100 years old.

Gloria Mark suggests that the Attention Span of, you know, your typical adult has shrunk. For example, like on computer screens, right? Like how often do we switch from one screen to another? In her research, the Attention Span was at some point like about two and a half minutes.

Many people think of this now as The Black Swan effect after Nassim Taleb's book of that name.

So Nassim defined a black swan event as having three central characteristics. Number one, and this is really important, it is unpredictable. Number two, it carries a massive impact. And number three, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable than it was.

But anyway, I think one weird thing, how's that, about The Black Swan effect is that people go seeking them out. They say, oh, this is a black swan event coming. This is a black swan. When by its nature, it is unpredictable. And rare. And very rare.

With a few exceptions, people didn't really start talking about um or complaining about it until the advent of voice recording. It is likely they were using it all along, but either they didn't notice it or didn't deem it worthy of writing down. It wasn't considered a word, but a noise like a cough.

He argues that empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality and immorality, and that far from helping us to improve the lives of others, empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices.

Empathy, he writes, is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with.

In 1974, they published a book about their findings called Type A Behavior and Your Heart.

He's at the City University of London and he wrote about celebrity for the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies, it's called.

I was just talking to our common friend, Bob Cialdini. Well, he's uncommon as a human being, but we are both friends with him. I was reading his soon to be published new version of influence and how we persuade each other.

This is not research of Levitt. This is research done by another economist formerly of the University of Chicago, Toby Moskowitz, who co-wrote a book called Scorecasting.

I read a book just last month. It was an advanced copy. I think it's coming out in the spring. I read it cover to cover. It's called I'm a Girl from Africa. And it's by a woman named Elizabeth Naya Mayaro.

And when she describes the levels of misogyny and not just attitudes but violent behavior toward women around the world. I mean, there may have been misogyny in Cherry Hole, New Jersey, where I grew up.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. I have to interrupt you. You did write a self-help book, Think Like a Freak.

Yeah, the third Freakonomics book we wrote was our attempt at a self-help book called Think Like a Freak.

One of the best-selling books, if you're feeling depressed or anxious and you don't have a cognitive behavioral therapist that you can go to one-on-one, you could buy Feeling Good by David Burns.

Do you know the book Self-Help, which I believe was the origin of the phrase? Have you ever come across that book by Samuel Smiles?

And he, Smiles, ended up writing a book that he went on to call Self-Help, which was published in 1859.

And it dawned on me that ruts with wagon wheels and the like are probably not an accessible analogy right now. But if you could go back to that visual of a rut in the mud that gets deeper and deeper and it's very hard to get out of that groove.

I did come across this book. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but I'd like to tell you about it a little bit. Maybe this would prove useful for Yvonne as well. It's written by two authors, one of whom I know you know, Barry Schwartz, who's a psychologist at Swarthmore, and Kenneth Sharp, who is a political scientist at Swarthmore. And it's called Practical Wisdom.

The second one, a wise person knows how to improvise, balancing conflicting aims and interpreting rules and principles in light of the particularities of each context.

Wisdom rule number three from Practical Wisdom. A wise person is perceptive, knows how to read social context and knows how to move beyond the black and white of rules and see the gray in the situation.

The last landmark of this book, Practical Wisdom, is as follows. A wise person is an experienced person. Practical Wisdom is a craft, and craftsmen are trained by having the right experiences.

And maybe the snob in you would feel better reading Meditations or reading the essays of Michel de Montaigne than reading Dale Carnegie.

Longtime listeners will know that this was the second time that Angela misreferenced the work. In NSQ episode 24, Why Do We Forget So Much of What We've Read?, Angela, appropriately enough, confuses the work with another best-selling self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which was written by author and businessman Stephen Covey.

John Wooden, the UCLA basketball coach. I remember reading it in his book. They all said some version of the true test of a person's character is what you do when no one is watching.

His final book examines how universities censor their teaching. The title of the book was originally in defense of free speech. The university is censor. But was changed to a book too risky to publish free speech in universities after his publisher, Emerald Press, canceled its publication for fear of, quote, the potential for serious harm to Emerald's reputation and the possibility of legal action.

You know, I think if you look back to the Dunning-Kruger research on this, which by the way, it's an old effect, but there's still new research being produced. And there was even a paper that came out a couple of years ago. David Dunning is one of the co-authors, and it was called Overconfidence Among Beginners Is a Little Learning a Dangerous Thing? And what I really liked about this paper is that they basically have these graphs of your confidence as you are progressing through multiple trials of tasks.

He wrote, not only are we blind to the obvious, but we are blind to our blindness.

Well, you were quoting Danny Kahneman. And if you ask Danny Kahneman, does reading his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, make you into a less biased, better thinker?