This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. On this week's episode, we're talking about backup plans. Researcher Katie Miltman shares her study on why it's not always a good idea to have a plan B. it may make you less motivated to pursue your primary goals. Dan Pink is here for another round of Stopwatch Science. So these are glorious times for scholars who research moral hazards. And we invited Matthew McConaughey to talk about the importance of backup plans in the movie Interstellar.
But Matthew was a little busy. So we went with our plan B and invited my friend Adam Cole from NPR Science Hello, having some real flashbacks to junior prom right now. Just kidding, Adam. You were always plan A. That sounds a lot better, yeah. Adam, just like the last time, I want you to listen to all the ideas in this episode and come up with a song that ties it all together. Do you think you could do that? Well, I'll try, but if I can't do it, do we have some sort of backup plan in place?
Here's the thing Adam, we don't and to understand why we don't, you need to listen to this next set of ideas. at the University of Pennsylvania was very interested in what happens when we We have this sense that having a security blanket or a backup plan B is a strategy that will be helpful to us. It will make us more emotionally comfortable with our plans. It will make us feel like we're taking less risks.
Katie Milkman tells me that there is a surprising downside to having that kind of safety net. Here she is again. it may make you less motivated to pursue your primary goals. So because you know that all your eggs aren't in this one basket, you may feel more confident and comfortable. Relaxing and letting up and not pushing as hard toward your primary goal since you know things will be okay You can always go with your backup plan
They used a couple of different methods to figure this out. The first method, which absolutely does not prove cause and effect but does provide some tantalizing evidence, was to simply survey people in a train station. so adam when katie milkman told me that the first part of her study was at a train station we decided we would try and replicate this ourselves
and we went down to Union Station in Washington DC, a producer and I, and ran a little experiment ourselves. We actually have about 5-10 minutes to talk about basketball. What is your name? Fiona. While walking through Union Station, we came across Fiona. She's a young woman from Kenya who was in Washington visiting her family. Her Romanian boyfriend was down the hall buying bus tickets to New York.
Fiona and Razvan are planning on moving to the United Kingdom together, but it's challenging for them to get the right visa. So plan A is that you just get the visa and get to the UK. And get a job there. And get a job there. What's plan B? Plan B is maybe Germany or something. Close enough. Because I have family in Germany, so it might be easier to be in Germany. So you are keeping a lot of options open? A lot of options, because with visas you never know.
Plan A to Z. So here's the question. When you have so many options, do you think that it actually distracts you from focusing on plan A, that having plan B, C, D, E, F, G? that it actually makes it less you're less focused on plan a because you have all those other things in the back of your head i'm very focused on plan a hoping it works but you know i'm trying to be pessimistic so that i'm not disappointed plan a doesn't work i have okay fallback plan fallback plan It just makes me more calm.
In case of anything going wrong with Plan A, I know I have a base here. So, with everything in my life, I always have... You know, other plans on the site. You have backup plans? Yes. Let me ask you a question. Has there ever been a time in your life when you've not had a plan B or C because you've just said, this is the only thing that I want?
There's nothing else that's going to be acceptable. And therefore, I'm not going to have plan B, C, D or E. This is just plan A and nothing else. For me, no. I think my boyfriend works with that. I mean, he just works with one plan. I'm the one who's trying to teach him how to have... Millions of plants inside. I mean even with boyfriends I always have. I hope I don't have to go to Plan BNC but it's good to have Plan BNC.
You know, okay, if we don't work out, this is what I'll do. Your boyfriend, before he comes, in the 30 seconds before he's here, let me ask you, so if he doesn't work out, what's the plan B? Every girl has people that maybe maybe maybe maybe Every girl, even she does.
if something doesn't work out there's that guy possible possible possible everyone has that i don't know about men but so you actually have this list of people in your head and you basically said this person right now that you're aware this is 80 percent
But there's a 75% chance of someone... Some of them are even 40%, but they're still in the line. They're better than zero, you know? I see. Is this your boyfriend? Yes. And we were just talking about where... and we are reporters and we're doing a story that looks at how people make plans and how they think about their plans.
And she was talking about the different strategies and approaches that you both have and your personalities. So when you're making plans, do you often have a plan B and say, if this doesn't work out, that's going to work out? She was saying that you just are very focused on the things that you want to do. Yeah. I don't want to be in a situation where I feel vulnerable, especially in another country when I travel, if it's a travelling plan. So every time I look at other options...
The worst case scenario. Oh, so you actually do keep options? Yeah, but it's more focused on Plan A. Yeah, I focus because I also don't accept failure. My plan everything has to go according to the plan.
So in general, for the big things in your life, not how to get to Philadelphia and which bus to get, but for the big things in your life, where you're going to work and who you're going to marry, do you actually have very clear ideas of what you want and say, this is what's going to happen and I'm going to stick to that? I'm trying to impose this philosophy of life. I think before I believed in more natural and things just happen.
But I am thinking lately, I took this approach, I need to know what I want because otherwise it will not just come to me. I need to step up, take decisions and go with it, not let it just come with karma. So nowadays I feel I'm imposing myself this philosophy of knowing what I want. I want this. Why do I want this? And stick to it. So in terms of romantic life, do you have a plan B if she doesn't work out?
Or are you saying this is the one and I'm not going to think about any other plans and options? Very good question. I don't have a plan B. I'm sticking to plan A. I'm sticking to my decision and I'll make it work if I start with a plan B in a relationship. Yeah, I'm thinking of the worst case scenario, but alcohol will get me through that. I don't need another Plan B, but now I'm sticking to Plan A because I think...
I'm doing a mature decision at the moment or I hope I'm doing it. So I'm fascinated because you're actually saying that having a plan B can affect how much you focus on plan A. that's why i guess maybe first when i talked about uh focusing when i'm traveling maybe i look like a control freak but i also think plan b makes you relax
and think yeah whatever let's just have a drink and if we miss the bus we take the second one let's just not give her all the attention because if it's not going to work there are there's plenty of fish in the sea But this will just make you relax and maybe not focus enough because the plan B is also comfortable. Plan B is always the comfort zone. You go back, there are plenty of buses, there are plenty of girls, there's plenty of this. It's back to the comfort zone where you don't have to.
to step up, look at the time, bring flowers, give kisses. Well, I think that Razvan has just written the song himself. That was very poetic. But what's the science behind this? So Adam Katie Milkman wanted to find out the evidence as well. She decided to take her research out of the train station and into the laboratory. And what we did is we gave participants a shared goal. They all had the same goal, which was to achieve high performance on a task we'd assigned to them.
And in one study, we told them that if they achieved that high performance, they would get to finish up five minutes early. So they'd get the same pay that they were expecting to receive, but they'd have five extra minutes in their day to do with whatever they please. And one group, we asked them before they pursued this task to think about another way that they could save five minutes today if they didn't achieve the goal of getting five minutes back in our study.
A second group we asked to simply brainstorm about what one could do with five minutes to hold brainstorming constant. And then a third group was a control group and they had no initial instructions. They just began the test. And what we found is that the group had thought about a backup plan, about another way that they could
saved five minutes today, achieved significantly less success on the task we assigned them. They worked less hard, they solved fewer puzzles, and this was significantly fewer than people in either of our control. So this is actually a disturbing finding in some ways because it really suggests that this very normal and perhaps even wise course of action, which is to have a plan B, to have a safety net when you're marking on something difficult and dangerous,
Really has a downside. I mean there's a real tension here. That's right I think there is a really important tension here and again what I don't want to say is that it means we should be done with backup plans because they provide real value and all we're trying to show here is that there's a downside we might not be appreciating and that we should try to find ways to stay equally motivated even if we do want to provide a safety net for ourselves.
How do we go about doing that? I mean, this has been found in similar studies. If you look at people wearing helmets, for example, when they go bicycling, they take more risks. And as they're bicycling, if you ask people to wear seatbelts in cars,
they now drive a little bit faster than if they were not wearing seat belts. And I don't think, as you're saying, the implication is we should eliminate seat belts and ask people not to wear helmets. But how do we get around this human tendency to say, I'm protected and therefore I can take a chance?
an absolutely fabulous question I think it's the big question that the study raises and unfortunately we don't know the answer but I do think awareness is always a good start so recognizing that there is this downside that there is this risk of feeling too comfortable, of feeling too confident, at least hopefully that can begin to combat it. I'm wondering in your own life, Katie, do you make backup plans? I absolutely make backup plans. Give me an example of backup plans that you make.
That's a good question. I'm trying to think of my latest backup plan. So Jihei Shen was a doctoral student here at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School and she was preparing to go on the academic job market hoping to find a fabulous faculty job.
And she came into my office and said she was a bit worried about having a backup plan, making a plan B in case she didn't get that job because she was worried it might demotivate her. Maybe one interesting implication is to think about whether or not you can outsource the job of backup plan. as a student's advisor, for instance, perhaps they can focus solely on the primary plan of getting a job and let the advisor worry about the backup plan of where we'll find them a postdoctoral.
scholarship if they don't find a faculty position. Maybe that's the best of both worlds. The student stays motivated and feels that They only have a plan A, no plan B, but the advisor's taking care of offsetting the risk by worrying about the plan B in the background. I think for this plan to work, you have to have an advisor that sends signals that they may be unreliable.
And that would send a message that the advisor actually can't be trusted to come up with a proper backup plan, which would motivate you to really focus on your primary goal. That's right. Or you could simply have an advisor who's very quiet and doesn't signal one way or the other. And hopefully that will provide enough uncertainty that the student will work very, very hard. Thank you so much for Junker, have you been coming up with a backup plan secretly in case I fail?
Adam I think the point of Katie Milkman's research is I shouldn't tell you if I have a backup plan because if I do going to make you slack off and think that you have a safety net. So absolutely not, Adam. Wow, my heart rate is rising as we speak. I guess I'll furiously take more notes. Wonderful. Now we're going to take a short break. When we come back, I'm going to play a game of Stopwatch Science with my friend Daniel Pink.
Dan and I will talk about a phenomenon called moral hazard. And the idea of moral hazard is that when you think you have a safety net, when you know that you have a backup plan, a plan B, you will take plan A less seriously. And as a result, all sorts of bad things happen. Welcome to another edition of Stopwatch Science. I'm joined by senior Stopwatch Science correspondent Daniel Pink.
Hey Shankar. Now, in addition to his role here on The Hidden Brain, Dan is also an author and a commentator. In Stopwatch Science, Dan and I challenge each other to present two pieces of research in under a minute each. Today, we're presenting studies about moral hazard. This is the idea that safety nets can sometimes cause us to take unnecessary risks. They change our behavior.
There's no safety net here on stopwatch signs, just a timer and a buzzer. Dan, can you tell me what sound I'm going to hear if I exceed my one minute? Well, I've chosen the old car horn sound like this. It sounds a little like a rooster, doesn't it? I have decided that the sound that I'm going to play for Dan when he exceeds his time is this.
What is that? That's the sound of a chimpanzee, Dan. Okay. Thank you. All right. Dan Pink, your first minute starts right now. So these are glorious times for scholars who research moral hazard. There's nothing like a financial crisis. It's really the full employment act for moral hazard scholars, including Michael Acklin and Andreas Kern. One is from Pitt, one is from Georgetown, and they did something really interesting.
They had a theory that they decided to back up looking at some numbers, and they found, it goes straight to the punchline, that if you want to predict which countries are going to have a financial crisis, look to see where U.S. troops are. Now, the reason for this is, once again, moral hazard. The thinking is that, hey, if there are troops in a particular country and the country goes south financially,
Big brother, Uncle Sam, is going to step up and bail the country out. Now, they also tested something. They said, well, maybe we put troops in countries that are at risk of financial crisis. Not the same. Come on. This is so interesting. I'm actually going to let you go on. Keep going. Do we put troops in places that are at risk of financial instability? And the answer is no, because there are other markers when U.S. troops go there that actually indicate financial health.
What it suggests is that when we deploy troops out there, it makes countries say, hey, we're protected. We can take some risks. And that's pretty much the standard definition of moral hazard. I think that's pretty amazing. Thank you. So speaking of moral hazard, I'm going to turn on my stopwatch here, and I'm going to give you one minute. Now remember, the car horn will sound. if you exceed your one minute. So get ready, right?
All right, I'm going to be talking about bicycles and bicycle helmets and a very interesting experiment that was run in England some years ago. This is a study by Ian Walker, who's in the Department of Psychology at the University of Bath. I'm not quite sure how they pronounce it. Anyway, what he did was he rode on a stretch of highway.
either with his helmet on or with his helmet off, and then measured using a camera how close cars came to him when he was wearing the helmet and when he was not wearing the helmet. And what Moral Hazard predicts is that when he seems to be protected because he's wearing a helmet,
Car drivers feel like they can take more risks because they feel that if I get close enough and he topples over, he's not going to die. He's wearing a helmet. And that's exactly what he found when he was wearing a helmet. Car drivers actually came closer to him. They drove closer. One of the interesting things he also found is that when he wore a woman's wig,
Fewer people came close to him because they had the stereotype that women drivers are women. They honked at him because he was wearing a wig. That's probably exactly what they did. But in this case they hung from some distance because their stereotype was women bicyclists were a little less stable than male bicyclists. Very interesting. So I guess Shankar's message to all you kids out there is...
Don't wear a helmet, just put on a woman's wig. I'm not sure I would say that, but I'm not going to say more on that because I know Dan is just trying to buy time instead of paying attention to the fact that his one minute starts... right now okay so we talked about uh uncle sam now we're going to talk about an even higher power god there's some great research out of stanford showing that when people hear references to god they're willing to take
risks, but only certain kinds of risks. So here's what they did. They said to people, do you want for a fee, stare into this bright light that might harm your eyes? People who are reminded of God beforehand were more likely to do it. Now, they also tested this with things that had moral content to them. So they said, do you want to learn how to bribe Do you want to learn how to parasail? And when people were faced with the opportunity to learn how to bribe people, something that had more...
they were actually less likely to take that risk. So what this shows is that when it comes to physical risk, not anything that involves values, that being exposed to God, seeing things like, in God we trust, seeing something like the Ten Commandments, guys. And make people. Chirp like a chimpanzee.
That was really interesting. Because people feel protected by God, so they take more risks. Now, Shankar, I have to say, in this case, you're not protected by God or by the United States military or by a Whig. So you are all on your own.
Starting right now. I'm happy to report that the study that I'm just about to tell Dan is going to destabilize him to the extent that he's probably going to forget about the stopwatch. Okay. Because it has to do with how parents with college-going kids behave. And Dan has kids who are just about to head off to college.
And this is researched by Laura Hamilton, who looks at what the effect is of parents paying for their children when they go to college. And what Laura Hamilton finds is that the more money parents pay for their kids, the less kids are required to stand on their own in college.
the worse the kids perform in terms of their GPA. It's not a huge effect, but what it finds is that when kids don't have to feel like their performance in college is actually on them, that there's somebody who's carrying them, that's someone who's going to give them money.
It makes them say, I'm just going to take it easy. I'm going to go to the bar. I'm just going to hang out with my friends. I'm going to pay less attention to my studies. So I don't know how this is going to change your behavior vis-a-vis your kids, Dan.
I'm going to tell you that it might be a good idea just to cut your kids off just like you're cutting me off right now. Yeah, wow. That's actually quite fascinating. It makes me want to call my daughter and say, Sophia, been nice knowing you but next fall you're completely on your own good luck i'm just trying to avoid moral hazard darling if you do that dan just make sure you didn't tell her the idea came from me no i won't
I'm back in the studio now with Adam Cole, producer and reporter extraordinary from NPR Science Desk. And we've challenged Adam to come up with a song that stitches all the ideas in this podcast episode together. Adam, have you gotten any ideas? I've written down the downside to Safety Net.
Lack of focus on primary goals. The Kenya, Romania, Germany, UK couple. Moral hazard. Plenty of girls. Plenty of buses. Writing a song is going to be a breeze for you. That's right. I'm just going to go back to the skunk bear cave and we'll see. All right, everyone. Adam is now out of the Skunk Bear Cave. Was this a success? Well, I came up with something. I know that you're a huge fan of pop punk. And so, famously. So what we've got here is a pop punk garage band.
entitled Moral Hazard with two Zs. Hazard with two Zs. I love it. With the song I Don't Need No Plan B. They all say you better have a plan. When I bike don't wear a helmet on my head Every day's fantastic. you don't Adam! That's amazing. Thanks for having me. The Hidden Brain Podcast is produced by Kyra McGurk-Allison and Mackie Penman. Special thanks this week to Adam Cole. You can find more of Adam at SkunkBear on YouTube and Tumblr.
Before I let you go, I'm wondering if you can do something for me. Can you let me know what you think of the podcast so far? What segments work for you? email us at hiddenbrain at npr.org or find a survey on our Facebook page. Until next week, I'm Shankar Vedantham and this is NPR.