3BI: randomness and vaccine side effects, spending for happiness, and the body-mind connection
Welcome to my weekly 3BI newsletter sharing three insights from the worlds of psychology, decision-making, and behavioral change. Sign up here to have it delivered straight to your inbox.
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Hello and happy holidays! My Thanksgiving break for the newsletter went a couple weeks longer than planned, but I’ll be back on track for the last few weeks of the year.
If you work in behavioral science and want to put your forecasting skills to the test, you should take this survey by some great researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. Guess which nudges will increase flu vaccination rates and you can win signed copies of behavioral science classics Thinking Fast and Slow or Nudge.
Take the survey here: Flu Vaccine Prediction Survey
Onto the insights:
Fooled by Randomness
One of my favorite books is Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, which delves into how our cognitive biases oversimplify the world.
Basically, our brain has a hard time accepting that the world is as random as it is, and finds comfort in overestimating causality and finding patterns and connections that make sense, because it lets us feel as though the world is more explainable than it is.
This is typically how conspiracy theories are born. Someone wants an explanation for something, and in the sheer volume of data and information out in the world, they find some random connections that give the closure they seek.
Well, guess what’s a prime candidate for new conspiracy theories? A new vaccine!
Bob Wachter, chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, recently pointed out that these tendencies will likely come through after COVID-19 vaccinations begin:
Science writer Derek Lowe expanded on this observation:
We’re talking about treating very, very large populations, which means that you’re going to see the usual run of mortality and morbidity that you see across large samples. Specifically, if you take 10 million people and just wave your hand back and forth over their upper arms, in the next two months you would expect to see about 4,000 heart attacks. About 4,000 strokes. Over 9,000 new diagnoses of cancer. And about 14,000 of that ten million will die, out of usual all-causes mortality. No one would notice. That’s how many people die and get sick anyway.
But if you took those ten million people and gave them a new vaccine instead, there’s a real danger that those heart attacks, cancer diagnoses, and deaths will be attributed to the vaccine. I mean, if you reach a large enough population, you are literally going to have cases where someone gets the vaccine and drops dead the next day (just as they would have if they *didn’t* get the vaccine). It could prove difficult to convince that person’s friends and relatives of that lack of connection, though. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the most powerful fallacies of human logic, and we’re not going to get rid of it any time soon. Especially when it comes to vaccines.
We need to recognize this and be prepared for the fuel this will give to misinformation. Don’t be fooled by randomness!
Money and happiness during the holidays
Another book I love is Happy Money by Michael Norton and Elizabeth Dunn, which explores the psychology of spending to see how our money habits impact happiness.
University of Pennsylvania behavioral economist Katy Milkman interviewed one of the authors for her newsletter to discuss happier spending. It’s got good news: if 2020’s got you down, your holiday gift shopping is likely to make you feel better, because spending on others brings more happiness than buying for ourselves:
Looking at credit card statements, it turns out that people spend most of their money on stuff for themselves. And I'm not criticizing — of course we do because we have to pay rent, we need shoes, stuff like that. So it's not surprising, but we wondered, does that make people happy? And if not, is there anything else people can do?
It turns out that the percent of your income you spend on stuff for yourself doesn't make you unhappy, but it’s not related to happiness. So all we needed was anything that beat nothing. We thought, what about the opposite? And in a series of surveys and experiments, we tried to show that for most people, most of the time, giving makes you happier than spending on yourself.
Why?
One is very simple: Giving is different than what we typically do. Giving to others is more emotionally rich, but also it’s just different and we know that if we're in a rut it can help to do new things. But I think you also feel good in part because other people tell you that you did a good thing. So we ran a study where we asked what makes you happier, giving when no one knows that you gave or giving when everybody knows.
Many religions have anonymous giving as the highest form of giving, and that does make you happier than spending on yourself, but not nearly as happy as if everybody knows. So the purest form doesn't make us the happiest, but it turns out that it's still good that we give no matter what. We really like people to smile and say thanks.
The holidays provide a natural time for us to give. That’s part of why this season is so cheery. But, it’s worth considering how to extend that practice beyond the season.
Subscribe to Katy’s great newsletter here.
Your brain is not for thinking
At some level, we all understand that there is a connection between our body and mind. That connection may be driven more by the body than we realize.
Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett writes that the mind primarily serves the body:
Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.
According to Barrett, our brain mostly functions as a resource allocator for the rest of the body:
Your brain runs your body using something like a budget. A financial budget tracks money as it’s earned and spent. The budget for your body tracks resources like water, salt and glucose as you gain and lose them. Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.
…
Consider what happens when you’re thirsty and drink a glass of water. The water takes about 20 minutes to reach your bloodstream, but you feel less thirsty within mere seconds. What relieves your thirst so quickly? Your brain does. It has learned from past experience that water is a deposit to your body budget that will hydrate you, so your brain quenches your thirst long before the water has any direct effect on your blood.
Other stuff
Epidemics and architecture:
I’ve written quite a bit about how behavior is changing during the pandemic and how it may remain changed going forward, but less so about how past outbreaks have impacted the world.
Architectural Digest has some interesting examples how the architecture of our homes is impacted by epidemics of the past, from closets to tiling. Bloomberg also has an article about how many radiators in older apartments were designed for pandemic life. When I lived in NYC, my apartment’s radiator would get so hot that I’d keep windows open in the dead of winter to cool off. Turns out that was intentional to increase ventilation and prevent spread of the Spanish Flu!
The history of seasons
Really interesting Twitter thread on how our concepts of seasons are shaped by geography and culture:
The science behind coronavirus vacciness: Great article explaining how Moderna’s mRNA vaccine works: How Moderna’s Vaccine Works.
This article on how we can prepare vaccines for future pandemics ahead of time was also really fascinating: We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time
And finally, an amazing picture of a full moon passing through Arches National Park in Utah:
Have a great weekend.