Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast)

childhood and child rearing, UH to pharmaceutical side effects. It's it's just endlessly astonishing who he is, the research he's done, understanding the impact of culture and society on UM, just how we think and how different let's just use East versus West as examples as different parts of the world approach problem solving and societal issues and economic sen just endlessly fascinating. He's written a dozen books, the most recent of which UH is Thinking, a memoir, which was quite fascinating.

He's one of these people. I don't want to say he name dropped because he worked with all these people, but he just so casually works in UM various characters from you know, the canon of twentieth century psychology and economics and and UH academia because he was really there as all these things were being developed. UM. I mentioned During the interview, Professor David Dunning of Dunning Krueger is the one who said, Hey, I work with Richard Nisbet.

You should really talk to him, and and really, what more do you need than that as an introduction. I wish we had another two hours. The conversation was absolutely fascinating. It's a deep dive into intelligence and thinking and how we get smarter both as individuals and society. Absolutely fascinating. I'm going to stop here and say, with no further ado my conversation with Richard Nisbet. This is Mesters in Business with very Renaults on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special

guest this week is Professor Richard Nesbitt. He is the co director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan, focusing on culture and reasoning and basic cognitive processes. No less than Malcolm Gladwell called him the most influential thinker in my life. And when Professor David Dunning yes that Dunning offered to make an introduction, I jumped at the chance. Professor Richard Nisbit, welcome to Bloomberg.

Thank you. It's my pleasure to have you. Before we dive in, I just want to give you a little bit about my background, because I have no real psychology background. My biases the world's of behavioral finance and cognitive eras really in the context of investing decisions, especially bed investing decisions. So pardons some of the naivete that I may exhibit

in some of my questions. There's like the slightest bit of overlap between what I've looked at and and your whole career, and that's why I found it so interesting. And and let's start with your career. There's nothing really in your background growing up in El Paso and in California that suggests an academic career in psychology. What led you to the study of human reasoning and decision making? Oh, I think it was just luck and key, and that's what I was meant to do. But I learned it

very early. Fortunately, I read Calvin Hall's Primer of Freudian Psychology and it was just za, that's it, That's what I'm gonna do, right right. Interesting that I really like the idea that has been talked about, and you you reference it um in your book Thinking, a Memoir, which we'll talk about in in a few moments, that the human propensity for floored reasoning was advantageous on the Savannah, but it really doesn't service well in a modern society.

Tell us a little bit about that, right, Um, well, there's a whole enterprise I'm sure you're aware of and psychology and economics showing Uh, people's reasoning is flawed in many respects, and most of them was Many people said, well, that can't be. You know, I managed to get through my day pretty well. Uh. That's sometimes um self delusional, but but by and large it's correct to say we

were not terrible at eavening across the boards. It's just that the Industrial Revolution and then in spades, the information revolution, just changed the nature of what we need to do. Uh, and in our reasoning in everyday life. Uh. It gave us data, It gave us uh numbers, Uh, it gave us graphs, It gave us reports from people that we never heard of. We encounter people that we don't know at all. All of this is just completely unanticipatable from

the life of a hunter gatherer. So the problem is the rug has been pulled out from under us, so we make errors all the time. Quite quite interesting, some of the research that you've done on cognition is really quite fascinating because it's so challenging to figure out what's actually going on in people's minds. I was kind of intrigued by some of the research that was done on birthwater and how that impacts people's career choices and aversion to risk taking or not. Tell us a little bit,

or even how they embrace risky your sports. Tell us a little bit about birthwater and and how did you figure out that was significant? Well? Um, I was my advisor UH and graduate school at Columbia, Stanley sh Actor UH studied birth order and one thing he discovered is that firstborn females are more frightened of the prospect of

electric shock than later born females. And I thought that's interesting because I've always been kind of afraid of getting hurt, and my younger brother was getting hurt all the time when he was a kid. UM, So I sort of filed that away. And then I heard of one of these people who looks at primates UH, and she studied monkeys, UH, and she just made this offhand observation that when a monkey mother has her first baby, she's all arms and

legs and tails. Keep it in the tree to keep it from falling thirty down thirty feet down from the forest canopy. Uh. By the time her fourth or fifth kid has come along, the kid falls out. Damn, I'm gonna have to pick the thing up. Um. She just so first borns are protected, uh in a way that later borns aren't. So I said, I said, how can I test this? And I started looking at uh sports and uh the birth order of people who played dangerous

sports versus non dangerous sports. And it turns out there later born is about more likely to play a dangerous sport than a firstborn. So. Um, and that's I just found out recently. There have been twenty studies since, all supporting that general statistic and is a giant number. We're usually looking for a couple of percent here or there to identify some difference of of note, this is clearly not only replicable, but very significant. Yeah, it's it's surprisingly strong.

If if I had been predicting what I'd find, I say, oh, maybe a ten or fifteen percent edge. But no, it's huge. So another one of your books, Geography of Thought, you put forth the theory Asians and Westerners have maintained very different systems of thought for thousands of years and these differences are scientifically measurable now now that's when it was first introduced. Was a pretty radical premise, but you had a data to back it up. Tell us a bit

about that. Well, it is a radical premise. And Um, I just happened to have a student a number of years ago from China, a really brilliant guy who's actually now dean of social sciences at Kingwa University, which is the top university in China. Uh, and actually had been working together for a while. He said, you know, Dick, you and I think completely differently about a lot of different kinds of things. And I said, well, tell me more, and he gave me a version of the following. He said,

you think very analytically, very linearly. When you look at some object or person, you are you thinking what are the attributes of that object or person? Uh? And you come up with rules? Are you you consult your rules about that kind of object or person to figure how it's going to react, how it's going to behave um? He said, I, as Chinese, UH think much more Um. Holistically, I pay much more attention to the context of everything, objects and people. I pay attention to relationships, I pay

attention to similarities. Uh, and this bruces all kinds of different conclusions between you and me looking at the same situation. Now that's actually he didn't quite say all of that, but he said stuff that was similar to that. In what I just said is a summary of our results. UM. And speaking of big effects, not everything I do get big effects, I can assure you. But Uh, I didn't actually believe him exactly. Although I had read a book by Nakamura called Ways of Thinking of Eastern People, so

I was prepared for some differences. Certainly, not the different is as large as we found. Uh. My favorite examples of these cognitive differences really have to do with perception more than reasoning, although there are plenty of big differences for reasoning. UM. Were one of our studies, and this was done with Takahiko Masuda. Uh. We showed underwater scenes two Americans in Japanese for twenty seconds, UH, and then

we asked them, what tell me what you saw. The Americans will say something like, well, I saw three big fish swimming off to the left. Um. They had one fin on top, they had pink stipples on their bellies. UM. There were rocks and shells on the bottom. So on the Japanese nearly always start with the context. I said, I saw what looked like a stream. The water was green. Uh, there were rocks and plants on the bottom. Uh, there

were three big fish swimming off to the left. Now, in total, we got more reports about context from the Japanese, from the Americans, then from the Americans, and more observations about relationships like the frog was on the lily pad um and uh so Uh it turns out and and the difference there between number of observations about the context, it's increase over what Americans do. Uh. And that's done

with no loss of information about the central objects. Uh. So there and so we wanted to see, well, what are they doing? Are they looking at this this thing differently? And the answer is yes they are. Um. We put a GisMo on their heads, um with a camera back at their eyes, so we know where they're looking at every moment. This is done with still photos uh and uh. We show people the photos for ten or twenty seconds,

um and um. What we find is that the Americans spend almost all their time looking at the object, the front of it, at the back of it, at the top of it, at the bottom of etcetera. The Japanese uh spend much much more time on the context, and they're actually constantly looking back and forth between the context and the object. Um. So uh. They they're not just seeing the object and the context, they're seeing relationships between the object uh and the context. So uh. This is

the The effects are huge for perception. Uh. There are some very large effects for cognition as well, which I can tell you about if you're interested. Uh. So um. One thing that we do, we do very simple studies to make our points. Uh. We show people a picture of a monkey. Uh. Ah. Let's let's get me take a better example. We show people a picture of a cow uh grass uh and um and a monkey uh. And we say which two of these pictures go together? Uh. The Americans said, well, the monkey and the cow go

to better go together because they're both animals. The Asians are much more likely to say, well, the cow and the grass go together because the cow eats the grass. So they're seeing relationships automatically that are not so salient to us. Uh and uh. They're paying much more attention to the object. Uh. Some of the more consequential differences have to do with understanding human behavior. UM. There is

UH an error UH in reasoning that people make. UM. I wonder how many of your guests have heard of. This error is called the fundamental attribution errors. So we tend to attribute the causes of behavior to a person's attributes UM. That is, UM, his personality, his abilities, his attitudes. UH, and we tend to ignore the con text. UH. East Asians are much more likely to pick up on the context and to attribute behavior to the context than we are.

UM and UH. An example of this UH is UH we do a study where we say, we've asked that this person you're about to hear from UH, We've asked him to please state the case uh as if you were in a debate for why marijuana should be legalized or some other topic and so UM and we say, either this person gave this talk in response to a psychology professor's request in response to a political science assignment, or UH in respond to a debate coach who said,

I want you to give me the pro arguments. UH as if you were in a debate and people then hear this UH speech and now you asked them, UH, what are you suppose this guy actually thinks uh and um. People are hugely influenced by what he's said, even though they know he was chosen randomly to give this particular talk. Now Asians East Asians. When I say Asians, I nearly always meet East Asians, Japanese, Chinese uh and um and Koreans,

but others as well. Uh we um tell people, Uh, well, they've been told that this person was required to give this each what do they think? They tell us? Americans teals, well, he thinks pretty much what he said. Asians don't do that. I don't really nobody thinks because he was assigned to do this by somebody else. And that effect is really huge. I mean, we make the error in that situation of very big airror that they are much less likely to make.

They do make the fundamental attribution error also, but it's just not nearly as frequently. I'm not nearly as strong an effect. We're going to talk more about the fundamental attribution err in a little bit, but I have to ask what is the societal or cultural basis for this difference between looking at things either with or without context and relationships, and how does it manifest itself in in

each society. Clearly there's a different structure in both, and the behaviors and economies and everything else are so different. Tell us a little bit about what leads to this and then where it goes from there. Uh. Well, first of all, point out you, as you did earlier, that the differences go back thousands of years UH and UM.

For example, for example, if you look at UM physics beliefs in the West and in the East, UM, the it turns out Westerners have always tended to have physical beliefs which were of a variety of the fundamental attribution Here they try to explain the behavior of objects purely in terms of properties of a object. So you know, the object felled because it's heavy. The Easterns have only objects fell because the material supporting it wasn't sufficient to

bear the way. So they understand the relation between the context and UH and the object and UH. Years ago already Chinese were well aware of the concept of action at a distance UM. So they understood the reason for the tides, for example, which was not understood even by Galileo. Uh, he didn't get it right. And they also had a good concept of magnetism UH, and of acoustics. So they

they had very accurate lay intuitive physics as compared to Westerners. Now, so that and the and the category and the logic by the way, uh apropool of analytic reasoning. UH logic was the story goes invented by Aristotle because he got sick of hearing allows the arguments in the marketplace and the political assembly. Um So he said, okay, can we agree that if your argument has this structure, it's allows the argument. Uh So. UH logic was formalized very early

in the West. It was never very much of an interest in the East. Uh. And it was never formalized. And there was only a very brief period in the third century BC when there was any concern with logic at all, and the it basically dropped out of of the intellectual armaments of the East. So why do we get these perceptual differences and these cognitive differences and also

as a consequence, the social differences? Uh? I believed early on without much of it's that it was because of the type of of economy uh that East Asians had of versus Europeans. Uh. East Asians had a great especially in China. I mean terrific circumstances for mass agriculture. Mass Agriculture, especially rice culture, demands lots of cooperation from people. So effective action depends on my looking at what you're doing and understanding the relationship between your action and my action

and so on. So I'm constantly looking out there, and I'm seeing the reasons for behavior, I'm seeing the context that creates them, and just and incidentally, if I'm paying attention out there, I have better understanding of physics. Um so. Um And I had a very sharp Turkish student a while back, who's oh, and I should say, what what was the situation in Greece. Well, Greece was mountains descending to the sea. Mass Agriculture is just not in the cards in that situation. People to make a living by

trading and fishing and kitchen gardening and so on. Um So, it's they don't have to pay attention to and then herding sheepherding, especially goat. Uh So, they don't have to pay attention to other people in leading an effective life. Um So, this Turkish student says, why I know an interesting town in Turkey where there are three major occupations farmers, fishers, and herders. Now, if you guys are right about why uh people think holistically in the East and analytically in

the west. Uh. Then we ought to find that the farmers and the fishers think more holistically than the herders. And that turns out to be true. So the herder sees the monkey and the cow as being related, and the and the farmers and the fishers see the cow and the grass uh to be um related. And uh.

So then the really beautiful study on this was a former student of mine looked at UH reasoning in China saying, well, people ought to be more holistic and South China than in North China because, Uh, you make your living historically in the south by rice farming, which is extremely social dependent. I mean, you can't do anything without lots of people cooperating, and it's wheat farming in the north of China, which

is much less dependent on other people. Sure enough, people reason more holistically in the South of China than in the North of China. Quite a very long answer to your question, No, but it's quite fascinating. Some of those things I found in the book were really fascinating and curious. And there's a thread that runs through all of this UH that that is just intriguing. I want to start with something that I thought was an urban legend, but

you presented very differently. One of the few factors that predict success as a scientist is the amount of time and childhood that person is sick. So explain that. Well, my theory about that is who knows, it's a Factum, we don't really know why. But my theory is that if you're sick, you spend a lot of time in bed by yourself, and there's not much to do. This is pre TV. There's not much to do but read and think. Uh. And um, this is gonna stand you

in good stead for certain kinds of occupations. Um, actually, I think most occupations. Um. So then the reason that's in my book, Uh, there's in the fact that it's sort of an interesting tidbit, Uh, is that I spent a huge amount of time alone wandering the the area of El Paso, Texas, which is right across the border from Warez. And Uh it was it was a wonderful place to wander around. I would go down to the Rio grand I would go to the irrigation canals and

look at the cat catfish and the crayfish. Uh. There was a UM kind of motel for Mexican farm workers. UM that I would uh go down and visit those folks, usually taking a bunch of Walt Disney comics which I had paid ten cents for and I charged them five cents uh or and I much later I realized this is a parado improving exchange. I got some money which for the my comics, and they got their comics cheaper than they would have had for them in the store. UM.

So it was it. I wandered around a lot, so I was thinking a lot, and I was something of an icelet that were not other kids in my neighborhood. So I did a lot of reading these days that wouldn't happen they be doing um looking at uh Instagram or um playing video games. Right, there's no downtime in those potential negative ramifications for that. So let's talk about some of your other research that that is somewhat intriguing.

Telling people about drug side effects has no impact on them, and this eventually leads to regulation about all the drug disclosures we see on pharmaceuticals and TV ads for different drugs. You're credited or blamed or at least your research is credited or blamed for those disclosures. Tell us how you came to that conclusion. Well, um, very early on, I did a study where I asked people to take a series of electric shocks of increasing intensity, and I asked

him to when can you first feel it? When does it first become painful? And when is it too painful to bear? By the way. A lot of people say, well, I would never. I would walk out of the room. No, you wouldn't. Everybody trying to be cooperative, and I presented is a reasonable thing for them to be doing for science. People will do it, um. But for some of these people, I say, I want you to take this pills called sproxin uh and um. It will cause your heart to

race a bit. It will come back and make your breathing heavier and more irregular. If you may find that your palms are a little bit sweaty, you may get a tightness feeling in your stomach. These are the symptoms people experience when you're giving them electric shock. They're the arousal symptoms that just come with the territory. Other people will say it'll just give them a few junk symptoms.

It will cause headache and some matching. Uh and sure enough, and this is for some reason you're asking them about things all all the big effects studies of ever an enormous effect. The people who have been told that the arousal will accompany the drug H take four times the amperation of other people. Uh. And, by the way, and this gets opens up a line of work which we may want to talk about later. The reason he is

completely unconscious. You you ask people, you know, tell me what did you think about the drug while you were taking the shock? And I wasn't thinking about the drug at all. Yes, they were, and what they were thinking was they're getting more and more aroused as this thing that I've been sure enough, their heart rate, they're breathing patterns and so on or changing, just like we said they would. They attribute the arousal, which otherwise would be

multiplying the pain, the pain experience. Uh. They're treating as an external, external thing. It has nothing to do with you know, my thoughts or emotions or uh anything else. It's just it's just that drug that caused those symptoms. Um and Uh. I did one other study which showed a therapeutic out come for this kind of thing I advertised for insomniacs. This was done at Yale UH with

Yale students UH for a study on on dreams. Allegedly. UM, so I found out how long it took them to get to sleep the previous two nights before they come into the lab UH, and I tell them for the next two nights, I want you to take this pill before you go to sleep. And it's an arousal pill. UH. It's going to cause you know, this meal may become your breathing may may become irregular, your heart rate may

become faster, et cetera, all the arousal symptoms. Other people we say nothing to about the effects of this pill, or we actually say it will reduce their arousal symptoms. And our anticipation was, I mean, here, this is based on my myself as an insomniac. I used to you know, lie in bed and you know, thinking about the day and the future, and there were things I was concerned about, and I start thinking about them and I get kind of worked up, and so I'm saying, you know, I'm

getting aroused, and that done. That's a very bad idea. So we anticipated and found that the people that we had given the arousal instructions to got to sleep more quickly. The nights that they took the bill, the people we said, uh, the pill will will reduce your arousal, took longer to get to sleep because we're thinking, you know, the the the arousal that they experience because of they're worried about

the situation with their girlfriend or our exam tomorrow whatever. Um. Though, the arousal that occurs as a result of these these scary, unpleasant thoughts. Um They they'll they'll say, well, it must be particularly bad tonight because I've got this pill that's supposed to call me down. And by the way, that was based on a personal experience as well. I after I had insomnia for quite a while as undergraduate, I said, okay, I'm gonna give up. I'm gonna take a sleeping drug.

And I took a sumin X and lay in bed waiting for it to take effects, which it never did, And it took me longer to get to sleep because I said, well, this this ought to get rid of those irreleval symptoms that I have, and it didn't. So years later somebody said, well, samin X is practically useless. So uh, it was never going to have an effect.

So so what's the relationships Taken the pill at bedtime and think it will reduce arousal, it takes them longer to get to sleep because they think, look, I've got it at least as much arousal as usual and even though I've got a pill in me. So Uh, the general point made by those two studies is that uh, you can have uh the effects of a pill. Uh that uh that that that aren't really there there there arousal is not being produced by that pill or reduced

by that pill, but by other experiences. Um. So this work got picked up by the f D a M because drug companies did not want to tell people about the side effects that they might have from the drug, because they said, well, the power of suggestion. We're psychologists, Sara, and we know that the power of suggestion is such that people are going to be experiencing these things that uh they're not really uh have anything to do with the pill, but they're gonna attribute they're gonna uh they'll

they'll they'll invent these effects. They'll start having these effects if you tell them about it, because via the power of suggestion. So let me jump in here and ask a quick question. What's the relationship between the expected physiological arousal in this external source and what I think lay people think of as the placebo effect. Well, the placebo

effect is, in fact, you get certain symptoms, uh, certain experiences. Uh. And if you've been given uh what is actually a placebo uh and told that it will improve your condition the pain or uh, your flu symptoms or whatever, people will in fact often experience those things or think that they're experiencing those things. So there is definitely a phenomenon of the placebo effect. But in a way, this is

the opposite. In fact, I mean, this pill is not causing any any symptoms of any kind, but they they they think that the pill is causing certain symptoms. So, but it very much depends on the symptoms. If it's arousal symptoms, uh, they will attribute any naturally occurring arousal to the pill. Uh and uh if it's uh decreasing arousal symptoms, they'll attribute any arousal to their own state, to their actual state, which they will assume is worse than they might have thought. So you can read into

people's experiences arousal. Let's due to some external source or you can read it out. So so the FDA requires that all possible side effects be reported. Um. You mentioned David Dunning earlier on that on your program. Uh, and he's done a fascinating study showing that um, people who have been uh well just a second, let me let me make sure I get the the story right about

what he's finding. Yeah. Uh, Dunning has found that, uh, people are less likely to pay attention to side effects if you list twenty seven side effects, you know, like the TV ads where there's may call blah blah blah blah blah blah. The more symptoms you give them, the less attention they paid to any of them, and the less likely they are to remember it later. If you just tell them a few of the very most important ones,

they're likely to retain that information. Um. So you know, psychology has a lot to do with what drug effects are, and what drugs side effects are, and what people attribute the side effects too. So so let's jump to attribution theory. What is the fundamental attribution error in acting versus observing.

I'm kind of intrigued in my field that when someone sees a successful investor, a trader, um they tend to say, well, that guy got lucky, But when they themselves are doing pretty good, instead of crediting luck, it's obviously due to

their own skill set. How is that related to the attribution theory, Well, in a way, that's almost the opposite of the attributionary and the fundamental attributionary attribute behavior to an attribute of the person, a personality, trade, or an ability that really should be understood in terms of context or situation. Um so um. But in showing that this is a there's a difference in our likelihood that we

make this error for ourselves versus others. Um. If you, um uh, show people a video of someone behaving in a particular way and ask them why they did it, they'll they'll go for the for the person's attributes, for their traits instead of paying attention to the context. But if it's they themselves who are doing this, they're they're they're they're they're responding to the significant extent to the context.

So they say they attribute the behavior their own behavior, they're much more likely to attribute it to the context of the situation than they would the same behavior by someone else. That's quite interesting. You mentioned an endless array of different. Um, very famous psychologists and sociologists that you've worked with over the years. Two of the people you discuss really stand out and and I have to reference

both of them. Um, there's an old joke about Amos Diversky that says, you know, the amis Diversky i Q test is the smarter a person is the sooner they figure out that Diversky is smarter than them. Um, is that your line in the book. It seems to suggest you're the person who coined that. Yes, I'm the person who claims that it's become I mean every psychologist knows that line for sure. I mean it's interesting that you know, the smarter you are quickly to realize you're not as

smart as someone else. Actually, this is related to a dunning finding, right, I mean, Um, the more knowledgeable people are, the more the better calibrated they are uh for uh for understanding uh the world they understand. They know very little about science. So I'll tell you I don't know. You asked me a question I can't answer. I don't

I don't know enough. More ignorant people will give you an answer because they don't realize they don't have the withal meta cognition as a distinct skill set from actual knowledge of the space exactly. So the smarter somebody is, the more likely they are to stand aside and not and not give you an opinion about something if they

don't have feel like they have sufficient sufficient knowledge. And we're going to spend a little more time talking about intelligence and i Q and how malleable and modifiable that is in a moment. But there's a quote you paraphrase of of Hans. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his name right, Hans cell you Hans Um. Success in a science is

a multiplicative function. It's intelligence times education times, ambition times, curiosity times, hard work times, the ability to get along with people and not just super high i Q s. Explain that it's quite a fast an eating little formula. Right. Well, you have to have all those things to be a successful scientist, and my my guess is that you have to have pretty much all those things to be a

successful to be successful in business. Um and um, I mean I have I know someone who had a tested i Q of a hundred and eighty four and he was incredible. I mean you didn't have to be with him for very long to realize, oh my god, this guy is really super super smart. Um. And but he was slightly autistic. I mean, he was slightly off. He would make comments that were inappropriate. Uh, he would laugh when that wasn't the right reaction and so on. Uh.

And he had a PhD from a major university. Uh, and he only managed to get very middling of a jobs. Academic jobs in his career should have been, you know, at a major university, and he was on very minor places. So that's a case of you know that that the particular thing that he lacked was ability to get along with people. But ambition is another thing that you often see if somebody he's got the whole package, but it just doesn't care enough to to to put it all

into into play. There's a quote that makes this point, by the way, which I really love from Warren Buffett, who says, you know, investing is not a game where the smartest guy wins. If you've got an i Q of a hundred and sixty, you may as well sell thirty of those points because you're not going to need him.

And there's there's a lot to that. You know, it's not just raw processing power, it's judgment and decision making and the ability to seek context, and a lot of those things aren't necessarily i Q there, they're a different form of intelligence, which kind of goes to and I don't wanna I don't wanna give the game away, because we'll talk about this in a moment, but it kind of goes to the concept that there are a lot of different ways to improve intelligence and improve, um, how

successful a person can be. And you point out in the book that the average IQ score in developed Western economies has risen over the past century. Tell us a little bit about that, right, well, that it act actually probably started with the industrial or revolution. Um. Suddenly you have a workforce that needs to be able to read and write and do arithmetic. So you start increasing the amount of schooling, introducing it are if it's already they're

sort of an embryo. You enhance the education. Uh. And for the last two years, the amount of time that people spend in school is just kept on increasing. Ah. And this is hard to believe it. Right after World War Two only about six or eight percent of the population had a college degree. Uh. And college does make you smarter. And by the way, I had a data about that if you want to hear about that. To my surprise, I really didn't. I just thought, you know,

college teaches you stuff. I didn't realize it actually makes you smarter and lots of very important ways. Well, it does both, right. It teaches you things, but it also gives you a framework to think about things. It's more than just here's a list of data points, memorize them. It's here's how to Here's a set of cognitive rules and mental models that you can use to solve problems exactly. UM so UM that An example UM that I like is UM I have lots of lots of my studies

and lots of Firsky economist studies. By the way, UM I had to do with showing the errors and reasoning that people make because they don't think statistically or probabilistically when they should. I mean, it's a these habits of thought are not they're not common. We don't we don't we're not typically taught them in such a way that they can make contact with everyday life events. UM. For example,

they're one of their most famous studies. Uh. Is you say there's a town where there are two hospitals, one has about fifteen births per day, and the other has about sixty births per day. At which of these hospitals do you think there would be more days in the year when or more of the births were boys. Most people say that it shouldn't make any difference. Uh, And about as many say it would be the larger hospital as would be the smaller hospital. In fact, it's astronomically

more likely to happen at the smaller, smaller one. Right, You're more likely to get a random outcome with a smaller data set than you are with the larger data is four times larger data set, Right, I mean you're gonna go far away from if there's three births uh per day, because uh, it's gonna be either two thirds zero three thirds boys. That's um so, uh so that's the case. We understand the law of large numbers. By the way, even a hunter gatherers understood the law of

large numbers and a lot of important contexts. But we don't have it stored away as an abstract rule to any time there's a little light that goes on in our heads. Data. Oh yeah, what's the end? What's the number of cases? My favorite example of somebody not using the law of large numbers and not understanding that the more variable the dimension you're looking at, the more data it's important to have to make a judgment. And this comes from when I went for the first time to Europe.

I spent about a week in London week or ten days, and it was absolutely gorgeous weather. I'm in blue sky, seventy degrees every single day, and I came away start with a lingering feeling that, you know, the British or such complainers, they actually have wonderful weather, but they're always complaining about the rain. Well, I I got h what I deserve. The next time I went to London. It never stopped dreaming the entire time. So now I wasn't so foolish just to think that weather isn't as variable

in England as it is anywhere else. But I just didn't take the trouble to say, wait a minute, how much evidence do I really have about what the weather is? Um so any rate. I studied people's failure to apply the law of large numbers when they should. They're attributing causality when the data they have is purely correlational. I studied their inability to apply the regression, statistical regression concept, uh,

two problems and so on and UH. When I was doing that work, I used to say, you know, not only are we stupid, but you can't make a smarter with these things. So when I said, well, you know, I'm going to prove that, I mean, I don't actually know for a fact that you know, you can't teach people these things. To my astonishment, in fifteen or twenty minutes, you can teach the law of large numbers, the regression principle, UH, the cost cost benefit principles, including a crucially important one

of uh of of the cost principle. UH that UM, I can't retrieve money I've already spent by consuming something. So you know, I got go to a movie and it's a lousy movie. You know, I may say, well, I don't want this thing, is hardly worth it. I just assumed be sitting at home. But you know, I don't want to waste the money I paid. You know which an economist says, honk wrong. You can't waste that money, you already wasted it. Uh. All you can do now

is has send good money after bad. Uh. You talk about this with books, And I had this experience more or less around the same time you did the realization that, hey, I'm not liking this book. I'm under no obligation to finish it. It's not homework. I didn't sign a contract if I'm not enjoying it. Put it aside. I know people who have a real emotional difficulty in saying no, no, I started it, I have to finish it. Well, I was absolutely you know, pathological. I mean, if I started,

by God, I was going to finish it. Uh. And and I don't know who told me that that's a good rule. I guess I just invented it myself. But of course it's a perfectly terrible rule. Uh. Whatever point you're not enjoying or you're not learning, then you should stop. Um. People don't have that principle, Uh, at such a level of abstraction that it will make contact with all the

problems in life that it should so. Um so, But you teach them in the laboratory just a very few problems using one of these principles, or actually just giving them the abstract principles, and either either one will help people. And if you give them both abstract and concrete cases, of course, um, they do even better. So I decided to say, well, what what does college do for you

on these things? And I gave them a package of problems like the the the that are solvable by using the some cost rule, or the law of large numbers, or the concept of statistical regression, which is that, uh, extreme events are not likely to be so extreme the next time they're encountered. We don't have that wired into us. I mean, it's a tremendously important principle that we you know it, just it doesn't come with the hardware or

the software for that matter, or the software. It doesn't come with this when in in a few million years of evolution would we have ever experienced things like exponential growth or compounding. If it never comes up, it's just a total blind spot to us until we're walked through. Right. Well, Although that said, I've watched people get the money whole problem explained to them. The you know do do you do you stay with your original choice of the three doors,

or once a door is revealed, do you switch? Even after you lay out the statistics to people, a lot of people still refuse to accept that the odds have changed and you should switch. Right, So we looked at all of these kinds of things, and I'm and they were just simple problems like I've just been talking about.

Or you tell people, uh, you know, at the end of uh, the first couple of weeks the baseball season, there are usually several batters with averages of four fifty or higher, but no one ever finishes the season with that an average. Why do you suppose that is? Now, if you ask this question of the U of M freshman before he set foot in the classroom, he will say, and I'm making it he because he's more likely to know about baseball. Uh. He will say, well, you know

the pictures make the necessary adjustments. Or you know, they they they're doing so well, they kind of goof off and stop trying as hard. After uh education lasting four years at the University of Michigan, they're like they said, well, wait a minute, early on in the season, there haven't been that many at bats. If you think about it, uh, after your first at back, your your average is either zero or one. Uh So when you get more and more, but nobody really has a four fifty level of ability

and that's going to show over the long haul. So I mean it goes from like giving you that kind of answer to sixty or see that kind of answer. I mean, college is hugely important for making you smarter. Peter teal to the contrary. Notwithstanding uh and uh so this was I was bowled over, But this I couldn't again. It's a tremendously strong effect. I mean, it's people go on average from answering of our problems correctly to our

problems correctly. None of these things that you know, the statistical rules, probabilistic rules, economic rules, psychological rules, none of these things, uh are taught explicitly nearly as much as they should be. I went and got after I did the study, I went and got an economic economic couple of economic economics texts, uh to see what they did with the sunk cost, And both of them they spoke

of it only in business situations. Uh. They didn't say, oh, by the way, this principle is important to you every day, um in many many ways, or the opportunity cost principle. They're they're not, they're not. They make no effort, And statistics courses make no effort to say, look, statistics is relevant, you know all the time, and probability and so on. So there are opportunities to do uh greatly improve people's education. Won't affect their i Q, but as sure as that

makes them smarter. Uh. And it's tragedy that these things are rarely taught, certainly not in the way of UH that will make contact with every other live events in high school. Instead, we make high school students take algebra, which they're not gonna use. I mean a tiny fraction are ever going to use in algebra. Uh. And tragically a lot of people drop out of high school because they can't hack algebra well, algebra to go out of the curriculum, as far as I'm concerned. And um, and

put probability, economics and statistics in. Yeah, I think that's a fabulous suggestion. Last question in this segments on thinking. You've now been at the University of Michigan for quite a long while. Uh, tell us about how you came to leave Yale and end up at Michigan, right, Uh, well, my story there appall's most people who hear it. That's why I asked, UM, so I was at Yale, personally

got the university, and I went to Michigan. Despite the fact that the day of my interview it was in February. An arbor is not a lovely place in February. It may surprise you, don't know. And this was a particularly unlovely day because there was dirty, patchy snow lying all around the very cold um And I had was interviewed by the executive Committee of the department, and uh, they most of the time, and the discussion was spent with him discussing baseball, which I know nothing about and isn't

really relevant to my career. Uh. And I spent the bulk of my time, well not the bulk, but the single the single person. I spent most time with a colossal bore. But I went to the University of Michigan anyway. In fact, I made up my mind I would go the University of Michigan absolutely regardless of what happened on when I was there, because I had heard only good things about the university, about the psychology department, about the town, etcetera.

I'm going to improve my life and all of these ways, and I'm not going to pay any attention to the concrete data which I get. And that's a huge bias that we have. You know, if if if I saw it, it must be real. Well, no, it might not be. Uh, you have better ways of finding out what an object is like than examining it yourself. That's what we have speech for and the ability to read, and we can

get information rather than relying on our own senses. And it was, in fact the absolute right decision for me, so I got what I deserved. Quite quite interesting. Let's talk a little bit about some of the impacts of your research on geography of thought. I'm kind of intrigued by the conclusion that we focus way too much on genetics and we really should be paying a whole lot more attention to the environment, the culture, and the society.

Tell us a little bit about that, right, Well, Um, I had studied reasoning for many, many years, and if you're a psychologist, to sort of keep up on the literature on many fields and one of them and most psychologists know something about his intelligence. But for some reason I got to thinking seriously about the intelligence literature. And the more I thought and the more I read, the more I realized that psychologists had gotten things desperately wrong

with intelligence. And there's a book that has all these desperately wrong things, and it's called the Bell Curve. And most of your listeners believe what the Bell curve tells them. They believe that genetics is accounts for um of the variation that you find an intelligence. They think that early childhood environment is not all that important unless it's their own kid and they've got to get there desperate to get him in the very best uh daycare situation, which

is a mistake. Um. They um. They underestimate the lifetime learning opportunities that make us uh much smarter or not, as the case may bee. UH. They think that blacks and whites have are separated in their i Q scores on the average by fifteen points. They think, well, probably maybe some of that genetic um. They think Asians have higher i Q s than than your people of European descent um and so on and all of that is

wrong um and uh. And I wrote a book called Intelligence and How to Get It uh, which shows what's wrong with all of that. Uh. The arguments are pretty complicated in the case of, for example, how much of i Q is due to your genes? UM. The most interesting thing I can say about it, first of all, it's it's I don't know what the contribution of genes is. I know it's less than sixty, way less than of

the variation. Uh. And the most interesting and important thing I can say about genes and intelligence is that the the contribution to the i Q of a population of upper middle class people only is about eight. It is huge there. They're The variation that you see between, you know, between people who were raised in upper middle class environments is largely variation that's produced by their genes. In this country, the contribution to i Q of genes of the lower

class is practically zero. How could that possibly be well, because upper middle class families are all alike. Uh, they're like happy families. The happy families are all alike. Upper middle class families are all alike with respect to cotny skill that they're they're very good, and there's not that much variation. I mean, lawyer Smith and businesswoman Jones, their kids are all getting essentially the same environment we respect to cognitive skill training. So wait, let me interrupt you here.

So when you say the same environment there they read. Their parents pay attention to them, They go to even a decent school. And so everybody who has that similar upper middle class or even middle class background is gonna take the most advantage of their own genetic background, but working class students you're suggesting get almost none of that, Yeah, because of the chaos that you find UH in in many of those families. And this has nothing to do

with race, This has nothing to do with religion. This is really everybody just scrapping really hard to make ends meet, and it it's not the ideal circumstance for raising a child, right. And you know, some environments obviously lower class environments are as good as you would ever find in an upper middle class. But some of the environments are chaos chaotic in the extreme, uh, and not much goes on that's

going to facilitate uh somebody rising to their level of ability. Um. And when the environment is massively different across UH individuals, as it is in the lower classes, then uh, it's the environment that's going to drive the bus. And genes are not really much relevant. A little side points that all make here, and this is that this is true

only in the US among rich countries. In Scandinavia especially, the contribution of genes to i Q is just as great for the lower classes people with the least money as it is the most money, because they're they're making sure that the poorest have good things going on in their environment, schooling and so on. So that um so the genes can't express themselves. Uh in the lower classes in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Um so. Um So that's that's the most interesting thing I can say about genes and

the environment. Well, let's stay with this is that, because you really raise too fascinating questions, and I'm going to assume you answered it in intelligence and how to get it? The first is what should parents of any economic background be doing to help their children become as intelligent and successful as possible? And then the bigger question is what should the US as a society be doing? Yeah, all right, of great Christians. Uh there it is wonderful anthropological work

that's gone on. Looking at where you just live with a family for a few weeks or months and see what goes on. Uh in the upper middle class family, Uh that they typically eat dinner together, and the dinner table conversation is kind of like a tennis game. I mean, dad says something, and mom says something, and the kid says something, and the dad responds to what the kids said, and so on. They learned how to think to a

significant extent in family gatherings. These kids get taken to the museum, they get read to, uh, often by quite good books. Uh, in the lower class family. And and this is intact. I mean we're not talking about pathological I mean it's you know, debts. Dad's a lunch pale dad, and and and mom's uh homemaker. Um, intact family. Uh. There isn't much in the way of conversation with the kid. You tell the kid what to do, and the kid asks you for something, and that it's just not at

all the same thing. Uh. There often is some reading uh in the lower class on it. You know, there may be some little golden books. I don't know if they still have those, But when the most of this research was initially done, uh, those were common. Um. And kids may get read to some Uh. And they don't tend to go to museums. Uh. They don't have their information, their their fiction of the top level, most interesting, most

likely to be food for thought. So Uh, there is a huge difference between upper and lower class in cognity skills. Some of that is undoubtedly genetic. I have no idea what fraction, but we know most of it is environmental. And this comes from studies of adoption. Uh, what happens to a kid from a lower class who gets adopted into a middle class family as compared to the kid who stays in the family of origin. And the answer is that's worth twelve to eighteen points in i Q.

I mean, that's enormous. That's the difference between somebody who might or might not graduate from high school versus someone that you would expect with complete college and might well go on to post graduate work. Um. So uh. And that's that shows how important the environment is. And that's that's the end of the question. What should a country like the United States be doing? If we have the goal of hey, we want to see more of our

kids succeed. We want to level the playing field and make sure everybody has the opportunity to do their best. What is Scandinaview doing that we're not? Well? First of all, they have they have daycare from I don't actually the word go um and uh daycare is it's important. I mean a good daycare program is important for intelligence for sure. If we with the respect to specifically I quh, the very best daycare programs that we have might may have an early effect that tends to largely fade on i

q UM. But the Nobel Prize winning economist Heckman at University of Chicago is summarize the evidence of what happens to these kids thirty years after they either have daycare or don't, and the differences I seem to be only telling you about really big effects today. It's like increase in the likelihood that the kid will graduate from high school, a like increasing the likelier that to go to college, UH having cutting in half of a likelihood that the kid is going to go to jail or be a

public charge. I mean, stuff is being learned in there about dealing with other people and self control, cooperation and so on that are tremendously not not i q but they're cognitive skills and social skills with a huge payoffs. And by the way, the economists have shown that good daycare UH pays back UH in a ratio of nine to one, that is, nine dollars gained for every one dollar spent on daycare. The gain to the treasury is

significant over the lifetime of a kid. So, I mean it's just so important that early childhood education and there and to the policy thing. Of course, in the the democrats, UM three point five trillion. Hope. Uh, there is early childhood care for everybody. That that's a huge investment. I mean, it's a hugely valuable investment, not to mention the human suffering and and h and human well being that are involved.

Quite quite intriguing. I want to talk about some of the things you've discussed about the state of of psychological research and academic research in general. Uh, most importantly with the reproduction problem. Tell us what's happening, um in the ability to reproduce academic research? Right. Well, this is a matter of some passion for me, as you might imagine.

Several years ago, UH, psychologist named Brian Noseck and a lot of other psychologists published an article in Science claiming that only of the psychology experiments that they attempted to replicate actually did replicate. UM. By the way, even if that were true, which it isn't, it would be better than what the drug companies do. Uh. Their replication rate is significantly lower than But the research was deep flawed

in many ways. For one thing, UH, a lot of the studies were chosen because someone found the results to be implausible. So only fifty of the on their face of it, implausible research uh got reproduced would be the way to describe what they did. But they they did a lot of things that were astonishingly far from what the original investigators did. Uh. Italians were asked of opinions about African Americans. Well, they don't have the same understanding

of African Americans in Italy that we do. Uh. People are asked, um how they would feel about, you know, flubbing a question in college class, but people who uh and replicating this by somebody who makes an error uh in business quite a different kind of thing. Uh. And if you, if you improve on this situation, you'll get about of people of studies replicating. Just simply asking the investigator of the studies said, look, this is our understanding

of what you did. Uh? Is that right? And they say, yeah, go ahead, or know you're missing something there? Uh. Just that gets it up. But in fact there was. It's extremely misleading to talk about the replicability of randomly selected studies, let alone the replicability of implausible seeming studies. Because I've asked I started asking people after this came out, Uh, can you think of any finding in psychology which seemed interesting and important? When it came out. Uh, that then

turns out not to be the case and doesn't replicate. Um, and uh people have to think for a while. I've only got a list of about a half dozen studies like that at this point. So that's enough to tell you we don't have a replicability problem. It's a certain class, you know, run of them l studies are Uh. But if studies you know, have been vetted appropriately. Uh, there's there's a very low rate of misinformation getting into the system.

And you're talking about actual lab studies, not things like Freud's abstract theory of the ID subsequently being replaced by a different thesis of psychology. You're talking about actual experimental psychology. Right. Let me give you an example. Uh. It's a one thing that we haven't gotten onto is how incredibly much we are affected by small, situational, contextual things in our lives. Uh,

they were affected unconsciously. One of clever study you have people hold a pencil in their mouth with the end of the pencil pointing in, which gives you kind of a sour puss and feel when you do that. Are you have them hold it between their teeth, Uh, horizontal to the floor, which makes it makes it you feel like you're smiling. And you have people look at cartoons under one of these conditions or the other, and sure enough, people who have been forced to smile I think the

cartoons are funnier. So then there's like ten or twenty studies attempting to replicate that effect and they don't find it. So that study just drops up. People's stop referring to this. It doesn't work. It turns out that all of the studies that attempted to replicate this have a video camera on the person. Very the person knows that he's being watched.

The whole point about this thing is that you're unaware in a conscious way of the fact that your facial expressions has been manipulated, and that's what allows the effect to occur. So sure enough, when you do it with the video camera, you don't get the effect. When you do it without the video camera, you do get the effect. Um so, uh so the the work is is really

very bad. On the other hand, I will say that, uh, that's article started a movement to look at the practices of psychologists research practices, and there have been a number of improvements. Uh uh, you're more likely. Going back to the law of large numbers, you're more like it to get a spurious result if you use a small number of subjects, because you you may uh you know, get something happening that isn't very likely to happen. You just

use the small enough sample that you get it. I went back and looked at some of the studies early in my career, and I was appalled at how few subjects I used, uh, including the studies that I mentioned about externalizing arousal effects ends of twelve per sell and it's it's just it's inappropriate. Uh. And over time, like everybody else, drifted to much larger numbers of cases than that. UM. But now no one would ever use in as low as most of us used at least some of the

time decades ago. UM. And there there are other pract just this to some good, some not so good. But the ones that are good, they're they're valuable that they have changed people's behavior. So so, speaking of doing experiments, I'm kind of fascinated by things like introspective reports, where people are verbally describing what they're thinking about how they're thinking, and you kind of reach the conclusion that these sorts

of things. At best, people can explain what they think they're thinking about, but not really how they actually think. Tell us a bit about that, right, well. Um, some of my favorite studies here about showing that we don't know what's going on in our heads. One beautiful one shows people of matrix of four cells up, down, right, left, and it tells us such a I'm gonna put an X on the computer screen and one of those uh quadr and Uh, I want you to predict where it's

going to appear. So early on the subject does terribly, and he gets better and better as time goes on. That's because there are rules that are determining where that X appears. It never appears in the same quadrant twice. Uh. It has to appear in quadrants to before it can appear in quadrant four, ETCETERA complicated rule system. Uh. And we know that people have learned the rules because when you change the rules, they fall back down to chance level. Now you ask this, if you say, tell me you

you do it. You were doing so great there and then kind of you know, honest to say, you kind of fell apart. What happened? And I said, well, I just I just lost the rhythm. Um. We had psychology. Uh. Some professors us some of the subjects, and one of them said, well, I think you were showing me distracting symbols. Uh, subliminally. So here are people learning rules uh that are quite complicated. Uh, and no awareness that they've learned those rules at all.

What's that? That's quite interesting? Yeah. So Uh. The Nobel Prize winner economist, organizational psychologist, um cognity psychologist Herbert Simon uh won the Nobel Prize. And you know, for while I was going around saying I do think a loud protocols. I have people solve problems and they think aloud, and that tells me the process that they're using to solve

the problem. And my bryans action, Well, no, it it just says that they tell you how their theory of how they would have solved the problem, which happens to correspond to your theory. But that not isn't necessarily what's going on. Uh, And uh these studies established that. And and there was a controversy that went back and forth between uh Simon and me. Uh and uh he actually gave me a beautiful example of this. He says, you know, when when people play their first chess game. Um, it's

uh uh. They they play, they make several moves, and then you asked them why you did that, and they can't tell you that I don't I don't know. I just was moving things randomly. I don't know why I was doing that. And Simon says, no, Actually, they were following rules. It's called Duffer's rules. Everybody plays the same way before they really have gotten any expertise at all.

It says, then if they continue to play, and they read books and they talk to other chess players, they are now beautifully cognizant of what's going on, and there they can tell exactly why they moved the rook to this position instead of the bishop and so on, and they're quite accurate. Then if you look at chess masters, I mean, world class players, they're no longer accurate about what they're doing because they've forgotten some of the stuff they learned in books in a in a conscious way.

And it's precisely because their masters is that they've invented, but they've induced certain rules that they're following, but they're they're hopeless. An example, an even simpler example is uh, language, we don't know what grammar is. If you try to have people explain English grammar, they're hopeless. They can't say a single correct thing. Uh. Nevertheless, we rarely violate those rules. We just don't have a conscious grasp on what they are.

So we're constantly learning things, inducing things uh that uh we're not aware of in a conscious way, solving problems in an unconscious way. Um and uh. One of my very favorite studies, you have people in a lab. There's two ropes hanging down from the ceiling. There's a bunch of objects lying around on the tables in there, and the experimenter says, I want you to tie the two ropes together. But the problem is they're too short to do that. So you have to find a way. And

one way is very obvious. You tie an extinction cord to one and you go over and grab the other, and you can now tie them together. And there are a lot of things like that. And after the subject has been stumped for a while, Uh, the experimenter says, uh, okay, so um uh, they do do it another way. Bill can do nothing, So then he goes he's been wandering around the lab while this is going on, handling around.

He casually puts one of the ropes into motion. Then, typically within forty five seconds, the subject grabs a rope, ties a heavy object like a pair of pliers, to a second moving like a pendulum, goes to the other rope, grabs the pendulum rope and ties them together, and the investigator says that that's very that's very clever. How did you happen to think of that? And again, this is another one of the studies to use psychology professors as subjects.

And one says, well, um, I thought of uh, monkeys, uh, swinging through trees across the river. The imagery occurred simultaneously with the solution, and he said, do you think it could have influenced you the fact that I put the rope in emotion? No, no, no, no, no. It's all about monkeys and rivers and swinging. And people have no idea why they were able to solve that problem. Now, this is not just a curio. It turns out that the unconscious mind is going on solving problems all the

time for free. We're not aware of what's going on, but it's happening, and that's that's great. I mean, uh, it's uh. Most of the stuff that that goes on is accurate. So that's reminds me a little bit of some of the split brain experiments where people who have had their I guess it's the corpus colossum severed. So what they've seen, their eye goes to the left side of the brain, the left eye goes to the right side.

But they're not communicating. And if they're showing shown two different things, two different images in each eye, they're unaware of why they're actually engaging in the sort of behavior they do based on whether something was shown to one side of their brain or the other. Is that related to this? It's a perfect example to bring to this. Those people are confabulating that they don't that the investigator

has shown them something to the left eye. Uh, and that gets incorporated in the person's thinking about what's going on. But but it's not conscious, it's not been presented to the verbal hemisphere. So yeah, it's exactly that. It's a contabulation. We're going we're confabulating all the time. So when somebody asked me why I did something, Uh, if it's a psychologist, I say, well, you know, bear in mind who I am. I wrote you know all those articles about unconscious reasoning.

So I don't really know why I did what it is, but I'll give you a story which sounds acceptable to me and will do you? Now, you you can only do this with psychologists. You can't. You can't just do this with aunt maa do well, thank you finally lost it? Um so? Uh, but we can put the unconscious to doing more work than it than it does and uh if you, but you have to give it some material to work over. So I use my teaching technique, my

seminar teaching techniques. I hand out thought questions one week for and that will be the what we'll focus on in the seminar next week. And my joke about that is, uh, this is simple somewhat like the thought questions you may have seen in other classes, with the difference being that I expect you to have thought about these questions. Uh. Now, if I sit down just before class and write the thoughts questions out there, not going to be very good

and the class is not going to be great. But if I just sit down for ten minutes and say, well, what are the main points? And I want this material to make and what would I do if somebody raises a you know particular point, how how would I deflect the discussion in that direction? And so on. I don't have to think for long. But then, you know, several days later, without having consciously thought about the thought questions at all, I sit down and start taking the thoughts

questions by dictation. Just they start flowing out of my bid. And it turns out that if you ask highly creative people, I mean the great people uh point Array, the mathematician, Amy Lowell, the great uh poet Uh, if you ask them, you know, how did you come up with that? There? They say saying, well the point to Ray says, well, I put my foot on the I booth on vacation.

I wasn't thinking about work at all, and at the moment I put my foot on the step of the bus, it occurred to me that the functions I needed to solve this problem where the very Fuxian functions that I had used to solve another problem years ago. Amy Lowell says, you know, I was in a art museum and I saw sculpture of bronze horses, and I thought, you know, it might be an interesting topic, uh for a um

for a poem. Someday months later, she sits down, and as she says, the poem was there without having thought about it consciously in that period of time. The point being if you prime the unconscious with something, it'll still it'll golf doing work, including at night. I have a friend who said, you know, um, I'm working on Calculus homework problems, you know, and get the problems three and it's not. I can't figure it out and work for thirty minutes, nothing's happening. So it just goes to sleep,

and often it's not. It wakes up. It's, oh, that's a beast up problem. That's all. That is amazing. A lot of the unconscious work, conveniently enough, gets done while we're asleep. Huh. That's absolutely fascinating. We've been speaking with Professor Richard Nisbet of the University of Michigan. If you enjoy this conversation, we'll be sure to check out any of the previous four hundred UH interviews we've conducted. You can find those at iTunes or Spotify or or your

favorite podcast UH source. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Sign up for my daily reads at helps dot com. Check out my regular column at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Follow me on Twitter at Ridholts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps me do these each week. Mohammed is my audio engineer, Paris Wald is my producer. A tick of Valbron is our project manager. Michael Batnick is our

head of research. I'm Barry Hults. You've been listening to Master's in Business on Bloomberg Radio.