Evolving with Nita Jain

Last time, we discussed how letting go of our sense of self can significantly impact our lives by reducing mental suffering, improving productivity, and helping us experience the benefits of awe. This week, we’ll explore another question together:

Can our mindsets make us healthier?

Our beliefs can indeed exert surprising physiological effects. A recent randomized clinical trial discovered that educating children about the side effects of allergy immunotherapy greatly improved patient compliance and parental anxiety during treatment for peanut allergies.

Oral immunotherapy is an emerging treatment for allergies in which patients are given gradually larger doses of an allergen in order to promote immune tolerance. The appearance of mild reactions to treatment like a scratchy throat or congestion can sometimes concern children and parents alike since these symptoms closely resemble those of a more severe allergic reaction like anaphylaxis.

The anxiety can be so great that families may skip doses or stop treatment completely. In the study, telling children that side effects may be beneficial and even help overcome allergy in the long term allowed kids to successfully complete treatment and experience fewer side effects when exposed to actual peanuts.

Why might a positive mindset change our response to something like allergens? Let’s dive a little deeper to find out.

Mindsets 101

Our mindsets affect our perceptions of reality and are influenced by our upbringing, cultural values, and environments. Marketing, advertising, and health influencers shape our attitudes towards foods, exercise plans, and lifestyle practices.

Many of our mindsets are simply the result of mimetic desire, meaning we imitate what others want. We desire what is socially desirable. Mimetic desire describes how social influences like parents, peers, teachers, media, and society impact nearly all our decisions from our career aspirations to the partners we choose.

Dr. Alia Crum, Professor of Psychology at Stanford, studies how mindsets affect health and physical performance. She defines mindsets as core beliefs or assumptions about a domain. Whether we think stress is enhancing or debilitating influences the outcomes that follow. Whether we believe the nature of intelligence is fixed or malleable affects motivation and the ability to persist during academic challenges.

Mindset vs. Placebo

While the origins of the placebo effect may have been based on insufficient evidence, science suggests that the way we feel about something does in fact impact the way it affects us. We often forget that the total effect of a medical treatment is a combination of the chemical properties of that drug plus the placebo effect, which consists of social context, beliefs or mindsets, and our body’s natural physiological ability to heal.

Mindset and Food Metabolism

Do our beliefs change our bodies’ physiological response to food?

Dr. Crum conducted a well-known study, sometimes called the “milkshake study,” in which she administered identical vanilla milkshakes to the same group of people separated by a week. Participants were initially told they were drinking a calorie-rich, indulgent milkshake full of fat and sugar. The second time, volunteers were told they were drinking a healthy, sensible, nutritious meal shake.

Levels of a gut hormone called ghrelin were measured before and after drinking each set of milkshakes. Sometimes called the “hunger hormone,” ghrelin signals to the hypothalamus in the brain that it’s time to seek out food. After a large meal, ghrelin levels drop, telling your body that you’ve eaten enough.

Scientists originally thought that ghrelin levels fluctuated in response to nutrient intake alone. Eat a cheeseburger, and ghrelin levels drop substantially. Eat a salad? Not so much. But Crum discovered something else entirely in her milkshake study.

She found that telling people that they were drinking something indulgent caused their ghrelin levels to drop threefold more than when they thought they were drinking a low-calorie shake. In other words, simply believing that they were consuming something filling caused their bodies to respond as if they actually were.

This evidence suggests that we may be able to manipulate metabolism with our mindsets. Crum argues that these findings require us to rethink our traditional metabolic model of “calories in, calories out,” which doesn’t account for the influence of mindset on physiology. According to Crum,

“Our beliefs matter in virtually every domain, in everything we do. How much is a mystery, but I don't think we've given enough credit to the role of our beliefs in determining our physiology, our reality.”

Should we cultivate mindsets of abundance?

Counterintuitively, the belief that we’re eating indulgent foods rather than healthy ones seems to result in improved satiety and better health outcomes. The reason we observe this correlation may be due to the power of abundance and scarcity mindsets. Stephen Covey was the first to coin these terms in his seminal book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The scarcity mindset is grounded in destructive competition and subscribes to the idea that opportunity is a finite pie such that if one person takes a large piece, there is less available for everyone else. Individuals with an abundance mindset, on the other hand, reject the notion of zero-sum games and believe there is more than enough to go around.

An abundance mindset allows us to celebrate the successes of others and share profits, power, and recognition. According to Covey, embracing an abundance mindset allows for freedom and mental clarity, which enables us to more effectively pursue our goals. Similar mechanisms may be at play when we consume food from a mindset of indulgence.

The calmness that accompanies the belief that we have more than enough to eat may lead to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, thereby preventing excessive ghrelin stimulation and the urge to overeat. In other words, operating from a mental place of abundance or indulgence may reduce chronic stress and therefore improve our metabolic health.

If an indulgence mindset can promote health, can actually consuming indulgent foods also lead to health benefits? Unfortunately, the science suggests otherwise. A 2020 review article published in the journal Nutrition Research described how satiety cues that promote a sense of fulness and satisfaction typically inhibit cravings for more food.

But Western diets rich in energy, sugar, and saturated fats seem to impair these inbuilt mechanisms of appetite reduction by hijacking our brain’s reward pathways and inappropriately releasing dopamine to reinforce behaviors. So how can we restore normal appetite regulation and cultivate a healthier relationship with food? Intuitive eating may provide a possible answer.

Can we make eating more intuitive?

Stress reduction may be one of the mechanisms by which intuitive eating improves well-being. Intuitive eating relies on a skill called interoception, which describes our ability to sense internal signals from our bodies. Interoception originates in the insular cortex of the brain and can help us register the sensation of hunger or predict our approximate heart rate.

Intuitive eating relies on satiety and appetite signals to guide eating habits instead of using emotional, social, or chronological cues. Interoceptive sensitivity has been associated with healthier BMIs, higher levels of self-esteem, and reduced incidence of disordered eating patterns compared to other dieting methods.

Many of us may have a reduced capacity for interoception due to chronic pain or trauma, a tendency to suppress emotions, or eating to always clean our plates instead of eating until we’re full. Retraining our bodies to perceive and respond to physiological sign…

Last time, we discussed the importance of loosening our attachment to our beliefs in order to have more productive discussions with people who disagree with us. Loosening our attachment to one belief in particular can alleviate mental suffering, boost our productivity through flow, and help us experience transcendence. What am I talking about?

I’m talking about rejecting the idea of the self. No, I don’t mean those experiments where someone tries a series of progressively stranger tasks in order to become desensitized to the sting of rejection. I’m talking about letting go of the concept of the self completely.

The Self Is an Illusion

French philosopher René Descartes once famously said, “Cogito ergo sum”—I think, therefore I am. Or to be more precise, “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum”—I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.

Some philosophers and neuroscientists argue that Descartes’ statement may be a non-sequitur, and the insecurity of needing affirmation of self-existence is likely in vain. According to Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, the idea of a stable, continuous self is an illusion, and a sizeable body of neuroscience research affirms this viewpoint.

The self is likely a social construct consisting of our values, interests, hopes, fears, dreams, and relationships. If the self doesn’t exist, any attacks on our personal character are rendered meaningless.

In an amusing scene from Friends, Rachel and Monica take offense when Phoebe suggests that Rachel is a pushover and Monica is high maintenance. When Rachel and Monica counter that Phoebe is flaky, Phoebe remains unbothered and concedes that she is indeed flaky.

How exactly is this illusion created?

In his book No Self, No Problem, Chris Niebauer explains that the left side of the brain is responsible for processing language, interpreting meaning, and crafting stories. Consider the word ‘book.’ What exactly does it mean? We might say it’s a medium for recording information with writing and images, often bound by a cover.

But we can’t assign a quality that is universal to all books. Language is a tool that we use in order to interpret and understand reality; it gives us the illusion that the names we assign to things have actual meaning. But these names are simply shorthands or proxies to understand our surroundings.

Perhaps René Magritte was trying to convey a similar idea in his infamous painting The Treachery of Images, which features the phrase “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (French for "This is not a pipe") under the image of a tobacco pipe. Explaining the reasoning behind his painting, Magritte said:

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe,’ I'd have been lying!

The pipe in the painting is not an actual pipe but a visual representation of one. To borrow from Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski, “The word is not the thing.”

Niebauer points out that the illusion of the self is similar to that of a mirage in a desert—you observe, visualize, and experience it; it’s just not actually there. If you try to answer the question “Who am I?,” your left brain will likely come up with a multitude of categories to define your selfhood such as gender, occupation, religion, values, and interests.

But remove categories from the equation, and it becomes significantly harder to pin down the essence of who you are. The “I” is an illusion extrapolated from the language the left brain uses to process reality.

Our left brains even assign meaning to various visual inputs. The Rorschach inkblot test is a way to conceptualize how this works. The Rorschach asks users to look at inkblot patterns on paper and report what they see. The act of ascribing meaning to these random images is a way to look at how the left brain works in real-time.

Given an identical inkblot image, two people can have vastly different interpretations—informed by their own individual reference frames. Recognizing patterns can be helpful but can also lead to unnecessary suffering. Let’s consider a real-world example.

If an employee sees her fellow coworkers congregated together in the break room while whispering and casting glances in her direction, she may assume that her colleagues are conspiring against her. But they could just as well be planning a surprise in her honor.

Our brains seek out patterns to explain reality. But these patterns only exist in our minds, and we need to realize that in order to reduce mental suffering.

What’s the antidote?

How then can we quiet our left brains? If the left brain is the language processing center, then the right brain is the spatial center responsible for movement-based activities. Yoga and exercise are both great ways to tap into right-brain consciousness. The right brain is also responsible for our sense of intuition or that “gut feeling” we get when we have a hunch but can’t exactly explain the reason for it.

Practicing compassion and gratitude are two additional ways to engage your right brain. Buddhism defines compassion as “the ability to see another person as ourselves.” Compassion originates in the RTPJ, which sounds like a Myers-Briggs personality type but isn’t. The RTPJ, or right temporoparietal junction, allows us to consider things from someone else’s point of view.

Gratitude also activates the right brain. A 2014 study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found that individuals who regularly practiced gratitude had more gray matter volume in the right inferior temporal gyrus. So the next time you find yourself stuck in rush-hour traffic or the middle of a rainstorm, remember that your perception of these experiences as ‘unfortunate’ is simply a byproduct of one half of your brain. Rejecting this interpretation and replacing it with gratitude for the time to yourself will help prevent needless stress, anxiety, and mental suffering.

In the same way that quieting the left brain can have health benefits, so too can deactivating the default mode network (DMN), which comprises several regions of the brain. The DMN is involved in activities of “wakeful rest” such as daydreaming or planning for the future. Research suggests that deactivating the DMN can help reduce stress and the risk of developing dementia.

Uitwaaien, the Dutch term for unwinding, refers to the practice of spending time in natural environments and has been proposed as a method to modulate DMN hyperactivity. Along a similar vein, a 2019 study examined how playing sports can help athletes cut through “brain static” in order to better interpret audio inputs. Researchers hypothesized that the athletes’ ability to tune out background noise could help prevent injuries and cardiovascular disease.

Tapping Into Flow Means Letting Go

Another reason to reject the self is to boost productivity by tapping into flow, that state of being “in the zone.” When you refer to yourself as “I”, you invoke the ego (a construct of the left brain), but ego death allows us to focus more intently on creative pursuits.

In order to tap into flow, we have to let go of our sense of self. That means releasing ourselves of any doubts, anxieties, fears, or insecurities. Flow is necessary for mastery of creative, artistic, and athletic endeavors.

C. Wilson Meloncelli describes flow as a state between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. In other words, flow lies somewhere between “fight or flight” and “rest and digest.” Flow occurs when you are disengaged from your sense of self and work becomes effortless.

Athletes, artists, and musicians frequently tap into the flow state when practicing their craft. Wide receiver Jerry Rice, soccer legend Pelé, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and violinist Itzhak Perlman are all prime examples. Author and coach Brad Stulberg explains,

Releasing from such a tight attachment to one’s self is a hallmark of flow, or that highly sought after state of being fully in the zone. Losing oneself is also th…

Last week, we discussed how techniques such as affect labeling and physiological sigh can help us to stay calm when triggered and get into a better state of mind. But how do we go about the messy business of actually engaging with people who think differently from us?

British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote,

Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

Sometimes, getting through to people feels impossible with both sides bolstered by a profligate confidence in their firepower. What should we do if we want to avoid living in an echo chamber but also prefer to avoid confrontation? How can we communicate our viewpoints both effectively and gently?

A Case of Cognitive Dissonance

Imagine two Americans named Marsha and Alexandria. Marsha supports the right to bear arms and believes abortion is equivalent to murder. Alex supports gun regulation and a woman’s right to choose. Which person is more likely to support capital punishment?

Based on the normal distribution of political opinions, most of us would say Marsha is more likely to support capital punishment because of her conservative views. But how do certain political ideologies get grouped together? Why would Marsha support the death penalty if she is pro-life? And why would Alex support individual freedom when it comes to abortion but not gun ownership? How do we explain the cognitive dissonance?

The answer may lie in the factors that govern our decision-making process. We may be more primed to accept certain policy positions depending on our genetics, gender, ethnic background, upbringing, personality, and socioeconomic status. In a 2003 paper, Jost and colleagues from Stanford University argued that personality traits can predict whether someone is more likely to identify as liberal or conservative.

In their meta-analysis, the researchers found that conservatives tend to have a higher need for order, structure, and closure compared to liberals and also rank lower on measures of tolerance for ambiguity, complexity, and openness to experience. In addition, conservatives were more likely to fear threats to social stability and score higher on measures of death anxiety.

Finding Common Ground

Moral Foundations Theory, put forth by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, argues that humans across cultures share a common core of ethical beliefs upon which we build different narratives and identities. How those values are expressed and the relative importance we assign to them can differ, however.

Some people may value adherence to authority above freedom of expression and thereby condemn flag burning as morally reprehensible. Others may place freedom of speech at the top of the moral hierarchy and therefore condone actions that reject patriotism in favor of equality. The five universal moral foundations are:

* Harm/care — leads to disapproval of individuals that inflict pain and suffering on others

* Fairness/reciprocity — involves issues of equality and justice

* Ingroup/loyalty — based on our attachment to groups (such as our family, church, or country) and underlies virtues of patriotism

* Authority/respect — tendency to create hierarchical structures of dominance and subordination and appeals to values of leadership, obedience, and tradition

* Purity/sanctity — evokes emotions of disgust in response to biological contaminants, such as spoiled food or chewing tobacco, and social contaminants, such as spiritual corruption or hedonism, underlies the notion that the body is a temple

Several studies have shown that liberals and conservatives differ in the relative value they assign to various foundations. Liberals are more likely to prioritize considerations of harm and fairness while conservatives tend to place a higher value on the foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity.

Liberals are likely to deem actions immoral if they cause harm, which likely explains their negative attitudes towards capital punishment and the use of torture on terrorist suspects. The stronger value that conservatives place on ingroup/loyalty is reflected in their attitudes toward illegal immigration.

Returning to the example of Marsha and Alex, how can we find a way to resolve the seemingly contradictory views? If Alex’s opposition to abortion is a function of her commitment to fairness and her position on gun control stems from a hatred of harm, then simultaneously being pro-choice on abortion and anti-choice on gun ownership is not morally inconsistent.

Similarly, Marsha’s sincere belief in the sanctity of life underlies her opposition to abortion, and her position on gun control stems from her belief that each member of a group should be able to defend against outside threats. Understanding the basic moral pillars that underlie our beliefs is a great first step toward communicating more effectively.

If we are to heal the pain and suffering caused by decades of divisive dialogue, we must first acknowledge the common humanity of all parties involved and then begin respectful conversations aimed at understanding. In his TED talk on how not to take things personally, former referee and communications expert Frederik Imbo explains, “If I try to see the intention of the other, I make space for understanding instead of irritation.”

Don’t Take It Personally

How do we stay calm when our personal beliefs are under attack? Looking to missionaries might provide an answer. Missionaries experience a lot of rejection when attempting to spread their message to a wider audience. How do they manage to maintain their composure while being repeatedly rebuffed?

The secret may lie in their attitude towards their beliefs. Missionaries don’t wield their beliefs as weapons but instead happily offer them as gifts. Sharing a gift is an act of joy, even if everyone doesn’t accept it.

How can we use this attitude to have more productive conversations with people who disagree with us? One strategy is loosening our attachment to our beliefs. According to philosophy professor Dale Lugenbehl, personal attachment to beliefs encourages personal competition at the expense of collaborative efforts to find the truth.

The late Buddhist master Thích Nhất Hạnh recommended that we all make the following promise to ourselves: “I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.”

In his talk, Imbo offers yet another approach to help cultivate a sense of non-attachment to our beliefs. He uses the poignant analogy of a crumpled, chewed up, regurgitated 20 Euro note to explain that our value remains the same regardless of how other people treat us. Your value does not depend on external validation. Your worth is inherent irrespective of whether someone else recognizes it.

Do I Make Myself Clear?

Another strategy we can implement is to develop a strong sense of self-awareness. In her book, No One Understands You and What To Do About It, social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson says that the gap between how we think we come across and how other people actually perceive us can be substantial.

Most of us suffer from the illusion of transparency, the belief that what we feel, desire, and intend is perfectly clear to others even when we have done very little to effectively communicate our thoughts. Meanwhile, people perceiving us are susceptible to the primacy effect, which means that the information exchanged during early encounters will forever shape our view of a person.

In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, economist Daniel Kahneman describes the two systems we use to process information, which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 processes information intuitively and automatically and tends to use shortcuts, or heuristics, to draw conclusions without much effort. The primacy effect comes about as the result of the lazy thinking of System 1.

Halvorson points to

We’ve all experienced the flood of negative emotions when someone says or does something triggering. It can often be difficult to remain calm when faced with attacks on our personal character. Sometimes criticism has less to do with us and more to do with the lens through which someone is looking—in light of their own values, hardships, and experiences. Before we rush to defend ourselves in the heat of the moment, we might consider the following:

Man in the Mirror

The self-serving bias describes our tendency to attribute positive events and successes to our own character traits but blame negative results on external factors unrelated to our character. Thinking this way can place your self-esteem on an emotional roller coaster, bobbing up and down with the ebb of the tide.

When things are going well, you’re God’s gift to humanity and deserve praise. When things fall apart, you’re the victim who deserves better. This constant sense of deserving is mentally draining and unconducive to personal growth. If we don’t acknowledge our shortcomings, we’re less likely to learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future.

Besides affecting individual behavior, self-serving bias presents with systemic effects on a global scale as well. A study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University examined the role of self-serving bias in climate change negotiations and found that college students in both China and the United States held nationalistic beliefs about which countries should reduce greenhouse gas emissions and by how much.

However, when researchers disguised the problem and the identity of the parties involved, students in both countries had similar ideas about what constitutes a fair distribution of burdens. Similarly, if we try to judge situations more impartially by removing ourselves from the equation, we can come up with more equitable solutions.

A similar but closely related concept is the actor-observer bias. The main difference is that the actor-observer bias focuses on both our behaviors as well as the behaviors of others while the self-serving bias only addresses our own behaviors. Fundamental attribution error, which we discussed last week, similarly addresses just one half of the equation, the behavior of others, while actor-observer bias incorporates both.

Actor-observer bias explains our tendency to judge others by different standards than we judge ourselves. The hypocrisy of actor-observer bias means that if you run a red light, it’s an honest mistake, but if someone else runs a red light, they are recklessly endangering the lives of others. Your actions are always justified, and your motives are always pure. But if someone else exhibits the same behavior, they are malicious and corrupt.

We tend to attribute our negative behaviors to external forces outside our control and assume that the negative behaviors of other people are the result of internal factors under their conscious control. If you fail a test, it’s because the teacher didn’t explain the material properly. If someone else fails, it’s because they didn’t study hard enough.

Stephen Pinker describes a phenomenon known as the “moralization gap.” During conflicts, we tend to unconsciously inflate perceptions of ourselves and underestimate the goodwill of others. Psychology studies have shown that both victims and perpetrators distort the facts of a situation to fit their respective narratives. Moreover, close friends of victims (third parties) are usually less forgiving than victims themselves (first parties).

Keeping cognitive biases in mind can help us reorient our perspective and remind us that the things we experience are not necessarily personal. When you fail at something, it doesn’t mean you are a failure as a person; it simply means you are a person who happens to fail sometimes. Criticisms can be seen as opportunities for improvement rather than personal attacks on our character.

Putting Perspective Into Practice

Now that we understand the psychology behind how we think, how can we practically apply this knowledge in our daily lives? Neuroscience offers a couple of techniques that might help us out during times of stress. The first is called affect labeling.

Affect Labeling

On The People’s Scientist podcast, neuroscientist Stephanie Caligiuri of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai explains that the logical part of our brain can inhibit more emotional reactive parts like the amygdala (involved in fear, aggression, and anxiety) and the medial zone of the hypothalamus, which regulates defensive behaviors.

The prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision making and judgment, can be engaged by the simple yet effective practice of affect labeling, which consists of several steps:

* Stop and take a deep breath to inhibit autonomic arousal and reduce stress.

* Label the emotion you are feeling, and be as specific as possible, e.g. “I feel angry” or “I feel afraid.”

* Identify the source of the emotion, and ask yourself, “Why do I feel this way?”

Going through this exercise helps inhibit emotional reactivity. In studies, the practice of affect labeling has been shown to reduce the intensity of negative emotions as well as heighten the experience of positive emotions.

Physiological Sigh

Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman of the Stanford School of Medicine takes this advice a step further and advocates using the “physiological sigh” to reduce autonomic arousal and impulsive reactivity. The physiological sigh consists of two deep inhales in a row (without exhaling in between) followed by a full exhale through the mouth to empty the lungs.

The action of the double inhale serves to “pop” the air sacks, or alveoli, in the lungs open, allowing oxygen to enter and carbon dioxide to be exhaled during the sigh out. Our bodies naturally perform this pattern of breathing every 1-5 minutes during sleep and waking hours.

A brain region called the retrotrapezoid nucleus is responsible for triggering these sighs whenever carbon dioxide builds up in the brain or blood. Huberman explains that meditation practices also help create a gap between external stimuli and our impulse to respond to them.

Stay Nourished

Paying attention to our nutritional status can also help modulate our stress response. Up to 86% of us may not be getting adequate amounts of magnesium in our diet despite normal plasma levels. Magnesium insufficiency can present with irritability, fatigue, anxiety, muscle weakness, and a lowered ability to cope with stress.

Magnesium counteracts stress responses by antagonizing NMDA receptors, increasing GABA release, reducing cortisol levels, and facilitating the production of serotonin. Lack of sufficient dietary magnesium can therefore perpetuate the stress response signal in the brain. Consuming too much alcohol or caffeine can further exacerbate the problem by causing rebound hyperexcitability and increasing anxiety.

Magnesium-rich foods include pumpkin seeds, dark chocolate, cashews, spinach, and black beans. During times of physical or psychological stress such as prolonged fasting, sleep deprivation, or intense exercise, our demand for magnesium may be higher than normal. Supplementation may sometimes be necessary to meet our daily requirements.

Used in conjunction, these strategies of affect labeling, physiological sigh, and magnesium replacement can help us to respond more rationally when provoked. Now, I’m not saying we need to be as Stoic as Spock or perfectly in control at all times, but implementing these simple tools can go a long way towards better understanding and more fruitful conversations. Next week, I’ll cover tips for more productive disagreements. Until then! 👋

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate, which means I may receive a small commissi…

Have you ever found yourself surprised by someone’s behavior? Perhaps a friend who had always shown you kindness betrayed you by disclosing private information. Maybe old classmates at a high school reunion felt unrecognizable from when you last saw them. Maybe you surprised yourself when you acted in a manner that was out of character.

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover

We often make assumptions about other people, but human judgment is extremely prone to fundamental attribution error, the tendency to ascribe traits to individuals based on behaviors we observe.

If someone donates to a food bank, we may assume that person is generous. If someone with a stutter has trouble expressing themselves during a job interview, we might erroneously assume that person is incompetent in other areas. Conversely, excellence in one discipline is not always transferable.

Folklore suggests that human behavior should be relatively easy to predict. Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster writes in his book Explaining Social Behavior:

People are often assumed to have personality traits (introvert, timid, etc.) as well as virtues (honesty, courage, etc.) or vices (the seven deadly sins, etc.). In folk psychology, these features are assumed to be stable over time and across situations. Proverbs in all languages testify to this assumption. “Who tells one lie will tell a hundred.” “Who lies also steals.” “Who steals an egg will steal an ox.” “Who keeps faith in small matters, does so in large ones.” “Who is caught red-handed once will always be distrusted.” If folk psychology is right, predicting and explaining behavior should be easy.

This assumption of stable character traits also underlies the aphorism, “Once a cheater, always a cheater.” But singular actions cannot be used to determine character. Personality is an evolving, fluid entity, not a concrete constant. If we develop expectations of people based solely on what we observe, we are working with limited information and setting ourselves up for disappointment.

Turn, Turn, Turn

If past behavior isn’t a good predictor, then what is? Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt might provide a possible answer. The central tenet of the book is that if you understand someone’s incentives, you can predict their behavior.

We can see this playing out on the world stage. Why would a large democracy like India refuse to take a stand against the atrocities committed in Ukraine? For the very same reason that China is maintaining its diplomacy.

India’s allegiance with Russia stems back to the 1950s when the Soviet Union supported Indian sovereignty over the disputed territory of Kashmir. China’s leader seeks a future in which Taiwan is reunited with the motherland and would expect Russia's support should that goal be accomplished by means of military invasion. Neither country wants to anger an ally, so both are maintaining silence out of convenience.

The same principle of incentivization applies to individuals, as personality traits are highly context-dependent. Your personality around your boss on a Monday morning is likely different than your behavior on a Friday night spent with your close friends. Elster explains, “Behavior is often no more stable than the situations that shape it.”

He describes a social psychology experiment in which theology students were asked to prepare for a brief presentation in a nearby building. Half the group was told to discuss the Good Samaritan parable while the other half was assigned a neutral topic. Each group was further subdivided into two more where half believed they were late and half were told they had plenty of time.

On their way to the other building, subjects came upon a man in apparent distress. Among students who believed they were late, only 10 percent offered assistance, but in the other group, 63 percent tried to help. In other words, preparing a talk about the Good Samaritan did not make students more likely to behave like one.

All the students involved in the experiment considered themselves good people, but the desire to avoid the judgment of a crowd seemed to override goodwill instincts. We need to understand character as the result of specific interactions between people and situations. We should pay attention to the interplay between the situation, incentives, and the person instead of ascribing broad character traits.

Let me share a personal example. The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator discriminates between judging and perceiving personalities. As a scientist, I frequently evaluate the quality of evidence by making judgments about reproducibility, methods, and study design. But around people, I tend to adopt the role of a wallflower or “transparent eyeball” (to borrow from Emerson), inconspicuously making observations devoid of any attempt to parse the data or draw conclusions.

Metamorphosis

While personality certainly changes with situations, it also changes considerably across your lifespan. The longest-running personality study of all time, published in 2016 in the journal Psychology and Aging, found that personality undergoes profound transformations between the ages of 14 and 77.

The study began in 1950 with the recruitment of 1200 teenagers in Scotland, and teachers were asked to fill out surveys to assess their students on six distinct personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, conscientiousness, emotional stability, originality, and desire to excel.

Researchers then reduced these six characteristics into a single dimension, which they termed dependability. Six decades later, the participants evaluated themselves using the same personality inventory and also nominated a close friend or family member to do the same. Researchers found no significant stability of any of the measured characteristics over the 63-year period.

Several confounding variables limit the utility of this study. The people answering the questions differed between the two time points. Teachers tasked with evaluating their students may have been prone to fundamental attribution error, and individuals asked to evaluate themselves were likely subject to the reference-group effect, the tendency to measure ourselves against our peers.

An outgoing introvert who is more sociable than his other introverted friends might describe himself as an extrovert, but his judgment is relative to his circle rather than an objective measure. While the 2016 study had several limitations, one noteworthy trend emerges across studies: “The longer the interval between two assessments of personality, the weaker the relationship between the two tends to be.”

The idea that you can become a completely different person over the course of your life could be comforting or frightening depending on your perspective. But maybe we’re missing the point. Attempts to assign personality traits are restrictive in some ways. We’re all a lot of things, walking contradictions, messy, imperfect, beautiful amalgamations. Maybe Sara Bareilles captured it best in her song from the musical Waitress:

She's imperfect but she triesShe is good but she liesShe is hard on herselfShe is broken and won't ask for helpShe is messy but she's kindShe is lonely most of the timeShe is all of this mixed upAnd baked in a beautiful pieShe is gone but she used to be mine

Thanks for reading. Until next week! 👋

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As many of you may already be aware, a bill making Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent by November 2023 has already made its way through the Senate. The decision has been met with mixed emotions. Some argue that permanent standard time is the better option and some are simply happy to no longer have to change the clocks twice a year.

Arguments in favor of permanent standard time and more early morning light exposure include reduced disease risks, safer bus stop environments since kids won’t be waiting in the dark, and fewer traffic fatalities involving schoolchildren.

Permanent DST, on the other hand, finds a strong advocate in big business since longer daylight hours lead to more consumer spending. As far as potential health benefits go, some research suggests that later sunsets allow children to get more exercise.

Horacio de la Iglesia, a neuroscientist who studies biological clocks at the University of Washington, believes that the attempt to make DST permanent will likely fail, citing the precedent of January 1974 when the United States implemented permanent daylight saving amid a national energy crisis.

Within a week, school boards were flooded with complaints from parents that children were going to school in darkness. An experiment that was designed to last two years was instead terminated in a matter of months. Public support for DST plummeted from 79% in December 1973 to 42% in February 1974.

Iglesia argues that sleep disruption hits adolescents especially hard since they naturally have an advanced cycle. Teenagers don’t begin to secrete melatonin until much later in the evening (around 11 p.m.) compared to adults. For this reason, many advocacy groups have historically proposed delayed start times for middle and high school students. In addition, cortisol regulation across the board is resistant to changes in clock time with daylight saving.

Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too?

The diversity of opinions concerning DST can teach us a lot about the art of negotiation. How, you might ask? Let me explain.

A successful negotiation has three defining characteristics:

* Envy-free: neither party would willingly trade their share for the other share

* Equitable: neither party feels shortchanged since both shares are of equal value

* Efficient: resources have been divided in a way to maximize utility

Let’s consider a simplified example—dividing a cake in half between two minions, Kevin and Bob. There is a single knife position that Kevin would consider a 50/50 split and another knife position that Bob would consider a 50/50 split. If the knife positions are the same, simply cut the cake there. If not, start sliding both knives toward each other at the same speed until they meet. This point is the ideal split.

The solution is envy-free since neither Kevin nor Bob prefer the other person’s piece and equitable since both pieces have the same perceived value. The arrangement is also efficient in the sense that one party would be worse off if the knife were moved to a different position.

If we consider the more complex issue of choosing one time standard to adhere to as a nation, the above approach obviously wouldn’t work, but different negotiation tactics have different strengths and weaknesses.

The “I cut, you choose” method, sometimes known as the shotgun clause in legal vernacular, is oftentimes envy-free but not equitable or efficient. If we return to the cake analogy, this approach means that if Kevin cuts the cake, Bob gets to choose which piece he wants. Kevin is incentivized to make both pieces as even as possible since he doesn’t know which piece he will end up with.

But Bob has a distinct advantage as the chooser since he may value one piece more than the other, allowing him to walk away with more than what he considers half. In this way, the shotgun clause isn’t equitable. Moreover, the division may not suit each person’s preferences. Imagine that the cake is half vanilla and half chocolate, and Kevin prefers vanilla while Bob prefers chocolate.

The optimal solution would be for Kevin to receive the vanilla half and Bob the chocolate half. But unless Kevin is aware of Bob’s preferences, he will be sure to include equal amounts of vanilla and chocolate in each piece. In other words, the division isn’t efficient.

A Matter of Time

How do these concepts relate to the legislation at hand? The effects of DST on sunrise time are not consistent across the country. Cities closer to the western boundary of their respective time zones experience later sunrises compared to those on the eastern border.

Switching to permanent DST would be most harmful to service industry workers, minority groups, and individuals with lower income status, many of whom may have to commute in the dark. From this point of view, the Sunshine Protection Act could be considered a “tragedy of the commons,” a situation where certain users act independently according to self-interest and contrary to the common good of all users.

When it comes to choosing a time standard, an envy-free solution is not possible. Whichever option we settle on, permanent standard time or permanent DST, one group will feel slighted.

Unless states depart from the established standard (as Hawaii and most of Arizona have done for decades), an equitable solution isn’t possible either. However, we can allow social welfare to dictate the most efficient solution, aiming to maximize the number of days with reasonable sunrise and sunset times across all localities.

Depending on whether sunrise or sunset times are given priority, the optimal solution will change. Science suggests that sunrise times should receive priority since early morning sunlight exposure synchronizes the master circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the brain with all the other peripheral circadian clocks in our bodies.

Under permanent daylight saving time, the average number of days with sunrises after 7 a.m. would increase from 146 under our current system to 190, with many of the country’s most populous metro areas, including Atlanta, Miami, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake City, seeing well over 200 days with sunrises after 7 a.m. each year.

If we define the latest reasonable sunrise time as 7:00 a.m. and the earliest reasonable sunset time as 6:00 p.m. and sunrise times matter significantly more as sleep experts suggest, switching to permanent standard time is optimal for nearly all cities except those that hug the eastern boundary of their respective time zones.

If sunrise and sunset times are given equal importance, however, the picture becomes a little murkier. Most of the Mountain, Central, and Eastern time zones would benefit from permanent standard time while the Pacific time zone would be evenly split among the options of abolishing DST, always using DST, and keeping the status quo.

Given the circadian disruption, accompanying health risks, and disproportionate effect on the most vulnerable members of society, permanent DST would do more harm than good. A return to permanent standard time would likely be the best course of action for the vast majority of Americans. Envy-free? No. Equitable? Also no. Efficient? All signs point to yes.