345. Applying Psychology to Everyday Life: Practical Strategies for Better Decision-Making - with Paul Bloom

Welcome to episode 345 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Paul Bloom, author of the new book Psych. Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello, everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Paul Bloom. Paul is professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Reagan, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. Paul studies how children and adults make sense of the world, with special focus on pleasure, morality, religion, fiction and art. He's won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and co editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science and for popular.

Outlets like the New York Times, the.

Guardian, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of seven books, including his latest, Psych the Story of the Human Mind, which we're talking about today. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books, including Psych, a timestamped summary of the episode, and so much more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 3, 4, 5. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Paul Bloom, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks so much for having me here.

Oh, yeah, I am so excited to chat with you today. It's been really interesting reading your book because it's a mix of like remembering so many psychology classes that I've taken and seeing new, you know, insights and ways of application within it. So it's been fun for me to read. And for everyone who doesn't yet know.

You, can you share a little bit.

About your background and the work that you do?

Yeah. I was born in Montreal and was an undergraduate at McGill, went to graduate school at MIT where I studied cognitive development. And a lot of my work was and remains with children. Looking at children learn to talk and their understanding of the world and how that expands. And then I went to University of Arizona and then Yale. And while at Yale, I started to sort of shift my career a bit. I began to Write popular books. My intellectual interest expanded a bit. I began to be very interested in moral psychology and issues that I think connect with a lot of what you talk about here involving decision making and what people like and the nature of pleasure and so on. And very recently I moved to University of Toronto, just immediately post pandemic and so now I hold a position at Yale and a position at Toronto.

Awesome. Yeah, so very recent then that you've moved to Toronto, so hopefully that's been a good move.

Oh, I love the city, I love the people. It's a great university. I'm very happy here.

That's awesome. I have only been to Toronto once so far. Should hopefully be there like I mentioned to you next year for a little bit. But I was in Toronto for six hours or something. So very brief.

Well, there's a great community of people here interested in the same things that you are. And also it's just an amazing city, very international, very cosmopolitan, much safer than American cities and pretty and everything's wonderful except for our winters which are horrific and make you want to die. Besides that, if Toronto had normal weather, it'd be. The house price would be even more expensive than that.

Oh, right.

Well, I guess then that's good for balancing or something in that way. But so I would love to hear. I know we're definitely going to talk about your newest book, Psych and then you've got a plethora of other really fascinating and interesting books. And I love the aspect of the looking at children and I know you talk about it a little bit in Psych and how, you know, across psychology, it maybe doesn't have as much, you know, street cred as it could or should have. And as a parent of young children, I've always found it fascinating to like watch the concepts I learn about acted out in my children. Right. As they make decisions or say things or do things. You think, oh, this is classically this thing.

Right.

You get to see it. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and insights on what you've learned in working with children that you think is important for people to know about.

Yeah, I also think it's an incredibly interesting topic. Everybody's interested in what it's like to be a child and how children become adults and the extent to which you could look at a 4 year old or a 5 year old and then say this is what this person's going to be like when they're 20 or 30 or 40. Those are just fascinating questions. And I feel that developmental psychology, like you mentioned is surprisingly unloved. We kind of punch below our weight. I think it's because we don't. Maybe because it's seen as women's work, or maybe there's sort of a sexist thing here. Maybe it's because we don't use the fancy machines, FMRI and stuff that the cognitive psychologists use. But in any case, people don't give it as much love as it deserves, and it deserves a lot of love. We made some real discoveries. I think the main discovery is how much of what we know about the world is hardwired, is built in, it's innate. And so there's all sorts of research done by people like Elizabeth Spelke at Harvard, Rene Bayarchon at Illinois, many, many other scholars, finding that even young babies have an understanding of the physical world. They know objects will fall unsupported. They know things persist over time. They have an understanding of social world. I've done some research, my colleagues, suggesting they have a moral understanding. Even a one year old could tell good guys from bad guys if you show them different interactions. This is a discovery, I think, which should knock people's socks off. It turns out that Plato and Kant and the great philosophers who propose innate ideas were in the end, correct.

Yeah, I thought it was so amazing. So my, my son is just turned two years old and I remember the first time we were. I was sitting with him, we were watching, you know, little things on YouTube and to that point where it's like you show him a little thing and he sort of knows something's happening, but he's more interested in shapes and bright colors and things like that, you know, and it was the ants go marching like a little thing. And so it has little ant. But this particular video, it was like the little ant came up and it was like, he eats a watermelon, he eats a whole cake, you know, and you could see that it was like the little ant and it would take like big bites. It ate like a whole cake in two bites or whatever, you know, and he, my son started laughing so uncontrollably hard at like seeing the tiny aunt eat the big watermelon or the whole piece of pumpkin pie or whatever it was. And he was, I think 50. He was right about 15 months old, not quite. And see, like understanding what it means, like that he could comprehend that like this little thing shouldn't do that big of a, like that much damage to a watermelon and like understand that this is funny just was just so amazing to me. I think it's just fascinating.

I agree. I actually think children's laughter at things tells you a lot about how smart they are and how they see the world. It tells you that. That this shouldn't happen, what he was saying. And something about that sort of this shouldn't happen cracks him up. And of course, the same thing happens for us. A lot of slapstick, a lot of physical comedy is based on sort of bizarre and unexpected actions, and they make us laugh too. But your story is a nice one because it combines two things at once. It combines an illustration of how smart kids are about the external world and also says something about humor, which is understudied and is a very cool topic.

Yeah. Have you done any research or got any insight on humor? Just for that aspect, Nothing special.

I've lectured on it. I've always been interested in it. I don't think we have good theories as to what's funny and what makes us laugh. It's something to do with incongruity, with weirdness. But not every weirdness makes us laugh. If you, you know, if, if, if you showed up late, it would be surprising to me. Oh, I thought you'd be on time, but it wouldn't be funny.

Right.

You know, on the other hand, if you came in. In a clown suit, maybe that would be funny. I don't know. So. So some sort of incongruity cracks us up.

Right. But then, yeah, the context really matters.

The context matters immensely. This is why, actually it's very. It's very easy when you're lecturing in a university to give a funny lecture because they don't expect that.

Yeah.

It's not like a comedy club where they're sitting down, there's. Okay, show me. Rather, they expect to be bored. Any sort of humor just elevates things.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know. I enjoyed. I laughed several times while, like, as I'm reading your book, there are these little moments of humor that I enjoyed.

Very much as well.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah. And I'm sure that's an aspect of why your course. And then the like added on course.

And now the book have been so popular. Can you share a little bit about.

I guess, what we would say, like the history of psych in the process of your class at Yale. And you know how the book came about.

I started teaching a class and psychology at University of Arizona way back. And then when I came to Yale, I continued to teach it and I really enjoyed it and it became a very popular course. So it was often the first course students would take when they entered Yale, and it was 500 kids, which isn't enormous for some universities, but it. It was very big for Yale. And then I wanted a bigger audience. So I did film this course where actually didn't film it. They had an animated version of me for Coursera, which right now has about a million views. And then I decided I wanted to write a book about it because you get so much out of a course, but a book could give you so much more. So I wrote psych, and the truth is I wrote psych during a pandemic, and I figured I had my Coursera course, I had notes for the course that were all sort of transcribed. I'm going to write a little book. I'm going to write a little book. I'm going to make enough money to renovate my house, because I wanted to renovate my house, and it's going to take me six months. And then I write my first chapter on Freud, and I think it's going to be like, I don't know, 2,000 words. It comes in five times that, and everything just bloats up. So now if you look at the book, it's kind of hefty, and instead of taking me a few months, it took me two years. But I'm proud of it. It's fun. And I've actually used. I gave it away for free for my corset, University of Toronto. And the students seem to like it. It's so. So I hope people. I hope people find it useful as a way to learn about psychology. It's not a textbook because it also has my own idiosyncratic views on things and, you know, more jokes than a textbook should have and. But. But that's how it came to be.

Yeah.

Well, I would love. And since you introduced this a little bit, I was going to ask you anyway. I love to ask people who have written, especially anybody who's written any book, for one thing, but people who have written multiple books and, like you said, having a successful course and, well, many successful courses. But I was thinking about the Coursera specifically. You think about how you construct and, like, put information together, the process you go through. There are so many people listening to the show that think about writing books or they're creating content for others. What sort of insights do you have for people that are considering, we'll say, writing a book or doing a course?

Yeah. One of my superpowers is I have very smart friends and very smart students and an extraordinary, brilliant wife, and I get to get a Lot of help from these people reading over my drafts and talking to me through this and having conversations for it. And so you write the book solo, at least for a book like mine, where every morning I try to write for an hour on the book. The way I do it at sort of nuts and bolts level is I know there are people who write chapter one, chapter, and chapter two, and chapter three. What I do is I open up a word processor called Scrivener, which is, you know, you could just use a series of word files, but I use Scrivener. And I take notes on everything. I'm always sort of trying to collect anecdotes, noting things that come up on Twitter, writing paper. And I take notes on everything. And I basically write. I don't know if I get 18 chapters or something. I write them in parallel. I go bounce back and forth from one to the other. And then as it takes shape, I worry more about the overall form and what coalesces and so on. I've never been the kind of writer who just sits and writes in beginning, middle, and end. I have tremendous admiration for people who can do that. But I tend to write in bits and pieces and then integrate it, and it works for me.

Yeah, no, that's great. I know when I. I write my books and my husband, because I go in and I don't really. I basically know where I want to get at the end, but I don't really know going in, how it's actually going to come together. And I know my husband has said, like, I could never, ever, ever do that, ever.

I mean, think of our poor editors. We pitch a book often with a book proposal, and then we send them something and bears very little resemblance to what the proposal was.

Yeah, I think. I know we're kindred also in that, like. So for my first book where my publisher, you know, they came back to me and they said, okay, so the.

Word count we're looking for, like, it.

Can'T be less than 35,000 words. Like, cool. What's the top end? You know, the bottom's not going to be a problem. Like, I'll hit that. So. Yeah. And I far exceeded what they said the max word count was.

Do you find that writing comes easy to you?

Yeah, it does. There's a little bit of needing to sometimes when you know you're at a particular point of being kind of sick of writing or something, you don't want to sit down and do something that's either like a hard or a new thought or something that's a different aspect or if you've been doing it for too many days in a row. I actually write my books in really condensed chunks where it's like I will focus on it for two weeks and like crank it all out. Where I've been, like you said, taking notes over a long period of time or taking a course and turning it into a book.

So two weeks, like 12 hours a day. And just.

Yeah, yeah. This third book that I wrote, the bulk of it really over two really like two week bits.

That is, that is the opposite of what I do. I, I sometimes can't work for. Well, I feel like I'm confessing something, but I have a timer on my computer for about six minutes and I work on my book for six minutes and then I'll spend the next six minutes reading something or going on Twitter or whatever. And I, I can't. I have this, I think attention deficit disorders, probably an overblown term for what I have, but I can't focus for that long. The idea of working straight for 12 hours. Science fiction to me is like flying. So I envy you.

Yeah, for me it's, I think with the, like, I've explained it to my husband is. And like partially, you know, with little kids around and I know you've got kids too, but there's a bit of like, I will rent a house. Like I go away, I'm there and I can just exist in the book in a way that like, I can just sort of like let it create itself around me and it becomes almost tangible when I have enough time to just sort of be with it. And so I'm not like actively writing for every second of every day for, you know, two weeks. But yeah, it's, it's just a different. A process that works for me, which I think is good for people to hear, like, whatever. Don't get hooked on. Like someone says this is how they wrote a book and that's the only way to do it because it's just not. Not the case.

Do you go off email and social media?

I try to limit distractions and sometimes maybe do out of office. But as you're saying, like you get, you need the distraction sometimes where you go and see and let those little bike sheds come that I can go and get, go into some sort of rabbit hole while I'm researching something way longer than I need to be looking into it. But yeah, it's a fun process. It's good to. Those are the times where you think, oh, you know, I really need to Respond to all these LinkedIn messages that have been piling up for six months.

Yes, yes. There's an old episode of the Simpsons I just gotta kind of go back to and have another look at. And it's the power of infinite distraction that we live with. Blessing and a curse, for sure.

Oh, no. Lots of fun stuff to go. Go check. But I like to include fun and interesting things in my books too. And I think you have a lot of fun, like tie ins. You talk about the. The matrix, which obviously makes sense in the context it comes in, but, you know, it could be so just like stiff and stodgy with anything that we're working on. When you're creating a course at university level or writing books or anything. And I feel like learning should be fun. Like we should be a fun having fun when we're writing and creating stuff. People, I think, learn better when they're interested and engaged.

Yeah. And I guess I think bringing in stuff like literary references or popular culture or powerful examples or anecdotes, it makes it more accessible. But I also think in the end it makes the product better. A good example could convey a thought and express a thought in a much better way than say, an abstract formulation can.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to provide an example of something that came to mind for me that I will definitely not remember, like the original quote or who said it or anything. But I think enough that maybe. So in Psych, one of the examples where you give of showing an older quote from someone that was talking about how the mind of a child or when we're born, born as like blank pages ready to be written, and you're saying, well, the, like a different way to think about this today is maybe like it's an iPhone without any apps or something. Right. So this little comparison point and then being able to explain what that might mean for someone in a way that they can relate to, you know, differently, I think is, you know, a helpful approach.

Yeah, I think, I think metaphors. Metaphors change. And you know, John Locke was thinking of slates and books and so on, and we could, we had. We'd easily think of a computer. Imagine a computer that has no information in it versus computer just preloaded with all sorts of stuff.

Yeah.

And of course, a lot of debate in psychology is which in fact is the best picture of the human mind.

Well, you spend a lot of time on that in the book. And I feel like this is the most of any choose your own adventure that has ever been with a guest on the podcast where I would say there's so many ways and so. So many things that we could.

That's right.

They're all the paths and all the things we could talk about. And so, like, when you think about. And knowing that the most people that listen to this show are looking at how they're going to improve their. Their business communications, maybe an understanding of themselves and at work and. And whatnot, you know, where would you start if someone was to come and ask you, like, questions or advice or thoughts or like, anything about these insights that you have gathered? And I apologize that that's like, the most broad question anyone's ever been asked. You can answer it however you choose.

It's pretty. It's pretty broad. You know, talking from perspective of my book, there'd be two chapters to go for. One would be the chapter on reasoning and rationality, which talks about the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the people who followed them, and on basically the powers of our reasoning, but also its limitations and how. And how it could be affected by framing, by ang. A lot of tools that people in business and marketing use. I guess the next chapter I'd go to was my final chapter on happiness, because I do think that there's some stuff we've learned about how to live rich and fulfilling lives. In fact, my previous book, the Sweet Spot, was about sort of the balance between pleasure and pain and what we really want in life. And I argued, it's not happiness, it's other things as well. And then I guess, and maybe we could spend some time on this. I would dart to the middle, which is the chapter on the crisis in psychology, which is a crisis, and that affects certainly my work, certainly what you talk about, which is a lot of the findings that we have drawn upon, that we've told people about have turned out to be not to replicate. And there are right now, as you probably know, some very prominent cases of fraud among people that you and I have talked about their work and maybe relied on it. And so I think anybody listening to people like you or people like me also has to be very cautious, not so much about fraud, which I don't think is as big a thing, though it matters intensely when it happens. But of the fact that this is a fragile science and people should be very cautious when dealing with people who tell them how to live their lives, because at some level, you know, our advice could get out of date very quickly.

Right. Right. Yeah. Well, I actually haven't yet had this conversation on the podcast and have been looking for the right moment. And it feels like in the world of serendipity, as you brought it up.

Yeah.

So do you care? Are you open to elaborating and maybe starting that conversation with your thoughts?

Oh, sure, you could start in many places, but through several events that happen at the same time, the publication of an influential paper, a series of surprising failures of studies to replicate a well known fraud or two, this converged to cause a real crisis in psychology. I think there is a real crisis or where a lot of the studies that we have come to rely on and believe in don't replicate. They don't seem to work. And there's good reason to believe that this isn't an accident, that we've practiced what's called false positive psychology or p hacking or whatever you want to call it, which is we've done our studies in such a way that we make it very easy to show effects even if they don't exist. And so there's a very long list of findings of the form. If there's a picture of an American flag at a voting place, you're more likely to vote Republican. Or if you take a shower, a hot shower, you're less likely to feel lonely. If you stand on a chair, a rickety chair, while reading about relationships, you'll think the relationship is fragile. If you're holding a heavy resume, you'll think that this is a more substantial candidate, and so on and so on and so on. And some of them, for all I know, may be real. But for all of those, there's been studies suggesting that they don't, that they aren't real. And it's now gotten to the point where people could sort of say, well, what do we know? Like what's really rock solid in psychology? And I have answers to that. I think there are real findings that, and we could talk about them that have stood the test of time. But particularly when it comes to social psychology, the psychology of persuasion, a lot of work that marketing and organizational psychology falls back on, there is a real crisis. So do you see things that way? Is that a fair description?

Yeah, I, you know, there's a. For me, one of the things that I have always said is that because I'm on the applied side of behavioral economics. Right. So of course we do rely, like you said, on what academia finds to help guide what we may look at when we're crafting messages, when, you know, we're, we're going to do anything within a business. And you know, for me, I always, always, always said that context really matters. Nothing is perfectly generalizable, really, ever. And so we have to understand often the intent behind what this was looking at and who they were talking to, what those conditions were factoring in, those supposedly irrelevant factors that Thaler talks about and things that shouldn't matter, but they really have an impact. And then going and testing with an openness to, we think this should happen based on what we have heard and what we believe to be true. And let's see what happens in the real world. Yeah, yeah. And can learn from that. And even where, like, I still include and talk about priming all the time, and I'll put the disclaimer of, like, a lot of these studies have not replicated, however, the way our brain makes associations, the way we connect things, the like foundationally, what this is talking about makes sense. And so we. And we know it has some impact, but you want to just be thoughtful. So you need to think about the words you use, the images you use, and how they could have an impact and what might be bad and what you want to avoid and what you want to try to support and know that none of it is magic. Right. It's not. We're not like, you know, waving a wand and somebody's going to change their mind or, you know, buy something they don't need or whatever it is, which, you know, hopefully nobody wants that anyway. But, yeah, that. That really is the approach that I've always had. And so I think, of course, as you said, like, there are some. Some cleanup that needs to be done. And I always just tell people to really think about the intent and the thoughtfulness of what someone's trying to do, what a study is trying to say is happening, and think about how that may apply in your own context before you move forward.

Yeah, I mean, regarding priming, I think you're right. There's good support. For instance, if you show somebody the word doctor, the word nurse will come to mind in a fraction of a second later. There's things like that. If you, you know, if you hear a jingle for, you know, for McDonald's, you might think about McDonald's. The mind does work that way. Associated things trigger other associated things. But whether they do so for a space of more than two or three seconds is an open question. And whether they have any practical effect on people's lives is an open question.

Yeah, but I've also had, you know, people that have been on the show that work in businesses where, you know, they have shown that they did something in the way that they asked a question or the captcha that they used, like looking for things about honesty, like saying to like find things that are associated with honesty before they filled out the questionnaire. And it did like have an impact in a, in applied state. So I think it's, I mean as.

You, as you know, that's an unfortunate example.

I know it's not that one. That, that's not the study I'm talking about. Yeah, but like in this case, you know, just that there are different things where people have seen it in actual applied areas and where people are loss averse. Right. If we look at that.

Right.

And we know people want to avoid a loss and so how do we frame this message to help trigger the, the loss aversion instead of that kind of potential gain perspective. And even if people say they don't like the idea of it, it still tends to work.

You know, I think that's, I think that's a good case and I think actually the stuff that's most rock solid is probably again inspired by Kahneman nature, these basic heuristics and biases. So there's loss aversion or status quo bias. You know, it doesn't make sense. So you go to a company and they assign you to a retirement plan and it's up to you to choose to change. A lot of people just leave it the same. We're very status quo biased. And because of that it really matters. There are issues of framing. You know, you're not surprised when something describes itself as, you know, 95% fat free versus 5% fat or a condom being so and so percentage effective versus our condom. It fails so and so percent of the time. There's a certain way you want to frame things and maybe some of this is common sense, but I do think that there are broader principles that work. But I do think it's also fair to say that our field is reeling from the failures and from somebody who's interested, not primarily practical stuff and in sort of theoretical understanding in the mind, this could be a real serious blow.

Right. Well, as you look to the future, do you have thoughts or hopes or suggestions or anything?

Yeah, I think we're doing our studies better. We're testing much bigger samples. We're pre registering our studies so we can't kind of play fast and loose statistics. Our studies I think are more theoretically grounded sometimes. Sometimes a lot of studies in psychology are like, wow, wouldn't it be crazy if this affected this? And you know, when you say something like this, it often doesn't work. But if you have a theory grounded, maybe an evolutionary theory for instance, then it sort of has more likelihood to work. I'm starting to trust a little bit more meta analyses. So take something just from I think yesterday I read which is everybody was talking happiness literature about gratitude exercises. You read gratitude exercises and there are studies suggesting that they do work. But then you do a meta analysis, you look at the whole body of studies and maybe they don't. To me I wasn't that surprised. I mean it seems like something like that wouldn't make much of a difference. One of the surprises is the evidence that exercise makes you happy, which to me I think would be like a no brainer actually it's not have a huge amount of support and maybe one way around some of this is what you said before, which is don't think in terms of these things are going to fail in terms of general principles. But it might be gratitude exercises work for some people, exercise works for some people and that's the best we're going to do.

Yeah, well, and it's an interesting balance I think, you know, to the point you're making. There is like that there are lots of things that make us humans the same and there are many things that make us different as well. And so you know, the way that something can, it can work and it is often true. And you know, like you say the exercise making people happy, maybe it's got some like. But to what level and in what experience is there something about a person that they're just like starting off and they're getting the endorphins or is, you know, that they are like intrinsically motivated and there's just so much happening. I think it's the like there's so many confounding factors that we couldn't even have thought to ask or think about or you know, and you can't necessarily control for that. It makes again it makes it really difficult for anything to fully generalize or you know, sometimes perhaps replicate and one.

And you take that in different ways. I mean one thing is I'm a huge fan of psychology and wrote a really thick book saying and I could talk to you a lot about I think it's successes but when it comes to sort of practical advice of a certain sort, it's not clear. It's not clear we have that much to say because of the factors you talked about because everything's sort of multiply determined. There's great individual differences and so on. And who knows, maybe we'll have more luck as More of a theoretical science, getting, getting a richer understanding of how the mind works in certain abstract conditions than we are as a sort of applied science. And people can still do applied work. It just will be. Won't be really informed as much by psychological theory.

Hmm, perhaps. Well, I'm hopeful that there will be a balance that allows for the, for that to be the case. Well, and so you were mentioning there are some successes and things. Let's like, we've had our kind of.

We've had the downer part.

So let's talk about those successes and why we're not just saying like, well, that was fun, let's move on.

Okay, well, here's one success which really does a real finding in psychology which people didn't know and some people still don't know and has a real practical difference. And this is the unreliability of memory. And it's highly constructive basis. So the work here, a lot of the famous work here was done by Elizabeth Loftus, who finds that it's not difficult to implant false memories into people. I show you a movie and I ask you, hey, in that movie, did you notice the school bus? Say, no, I didn't. And then six months later, I asked you at the movie and he said, there must have been a school bus in there because you're memory in a question. In real life, it is shocking how unreliable our memories are, even ones we think are picture perfect. And this is from like a million studies now that basically our memories aren't recordings in our heads, but reconstructions based on our experiences, our expectations and so on. So, you know, how many of the stories are in your head are yours as opposed to your husband's? How many of them? You know, people will say something which happened to me a year ago in great detail. And I think the way to think about this is you think that's exactly what happened. Almost certainly if we were to have a camera there, it's nothing like that. And maybe it didn't happen at all. And so this is from a standpoint and from a practical point of view. Jury people, eyewitness testimony has been truly challenged by this. After some extremely high profile cases where somebody said with tremendous confidence, that's the person who attacked me, that's the person who robbed from me, whatever. And they're just wrong. They turned me entirely wrong. And they're not lying. It's just memory is a funny thing. We now know that you point to a lineup and you say, is that the person. The very act of doing that makes you A week later think, oh, that's the person.

Right.

Because your memories get splurged together.

Right, Right, definitely.

So that's one of, I think, the success stories of psychology.

Yeah. It's just really fascinating. Memory is such a really interesting space to look at, and especially because we can be so confident and just absolutely sure that it's right.

And that's right. That's right. That's right. It's the tension, how confident we are. And, you know, you talk about 100 laboratory experiments, but I don't know about you, but I have been in arguments with people I love where I said, well, you know what? You should have never said that to me. And they say, I never did say that to you. And, oh, no, no, no, I remember. I remember you. And then you had this big fight. And then at one point somebody says, I wish there was a camera in the room recording this, because then you would see. But in reality, I've been shocked sometimes where there actually was a camera in the room for some sort of event. And I remember that event, and then I go and look at the camera and nothing like you would imagine, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's a fun and funny thing. And so as we think about all of this, for people in, you know, if they're thinking about their work. Right. And what. Whatever they work in tech, they work at a startup, they work in as an entrepreneur. Right. As you think about how psychology impacts people at work, what area. And I know you mentioned some sections of the book for them to look at, but I guess just, are there any particular insights or things that you think are important for people to know other than, you know, to have some empathy for someone remembering something differently than you? Yes. Confirmation bias is real. Focusing illusion is real. Yeah.

I think one thing which is interesting, and here is psychology, but it's also philosophy in other fields, concerns what people want. They want out of a job. They want whether they're a boss, whether they're an employee, whether they're, you know, some sort of CEO or someone who does some sort of physical labor. And it's not as simple. And here's some work actually by Tom Tyler, who used to be my colleague at Yale. It's not as simple as people want money, a lot of money and a nice office and easy work. What people want is more complicated than that. They often want. They certainly want respect. They want to be treated fairly and with respect. They also often want difficulty and challenge. So there was a survey done of, like, millions of people and broke it up into 500 different jobs. And the question is, what jobs are most meaningful for people? And the answers for the most meaningful jobs were being in the military, being a teacher, being a nurse, being a doctor, being clergy. And these are not high paying jobs. Maybe Dr. Is, but the rest aren't. They're maybe not the most respected jobs, you know, high school teacher, not the most respect. You know, it's. And, and, and yet people get immense reward out of it. And it's not. Despite the difficulty and the challenge and the struggle, I think it's large part because of it. I think we thrive in cases where we feel we can make a difference, but we thrive where there's difficulty. And I think somebody who tries to construct a work environment where things are easy and effortless and just nothing but pleasant is probably going in the wrong direction. Many people, it'll have short term pleasure, but they'll leave the first time they encounter an alternative that challenges them.

Right.

Well, I think that also. So you mentioned from one of your other books about how happiness isn't the thing that we're trying to get. Is this getting at a little bit of what is it that we're actually trying to find?

I think there's no one answer. I think I'm kind of what sometimes called a motivational pluralist. I think there's many things we want. So we want pleasure, we want pleasure. You know, we want to. It's a hot day, we want to jump into that. That's just, you know, it's great hot fudge sundae beckons. It tastes so good. We want that. But we also want to be good. We feel awful if we're doing the bad thing. We want to be good not just because being good gives us pleasure, but because it has its own value. We want meaning, whatever that is. We want to do meaningful things. We want to make a difference. Even if I could convince you, even if we're true, that you could live the rest of your life blissed out on heroin in a state of tremendous pleasure, you'd say, well, many people would say, well, that's kind of a crap life. I'm not doing anything. And we want to do things. We want to make a difference. Some of us want transcendence, spirituality, we want variety, we want to be creative. So just a lot of things people want. And I think part of the struggle we have in our everyday life is figuring out what the proper balance is. You know, anybody deciding whether or not to have a kid, for instance, deals with these trade offs as to what they want, what they're willing to give up and what they want to get.

Yeah. I recently interviewed Hal Hirschfeld about his book your Future Self. And one of my favorite things that he talks about in the book was where he was at a seminar, someone was giving, and they were talking about, you have the choice now to decide if you want to be a vampire. But, like, you have to choose whether you think you're gonna like it or not. And once you've made a decision, there's no going back. Like, you either are gonna be one or you're not. And this is the thing. Yeah. And that it ended up being a metaphor for having children. And like you.

Yes. This is the work of my. My friend Lori Paul, the philosopher talks about transformative experiences and. And points out that having kids is the sort of thing that you. You're a different person once you do it, and then your own standards don't apply. Like, you might be told that once you have kids, you're not going to want to go out late at night and party as much. And then you say, well, I don't want to change my. It changes the way I am. And in fact, from the standpoint of the psychology of happiness, having kids is a huge debate over whether or not having kids makes you happier. And I think, on balance, for many people, it probably doesn't, but it makes your life more meaningful.

Yeah.

No. Interesting.

Just one other thing that was also from. From your book that stuck with me. And again, I don't. I'm not sure what is, like, a unique example you're providing and what's based on some of the literature in some cases, but even saying, like, if you. If we were to tell you to imagine, like, imagine that you're a bat, like, and that you are the bat, and try to, like, come from this experience of being a bat. I can never really know what it's like to be a bat because I don't understand its brain. I have, like, my mind inside of a bat, but that's not the same thing. Right.

It's a famous philosophical example.

Yeah.

Designed to make a more general point, which is that. And a point about consciousness, which is very interesting, which is we struggle to appreciate the consciousness of people around us, but in some sense, it's impossible. We can't escape from our sort of narrow space. This is. Thomas Nagel has this. What's it like to be a bat? And this point is, you can't. You'll never know. You know, you can put your brain inside a shrink. Your brain, put it inside A bat. But you'll just be you inside a bat. And by the same token, I can't really know what it's like to be you. I can know what it's like to be me in your body. Perhaps I can know. And we have some similarities. If not, communication would be impossible. Love would be impossible. Cooperation would be impossible. But I can never really know what it's like to be you. And this is, in fact, one of the reasons I'm skeptical about empathy as a sort of cure all for morality, which is I think we're awful at empathy. We think we're good, but really awful at it. And rather than try to see the world through your eyes, I think I'm better off trying to treat you with respect and take you seriously and grant you the same rights and privileges that I have. And that'll do. But I don't have to be you.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. When we think about just building culture at work and employees and relating to peers and anybody else, and it's really easy to sometimes say, well, they did this to me because of X. Or even if you're trying to understand where someone else is coming from, knowing our own limitations of our own brains, you know, is important in the way that we try to relate and interact and support others on the team.

Yes. It's worth appreciating that just as we're the heroes of our own stories, that's true for everybody else.

Right.

Everyone else. You know, Tom Gilovich, one of the findings I like from social psychology is the spotlight effect. And the spotlight effect is everybody thinks that they're focusing everybody's attention. You wear a funny T shirt, everybody notices. You say something stupid, everybody notices. But the truth is they're all focusing on themselves. Everybody's spotlight is blaming on themselves. And the mistake is to think that when I'm talking to you, I'm the most important person to you as well as to me. When really? Yeah. So that is kind of worth knowing.

Definitely. That's a fun one. I will absolutely link to Vanessa Bond's episode and we talked about you have more influence than you think, which talked about the spotlight effect and a lot of that in the show notes for everyone. So. Well, as I said, I think we agreed going into this, we had no idea where the conversation was going to go because it had ten gazillion possible paths. And I want to thank you for going on the journey with me to, you know, wherever we went through and ended up on the other side for everyone. Who is now excited to go, you know, learn more about you and check out some of your books, psych and others. You know what's their best path to connect and learn more.

I have a webpage paulbloom.net but you know what I have as of four days ago, I have a substack.

Oh nice.

I started a substack because I wanted to be able to write things to get me into trouble or say interesting things without going through an editor. So check out the sub. It's called Small potatoes and it's paulblum.substack.com first time I've ever said this to anybody. I'm announcing the substack to you. Yay.

I'm so excited. Well, we will definitely link to that in the show notes as well as to your website and ways to get your books.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, and just thanks again for coming on the show and talking with me today.

This has been terrific. Means a lot. Thank you.

Thank you again to Dr. Paul Bloom for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I appreciate that Paul took the time to write out a book.

Of the history of psychology.

I mean, there's a lot there to be sure. And I enjoyed our conversation about children and the fascinating insights that come from kids. Being a parent myself, I've always found so much insight into how our brains work by watching my kids and other kids behave while they're still developing, being able to see how they learn words and how they communicate and how they develop a sense of humor like Paul and I discussed today. It really is fascinating and as always, it comes back to thoughtfulness and asking lots of questions. Having that sense of wonder and what if toward the world around you goes a long way into communicating and application of behavioral economics in any area. I think there's another lesson there too, which is to follow your passion even if others don't really get it. I'm so glad that Paul and others decided to research the behaviors of children, even if the greater field didn't think it was worth the time and effort. We've learned so much about ourselves by looking at kids, and it's thanks to people who followed great questions even when others didn't see the same value. And this carries across so many industries.

And areas of focus.

Whatever you're going to pursue, being genuinely interested usually helps. Lastly, I want to thank Paul for starting the conversation about some of the issues facing academic research right now. In many fields, including psychology and behavioral science, there are concerns about replication and studies that may not be as impactful as they were initially reported, and in some of the most extreme cases, a few bad actors who, it appears, have falsified data. These findings have been really upsetting for those of us in the field who've relied on the research over the years, and while it may be hard to talk about, it is important to have the discussion. We can't fix things that remain in the shadows. Things don't get better by sweeping them under the rug. So even if it hurts, taking a closer look at the problem so we can learn from it and move forward stronger is really important. If you notice that I'm being a bit vague in my description here, that is intentional and there are a couple of reasons why. First is because there aren't any clear answers yet at the time of this recording, everything is still speculation and there's a lot going on, and because I'm not privy to a lot of those details, I don't want to speak about.

Things I don't know enough about.

Also, this episode is recorded in advance of when it's going to air and it's intended to be evergreen, so I'm choosing to say things I believe will continue to be true for the long haul. If you have questions about the specifics or anything more, want to know where to read more about what's happening across academic research right now, please send me an email melinathebrainybusiness.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. You'll find me as Melina Palmer and I'll be happy to share what I can with anyone who's interested to learn and discuss more as we close out the show. Don't forget about those show notes, which include links to all those related past episodes and books, including psych and ways to get in contact with Paul and follow his substack and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 345 and thank you again to Dr. Paul Bloom for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.