L.O.G. 125 Thinking with Dr. Richard Nisbett

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media—the links are also in the episode details—and hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

All right, Dr. Nisbett, thank you so much for coming on today. Greg and I are super excited to have you on here. Everyone just listened to your bio and intro, so no need to do that. But you have an impressive body of work behind you, and we're thankful for you coming on the show today.

Thank you, happy to be here.

So, you just came out with your book called Thinking. My goal is by the end of this podcast we can tell everyone how they're supposed to think, right? Is that the setup?

This one at least. Maybe even sooner.

Okay, well if we could do that in five minutes, even better for people, right? Right.

One of the things I think is exciting, Brian, is that we share a bit of a background, Doc. The field of judgment and decision-making had its origin in Michigan's mathematical psychology program. Much of my wife's family is from Ann Arbor, related to Michigan. I taught some basics of constitutional law there back in the day when I was a Michigan law enforcement professional. I became wrapped with behaviorism back in the '60s. You knew B.F. Skinner, which is amazing. I read all of Chomsky's work trying to dissent on Skinner's work. Marty Seligman, he was one of the early people that plucked my brain and got me excited.

What I thought was fascinating at the very beginning of the book is you're talking about your proclivity for outrageous behavior as a youngster, and you considered yourself a counter-counterphobic, which I think is great: jumping off a roof at 10 years old!

Well, I was caught rappelling off the smokestack of my two-story Detroit home with my dad's extension cords.

And then I was fascinated later in life by G. Gordon Liddy. You know, tie yourself to the tree for the storm, eat the rat because you were afraid of the rat. So talk to me for a minute about how that outrageous behavior, how that counter-counterphobia, helped you navigate your early life.

Well, actually, it's just counterphobia. The phobia is the fear, the counterphobia is trying to counter the fear. So, well, you know, I had no idea that's what I was doing. I mean, it was only decades later. I was like, "My God, that was counterphobic behavior." I mean, I used—I could not have told you why it was I had to pick up every lizard I encountered. I'd say, "Oh, I just, I pick up lizards. I just, that's what I do." And jumping off the roof of the house, I don't know, adventure. I might say, "Well, it's adventure," but so, you know, I don't know that many people who—I've told lots of people about my counterphobic behavior, and I don't know that many people who say, "Oh yeah, I did a similar thing," or, "I had a friend who..." I mean, it seems to be relatively rare, right?

So, in your book, and I kind of want to jump into it, because I was fascinated by—you've written a lot, but this is your most recent one—and you kind of talk about your life and your experiences and everything you've studied, sort of interweaved all in between there in this story. So, just so everyone knows, you get into a lot of reasoning, cognitive processes, and you talk about different cultures and the way we look at things. So it's always fascinating when you get into cognition and metacognition. There's the philosophical route you can take, there's the more scientific, the psychological and social—especially social psychology—route that a lot of people have, and they're all overlapping. Greg and I get into a lot about specifically behavior and, like I had explained, how to read behavior. We're very hyper-focused on what the person's behavior is within, obviously, that set context in which we're observing it, right? Because one of the things you talk about, and I think it's extremely important for people to understand, I see a lot of parallels today in social media and what some people call "the death of expertise," or suddenly now everyone is an expert on everything. Is this what you described in the book about fundamental attribution errors? This is kind of a big issue I see a lot, so could you for our listeners kind of define what fundamental attribution errors are, where this came from, and what it actually means?

Well, it means that we are inclined to explain behavior in terms of enduring aspects of the person: personality traits, abilities, preferences, attitudes, and so on. And that's usually an error. I mean, it's certainly an error to exclusively focus on those things, often when they're just a supposition. I mean, I see someone, some mother, behave aggressively toward her child in Kmart, and I say, "Oh, well, she's an aggressive person. She's a hostile." I don't know what kind of day she's had. I don't know exactly how obnoxious that kid is. And it's just a lazy, automatic tendency we have to assume that personality and other constant states of the individual determine their behavior, when it may frequently be just the situation, or primarily the situation. Right?

And that goes into a lot of what we do, especially in training folks. And like I said, observing human behaviors, we kind of bring in our own traits, our own experiences, our own biases, right into it, and we make those assumptions. We're looking at someone, let's say, you're on a patrol or you're overseas, and you're in the military, and they're looking at someone's behavior going, "Oh my gosh, this is a suicide bomber!" when, you know, it could be a mental health or substance abuse issue as to why that person is acting that way, right? So we automatically kind of jam in that—we call it "jamming the square peg into a round hole"—by not balancing that out with, "Well, what else can we prove in the situation? What do we really know?" So that kind of seems to be an area where it's difficult for people to do. Why do we do that? Why do we automatically just attribute values to some things and not to others and just make these rapid assumptions like that?

Well, there's not a simple answer to that that I have, but I certainly think a part of it is it's just so easy to go from aggressive behavior to aggressive person, or kind behavior to kind person. I mean, that's just a kind of automatic way of translating the noun into an adjective about the person. And part of it has to do with the similarity. I mean, it sounds reasonable, right? I'm going to see somebody do something aggressive, "Oh, that's because they're an aggressive person." You don't ever have to check on it, but it's just a kind of lazy, automatic way of understanding behavior.

One of the things we talk a lot about is confirmation bias. For example, a police officer in their environment. Now, a police officer is "under the gun," so to speak, with their behavior in certain realms, and certain calls are much more diverse and hard to dissect. For example, we talk about psychological de-escalation, sociological de-escalation. A police officer suffers confirmation bias, for example, when they get the dispatch call. The dispatcher tells them the type of call they're going on, and in their mental models, they're already deciding based on their experiences, based on their training, all those things before they even get to the scene. So sometimes when they get to the scene, they're already up here (gestures upward), the suspect is somewhere down here (gestures downward) or even the reporting party. And that dissonance, that turbidity, creates a huge schism at the scene. And generally, what we've found is that lesser trained or less experienced officers will resort to a higher level of violence to correct the situation. Now, that's very similar to what you're talking about here, isn't it?

I don't know, is that a case of—well, of confirmation? Yeah, well, right. If you have a fixed idea of what's going on in a situation, you're going to be quite likely to be able to sustain it on the basis of inadequate information. So yeah, I do think that's a good example of it.

And see, so my point there, Doc, is trying to tie together that some people are afraid of science, which is amazing. But what they do is they'll read a book like yours and they'll only highlight or underline or fold the page, you know, dog-ear the page, on the part that confirms stuff that they already believe or that they already know, rather than immersing themselves in your book and saying, "Wow, I had never considered it from that perspective. I'd never considered that explanatory storyline." How do you correct that bias?

Well, it's—I don't know that it certainly is a tendency. I mean, I'm afraid I'm guilty of the same thing. If I read a book, I say, "Oh, I've always believed that." So I underlined it. There you go, I'm much more likely to do that. But you know, every now and then we do see, we do read things that contradict our beliefs, so we're capable of adjusting if there's evidence or if something's carefully worded, strongly put, we give it consideration. But you're certainly right, confirmation bias is a good way of describing what most of us probably do most of the time in exposing ourselves to communication. We say, "Oh yeah, that's right. I agree with that." Yeah.

And that's why I always bring up the social media example today, because there's so much more of it. And then now, if I have a group of people who also think the same way or have that same opinion, suddenly now my thought has even validated even more, right? So now I have that kind of sociological support there for my opinions and beliefs, right?

And that's a scary part of our situation right now, is that even the most lunatic idea is going to find an audience sympathetic to that view. I mean, it's scary to me.

It is, and Greg and I go back and forth on that kind of debate. My thing is, "Well, how scary is it? How prevalent is it? Or is it just—is it just louder? Is there just more noise now because of how connected everyone is on social media, or is it really more of a problem?" Because some of this gets into, again, what you write about, not just in this book, but in some of your other writings, and what you study, is how that is different culturally, right? Not just Western civilization versus Eastern civilization, but also culturally here in the United States, how that kind of plays into sometimes how we approach these things and how we think. Is that a good way to describe it, or how would you describe that?

Yeah, sure. But you know, you're right, it's hard to know how much of a problem it is. I mean, certainly if you're never seeing a contrary opinion, then naturally you're going to assume that's the way things are. People are certainly locked into communication networks which bolster their view about everything. I've started reading—I'm a liberal—I started reading The Wall Street Journal partly because I want to know how the other side is thinking, and partly because I feel like I ought to expose myself to a wider range. If you live in—if you're an academic, I mean, you're surrounded by nothing. The political positions range from center-left to far-left. I mean, that's the range. And in reading The Wall Street Journal, some of the opinion writers are very clever people, and I often find myself moving in their direction. One of my favorites is Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. She's just so shrewd. Most of her stuff does not really have a heavy political angle one way or another. She's just a shrewd observer of the scene. But some of her opinions are, you know, identifiably right-wing, and sometimes I must say she drags me somewhat in her direction. And I really think people ought to feel obligated to expose themselves to a full range of political opinion. I think it would help turn down the temperature.

Yeah. That's a great point. And I would say that for many years, when I get into—you know, we do small group training, part task, in-person, practical application, all these things at different places—and one of the things that people often ask me is, "How do I socialize my opinions?" or, "What types of things should I be reading?" And I tell them, "You know what, you've got to pick up Cigar Aficionado. You've got to pick up Sailing Magazine. You've got to read some of the other stuff that's out there because if not, what happens? You become the groove on the record, and then you only want to read the things that are going to bolster your opinion." Well, that's a fantastic way to come back around, you know, the Möbius loop, right back to your original opinion and say, "Hey, that sounds good," rather than broadening your horizons a little bit. It's okay to read the dissenting opinion, isn't it? I mean, don't we learn more sometimes from our mistakes than we do from reading somebody's positive opinion of our work?

Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, it's crucial to have criticism. I mean, when a graduate student writes their first scientific paper, it's usually pretty bad in lots of ways, and I criticize it from A to Z, wondering, "Oh, is this going to do any good?" And they nearly always amaze me. The second paper they hand in is much, much better. But you know, your point about not just political opinions, but finding out what's out there, what do people do, what do they think, and not base our views of the world on just whatever we happen to see on TV or reading novels. On this business of living in silos where we don't know what's going on more generally, I was part of a group of academics, social scientists, who were working for the Democrats in 2016 trying to give support to Biden, and we never seriously regarded it as possible that Trump could be elected. Meanwhile, Michael Moore, you know, the documentary filmmaker, working-class guy from Michigan, kept telling anybody who would listen, "Trump is going to win the election!" And I thought, "Well, it's kind of an odd, out-there view." But if we had read some of the kinds of things that we were talking about, that would have broadened our view of what the electorate is like, and we wouldn't have been so surprised. In fact, we might have been more effective sources for the Democratic campaign.

That's a brilliant point. And yeah, a specific point: Brian and I were traveling in the American Southwest. We were doing courses along the border in Texas and in New Mexico and Arizona during the election run-up with Hillary Clinton and certainly with Biden posturing. One of the things that we noticed is there was an entire section of America that was all in support of Trump, and Trump signs and bumper stickers and all these things. And then we flew back to the Beltway, and we were being debriefed on a completely different topic. And I made the assertion that, "Hey, based on what we're seeing, it's going to side towards Trump," and we got laughed out of the room because everybody in the room had followed the party line, and nobody was willing to create an explanatory storyline and even consider the fact. So when you're conducting things like predictive analysis, one of the things you have to do is you have to consider the opinion from being in the shoes of the person at the place in time that's not you, your opponent, you. And so that's a very—that's a point well taken. What did you see? Because I have to ask, even after the loss, I didn't see a lot of strategy come out from those decisions. And even with Trump's first impeachment, you actually debated against Laurence Tribe, and Laurence is a huge model of academic behavior in the Constitution for me. Why didn't we learn from our mistakes in the recent elections?

Yeah, I—maybe we have. I don't know if it remains to be seen whether—I do think I see a little more humility on the part of my fellow academics about whether they really know what's going on in the country. But I mean, of course, you also sort of see the opposite. People think that the country is a hotbed of right-wing and unpleasant and violence. So there's paranoia, which is just as bad a mistake, but it sort of counters this assumption that what I see around me is all there is.

And that's a good point you brought up too, is we're talking to you with your career in this field, a subject matter level expert in this area, wrote a book called Thinking, going, "Hey, we got this wrong!" Like, even the guy in this case who should know better, right? And I think that that's important for everyone to understand, because these are natural human tendencies, right? These are thought processes that we have based on biology and environment and what we've learned throughout our life that lead us to this. So that's always the biggest thing. Especially in our line of work, it's like, "Well, I don't want to be wrong. How do I not be wrong?" And we always say, "Look, as long as you're right more times than you're wrong, then you're doing really well, right?" I mean, there's no perfect. You're never going to get it right every time. You're never going to be able to predict everything. But it's very, very difficult. And Greg brought up predictive analysis too, and that's what we're talking about with some of the stuff you're doing, is that even at your level, we're unable to do that. And that's kind of what I get into about, you know, it's about how to think, not what to think, right? I mean, that's what we should focus on, and I think that's kind of what you're talking about in your book as well, right?

Yeah, that certainly is what I'm talking about. And by the way, all of the errors that I described in the book are errors that I make. I mean, it's exactly so.

Well, and one of those areas that you talk about early on in your life: you got out-acted by F. Murray Abraham. So I found great joy in that because I've run into—I've been lucky enough to run into some really influential people over the years. But the problem was that I got "skinned knees" or scar tissue out of every one of those encounters, and I think it really developed who I am. Is that part of the process? Is that part of the growth of an intellectual, finding out that sometimes you're wrong and then fixing it?

Well, I'd like to think so. I mean, I would like to think that people who think for a living are more likely to improve their reasoning. I can assure you, my acting did not improve after being actually beaten at that. But for some of your listeners who may not know, F. Murray Abraham is the guy who played Salieri in Amadeus, the sort of mediocre musician who was trying to in some sense defeat Mozart. And it was—I will say this about myself, however, it didn't take me long to realize this guy was on a totally different plane, right?

So I think we've all been in meetings at one time or another where we were trying to espouse a certain opinion, and we figured out we were in a—you know, we were "very big fish in a small bowl"—or the exact opposite was true.

Yeah, and we tried to find the nearest exit, right?

Right, yeah. Right.

The humility part always comes at a price. Yeah, that's the "skinning the knees." And that's part of—you know, our thinking is so much influenced by our emotions, right? I mean, and how we think and the way we approach things. And you talk about in there, we talk a lot about memory-emotion links or emotional memory links, right? I can recall information better if there's been some emotion tied to it, whether that's an experience or a funny movie, right? It helps that myelinization happens faster. I can recall that stuff. And you had talked about something called the jukebox theory. Can you kind of explain what that is a little bit for us?

Well, my advisor in graduate school was the great social psychologist Stanley Schachter, and he had a view of emotion that it was a sort of two-stage process. There's a cognition that you have that's appropriate to a particular emotion, but the oomph, what gives it its tang, is the physiological arousal. And that's called the jukebox theory because the cognition is the song, and the arousal is the quarter that you put in the jukebox, and nothing happens if you don't have both. But the important part of that theory was that the same physiological arousal amplifies all emotions. And I don't think we would say that's quite accurate today, but there's a lot of truth to it. And then he came across the idea in his research that people don't have a clear idea what the source of their physiological arousal is. They don't really know what it's coming from. There are several experiments that I did with Schachter that make that point, that people can experience physiological arousal but think it's caused by a pill when it's actually caused by electric shock that they're receiving. My favorite experiment, showing the extent to which we don't recognize the source of our arousal, is a study that a guy did with a very attractive interviewer interviewing males either on a swaying suspension bridge over a chasm—a fairly terrifying situation—or interviewing them in an ordinary way on terra firma. And the males who were interviewed on the swaying bridge were much more likely to ask the interviewer for a date. So this terror-produced arousal makes them think that they're aroused by this woman. But by now, there are dozens of experiments showing that we don't necessarily know the source of our physiological arousal, and therefore it can amplify any cognition that's out there.

Yeah, and I think that goes directly along with the unconscious mind's ability to solve problems. People try to discuss why they did something, and many times they're way off base. And you talked specifically about that in your chapter on rationality. And I owe you and everybody that came before me, on the shoulders of giants. When I was writing the Combat Hunter program, there were Marines that were in combat, kinetic combat, that were dying in early Iraq. And one of the things was that they couldn't identify IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) quickly enough, and sometimes they were in the kill zone, and then detrimental effects would occur. So what I based all of my theories on was the work that you guys did and said, "Hey, listen, if there's sufficient arousal, if we have the sociological, psychological, and physiological acumen to be able to say when these emotions are heightened, there's a likelihood that your brain is triggered on some environmental thing that maybe you're not seeing right away." And we assigned actually songs to it. The song was The Clash hit, "Should I Stay or Should I Go." And we got one very early on test that we had conducted in Iraq, and a SEAL team contacted and said, "Hey, listen, we're going down a trail into this village. We saw some of these pre-event indications that you talk about in your training. All of a sudden, we started getting a physiological response, and one of the SEALs started singing out loud, 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?' And we knew we were approaching the ambush." The amazing thing is that science can work directly with actors in the field to produce tangible results. And one of those results can make a person safer, make a person less prone to just go willy-nilly into an area and be shot by a sniper or blown up by an IED. So I owe you a debt of gratitude, and certainly all of the people that you worked with at the academic level, because all of my work, my theories, were predicated on yours, actually.

Actually, that's a wonderful use of that generalization: that we can be influenced by stimuli that are outside our level of awareness. And you're saying one way to compensate for that fact is if you're aroused, if you notice a higher level of arousal than you expected—I mean, it may be nothing, but it may mean that you've picked up a signal of danger. I think that's just a wonderful example.

Well, and Doc, I would thank you also because the work that we're doing now in police work. You know, I talk about the ABCs—the airway, the bleeding, the circulation type of thing for first aid. Well, first aid for "coppers" (police officers) that are on a hectic scene is always be considering de-escalation, because if you can de-escalate a situation psychologically, sociologically, physiologically, what you do is you lessen the likelihood that there's going to be detrimental after-effects. And so the idea is that, and you correctly called it a generalization, "Hey, listen, you don't have to understand the specifics of entropy, do you get what I'm trying to say, to apply the basics of entropy." And I think that's the link. The link is that your inspiration and certainly this book that you wrote and certainly your body of work speak directly to what we're talking about: that predictive analysis can work when you measure certain things against an environment. Now, it's not going to be the answer every time, but at least you're going to be much more situationally aware. Your decision-making, your judgments may be better informed than just tossing the dice and taking what nature and nurture have waiting in store for you, right?

And one of the things we get into with this too is because I'm always fascinated—again, it's why I brought up the fundamental attribution error—kind of why we get these things wrong. And what I see a lot when we're training and we're doing some sort of observation exercise, it's always everyone wants to jump to whatever conclusion that they've obviously formed, right? Because they're watching a series of events unfold just as an observer, they're watching these actors play out, and then now they're not putting themselves in the perspective of the actor in the scene; they're as that observer. And so they're arriving at a conclusion when the artifacts and evidence aren't leading to that. And that's always my thing, and there's like, "Well, why are you going to this? And why are you feeling that way? Or why are you not balancing that out?" Because one of the issues is then, "How do I not do that? How do I not jump to an unreasonable conclusion? What can I do to balance that?" I mean, you even just said, we don't know the source of that arousal sometimes, that physiological arousal. We feel that way, but how do I identify that source, or how do I at least take into account that I don't know where it's coming from?

And one of the things, Doctor, you've got to understand too, listen, I would love to say that most of the people that we're sending into combat are our best and our brightest and have the highest GSAT scores. But the fact of the matter is, that's not always the truth. Sometimes we have a younger, more inexperienced person that's out there. So one of the things that Brian and I do, and certainly our team does, is when we set up a practical application scenario, it's sort of an experiment in progress. With actors, we set up certain confounds and then talk to the people at different distances, because they have to be able to—you know, the gift of time and distance: the further you are away from a sniper or explosive, the better chance you have of surviving. And a certain confound would be a person acting in a very suspicious manner. But the fact is that the confound here is that they stepped in gum. And you know what it's like, you stepped in gum, it's a hot day, you got it on your shoe, you want to wipe it off. And now all of a sudden that person "pops hot" and everybody that's watching through their binos (binoculars) goes, "It's Colonel Mustard in the study with the pipe wrench!" And then we back it off and we go, "Wait a minute, why are we rushing to those conclusions? What are the artifacts and evidence?" And sometimes just teaching the person a more scientific method of approaching their observations is enough to stimulate their mind to say, "Let's not rush in there. Let's take a minute and try to decide." And again, that's based on your work as well.

Definitely. So I know, kind of like you talked about in some of the stuff that you've written, not just in this book, but I was kind of fascinated in this book that you brought up the differences in culture and how that plays on basically our logic. So what are those differences for everyone? You know, a typical kind of Western way of viewing things versus an Eastern way of viewing things, and how does that affect the way we think?

Right. Well, the origin of that work for me was a brilliant Chinese student came to work with me at the University of Michigan. He had heard some talks I gave at a university where he was an undergraduate. And after he had been working together for a while, he said, "You know, Dick, you and I think very differently about things." I said, "Tell me more." And then he said, essentially—although I'm amplifying a bit in terms of the work we subsequently did—he said, "You have a kind of analytic approach. You look at some object or person, you analyze it, you pay attention to its attributes, and you figure out, 'How can you control this situation? How can you get what you want out of it?'" And you're very logical, I mean, you apply logic, you didn't say this, but rightly or wrongly, in the situation. Whereas Chinese, as we now found out, East Asians in general, look way beyond the object. They look at the context, and they look at relationships, and they're concerned with similarity. They're not so concerned with analyzing causality to figure out how they can control a situation. There are many, many experiments that we did, and that I did with subsequent students, but the most dramatic one is one that was done by a Japanese student. And we showed underwater scenes to Japanese and American undergraduates that lasted 20 seconds. And then we asked them, "What did you see?" And the Americans were likely to go for that central object. "I saw three big fish swimming off to the left. They had white bellies and pink stipples on them and fins on their back." The Japanese subjects almost invariably started with context. So they'd say, "I saw what looked like a stream. The water was green. There were rocks and plants on the bottom. There were three big fish swimming off to the left." Now, the Japanese subjects produced 60% more information about the context as opposed to central objects than the Americans did, and they produced twice as many items of information about relationships, like, "There were snails on the plants." So it's not just a difference in thinking, it's a difference in seeing. And subsequent research has shown this kind of greater attention to the context in every sense, greater attention to history. There's a joke—well, it's not a joke exactly. We regard it as funny, but it wasn't put that way. Someone asked Zhou Enlai, who was Mao Zedong's premiere (premier), "Do you think the effects of the French Revolution were mostly good or bad?" And he said, "It's too soon to tell." And that's funny to us. I mean, it's not funny to a Chinese, but I mean, you have to pay attention to the full context, historical context, the timeline, and everything else. I don't know who's right or wrong there, but heck, there's a big difference.

Well, and part of that difference too is that you mentioned in the book a great point about how we would look at it in a linear fashion. And so if we wanted to take a look at a chart and plot what the likely future of that chart is, we would continue in a linear fashion. Whereas Asians, and specifically the Chinese in your example, would use a curvilinear fashion, or almost a circular, because it's a series of constant change. And to me that speaks volumes and is a great section of the book to help us try to figure out what are those differences, because if we don't understand the differences, we'll never be able to exploit the similarities, right?

You know, it's such a deeply embedded difference between the Western approach and the Eastern approach. I mean, Westerners assume, "If the world is the way it is now, I'm pretty sure that's what's going to be in the future." For an East Asian, knowing if the world is the way it is now means, "Well, it's about to change." And as you point out, not just a change in a literal, in a linear sense, but to change in a curvilinear sense. The best and most dramatic example I know of this is a woman who teaches social psychologists who teaches at a business school in Canada. She gave stock performances at three different points in time, and they're either all going up or they're all going down. And if they're going up, the American—and then you say, "What's going to happen next with that stock?" The Americans say, "Oh, it's going to keep going up." Or, "It's going to keep going down." The Chinese say, "If it's been going up, it's going to go down. What goes up must come down, and what goes down must come up." Incidentally, this causes Chinese and East Asians more generally, I'm sure, puts them at risk in the stock market. Because if you're—if you're—they would—they chose these students chose to, they say, "I would buy that stock." The Americans will buy the stock that's going up, they'll sell the stock that's going down. The Chinese would sell the stock that's going up and buy the stock that's going down. And that's the road to the poorhouse. I mean, right? Exactly. So, we found more errors in reasoning for Westerners than for Easterners, but you find plenty of errors on both sides produced by these biases. They're just different errors going to cause you trouble in different situations or stand you in good stead in different situations.

Yeah, and you know, that's even different even within the United States with different cultures. And inside the United States as well, even—you know, if I was going to zoom out to Eastern versus Western, if I zoom in, there's even cultural differences within here in the U.S. And you speak to a lot of them there just about biases and lack of historical context. I think, just being a younger, newer nation compared to some of these civilizations we're talking about, we're still the new kids on the block in a sense, even though our democracy has been going for a very long time and outlived a lot of other folks. But I think that plays into a lot of the way we think, not just at a personal individual level, but when you multiply that at scale for different policy decisions, like we want knee-jerk reactions on things, and, "Oh, this is the new thing that everyone's upset about, let's hurry up and do that!" when we don't really take into account, "Where did this come from? How did we get to this point here?" And I think when we look at just, because some people say, "Well, yeah, I get it, there's different logical differences between how we process information. But really, as it comes to my daily life at work or something, what does that really matter?" Well, it does, especially at scale. I think a lot. Does that kind of—would that make sense and why we see some of the things that we do?

Yeah, I think some problems—or some, most of the errors we make don't have any consequences, right? But some do. Right.

And I think that's such an important point, because looking forward with predictive analysis, we also have to look backwards. And there's an incredible quote that you used in the book, and now I'm going to be advised—I'm going to plagiarize and steal it and use it always.

Please do that. Yeah.

And you wrote that, "I believe that motives are invoked far too often to explain behavior that is harmful to other people or oneself. Cognitive processes are so error-prone that it's usually unnecessary to invoke bad motives or distorting emotions to explain the evil in the world." What an amazing—I'll tell you, first of all, I can't say enough about the book. And it's one of those books that I've got my little folded pages all over the place, because I go, "See, see? You have to, you have to look at this." Brian and I are constantly asked to comment on a school shooting, or a gunman that walks into a Safeway or a Kroger and kills people. And the first question on everybody's mind, and certainly the "fifth estate" (the media) that can't get out of their own way sometimes, is, "What's the motive? What's the motive? What's the motive?" Well, the motive was to kill folks. The motive was to go out in a blaze of glory. But instead of looking at your quote and saying, "Hey, wait a minute, let's not worry about that motive. Let's take a bigger, broader look at these factors that allowed it to happen, the pre-event indications of violence, perhaps all these other things, or predictive analysis that said that we could predict the factors that contributed to this and perhaps see them start to form in another situation and stop it or mitigate it before it occurs." So a hugely important quote to me. How did you come across that way of thinking? Was it just the vastness of all the training that you had done and all the experiments that you had done? Was there a personal epiphany on the specific point of motive?

Yeah, yeah. It definitely comes from my research. I mean, I present people with some simple stimulus, and I know it's going to have a certain effect on their behavior, and sure enough it does. And then I ask them to explain, "Why did you do that? What was your motive?" And they don't refer to that stimulus at all. They just refer to something about their history or their psychological makeup or something, right? And what we don't realize is how easy it is for us to sort of fabricate explanations for things. We're not lying, I mean, it's just easy for us to fabricate. And we live in a world where we are constantly being bombarded by stimuli, constantly put in situations that cause us to behave in a particular way, sometimes an unfortunate way. I mean, it even results in evil. And we don't realize, especially when we're looking at another person's unfortunate behavior or behavior that has unfortunate consequences, we don't tend to look to the situation. Actually, there is a cultural difference in this. One of the very earliest studies that was done by this Chinese student whose name is Kaiping Peng—he's now, by the way, the Dean of Social Sciences at a major university in China—he and another student named Michael Morris. Remember back when there were all these post office killings, and they presented one particular straight from information out of the newspaper about some guy who kills his supervisor and several other people in the office? And you ask people why. The Americans, "Oh, he's a terrible guy. He's a nutcase. He was a bomb ready to go off!" And you ask the Chinese, they say, "Well, you know, he had a history of very unfortunate relations with his supervisor and with some of his fellow employees." They don't necessarily assume that the guy was a normal person, but they say, "Let's look at the context first." But I must say, you know, you mentioned this question because I did research on violence in the South, prompted by the fact that I grew up in the South and saw middle-class people would sometimes kill each other, which doesn't happen nearly as often in the North. That was my opinion; I did the research to prove that it's true. And we found that the difference is it doesn't come from what people in your business, I've been told, call "7-Eleven killings." That is, where some guy behind the cash register makes a false move and the guy shoots him. These are equally common in North and South. But in the South, there are many more homicides in the context where you assume there's been an insult: romantic triangle or an insult in a barroom and so on. So because of this, you know, I've done research on violence. I occasionally get asked by newspapers to comment. I just refuse to do so. And I'm encouraged, if it occurs in the South, I'm encouraged to attribute it to something about the South. I said, "I don't—I don't know. I just—I will not comment because I just don't feel like I have enough information to make any kind of motivational interpretation." That's great.

And you know, we say that all the time, "Do not rush to put that round peg into that square hole. With enough force, of course, it'll fit." But then we're doing a disservice to all the other situations where we're using an artifact and evidence-based analysis. And when we profile behavior, we profile it from the sense of an anomaly. The anomaly against the baseline might determine a likely indicia that something has gone wrong, that the pattern has changed. And when we have a pattern change, perhaps that's a significant point in where to start our research or our observation or our surveillance. And if we could only—and the reason we do the podcast, I think, is if we could only get other people to think that way. Like, for example, the honor killing aspect is one that doesn't immediately jump up into your—you don't first think about that. You think, "Hey, wait a minute, this person's a realtor, this person's a doctor, and why would they go to that behavior?" Because we think that there's some scandalous person involved in nefarious activity. That's not always the fact. And that rush to judgment is sometimes why we're so wrong with our initial news reports. And I think the immediacy of information—I'm going to beg Brian, I apologize, on the news—but the immediacy of the information creates that knee-jerk, and people now, I believe, only read the first few words of the headline and draw an unreasonable conclusion immediately. They don't reach—you know, they don't socialize, they don't read journals, they don't deep dive, right?

I don't understand, by the way, why journalists will ask that. They don't know what we know, that it's just—you're not going to be able to, especially not on the spur of the moment. I mean, the guy just shot somebody, right? I mean, of course everybody would like to know why it happened, but I don't think I ever end up feeling like I know what happened when these rights killings (referring to violence in the context of perceived insults) occurred. I don't. It's just, I'm sorry, it's going to be—it's beyond our ken. We're not going to know.

And I think that's brilliant, because if you approach it from that standpoint, if we approach it from like predicting the weather or predicting an earthquake or predicting a tsunami, and we say, "These certain indices generally tend to lead into this turbidity, which can create violence," that's at least something that everybody can go, "Okay, I get it. I can be on the lookout for that." But by coming in and using non-science or no science at all, I think it's doing a solid disservice, right?

And the "why" part, I think, is always a natural curiosity as humans. We want to know why that would happen because, again, we don't think of ourselves as ever being able to do something like that, especially if you're talking some horrific attack like a school shooting or something. No one ever goes, "Well, yeah, I can see why he'd want to do that," right? That's not a typical response you get. It's always, "I would never do something like that. Why would they ever do that?" But when it comes to you getting cut off—I mean, how many times do we see getting cut off in traffic, how many road rage incidents? There's a lot going on right now up in the L.A. (Los Angeles) area, like a string of them recently too, where people are heated, someone gets cut off, then a gun comes out, and they start shooting, stuff like that. And when you get cut off, you feel pretty personally insulted, right? "That person just took your spot, that's your space," or whatever, right? Even though you're just on the freeway, right? But you don't ever put yourself in the shoes of someone who cuts someone off by accident, right? Because you're running late, you've got to get to the airport, your kid's screaming in the backseat, you didn't even see them in your side-view mirror. We don't ever take that approach. We always just—it's the "us versus them," I think. And that goes into why I brought up the fundamental attribution error so much, because of that, and also what you said: not knowing the source of that arousal, not understanding why we're so heated. That's part of the problem, I think.

Yep, right.

And I mean, there's a chapter, Brian, in the book, and there's a very good couple of paragraphs on non-conscious learning. And I think one of the things, Doc, is that the test, or the proctor of the test, gave a hint by letting the rope sway back and forth, and the goal was to get the ropes to connect. And the great thing was that none of the people attributed that cue to their thinking. Everybody said, "You know, that was my next step in the game." I think that's what we're doing here: we're calling plays from the sidelines with zero information and trying to make them fit our mental model of what might have occurred. Talk to me a minute about that test, because that was a great experiment, right?

It's actually my favorite experiment. It was done at the University of Michigan a hundred years ago almost; it was in the early '30s. So he has people come to the laboratory, there are two ropes hanging from the ceiling, and he says, "Your job is to tie those ropes together." And you can't just grab one and then grab the other—they're too far apart. And there are things lying around all over the laboratory that they might use. I mean, like one is another rope, so you tie that rope to one of the ropes hanging from the ceiling and bring it over the other and grab it, and then you can tie them together. But after they've been doing things for a while, and they're stumped, the experimenter just casually walks past one—he's been wandering around the room, so there's nothing unusual about this—and just casually flicks one of the ropes, puts it in motion. And then, typically within 45 seconds, the subject grabs an object—pliers or something—ties it to one of the ropes, sets it into motion like a pendulum, runs over to the other rope, and when the pendulum comes by, you can grab the rope and tie them together. And he says, "That's great, how did you happen to solve that?" No one refers to the swinging of the rope. And some of his subjects were psychology professors. And I guess, well, my favorite answer is, "Well, I thought of the situation of monkeys swinging on vines across trees. The imagery came simultaneously with the solution." I mean, he's not lying, I mean, it's just—that's plausible. I mean, at some point he probably did think about monkeys and trees, but so, even for the simple things like problem solutions, we shouldn't assume that we know why we figured out the solution. Most of the time, I'm sure we do, but a lot of solutions, you know, they come from who knows where, and we invent a story.

Yep. And that's one of the things that we love about not being hyper-alert or hyper-vigilant in our environment. We solve it by saying, "Look, there's MLCOAs (Most Likely Courses of Action) and MDCOAs (Most Dangerous Courses of Action). And as long as you spend most of your day in the MLCOA world, you're probably going to be just fine, and you don't have to understand the motive. You don't have to understand those external stressors or the external arousals to predict likely danger." And so that epiphany alone can help some people relax, and it lowers your anxiety level in operating in an ambiguous environment.

Interesting that it has that effect.

Sure it would. Yep. Yeah.

Sometimes that balancing act of—I mean, like we talk about it, your brain wants that explanatory storyline. The monkey with the rope swinging, obviously, okay, that's made up in my head. And like you said, I'm not lying, it's what I truly believe. But our brain wants to create those explanatory storylines, so if I let it go, it's going to come up with a solution, it's going to come up with an explanation, even if that doesn't fit what's really going on in the scene. And I think even just having that awareness of the fact of their certain limitations that I have, I only know so much. Is that a good way for the average—for just someone listening to this right now—to go, "You know, great, you're telling me all of these things that I do wrong, and that my brain makes stuff up, and it's based—it could be based on my culture and how I was raised. Like, what am I supposed to do then? Because then it sounds like, 'Well, do I not believe anything? What am I supposed to believe?' And that's like, 'How am I supposed to think, right?'"

Yeah, yeah. People don't like to think this way, right? It burns a lot of calories thinking that way. So I just think we're better off being aware of limited knowledge of everything in the world, including why we do things. I mean, when psychologists ask me why I did something, I said, "Well, remember who you're talking to." Right? I can give you a story, and I now believe it, but you shouldn't. [Laughter]

Right, that's so true. You know, we call that in training—we do a lot of in-person training—we call that "the Jason Bourne." Everybody is so wanting to be the protagonist of their story. They want to be the epicenter of all decisions. So therefore, everything that's going on, including the vast stars in the universe, has to have something to do with me: "That was a motive for me to do this or that." And so, your book, the great thing about it is, first of all, I got to tell you, there's a couple of quips in there that I had to resort to the dictionary to go, "I know this is hilarious, but I got to look those words up a little bit." But what was fun about it is that you got so deep in some points, and you kept coming back to these rational, logical conclusions that anybody could make. And that's what I think is so great about the book: somebody with your acumen—and I'm nowhere near your scale, I'm a "village idiot" in Gunnison, a very small town in the mountains in Colorado—and I could still enjoy every page of your book by going back and going, "Wow, that really made me think." And the "Gladwellians" will like it as well. Malcolm Gladwell gave you a huge thumbs-up. And Gladwell thinks a lot like you do: "You know, the left-handed pitcher from a sunny state that graduated in January is more prone to be able to do something else." Those are great thinking experiments, and I think the more we open our mind to knowing what we don't know, the less inclined we're going to be to try to turn ourselves into the Jason Bourne expert every time something comes up.

Right. So I go back, actually, because reading through your stuff kind of reminded me of—I go back to a quote by Werner Heisenberg. Physicists, because they really get behavior at a subatomic level, right? And what he said is, "What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." And I think that approach, just remembering things like that and seeing those differences, I think, helps look at things a little bit more logically, right? Things are more subjective than we really want to believe sometimes. And to kind of circle back, because I was super fascinated by the different cultural expressions and ways of thought to look at these things. And since you talk specifically about East Asian and China, and China is always in the news now because "they're taking over the world" and "they're always stealing our stuff," and, "they want to just basically use us for farmland at some point," you know, whatever it is. So, how do you look at it? I mean, now we're getting into kind of geopolitics and economic indicators, but how do you look at it, knowing what you know, just about the culture of Chinese and how they think of what they're doing now and where they're going?

You know, I do think about it a lot, as you can imagine. Everybody does, but I think about it because I've studied the Chinese. I don't know where they're going. I mean, I'm alarmed, I really am. And what I'm primarily frightened of is the authoritarian government there. But you know, I know so many Chinese who are such reasonable, pleasant people. I keep reminding myself of that, and he said, "Well, you know, I probably—it's probably a biased sample of Chinese that I know, and who knows what else is out there." I just don't know. But I do take heart from the fact that I know—I actually find Chinese, with Chinese I know, more congenial, easier to get along with than a lot of people from European countries I could mention, but won't. No.

And my thing is too, with those different cultures and looking at it is, everyone's like you just said, "All right, well, I know all these people from China, and who are academics there, and this is the way they think, and are pleasant people." And everyone thinks, "Hey, they're taking over the world," or "this is what they're trying to do." But you look at their government and their society, and how that changes over time, is, they have a rising middle class. Does that change the way their outlook is going to be in five, ten, twenty years from now, and how they think? I mean, and you look at all cultures that do that, they start out as kind of, you've got the "haves and have-nots," and so they're constantly battling stuff. And then once you get that rise of that middle class, well, things start to change a little bit. You have a little bit more economic freedom, you have different ways of looking at things, you have a little bit more balance, I guess, in the society. So there's a lot of those factors that kind of come into play. And one other area of the book you talked about briefly, kind of towards the end, you get into it, and I know you said, "Oh, do you have to get going now?" Yeah, okay, yeah, no, that's fine. I apologize, I didn't even realize how long we were going there for. I think we're at the hour mark already, so that's fine. So I will—I appreciate you coming on and sharing. We're going to have the links to the book up in the episode details and everything, so everyone can check it out. Your book Thinking—they can just click on it right from where they get this podcast, and it'll go straight to the Amazon website to order it. But we really appreciate you coming on, and I'll give you any last comments that you'd like to share with everyone.

Well, certainly, I enjoyed it a lot. I actually have been fascinated talking to you guys. The uses you're being able to make of psychology, including some that I've been involved in, have fascinated me. And I think it gives a dimension for your listeners that other people are not likely to have. So it's been kind of a revelation to me. I've greatly enjoyed it. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Let's collaborate on something, okay?

All right. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dr. Nisbett.

Don't forget, everyone, that training changes behavior, right?

Exactly.