Welcome to the Be Good Podcast,
where we explore the application of behavioral economics for good in order to nudge better business and better lives.
Hi and welcome to this episode of Be Good,
brought to you by BVA Nudge Consulting,
a global consultancy specializing in the application of behavioral science for successful behavior change.
Every month we get to speak with a leader in the field of behavioral science,
psychology and neuroscience in order to get to know more about them,
their work and its application to emerging issues.
My name is Eric Singler,
founder and CEO of BVA Nudge Consulting,
and with me is my colleague,
Suzanne Kirkendall,
CEO of BVA Nudge Consulting North America.
Hi,
Suzanne.
Hi,
Eric.
It is so great to be joining you today,
and I am truly honored to be introducing this episode's guest.
We're going to be speaking with an absolute giant of our field,
Professor Cass Sunstein.
Cass is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School,
where he founded and directs the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy.
From 2009 to 2012,
he was administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs,
where he pioneered the application of behavioral science to public policy in the United States.
As many of you know,
Cass is also the author of over 20 books,
including the worldwide bestsellers Nudge with Richard Thaler,
and in 2021,
the book Noise with professors Olivier Sibony and the late Daniel Kahneman,
who has sadly very recently passed away.
Today we're going to be speaking about Cass's latest book,
co-authored with Tali Sherritt,
professor of cognitive neuroscience at UCL and MIT,
called Look Again,
The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.
Cass,
welcome to our Be Good podcast.
Pleasure to be here.
Cass,
a big thank you for your participation.
We are,
as I was mentioning,
truly honored to have you as our guest.
It has been many years since we first met at your inaugural keynote for our Nudge in France conference at the
École Normale Supérieure.
I don't know if you remember,
Cass.
Since then,
you have kindly participated in this podcast twice already.
You are our most regular guest and you also delivered the highly appreciated keynote at our conference,
the Human Advantage Conference in 2022.
So it is with great personal pleasure and gratitude that we welcome you again.
And again,
a big thank you for giving us and our listeners some of your precious time again.
A great pleasure to be here and the honor is all mine.
I really am grateful to you.
Before discussing your new book,
I'd like to address a very sad topic,
which is the passing of Daniel Kahneman just last week,
the giant of our field with whom you were very close.
So can you tell us,
Cass,
from your perspective,
what Daniel Kahneman's contribution has been to behavioral science?
Well,
I think it's fair to say that Darwin contributed a fair bit to the theory of evolution.
And in thinking about...
physics,
Newton was pretty important to that.
Existentialism had something to do with Jean-Paul Sartre.
And
Kahneman is,
with respect to behavioral science,
like those people.
That is to say,
he's a giant and a founder is accurate,
but it's actually too small.
It's that his unbelievably fertile mind.
And his combination of breadth and depth is defining for behavioral science.
In fact,
the very term behavioral science as the one that organizes our efforts,
that comes from him.
There were various earlier efforts,
and he thought that was the best term.
But the idea of loss aversion,
the idea of heuristics and biases,
the contemporary study of well-being,
the distinction between bias and noise,
work on focusing illusion and adaptation,
all this and
10,001 other things came from that single person.
Why and how he will continue to inspire many researchers worldwide.
No question about that.
So a little like,
I think,
Darwin,
the fertility of his thought and the kind of seeds he planted for other people to help grow into trees and forests and planets in some cases.
This we're kind of seeing right now.
So there's extraordinary work on.
The use of heuristics in medicine and law,
in fact,
unpublished work that is pathbreaking,
and it's founded really on work that
Kahneman did with Tversky,
some of his work on well-being,
what makes people happy,
what makes them satisfied.
what makes them suffer,
whether money's really important,
what else is important.
People don't like commuting,
by the way.
These are things that
Danny, as everyone called him,
did the defining work on.
And I think he would be the first to say that future generations and current young people or active people who aren't so young are going to supersede his work.
That's what he hoped for.
But superseding of work is often because one is standing on the shoulders of a particular giant.
One quality that struck me about Daniel Kahneman is his ability to criticize his own work.
For instance,
some findings from his research published in Thinking Fast and Slow were not replicated in subsequent experiments.
And Kahneman didn't seek to criticize the new results,
but rather to understand them and adjust his own conclusions.
Can you tell us more about this?
Remarkable and very rare quality.
Okay,
so I'm laughing because there's,
let's call it the sanitized version and then the less sanitized version.
So let's start with,
they're both kind of suitable for children,
but we'll start with the sanitized version,
which is that for him,
the truth is what he cared about.
This is actually true.
And so that if he found that something he did.
wasn't right,
either wasn't quite right,
or if it was wrong,
he would be somewhere between welcoming and thrilled to try to figure out what was right.
And at some points,
he said,
I have no sunk costs.
So if he did a lot of work,
and it turned out that it was a failure or a catastrophe,
throwing it away was completely fine.
And if someone found or if he found that his own work wasn't right.
That was something he was completely good with.
The less sanitized version,
I can tell you,
as a frequent collaborator of his,
was he would be brutally critical of the work of his co-authors,
and he was brutally more critical of the work of himself.
So to work with him on a project in retrospect,
it's a miracle that it got published.
because he would spend so much time explaining to himself and his co-author or co-authors why what we were doing was on the wrong track or completely hopeless.
The number of times he would say,
this is terrible.
I don't know how we could have made such an awful mistake in something that we would work on for a number of months that was both
the most fun part of the process,
and the most dandy part of the process.
So there's the openness to new ideas,
let's call that the sanitized version,
and there's also the unlimited capacity for self-criticism.
which was,
I think,
part of why he liked doing academic work,
really.
For some people to be so critical of oneself would be painful.
But for him,
it was,
oh,
that was wrong.
And at one point,
Olivier Siboney,
one of our co-authors on
Noise, it was three of us,
said to Danny,
we're just going around in circles with the aspiration.
And Danny said,
no,
it's a spiral.
It's going up.
It's a spiral.
And they were both right.
Well,
thank you for sharing,
Cass.
We are sorry for the loss of your friend and colleague,
not just a giant in the field.
But yeah,
glad we could be here to learn a little bit more.
So we'd now love to speak about your recent book,
Look Again,
The Power of Noticing What Was Always There,
which was just published a month ago.
And this book is all about habituation.
Can you please first describe the concept of habituation for our listeners?
Okay,
the basic idea is diminishing sensitivity to a stimulus.
So if you go in a room and there's a bad smell in the room,
let's say it's smoke or something you don't like,
in the first seconds and minutes it's going to be a little overwhelming and you're going to think,
I kind of have to leave this room.
After some number of minutes,
maybe 20 or 30,
you won't even smell the smell anymore.
Most people won't.
The neurons,
the olfactory neurons will say,
it's fine,
there's no smell.
If you go in the ocean and the water's really cold,
in the first seconds you'll think,
how can I have made this ridiculous decision to swim in this freezing water?
But after a while,
you'll say to your friends,
come on in,
the water's fine.
And it won't be because you're mean or mischievous.
And because the water really will be fine,
you'll get used to the cold.
This is true for hot water in a hot shower or bath.
It's true for encountering things that are new and fantastic,
like you're on vacation.
The first period is off the charts great.
But after you've been on a great vacation,
let's say even in Paris,
after a few days,
the Parisness of Paris.
is less astonishing to you than it was on the first day or two.
And this is also true of terrible things.
So if you encounter some unkindness or,
let's say,
some terrible inefficiency at work,
and it's repeated,
the first encounter will be,
how can this possibly be true in the world?
And then after a week,
you'll think,
oh,
I guess that's what it's like.
So we show reduced sensitivity to things,
including misinformation,
including corruption,
including beauty,
including lying.
And before I hand off.
to Eric to discuss the content in detail.
Could you please tell us the one key learning that you want our audience to remember after our conversation?
If they remember nothing else,
what should they take away?
The dishabituation is a very great thing.
That's a mouthful,
but it means if you can find a way to get distance on things that are fantastic in your life,
to which you become habituated,
they will re-sparkle.
They will look
full of color and magnificence again,
and to dishabituate and see,
let's say,
a friendship or a partnership or a neighborhood or a job as if you were seeing it for the first time,
that's a great gift to yourself.
So absence does make the heart grow fonder.
Well,
absence or either real breaks or breaks that are in your head.
So a hero of our book is Julia Roberts,
the actor who,
in an interview in the
New York Times not terribly long ago,
said that her perfect day involved getting her kids ready for school,
making lunch for them,
having lunch with her husband.
And then she stopped herself and said,
this is boring.
But she said,
because of my job,
I'm an actor.
I go away for weeks on end.
I come back and it's surrounded by pixie dust.
It re-sparkles.
So
I'd say absence makes the heart go fonder is got a lot.
There's a lot in that sentence,
but we can take it to mean that if you can dishabituate from something,
let's say I'm looking out at the street as I'm talking to you and I get to live in a neighborhood that has trees.
Kind of great.
First day I looked out on the neighborhood,
I thought,
my gosh,
this is fantastic.
Most of the time I just think,
oh,
those are trees.
But since we're talking about this,
I'm a little bit thrilled by the trees I'm looking at.
And if you're in,
let's say,
a workplace where the people are basically nice and good,
to think of that not as gray background smells that you don't notice,
but instead something that's kind of,
how did I get so lucky?
Then there's the pixie dust again.
Cass,
I'd like to dive in by discussing a topic that interests,
I think,
each of us,
which is happiness.
First,
could you tell us,
according to research,
what are the most important factors for happiness?
promoting our happiness.
Well,
let's back up a little bit and talk about what happiness might mean.
And if we kind of broaden the view screen,
there are three things that people care about.
One is happiness in,
let's say,
ordinary language,
French or English or Chinese or German,
where...
The question is,
are you smiling?
Are you frustrated?
Are you bored?
Are you feeling delighted and joyful?
Do you want to continue with what you're doing right now?
Do you want to keep at it?
That's one thing people care about.
Another thing that is connected with the Aristotelian idea of eudaimonia is a sense of meaning or purpose in life.
So if you feel
I'm watching the best TV shows and.
Boy,
am I laughing.
You might think my life isn't very meaningful.
It's kind of TV,
TV,
TV.
And you might think that happiness in the more Aristotelian sense involves a sense of meaning or purpose.
And people will sacrifice smiles and laughter for the sake of meaning and purpose and vice versa.
A more recent work suggests that there's a third thing that's missed in the happiness meaning duo,
and that's.
psychological richness.
So if you have variety in your life,
if you,
let's say,
have a job you really like,
but also a hobby or a job you really like that has like five different faces,
so there are different things you do in your job,
or there's a job you really like,
and then you also have another job on the side that's very different and really cool,
then you come back to your main job.
looks amazing.
People like that.
And people will sacrifice happiness and meaning for the sake of psychological richness.
And I think what we want to say about that is that meaning gets old.
If you spend 10 years as a cancer researcher,
the first year you might think,
I get to be a cancer researcher.
But by year 10,
it just doesn't have the same internal surprise.
signal that it did.
And the same is true of things that make you smile and laugh.
The surprise signal goes away.
And listening to Taylor Swift over and over again,
and I choose her because she's my favorite,
even Taylor Swift over and over again makes one less happy than Taylor Swift,
let's say,
with breaks.
So variety is really important,
psychological richness,
because by definition,
you don't get used to what's changing.
Okay,
in terms of the ingredients,
of happiness.
This is a very complicated story.
We have to distinguish between people's sense of whether they're satisfied with their lives and their sense of whether they're moment by moment happy.
One is called the valued of well-being and the other is called experienced well-being.
It might be that you're a cancer researcher and you're really satisfied with your life,
but you're not enjoying it moment to moment very much,
or it might be that you
are a comedian,
let's say,
and maybe some comedians feel this is really delightful and happy all the time,
but maybe not as meaningful as some other lines of work.
Forgive me,
comedians.
I admire you all.
In terms of things that make people happy,
social relationships that are good and both meaningful and smile-producing,
this isn't exactly new.
But that's kind of important.
Money,
this is a little more fun,
I think,
because it's a little terrible to say.
Money is important.
So at least in countries where this is studied,
people with more money are happier.
Not like a ton happier,
but happier.
And one reason is the stresses associated with poverty are numerous,
and they can be reduced a fair bit with money.
and if you are poor and kind of inclined to be unhappy then your ability to get help is extremely limited people really enjoy this is an adult program as of now people
really enjoy romance that's not a surprise but that's kind of the prize winner of what people enjoy a lot people don't really enjoy very much taking care of little cats
The data suggests that that's tough.
for women,
by the way.
Now,
it may be the most meaningful thing,
and they wouldn't wish it away for anything,
but people aren't having a lot of fun taking care of little kids.
Being on social media tends not to be a prize winner for people's experience,
well-being.
People going to an event with people they really like,
spending time with them,
that's a big plus.
Cass,
could you explain why the concept of habituation plays such an important role in happiness?
Yes.
So the idea of habituation in the last 30 years of behavioral work has taken a backseat,
and
I think it belongs in the cockpit.
So suppose you are,
well,
let's talk about midlife crisis,
shall we?
Why is it that all around the world people have a midlife crisis?
Here's,
I think,
an informed hunch.
that if you're in your
20s or
30s, anything can happen.
You might fall in love tomorrow.
You might find a new career path that's going to fundamentally alter your life.
You might have your heart broken.
You might completely end up doing something that you had no idea you would do.
If you're in your
50s and
60s, the likelihood of any of those things happening is really low.
So people might have a relationship they're very content with,
a job that's very solid,
a living situation that's secure enough.
And so they don't have instability.
But it's a little like some old work actually from Europe.
showing that if you're looking at a cloud of colors and there's a fixation thing in the middle and you're asked to stare at it,
the colors all start to turn gray.
It's because if you don't move your head and you just stare at a thing that has lots of colors,
your brain stops registering the fact of colors.
It's just gray.
So the midlife crisis is associated with everything's gray.
and that is a product of habituation.
People have habituated to the various good things,
and they don't get energy or a sense of excitement from them,
and that can be potentially a crisis.
So that's one example.
Here's another example from my co-author,
Tali Sharath's laboratory.
If you give people an incentive to lie,
they will lie.
They will lie to a stranger to make money.
When they start lying,
the amygdala in the brain is firing.
It's saying a very loud,
no,
don't lie.
That's wrong.
But as the day goes on,
as the lies continue,
the amygdala gets quieter and quieter,
so much so that the amygdala doesn't say aloud no anymore.
It says a kind of,
okay,
I guess that's what we do.
So one's own immorality over time.
for those who have one or another form of immorality,
is a product of habituation.
I had a friend a number of years ago,
I didn't really understand this,
who cheated on his taxes.
That itself was a little surprising,
more than surprising.
But more surprising was he talked about it a lot.
And he would talk about how he cheated on his taxes and,
you know,
with an implicit,
you do too,
don't you?
And
I didn't and don't.
And his habituation to his own tax cheating was such that he didn't even think it was something that he should be hesitant to disclose to others.
And if we think in business about corruption or various forms of illegality,
it often becomes possible because people's amygdala stops fine.
They habituate to it.
And with respect,
I'll give one more example.
With respect to misinformation,
there's something called the illusory truth effect,
where if you hear a falsehood repeated a few times,
you habituate to it.
There's no surprise signal in the brain,
so you tend to believe it.
It's a very powerful effect in life and in the laboratory.
If you hear twice or three times something that's false,
it's really easy to process.
So if you say something like...
a shrimp's heart is in its head.
I actually believe that to be true,
maybe because I've heard it a few times.
A shrimp's heart is in its head.
Then people,
having heard it a couple of times,
start to think it's true.
It's just easy to process.
Where you hear it first time and you think,
no,
that can't be right.
A heart and a head.
And there's something kind of evolutionarily sensible in believing to be true things you've heard a number of times.
probably that's not the worst heuristic,
but it can mean that habituation leads to a belief in something that's not true at all.
You spoke about variety and the importance of variety and diversity.
There is something else which fills the lips of many people around the world,
which is the use of social media.
What do we know about the impact of social media use on our well-being?
Is there an optimal level of social media usage?
I think the simplest answer is less for most people.
So here's some data we have.
Actually,
two streams of data that bear on this question.
One is people were asked,
how much would you have to be paid to be off Facebook for a month?
And a number of people said,
roughly $100,
100 pounds,
100 euros.
And of a large population who said that,
half were told,
okay,
we're going to give you the money,
you're off for the month.
And the other half were told,
sorry,
you're not going to get the money,
you stay on for a month,
but we're going to ask you a battery of questions in that month.
And what happened was that
The experimenters measured how people who were off for the month were doing compared to people who stayed on for a month.
Large sample and randomized so you could tell what being off for a month did for the people.
Turns out that the people who were off Facebook for a month were
A. More satisfied with their lives
B.
Happier
C,
less anxious,
and D,
less depressed.
So along every dimension of well-being,
that was a really good month.
Okay,
here's a second stream of data,
which I find very,
very cool.
People,
young people were asked,
how much would you have to be paid to be off
Instagram or TikTok for the next month?
and consistent with the data I just gave,
people said,
real money,
$50,
$60,
50 euros,
60 euros,
you're going to have to pay me a good chunk of money to get me off.
Then people were asked,
well,
the same people were asked,
how much would you have to be paid to be off TikTok or Instagram if everyone in your community was off TikTok or Instagram?
And the answer to that question was,
oh,
in that case,
I'll pay you.
I said,
if everyone I know is going to be off TikTok,
then I'll pay you.
You don't have to pay me,
which suggests that young people don't want to be on
Instagram or TikTok in very large numbers,
at least.
But they will demand a lot of money to be off because they don't want to be left off a network.
from which other people are,
what's the right word,
benefiting or something.
So if you put these two pieces of work together,
we know first that being involved in social media less produces an uptick in well-being.
And we know that many young people at least are aware of this in the sense that they would pay real money to get a situation in which everyone's off.
that must be because they think it's not a very good thing for them.
Habituation doesn't just play a major role for our happiness,
it also has a very large impact on another important thing,
which is our creativity.
So could you explain the relationship between habituation and creativity and how we can use that to our advantage?
Let's talk about two people,
shall we,
to anchor it.
One is Dick Thaler,
my co-author and the founder of
Modern Behavioral Science.
You look at how he got into behavioral economics.
Well,
I think the more precise term is how he invented behavioral economics.
There wasn't any such before him.
He was a graduate student who wasn't especially good at math.
And so his prospects in regular economics were very limited.
But he was iconoclastic and he liked breaking rules.
Going back to his childhood,
he liked changing the rules of the game.
And this guy is not a habituating kind of a guy.
He's a little bit of a disabituation entrepreneur,
let's call it.
And he discovered some psychological findings from Kahneman and Tversky,
and they electrified him.
And while many economists,
in fact,
all economists at first regarded this as,
you know,
somewhere between an interesting sideshow and absurd,
he thought,
oh.
Oh,
people use heuristics to make probability judgments,
and that leads to biases.
And oh,
people are averse to losses.
And maybe that explains a lot of things about markets and consumer behavior.
And what he did,
because he was not a habituating type,
was he got really creative.
He didn't go down the regular streams.
He thought,
what is there on another stream that I can introduce?
Now,
the Dick Thaler of
Olympic athletic competition is also called Dick.
His name is Dick Fosbury.
You may know the name.
He invented something called the Fosbury flop,
which is a way of doing the high jump that basically everyone does now.
But when he invented it,
it was called the Fosbury flop because it was a new way of jumping.
It's a way of running to the high jump and going over the bar that no one had done before.
And people originally thought this is extremely absurd,
this way of jumping.
And they stopped laughing so much when he made the United States Olympic team.
He wasn't a particularly amazing athlete,
by the way,
but he discovered a new way of jumping.
He won the
Olympic, he won the,
made the U.S.
Olympic team.
And when he won the
Olympic gold medal and set the Olympic record,
then people weren't laughing anymore.
They thought the Fosbury flop,
maybe that's the way to jump.
and the reason he could do this,
and he was like Dick Thaler,
was A,
he wasn't that great an athlete,
like Thaler wasn't that great an economist,
and B,
he had some outside knowledge.
He was an engineer,
so he knew something about engineering,
which was relevant to his redesign,
let's say,
of how to do the high jump,
and that meant he wasn't habituated to the old ways.
It turns out that if you...
stand up and walk around a little bit,
the data is suggestive that you will be more creative for approximately six minutes,
only six minutes,
but you'll be more creative.
And that's because the standing up and walking around dishabituates you and the paths along which your mind had been going start getting jarred a little bit.
So innovation and creativity is often a product of uh
some form of separation between self and the paths one had formerly been on.
I can say I noticed when I was working for President Obama,
I worked for four years,
by the end of my fourth year,
I was really...
competent at managing my job.
I wasn't unfamiliar with it,
so I could really know what to do.
I knew what all the acronyms meant.
CEQ,
DPC,
NEC,
NSC.
That was like,
at the beginning,
I had no idea what those were,
and then I know what they were and how to manage them,
but I was not creative anymore.
I didn't have fresh ideas.
And that's because after four years,
I was just on paths.
And if you come into a new job or separate yourself from your current job for a while and then go back,
maybe just because you take a three-week vacation,
the potential for discovering a new Fosbury flop becomes a lot higher.
Maybe we could speak about risk habituation,
Cass,
which is,
according to your definition,
the tendency to perceive a behaviour as less and less risky the more you engage with it.
It seems that there are benefits and drawbacks to habituation to risk.
Could you tell us more about this?
Yes.
My wife grew up in Ireland and
I go to Ireland with her every year,
which means we have to drive on the wrong side of the road.
So
I have to switch.
And
I remember thinking for the first maybe three years of driving in Ireland.
I'm going to crash for sure because everything's backwards.
But I didn't crash at all.
In fact,
I was an extremely safe driver.
And there's evidence that if,
I think this happened in Sweden,
that there was a switch from driving one side of the road to the other side of the road.
On a day everyone was switched and accidents were anticipated by many,
a skyrocket.
In fact,
it went way down.
And the reason it went way down is that if you're a driver,
you're habituated.
If you're lucky,
you're
used to just driving in your normal way and not crashing and everything's fine and easy,
you're not really on the alert anymore.
And this is true for risk habituation in general,
where if you're engaged in some risky job,
let's say you're a construction worker after you've been doing it for a while,
you're not alert to the dangers and you're probably pretty safe.
But because there isn't a surprise signal firing in your head,
Saying,
I'm on a construction site now and something can go sour,
maybe six weeks in,
that's when you're especially in danger,
not because circumstances are worse,
but because your head is less alert to the fact that you're on a construction site.
for athletes engaged in,
let's say,
some risky competition,
if you've been doing it a lot,
you will probably be inattentive to the dangers that you face.
And the reason is that none of them has come to fruition.
Whereas if you're in a risky athletic competition,
let's say boxing or something,
the first time you're in it for real,
the surprise signal is firing and you are really trying to protect yourself.
I would like also to talk about something
I find very interesting,
which is the link between tyranny and habituation.
Can you explain how it is possible to habituate to tyranny?
Okay,
so let's,
shall we go right there?
Let's talk about Hitler,
shall we?
So...
France and America,
we can talk about Hitler and maybe Germany too,
with special alertness to the horror that Hitler inflicted on his own country.
So we did for the book a lot of work on the rise of fascism.
And one thing that emerged is that
Hitler wasn't history's Hitler immediately.
He wasn't,
with respect to
Jews and others,
he wasn't history's Hitler in his first six months.
And what people there described.
uh was um things happening slowly now from the standpoint of now the period between let's say hitler's um rise to power and the end of world war ii seems like a blink of an eye but in real time it wasn't that at all it was it was slow and
one person there said in the
1950s you know this was the gradual habituation of the people that's actually the words he used
And he said it was like a field of corn where it's growing slowly and you don't notice it until it's over your head.
And think a bit,
if you would,
of
Italy or the French Revolution even,
where things got terrible.
Italy,
I'm talking under Mussolini,
and
I defer to others on the specifics of the French Revolution,
but the reign of terror wasn't like it was instant.
Maybe it was faster than some things,
but there's a day when it's bad,
and then it's...
worse than bad,
and then it's very,
very bad,
and then all hell breaks loose.
And that's some version of that,
that that is the rise of Nazism,
and that's how it was experienced by
Germans observing it,
where if you'd gone from
Hitler's being chancellor to Hitler at his worst in two months.
I think the people would have stood for it,
would have been tolerable.
But something else happened.
And if you look at things that aren't ideal,
let's say in North America and Europe right now,
you can fill the blank in as you wish.
The fact is that there's a gradual something.
Let's profoundly hope it's not going to become terrible,
but there's a gradual something that is of a concern.
For you,
the future of disabituation lies in what you call experimenting in living.
Could you explain this?
Yes.
So the two heroes of the book are
Julia Roberts and John Stuart Mill.
And
Bill is a great theorist of dishabituation.
And what he thought is experiments of living,
he called them,
let's use the more semantically straightforward experiments in living,
are essential.
Where you see people doing things that are really different.
It might be you live in,
let's say,
Italy and then you visit France.
Canada,
and you see something that's really different.
Or it might be that you're 19 years old and you're in a family where things seem a certain way,
and then you go off to camp or go off to college,
and there are people who just are experimenting with different things.
It might be different.
You know,
ways of spending a day.
It might be different kinds of work.
It might be different ways of thinking about the universe and the experiments that you're observing.
make maybe what you've been doing seem incredibly great and new,
or maybe make what you've been doing seem a little tired and uninventive.
And if you think about things at work and in business that are fantastic,
maybe,
you know,
take your pick of a business that's extremely creative,
either the people are engaging in experiments and living,
or they've learned from someone else.
Why don't we try that?
And I know in government,
I've had a lot of experience with government,
experiments are often the key to just being better at being in government.
And because of travel and the Internet and coming virtual reality,
the potential for us to dishabituate and discover what's...
amazing but not appreciated in our own way of living,
or maybe capable of being made amazing by transferring something we learn from a day in Paris or a day in Berlin or a week in Singapore.
We can do that.
So Cass,
before we wrap up our conversation,
we would like to ask you for your perspective on one other topic,
which is a bit different from the topic of your book,
but also very important and very timely.
We'd love to hear your perspective on the important considerations in the ethics of artificial intelligence.
How nice that you ask.
I'm right now,
even today,
working on a book on this topic.
So let's talk about AI and consumers,
shall we?
AI should be able to know with great specificity what each of us is inclined to buy.
So let's talk about consumers.
So if there's a new book on behavioral science,
chances are I'm going to buy it.
And tragically,
there are people in the world who would have no interest in such books.
And there's...
a capacity for AI to know.
And AI could also charge me a fair bit for such books,
and I'll say that's completely fine.
And other people,
you're going to have to charge them very little to get them even willing to consider buying such books.
So let's say tastes and intensity of tastes,
AI will know,
already knows,
much better than ever before.
Okay,
if people are rational and free from behavioral biases,
this is a beautiful world in which
consumers are going to be better off,
the economy is going to be better off,
it's going to be phenomenal.
But if people are imperfectly informed and subject to behavioral biases,
let's say unrealistic optimism or present bias,
then AI will know that.
It'll know you are unrealistically optimistic.
You are focused on today and tomorrow.
I can use that to get you to buy what I want.
So people who are prone to identify viable biases will be more vulnerable than ever before to
AI, let's say,
exploitation or manipulation.
And as Tom Hanks said when he was an astronaut,
or maybe it was in a movie,
Houston,
we have a problem.
And
Europe, North America,
Asia,
Africa.
help,
help Houston.
Yeah,
well,
we'll definitely have to have you back to hear about that book when it's ready.
But for today,
we want to say a huge thank you for joining us today,
Cass.
This is an amazing conversation.
For our listeners who want to find out more about you and your work,
where would you like them to go?
Well,
there are two answers.
One,
which is politically incorrect,
is amazon.com.
Some people don't like Amazon so much,
but I have books,
including Look Again there.
There's this amazing thing called the Social Science Research Network.
And if you put in my name,
you'll find more papers than I should have written.
Perfect.
Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot,
Cass.
It was a fantastic conversation again.
Thank you.
I really enjoyed it.
Amazing questions.
Great to see you also,
Eric.
Be Good,
a podcast by the BVA Nudge Unit.