New Year's Resolutions: Science and Moral Behavior

be wrong, but it's yeah. It generally occurs like one month out from from Western New Year because I feel mainly I feel that like if you're if you're gonna get excited about like turning over a new leaf, for getting back in the role of things. However you choose to take on a new year, like I try not to to, you know, strap my self to the mask too much, uh and make any kind of you know, a weird bargain about the future. But it's like just

coming off the holidays, it's just too much chaos. Everything's out of order. It's the worst time in the world to decide you're going to start a new habit or a new cycle of doing things, or are you gonna or that you're gonna engage in any level of betterment, Better to wait until January is over and try that stuff out in February. That's that's my approach. Yeah, I think if you're going to make a resolution, you should

do it in the spring. Yeah, But have you ever made a New Year's resolution and like actually followed through with it, Like if you've tried it? Was it always just kind of a thing you thought about for a bit and then u um, maybe in the you know, earlier on. But like I think last year, I decided to stick to a basic yoga schedule, like decide what classes I was going to go to and make a point to go to them, and and worked out well.

But that was a reasonable goal, like something that that I was already sort of halfway meeting, and then I just said, all right, we're gonna just roll with this this routine once things get going in February. I don't know if you've ever noticed this to be the case at a GEM or y m c A or something that you go to, but they're just horrible in like January, first half of February you just it's it's they're packed and then there and then the herd thins out. You know,

suddenly nobody's coming anymore by March. Yeah, yeah, I definitely noticed that because I go to yoga at a y m c A and and I love it. I love my yoga teachers, all of the classes. But you do see that influx of new faces, and a lot of them are not gonna, not gonna stick around. And some of them will show up with their genes on in socks and with no understanding of what they're about to get into. Some will show up fifteen or twenty minutes

late or leave fifteen or twenty minutes early. But it's yeah, it's just part of the process of people setting goals, trying new things, and not everything works out, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but of course that that's always the kind of goal you see, right when people make New Year's resolutions, they it seems like they're almost

always inherently narcissistic, like they are for personal improvement. But there for that kind of personal improvement, like I'm going to quit smoking, I'm gonna lose weight, I'm gonna get in shape. There for things that that aren't bad. I mean, they're good for you, but they're they're you know, sort of self focused. Yeah, I mean those seem to be the ones that dominate all the lists and advice columns that come out around this time of year. We want to you know, we want to look sexier and feel

stronger and live forever. This is gonna be the year I live forever, exactly right, and really locking down eternity this year. Um. But instead of these kind of self gratifying, uh, you know, self improvement projects, I wondered about the personal betterment project of of trying to be a better person. I know sometimes people think about this in New Year's

and and and why shouldn't we think about it? Like, if we're going to try to commit to changing our lives in some way for the better, why not try to be better humans? Yeah? And you know, and I know some individuals do engage in, uh in this kind of goal setting. But but it's it's also just as if not more difficult. It's more it's just as challenging as trying to change your body. You're going to try

and change your your mind state. Instead, you're gonna change the way you interact with those around you and what you care about, and and try and do so in a in a meaningful way that actually lasts beyond January. Yeah, I mean, how realistic is it to say this is the year I stopped kicking strangers down flights of stairs, because if that's already your thing, I mean, people really don't change all that much. People change, but it it takes a little bit more to to really turn over

a new leaf. Well, that's an interesting thing. You point out. People don't change engine by and large. That's the extent to which that's true is depressing. It's very, very difficult to truly change our behavior in an effective, significant and permanent way. But fortunately we do have some science about the mind. And this is what we're gonna end up

talking about today. If you make a New Year's resolution that you actually want to be a better person, you want to live a more moral life and treat others better, and not just in this vague form of you know, I'm gonna do it some kind kind of promise, but in a way that actually gets results and changes your behavior. How can we do it? It seems like we should look to science. Yeah, because we were talking about leveling up the old d n D character sheet. Here we're

talking about changing our stats. Uh, what does science have to say about stat adjustments on the real life character sheet? Right? And I can already hear people objecting and saying, wait a minute, you can't do that, because science is about empirical facts and morality is about values, and those things don't mix. Now, one of the things I'd say is that there, in fact, is an ongoing debate about whether

you can derive moral values from science. I'm not saying you can, but we don't need to go there for the purpose of this discussion. Like that, that's a debate we don't even have to enter, because I would put up an analogy of engineering, like let's say you're building

a hydroelectric dam. There is nothing about physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics, any of that that tells you that it's best to build a dam that produces the most electricity, cost the least money to build, has the lowest ecological impact on the river that you put it in, and has the

least likelihood of failing and flooding everybody downstream. But if you start with those priorities as your assumptions, you can most definitely use scientific fields like physics and chemistry and fluid dynam amics to build the best possible dam to achieve those goals. And I think you can sort of

approach morality in the same way. If you start with some given goals of improving moral behavior, and especially you want to start with specific ones like uh, like maybe making yourself more generous or being more honest, you can use research in neuroscience and psychology and related fields to optimize your moral behavior and use what we know about the human mind and the brain to fix the problem and get results, sort of trick your brain and making

you the person you want to be. Yeah, So before we get into the actual research, I do definitely want to start with some caveats because the scientific study of moral behavior is far from perfect and there are a lot of potential difficulties we encounter when entering this field. One example would be a sort of lack of agreement on moral goal, like if a study is being conducted by a member of a religion that says tomatoes or

minor gods and eating them as a heinous sin. Abstention from tomato products is a crucial part of moral behavior, and this is why it's important to study clearly specified types of behavior one at a time, like studying how much money someone gives to a charity as opposed to just studying how good of a person are you? Yeah, and and also in this getting into things that are

more or less universally considered moral positives. Yeah. Um. Another thing would be that I think morality is an area where you have to be especially careful about experiment or bias. For example, it's probably no surprise that, uh, if your experiment ers are a group of liberals, they might find that liberals are more moral than conservatives, and vice versa.

If their conservatives, they might find conservatives are more moral. Um, So you have to be especially cognizant of your of your you know, experimental controls put in place to limit the fact that the extent to which bias can affect the outcomes. And then you've got methodological difficulties like how do you test to see how moral somebody's behavior is?

You know, you can invite them into a lab and have them play a game or do some kind of interaction under controlled conditions, but people might behave very differently under controlled conditions than they do in the wild. It's one thing to give somebody a questionnaire, or have to read a story and tell you how they feel about it, or put some pebbles in a cup, But ultimately we're

talking about the real morality takes place in outside the lab. Yeah, but then if you want to track people's morality outside the lab, you're pretty much gonna have to use self reporting, right, people are going to have to report to you what they did. And there is a pretty obvious problem there. How honest can we expect people to be about what

their moral behaviors are. So, despite all those difficulties, I think this is still a field we can study and a place where we can try to look at some studies and apply them to our moral behaviors to see if we can hack our morals and and get under the get under the bedrock there and move some things around. So I think maybe the first place we should start is by looking at some traditional answers to the question

of how to be a better person. Like, this is not a new question, obviously, people have been talking about this for thousands of years. You could look back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, or you know, all the way up to more recent moral philosophers go a couple hundred years ago to Emmanuel Kant. These are people who had very strong opinions about how you could derive from first principles what

the moral life was and how to live it. So the question is does moral philosophy or studying ethics make you a better person? And this is where a really interesting article from Ian magazine comes into play, written by Eric Gushway skivel Uh titled Well, the Ian magazine titles kind of shift, but I think the cheeseburger ethics with kind of a subhead how often do ethics professors call

their mothers right? And it attempts to answer this question where Schwitz cable and he he chronicles his work and his work with another person named Joshua Rust over the years to study how exactly do people who study ethics and moral philosophy behave in their lives? Does does studying

ethics make you a better person? And they seem to have found time and time again that the answer is no. Ethicists who are you know, professors who study ethics and moral philosophy for a living don't seem to be any better or worse than other professors. So professors of chemistry, history, et cetera, by a huge list of measures. Uh, they give,

they give a list. In this article, Schwitz Cable says he looked at whether or not you vote in public collections, how often you call your mother, eating the meat of mammals, donating to charity, littering, disruptive chatting, and door slamming during philosophy presentation, responding to student emails, attending conferences without paying registration fees. There's a real killer there. Um organ donation, blood donation, theft of library books, and overall moral evaluation

by one's departmental peers based on personal impressions. So there you get at least some third party info. Their honesty and responding to survey questions and joining the Nazi Party in nineteen thirties Germany. And what they found is that the ethicists uh and the moral philosophers just they're like everybody else. They're like the other professors studying. This doesn't

make them do any better on these tests. Now, one thing that they did find it was different, is that ethicists tend to accept more rigorous moral standards than non ethicists, Yet they don't seem to be any more likely to actually follow them. So a couple of examples they give. One is that ethicists are way more likely than other people to say that eating the meat of mammals is morally wrong, yet they don't eat the meat of mammals

any less than anybody else. They're also more likely to say that you should give more of your income a higher percentage to charity than other people say, but they don't give more than other people do. So it's like they tend to accept higher standards, but they can't meet them. So they have a more precise understanding of the sort of the ethical suit of armor we all should be wearing, but they're they're no more likely than we are to slip it on exactly. Yeah, that's a good way of

putting it. And there are a lot of explanations. This is actually Schwitz Gables article is a really good one, and I h recommend reading it. It's very interesting. But and he gives lots of explanations for why this might be the case. But yeah, it appears that studying ethics and moral philosophy is not the answer to not necessarily bad. It's not that you shouldn't do it, but it's not going to make you behave more and morally at least statistically.

Now there's another very traditional, classic answer to this question, how to be a better person, you get some religion in you. And the Udian magazine article went into that a little bit and mentioning members of the clergy and in questioning us and members of the clergy that asking them, hey, is they member of the clergy? Are they a better person than the the average person outside um, the church? And they said, um, you know it's probably about the same,

maybe the clergy a little worse. Uh yeah, And and of course he could chalk that he chalked that up to It's possible they were just being humble about their own profession, but at least as as far as they presented publicly, they didn't think that they were any better than anybody else. And there have been plenty of studies that have looked into the relationship between levels of religiosity

and moral behavior. Now, when we get into this, it's of course worth thing that this is a super loaded topic. People often have very strong feelings about whether or not religion is a good thing or a bad thing, So it's again very easy to see how bias could creep into scientific research on this subject if we're not careful. But like we said, there have been lots of studies. Uh, the answers seem to be I would say, very complicated and contradictory. You see stuff going on both sides in

both directions on this. Uh. For example, I I know you found one study that a religious belief in Hell is linked to lower crime. Right, Yeah, that was awous. Twelve paper diversion Effects of Belief in Heaven and Hell and National Crime Rates by A. Zem F Sharif um Well, he co authored it at any rate psychologist, and he compared national crime rates with rates of belief in Heaven and Hell in sixty seven countries, and it came back

with some interesting findings. First of all, Heaven's belief rate is almost always higher than Hell's belief rate um. And that kind of collaborates my personal theory that Hell is always an unwanted and add on for many religions or for even just semi religious people. It's the side dish we didn't order, and generally we don't want to eat it.

But the papers major statistical finding was that nations with higher belief rates in Hell predicted the lower crime rates, while higher belief rates and heaven predicted higher crime rates. Wait what Yeah, so essentially that the idea here, I guess that you could say that the the stick was more effective than the carrot um as far as the

religious worldview goes. Uh, And that health fearing citizens are more mindful of screwing up in this life, while the heaven crowd think they've got it knocked in the next life. No matter what. It's um. But but even this study underlying some of the problems here, because when you just talk about religion, what are you talking about religion? Has the one religion or even one slice of a particular faith might tweak the carrot stick scenario a little bit

in one direction or the other. How is this system of faith enforcing more behavior? Is it? You know, is it really cutting you off from the world around you? And and uh? And focusing inward? Is it focusing outward? And it's going to vary from faith to faith. Yeah, and it's going to vary from person to person. I mean, part of the problem here is that when we're dealing

with science, we're always dealing with broad statistical phenomena. So it might be the case that in general, religion makes people better, but it actually makes you worse, or vice versa. In general, it makes people worse, but it makes you better. You could be the anomaly, you could be different than the average. Yeah. And I also want to mention that there's a two thousand three Harvard study that determined economic growth responds positible but positively to the extent of religious

but leaves notably those in heaven and hell. So their take was that high religious beliefs stimulate growth, stimulate economic growth because they help sustain behavior. But again that's a

an economic view. But then again, there there's no We read some research this year about the effects of religious belief or at least correlations between religious religiosity and children and altruism, right, Yeah, this was Yeah, a new study that came out titled the Negative Association between religiousness and Children's Altruism across the World, and this was published in

the journal Current Biology. Was a study of one thousand, one hundred seventy children in Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey, South Africa, and the United States and included five Muslims, two Christians, and three d twenty three non religious children. And what

do they find. Their key findings were that, first of all, family religious identification decreases children's altruistic behaviors decreases decreases it uh, And that religiousness predicts parent reported child sensitivity to injustices and empathy, and that children from religious households are harsher

in their punitive tendencies. Okay, so so this found at least in this one study, this broad survey of of religious and non religious children, and the children were from a couple of different religions, the religious kids did not do better in terms of being kinder to others being more altruistic. In fact, they did worse. Yeah, I imagine. I mean, you can sort of view it as the religion just provides a framework in which we make sense of our own moral achievements and failings, rather than a

guideline that holds us up. Yeah. But then again, there have been other studies that, of course found religious spurring, a sort of religious priming, caused people to behave better right. Yeah, there was a two thousand studies two thousand seven paper in Psychological Science that found both religious and non religious people shared more money with a stranger after reading sentences

containing various whigious words such as spirit and God. But people were also more generous after reading words associated with secular authorities such as police. Uh. And then there's another study that was published in seventy three in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and they found that more religious people were just as likely as rest less religious people to bypass a stranger in distress. Yeah, and and that parody does seem to come through in the literature

a good bit. I want to look at one more statistical study on religious behavior, and it wasn't just on religious behavior, but it included that. And that was a two thousand and fourteen study in in Science called Morality in Everyday Life by Wilhelm Hoffman, Daniel C. Waizenski, Mark J. Brandt, and Linda J. Skitka. And this is where they got a group of twelve hundred and fifty two participants and they were each participant received five text messages a day

for three days. Each text message had a link to the studies website, which prompted them to record moral and in world experiences they'd gone through in the previous hour. So, did anything interestingly moral immoral just happened in your life? Did somebody do something moral or immoral to you, did you do something moral or immoral? Just some examples from a These were some great examples I read on a news release about this. The of the good deeds reported

included sharing an extra sandwich with a homeless man. That's guys good. But examples of the types of bad deeds reported were arranging an adulterous encounter and quote hired someone to kill a musk rat that's not ultimately causing any harm. Well, I feel I can feel good then that I have not done either of those things this week, right, So maybe you should license yourself to do something evil because

you haven't had a muskrat assassinated. I like that they were just arranging an adulterous encounter that because that brings to mind and maybe they were not engaged in it, but they just orchestrated the the rendezvous. Oh well, I mean that was the A lot of after the Ashley Madison leak, A lot of people had this defense, right, like I was sort of seeking an affair, but I never actually had one. Um. But anyway, so what did

they find in this study? They found over the broad statistics of the study, religious and non religious people committed both moral and immoral acts with about the same frequency. There just really wasn't a big difference in how they acted. So these are what we've just talked about moral philosophy and ethics and in religion. These are not arguments against adhering to a religion or studying moral philosophy. It's not like saying you know that those are bad things to do.

It's just certainly not clear that either of these will put you on the path to moral excellence. Yeah. I keep coming back to the suit of armor um analogy I made earlier. It's I guess the way to look at it is taking on a religious faith or even just kind of pseudo religious faith, or a new age a way of looking at it, any kind of worldview. It's not an exoskeleton that's going to power your body.

It's it's more in line with a suit of armor, clothing, a mapping system, some sort of framework for how moral behavior can work. But you're still going to have to move in that thing yourself. You have to use. Your muscles are going to be the thing making you walk across the room. Yeah, I think that's a really good analogy. It's just like the ethics thing In both cases, the religion and the study of ethics might give you clearer ideas about what you think your moral goals should be.

But in order to get the motivation to follow through on your moral convention convictions you're you just might need some better tricks, better tricks up your sleeve, and we might find find these tricks in studying psychology. So what do we know about the human brain and moral behavior? And are there anyways we can use science to trick

the former into the ladder? Okay, okay, So we're now going to be looking at some scientific studies about factors that correlate to or per it's even cause differences in how we practice moral behavior towards others. And I think one of the biggest areas that's been studied in this field is generosity, that the act of giving and giving more to others, taking you know, self sacrificially offering to

other people things that can help them. And there have been lots and lots of studies in this field, right, Yes, there have, and certainly we're not gonna be able to explore all of them today. Yeah, but we're going to try to offer a selection of some that we found interesting. And that might be useful in coming up with strategies of improving your moral behavior. And one of the findings has to do with how we respond to the idea of the victim in in the case where somebody needs

generosity or somebody could benefit from your health. Yeah. This is from a paper Sympathy and Callousness The Impact of deliberative Thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims, And this is published in the General Organizational behavi if you're in human Performance. So the study basically looked at the whole face of the tragedy angle. Yeah, and you can

probably be familiar with this just from your experience. Right, there's sort of you know that old quote, uh that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths or a statistic Yeah, it sort of goes along those lines, right. Yeah. This boils down to the you know, the common fact that if a tragedy occurs somewhere in the world, what are you going to respond to. You're gonna respond to a statistical breakdown about how many people are suffering and what happened, or are you going to respond to that

one evocative photo of a single individual who's suffering? Yeah, And it, you know it. It shouldn't be the case, but it is the case that the former is true. I mean, if you care about helping one person, you should care a hundred times as much about helping a hundred people, right, But that is not, in fact the case, That is not what our brains do. Yeah, this study found that when thinking deliberatively, people discount sympathy towards identifiable

victims but failed to generate sympathy towards statistical victims. So some of the key takeaways from from this study where that teaching or priming people to recognize the discrepancy in giving toward identifiable and statistical victims has a perverse effect. Individuals give less to identifiable victims, but they don't actually increase giving to statistical victims. So no, so this is not just what we mentioned, but the fact that thinking

about it deliberately doesn't help. In fact, it makes you less generous. Yeah, I guess it's kind of like you see through what were the old TV ads where for just pennies a day you can help this child. Um, yeah, I can't remember name the actors from what all in the family we do those commercials? No, it's true, you know, if there there's like a you know, Save the Children or something like that, they would say, this child is Jeffrey, you know, Jeffrey, Jeffrey needs help, when really the problem

is that there are many, many children who are suffering. Yeah, but the weird thing is that the study seems to indicate that we're more likely to want to help Jeffrey. But then if we are convinced that Jeffrey either isn't real or we're just like, that's just one kid and it's a seede problem going on, realizing that we don't actually want to we don't even want to help Jeffrey anymore. Yeah, we don't want to hel Jeffrey, were we don't end up helping everyone else either, So it just kind of

stalls out. Um. They they found that if organizations want to raise money for a charitable cause, it's far better to appeal to the heart with that photo of Jeffrey than to the head with you know, a full sort of MPR breakdown about who's suffering and what the needs are feeling, rather than analytical thinking drive donation. Yeah. So that's kind of unfortunate because on one hand, you always

want to provide people with the most true, accurate information possible. Right, But it turns out that in general, people respond more to perhaps a skewed, uh not fully curate picture of the problem. You're more likely to help if you haven't thought about the problem all that much, and you're responding emotionally to one particular anecdote about a particular person suffering rather than a true, you know, numerical representation of the

scope of the problem and asked to think about it deliberately. Right. Yeah. So anyway, the takeaway from this though, might be that if you want to be more generous, focus on the focus on the anecdote, right, yeah, focus on and individuals, and and also like, don't give into the uh, don't don't give into the into the skepticism of or just the negativity of saying, hey, you're trying to manipulate me with this picture of this uh, this child or this

suffering individual, Like, I guess take it at face value. Um, you know, unless there's something shady going on, take it it face value that, Yeah, this is what's going on, and I need to emotionally connect with this. Okay, Well, what's another finding about weird ways we might encourage trick our brains into being more generous. Well, one way is to endure ritual pain. Uh, ritual pain. Huh yeah, yeah,

this is uh so uh. This is one that I actually was turned onto by another Ian magazine article, and this one came from anthropologists Dmitri Zagats and he was studying um uh in particularly, he was looking at Thia pussum Uh festival, which is a Hindu festival uh thaih Posum is a Hindu festival celebrate on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai, and devotees prey and make vows, and when their prayers are answered, they fulfilled their vows by piercing parts of their bodies such as

their cheeks, their tongues and backs before you know, carrying on the sacred vessel along a for a kilometer parade route. Oh boy, yeah, so it does sound painful. Yeah, he was. So. He was looking at this while and studying it while also contemplating the work of French sociologists. He kneeled dur Time, who argued in elementary forms of religious life, that's the nineteen twelve work that the collective performance of ritual generates a kind of electricity and a static state of shared

excitement that he referred to as collective effervescence. So, taking that in mind, he looked to see what what kind of effects does this painful ritual have on behavior and in particularly generosity, he found quote, those who had participated in the extreme ritual gave twice as much as those

who had taken part in collective collective prayer. He found the same high levels of generosity among those who had him him themselves gone through the painful activities, uh as as those who had just merely followed the procession and without actually engaging in self torture. So, as it turned out, the painful ritual boosted pro social behavior for its participants.

Huh So, so you can look at this in a number of ways, right, I mean you could think that, well, maybe just the sort of ecstatic state of mind that this ritual puts you in primes you to to give more.

Or you could look at this as a function of just sort of a secondary function of being deeply involved in a in a social and religious community, right yeah, yeah, I mean, on one hand, yeah, you can also say that you know you're feeling this pain and therefore in pain, you're maybe more empathetic to the suffering of others, but

indeed you're also putting yourself in this collective effervescence. You're allowing yourself to perhaps um catch generosity, to to to to catch it as if it were some sort of a disease or an illness. And that leads us to another thing that scientists have found about generosity, which is that to a certain extent, it's contagious. Yeah. We and it's actually in specific ways that it's contagious. There are

other ways in which its apparently not contagious us. But yeah, what if people found about the social contagion of generosity, Well, there was there's a paper the Social Contagion of Generosity my Molina Teviskova and Michael W. Macy, and they basically looked at two ways that you can encounter generosity. Either you're you've you've been a recipient, or you've watched someone

else receive it. And they found that receiving help can increase the willingness to be generous towards others, but merely observing help can have the opposite effect, especially among those who have not received help yet. So it's kind of like, you know, uh, what's what's the word like, you know, passing the buck on, passing it, playing it forward or something it pay forward. The book stops here because I don't practice generosity to anyone. No, yeah, yeah, they there.

I think there's a horrible movie about that in there. I believe that I have not seen it, so I can't pass judgment on it. But yeah, but the idea is that somebody who has had a kind thing done for them is more likely to do a kind thing for somebody else. And that was actually that was That finding was replicated in the paper Morality in Everyday Life, the same paper I talked about earlier. Yeah, that found

the text message. When that found no major difference between religious and non religious people, it also found um support for moral contagion. They found that people who benefited from a moral deed were more likely to do something moral for somebody else later on. So you could potentially talk this up for being an argument for being a part of, if not a religious community, and some sort of close community that engages in generous activity right or even each other.

And then also to outsiders. I mean, if you really wanted to trick your brain this way, you could set up a relationship with somebody where you say, hey, you're gonna be my generosity contagion buddy, and every day you're gonna do three nice things for me that I didn't expect that will maybe prime me to just be a more generous person for the rest of the world. So, like, pretend you're a vagrant, as if you're a character in a Sherlock home story. Uh, and then when people are

generous to you, this will instill generosity in yourself. Yeah, it could be. But at the same time, if you want to trick your brain into being more generous, apparently you shouldn't watch people being generous to others because that you can just kind of diffuse the responsibility there. You know, you watch somebody else doing some community work and you think, oh that's nice. Well, I'm glad those people are getting the help they need. I can go, you know, kick

somebody down the flight of stairs. Yeah, or maybe even thinking, hey, nobody's helping me out, Well go on and do my thing. One more funny thing I found about generosity I'm not

gonna spend a lot of time on. This was just the finding that supposedly there are gender differences in what encourages people to be more generous, and there's a study that found that apparently men are more likely to donate to the poor if reminded that doing so indirectly benefits them as well as opposed to other encouraging justifications like oh, the person really deserves the help, or they've had a

hard time. Men are most likely to donate if you make the case to them that the donation is good for the donor. Okay, so if you need to trick yourself with that in mind, you can certainly use that from an influtive purposes. Well, let's move on to another quality, honesty. Honesty, Uh, Robert, don't want to put you in a scenario. Imagine I give you a die, like a gambling die, and I tell you that I'm going to pay you a sum of money corresponding to the number of your role. So

the higher your role, the higher the payout. Six dots gets you the most money, the cyclops I gets you the least. And I ask you to roll your die once so that I can't see it, and this is the money roll. And then I allow you to roll the die a few more times, just so you can rest assured that the die is not loaded. It's a regular die. You can roll whatever number, and then I ask you via a computer terminal to enter the number from your initial money role. I remember nobody saw the role,

but you you can enter any number you want. But should you be honest how much money we're talking here? Show? Well, let's let's say that I'm giving you about two fifty or three bucks per per dot on the die, okay, and then we're telling them all up. Yeah, Well, I mean, in that case, I'm probably gonna be inclined to just play by the rules because I'm gonna win some money, I'm gonna lose some money, and uh, there's not really

any advantage in tweaking in my favorite. But if you're not gonna lose any money, well, I mean, but I am going to lose out on a maximum payout. But the amount you could lose by not by not reporting is not that much as you could get up to

what like eighteen bucks maybe here? Yeah okay, but if it were for a single amount, if we were doing one die roll for say three d bucks, and and I didn't have it in my head that this is like coming out of your pocket, that this wasn't gonna hurt anybody that basically you had three d dollars to spend on this experiment, then yeah, I would definitely lie

about it. So there's a price on your honesty. If there is a price on my honesty, if it does not hurt anyone, sure, yeah, I mean it would be different if it was like I really wanted to, yeah, take my wife out to dinner for our anniversary, but I'm also going to do this crazy dice game instead. Well, let's go back to about two fifty per per dot.

Imagine this under two different scenarios. Number one, you can take as long as you want to enter the number into the computer, You do your roles, and you can just sit there and enter it whenever you want. The other scenario is you have to enter it very quickly, like within some number of seconds. Does this change what happens? M So I'm gonna have less time to decide if online or not. In that case, I probably tempted to

just enter the truth. Yeah. Funny you should say that, because actually there's a study from Psychological Science in that found exactly the opposite. They found. The paper was tall called honesty requires time and lack of justifications. By h Shall shall Vie or the Elder and Yoela Barebi Meyer. And they found that people who could take as long as they wanted ended up being more honest. But wait, you might be asking, how did they know how honest people were being if they couldn't see the die uh.

And here this is an interesting fact about the study. They just used the power of statistics over many roles. The average die roll will will begin to converge on the natural average of three point five. You can do the math yourself, you know, add up one through six and then divide by six possible possibilities. The average should be three point five. So if you try this with many participants and you notice at the end that their average is much higher than three point five, you can

be pretty much certain that they're lying. We can assume almost nobody lied to reduce their payout. Uh. Thus the answers consisted always of a mix of truthful reports and

then deceitful inflated reports. So they did one experiment where they forced people to enter their result within twenty seconds, and then of course they gave people as much time as they wanted and for the for the people who had to enter their role within twenty seconds, they found an average of four point six people were really really entering those sixes. And then they found that people who did not have any time pressure integ roll of three

point nine. So both groups inflated their averages, but the people who had more time to deliberate, who didn't have a time constraint, were more honest they lied less. And then they did a separate experiment where they did it again, but they just gave people eight seconds, so even less

time to make the decision. The people who had eight seconds had an average of four point four, so a little bit less than the people who had twenty seconds, But the people who had no time limit reported an average of three point four, so pretty much right on the average. So basically there's any Without time to reflect, people are going to default to cheating. Yes, So to take home here would be think long and hard about your moral decisions, and that will perhaps lead you to

the more moral choice. Well, though that might not necessarily be the case with something like generosity. This is a funny thing where our our our decision to be moral, and the way we hack our brain to follow through with it is different depending on what moral quality we're trying to encourage. According to this study, the longer and more deliberately you think about something, probably the more honest you're going to be, the less likely to cheat you're

going to be. But on the other one, you know, we we saw we saw the deliberative thinking about generosity made people less generous. Yeah. And in fact, there's a two thousand fifteen study from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and they their findings actually say, trust your gut, don't think about it, just go with your gut instinct, and that's liable to be the more moral choice. How did

that work out? Well? And I should know that the moral choice here within the framework of the experiment relates to to cheating. Uh. So they took a hundred individuals, they gave him a questionnaire to determine their their base dependency on gut instincts, and then they read them stories in which they they make a mistake uh and blame a co worker, and in the control group they take

full responsibility for the mistake. So their findings were, first of all, the individuals who are prone to trust their instinctive hunches may at times be less likely to commit im moral acts compared to those who tend to discount their intuition. So yeah, if you're the type of person who says, is this the right choice? Is probably not

the right choice, then you're probably gonna end up flipping right. Uh. They also found that people who tend to rely on their gut instincts are less likely to cheat after reflecting on past experiences during which they behaved in more like okay, And then they did a second experiment and potestimants were asked to write about a time they acted in morally um or a control topic with control group, and then they were asked to take an unsolvable i Q test.

People who tended to rely on their gut feelings, uh, they found are less likely to cheat after reflecting on a time when they behaved im morally. And the theory here is that people try to compensate for past bad behavior by acting morally in the present. So you might be if you're a person who follows your gut instincts, you might be more likely to tell the truth if you think about a time you were dishonest in the past. Yeah, it kind of depends on what your gut instinct tends

to be. What's your base gut instinct. If your your gut instinct is always to lie about your your die roll, then you know, stick with it and know what you know, your gut know if your gut is uh is good or even right? Well, I mean that that gut instinct. It sounds like what they're talking about to me is what we would call conscience, right that you you can have rational deliberative processes about thinking about what's the thing to do? Should I do this? Should I not do it?

But then there's also that sort of involuntary uh, that that internal critic that you don't even really have control over. It's just the thing that nags at you that tells you you really shouldn't do this. That sounds like the kind of gut feeling to me, right, Yeah, I feel like mindfulness is a good take on from either of these, Like the greater extent to which you are just mindful of uh, the voices going on and the temptations and what's coloring your responses uh can be a great aid

in making the correct moral choice. Yeah, Okay, I got another one. What about forgiveness? Is there any science related to forgiving others, not holding grudges and letting things go there is, and this is one that's uh, that's that's always fascinated me because because I I can be I'm tired about holding onto my grudges sometimes and and I don't want to hold onto them, you know, because grudges are horrible. They weigh you down, They feel your thought.

You find yourself thinking about like somebody from high school that you hated, even though like that person, they don't even exist anymore in your life, but they're still caring weight on your conscious. Just get real happy when you see that person from my school posts something embarrassing on Facebook. Yeah. Yeah, that's sort of thing. I feel like everyone can can

relate to this on some point. You know, you end up keeping your Nixon enemy list in your head and and that you cling to it, but you really you don't want it in your life. You want to forget it. And uh. There's actually a two thousand fourteen study from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland that was published in Psychological Science, and they found that the details of a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression

has been forgiven. So this is interesting when you think of unforgiven transgressions that might play out in your head. You know, that's essentially an unchecked off mental list because remembers we've discussed before. Uncompleted tasks also stick in the mind, right that. Let's that the zigarnic effect. Yeah, yeah, so you can see this applying to for fiveness. I'm yet to forgive that person, so they're right in my head and you've gotta wake up. Yeah, you've got a box

that isn't checked yet. And or I have not avenged myself. I have not murdered them in their sleep and dumped their body in a creek exactly. I mean, no matter what happens to that person, I don't know. I think I would go with the Kung Fu movie mentality on this is you haven't really solved the problem until you've either forgiven them or they're dead, killed them or at

least dead to you. If you can just if you can just completely like wipe them off, then then that works too, I guess, right, And since we're not advocating vengeful murder here, that the solution would seem to be forgiveness. And then there's also a two thousand fifteen study from the University of Missouri Columbia. They found it forgiving others protects women from depression, but not men, thus pointing to

the importance of gender specific counseling or treatment. So they found that older women who forgave others were less likely to report depressive symptoms regardless of whether they felt unforgiven by others themselves, while older men reported the highest levels depression when they both forgave others and felt unforgiven by others. So they found that They also found that, while helpful, self forgiveness didn't act as the protector against depression in

the case of the unforgiven mental state. So this kind of plays into the whole addags like, oh, you have to forgive yourself before you can, you know, move past some traumatic occurrence. Like there's a little truth to that, but some people are just way too good at forgiving themselves. Oh yeah, yeah. Some people are like that's the that's the easy part. Like they did that the second after it happened, right, you know, You're like, don't beat yourself up,

and they're like, yeah, good advice. And then there's also some research from Ohio State University that suggests that people who have trouble metabolizing glucose in their bodies show more evidence of aggression and less willingness to forgive others. So they have this, uh, this transgression in their mind and they're just they have just more of an aggressive response to it, and that there may be a um, A

body chemistry a scenario underlying it. They point out though, that the potential problem here is the number of people who have trouble metabolizing glucose, mainly individuals with diabetes, is rising rapidly. From nineteen through two thousand eight, the number of Americans with diabetes more than triple five point six

million to eighteen point one million. Well, that sounds like a difficult thing to turn into a recommendation for somebody's behaviors, Like manage your internal blood sugar so that you don't have blood sugar problems and that will make you less aggressive to others. I mean, it's good to have good blood sugar in any case. Um, And here is maybe another benefit of that, Yeah, I mean potentially boosting glucose

levels could reduce some you know, temporary aggressive behavior. So I don't know, if you're feeling a little unforgiving of someone half sucker, have a put a little extra honey in your tea and see how that that suits you, I guess, but sugar yourself responsible? Yes, indeed. Now out here's another one that I found pretty interesting, offering the observation that it might be true that altruism, you know, the giving, giving to others, being kind and supportive of

other people, is encouraged by a feeling of awe. And so this is a May paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called AWE, the Small Self and pro Social Behavior. They found that the feeling of awe may cause people to behave more altruistically than they normally would. The paper was by Paul piff, Pia Dietz, Matthew Feinberg, and Daniel Stencado and Donker Keltner and so uh. They offer a couple of things in terms of defining AWE.

Just a couple of quotes from the paper here. One is that firsthand accounts of awe felt during experiences with religion and spirituality, nature, art, and music often center upon two themes, the feeling of being diminished in the presence of something greater than the self, and the motivation to be good to others. Uh. And and they define all by saying, it's an emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that defy one's accustomed frame of reference in some domain.

So you know what all is, he's thinking about the scale of the universe, looking at a sunset or watching a volcano erupt or you know, seeing things that are vast and huge and powerful and make you realize the smallness and powerlessness of yourself. Yea, so Pif and colleagues. They first got a sample of people to complete a

questionnaire to see how susceptible to all they were. They played a game where they were given a number of raffle tickets and they had the opportunity to share them with other people who didn't have raffle tickets of their own. And the researchers found, first of all, a correlation between people who reported a tendency to feel awe and generosity. So if you're one of these people who is likely to have experiences of awe, you're more likely to be generous.

Then they conducted four more experiments involving individual behavior tests, so people in an experimental group would be given an experience designed to induce AWE, such as watching a slow motion video of droplets of water splashing into milk, or watching a montage of large scale natural threats like tornadoes and volcanoes, or being in the presence of huge eucalyptus trees, and yeah, exactly, and the the what the koala bears?

Feeling awe at the way they grip my skin? And so the control groups were subjected to neutral experiences or experiences designed to cause other emotions like maybe pride or something, and what they found was, Yes, the experience of self diminishment we call awe does seem to cause people to behave more altruistically towards others. You know, thinking back, I can definitely relate to this idea of of of awe and altruism. Uh specifically, Um, I've never been to Burning Man,

but I have been to some regional burns. You know, there's kind of like offshoots of it. And at these places, the ones I've been to, there's a they have a gift economy where ideally nobody's gonna be selling this that the other you're sharing food, or there's more of a you know, an openness and just how you relate to

each other. And I remember just you know, just stepping into that and then growing accustomed to this, uh, this environment where suddenly you're you're smiling and saying hi to everybody instead of you know, just sort of the head down, eyes on your your feet approach to taking public transportation in a large metropolitan area. Like it just it's it's

it is kind of awesome. You find yourself realizing whoa we can People can live like this, People can interact with each other in a different way and on a smaller level, like when you when you go to help somebody and you you're closer to like their pain, either suffering or whatever's going in their life. That can also be this moment of where you're you realize, you know, it's it's not all about me, it's also see the whole. Yeah. Yeah, you kind of do that powers attend zoom out from

your own life. You know. What this study reminded me of was something I had read about in the past, known as the overview effect and literature about it, which which has to do with a commonly reported feeling that that astronauts talk about once they've been to space and

seeing the Earth from above. Yeah. Yeah, the according to YESA and NASSA reports, we're talking about euphoric feelings that involved quote new insight into the meaning of life and the unity of mankind A Paulo fourteen astronaut edgar Mitchell described this sensation as the overview effect. And uh, and I and I have a nice summer of this from Discovery Space um writer and I believe I still had editor over their een O'Neil who used to used to

work with he explains. He explains it as as follows. Quote. He described this and sensation gave him a profound sense of connectedness with a feeling of bliss and timelessness. He was overwhelmed by the experience. He became profoundly aware that each and every atom in the universe was connected in some way, and on seeing Earth from space, he had an understanding that all the humans, animals, and systems were

a part of the same thing, a synergistic whole. It was an interconnected euphoria because the Earth is so small and and we're up above it in the spaceship. Essentially, well, yeah, I mean it's hard to imagine anything more literally all inspiring than that, right, I mean that that's almost perfectly

the definition of awe Uh. Realizing the smallness being diminished in the face of of incomparably vast phenomena when you're in space and you suddenly realized that Earth isn't the universe, it's a it's a tiny rock, and where these tiny creatures occupying the surface of the rock. Yeah, I can certainly see how that would be sort of the ultimate experience of awe, and how it could cause one to I don't know, to just allow all of the petty

squabbles of human life too, to dissolve into this this nothingness. Yeah, I mean it. It's one of those things that interrupts the sort of me, me me narrative, that default mode network that goes on in her mind. It kind of comes back to mindfulness, you know, just getting out of your own story. And if it takes going into space to do that, if it takes helping somebody out that I'm delivering a meal or something engaging in some level of altruistic behavior, then uh, then do it. Yeah, give

it a give it a try. That would be my recommendation, not only to everyone else. I'm not, you know, just speaking on a podium here, like I I want to take that on myself as a challenge for the new year in a in an unofficial way, and not until February. It sounds like a good one. Uh. I want to encourage myself to be more altruistic by standing at the lip of a volcano and active one staring into it more often, more often at least than I do now.

Um So, so we've we've talked about these studies and as we said at the beginning, we I mean, we can't even come close to covering the full breadth of studies in this area. Yeah, it's ongoing. We're gonna see a countless more in the years of fall how how psychology effects and influences moral behavior. But that's sort of just a sampling of the kind of research that's out there.

And so I'm wondering if we can take any of the stuff we've looked at in this episode, the findings we've found it and turn them into strategies for tricking your brain into doing good. Well. I have a little bit of advice here, and this this comes from Charles do Higgs The Power of Habit, and he points out that every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a

habit loop. And there it's a three part process. So first there's a queue or trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and out of behavior unfold. And then there's routine, and finally there's rewards. Something that your your brain likes, helps it remember the habit loop in the future. Uh So, habit making behavior. All this ties to a part of the brain called the basil ganglia.

This is where we find emotions and memories and pattern recognition, and the basil ganglia takes behavior and turns it into an automatic routine, kind of like a hot key for the human body. This this is what happens when this cemula presents itself the macro. Yeah, and that could be and when we say action, it could be an action, but we could also be just like this is the way I think in response to something. UM Now decisions on the other hand, or maybe a different part of

the brain called the prefrontal cortex. But as soon as behavior becomes automatic, the decision making part of your brain goes into a sort of sleep mode. And and and and uh and it's important to know that environment and forces as well. So like if you go on a vacation, if you travel or go just go to a different environment. Um this can mix things up because you're changing the

stimuli around you. And it's one of the reasons that they aations are a great place, a great time to focus on changing a habit because you're stepping outside of your normal stimuli. I think that sounds true. I found that to be true in my life. I think life changing decisions are often made at a time when you are not under your normal circumstances. Yeah. Um, I think this is This is an interesting way of looking at it.

And one thing you could take away from this is that if you're talking about making deliberate decisions to change your moral behavior, they're not going to have to be deliberate decisions forever, right, right, They would just have to be You'd have to make that deliberate decision enough times long enough to establish a habit. And then once you've established a habit, you don't have to be so deliberate

about it anymore. It's just the new way you do things, right, But just remember that the old way you do things and the environment in which you do them is going to be a hurdle to overcome in making that change, because you know, whatever you're planning to do stand in the edge of volcano, or share half your sandwich will with someone who's hungry. Uh, they're still gonna be that temptation to set in front of the Xbox and play a game instead when you see that little green eye

staring at you. But maybe if the game you're playing on the Xbox is so awe inspiring that it really does diminish your sense of self, it would make you more altruistic. Maybe that sounds like a good a good uh premise for a study. Well, let's see. Let's let's design a video game to hit all of these features we've talked about. So you have a game that at

the you have to enter your credit card information. In the game, it gives you all inspiring scenarios where you you see amazing, cosmic, powerful events that you have no control over. And then you're you're faced with a single anecdotal case of a person who's suffering rather than the whole statistical overview of the problem. And then the game forces you to endure a ritual pain ceremony. You have to go through a communal ceremony with that her it's

your body. Then the game connects you with other users who do something nice for you, and you get to experience the contagion of generosity. H Then the game asks you to report your moral behavior to your social network, but gives you uh and lets you report, you know, whatever you want, but gives you enough time that you can sit there and be deliberate and think about it so that you're honest instead of immediately defaulting to cheat mode.

All right, well, you know, I think throw in a few more cut scenes and we have the next metal Gear game. A yeah, yeah, metal Gear Charity. Charitable Snake is your character and it's it's particular, particular game. Now, now what kind of charitable organization would would a Metal Gear game? I don't know. It's a complicated question. They really get into some tense uh. Like there's a lot of tense real life stuff wrapped up in some of the more recent installments, right so I haven't played them.

I don't know. I would guess it would maybe maybe relate to, uh, I mean, refugee scenarios of work, foreign regions. I mean, they're all they all deal with kind of guerilla situations and international wrongdoing. So do they still have giant robots? Would you build a giant robot that feeds the hungry. I think they're still a giant robots. They tend to occur at the end of the game, and I burn out before I get so I see. So they're just kind of like the gods of metal gear

that I never actually witnessed. Okay, well, uh, as we mentioned earlier a couple of times, you know this, this is a big field, and maybe this is a field where we will have the chance to return to it in the future. There I'm sure gonna be plenty more studies coming out all the time about psychology and moral behavior, and maybe we can revisit the topic then. Yeah. And you know, on the subject of charity, supposed to be something interesting to discuss in a maybe a future listener

mail topic. If there's a particular charity that's near and dear to your heart, you know, like a vetted charity of some sort, let us know about it. Oh yeah, kind of fun to share these out and spread the word about about some of the causes out there in the world. Yeah, please do. And one last thing at this time of year, good luck with your New Year's resolution, whatever it is, self serving or not. Yeah, and if you don't get it in January, just pick it up

the next month for Chinese New Year. That's what I do in the meantime. Check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's we find. All of our episodes are videos, blog post links out to social media accounts were we're on Facebook and Twitter as Blow the Mind, We're in tumbler as Stuff to Blow your Mind. Follow us on those uh on those formats if you use them, and if you want to get in touch with us, was in a feedback on this or other recent episodes?

Or if you want to let us know what your favorite charity is or what your New Year's resolution is, you can email us at Blow the Mind the house, stuff works dot com. Well more on this and passons of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com two p.