Exploring the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior | Team: Host and Executive Editor Shankar Vedantam & Executive Producer @taranoelleboyle
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Right before a big moment, your palms sweat and your heart races. We read it as fear. But your body does the exact same thing when it's excited. Next time, try telling yourself: I'm getting ready. Same body, different story.
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When Rika Matsuda was seven, she crashed her bicycle at a park. A stranger stopped to help and made her an origami crane while they waited for her grandfather. Years later, she discovered a message hidden inside. hiddenbrain.org/unsunghero/r…
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What does extreme income inequality do to your body and mind? A lot more than you might realize. 🧵
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Extreme inequality also makes you more likely to make riskier, more impulsive financial decisions.
You bet on things you would never bet on if you felt secure.
You engage in risky gambling because, on a deep level, you feel driven to keep up.
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What you're chasing isn't just money. Your feelings about your financial status are powerfully shaped by the comparisons you make with other people—particularly those above you on the income ladder.
We see the people above us, and we feel the gap between them and us. The size of that gap shapes how we think, how we vote, how stressed we feel.
How has your place on the ladder shaped your life and your view of the world around you?
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“We began to look at the way people interpreted the bad events in their lives. And this opened up an enormous literature on learned optimism, and it basically showed that the people who became helpless in the laboratory believed the helplessness was permanent, pervasive, and typically their fault.”
This week, we talk to psychologist Martin Seligman about agency, optimism, and how the stories we tell about setbacks can shape how we recover from them.
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Why do some people act on the possibilities before them, while others come to believe that nothing they do will make a difference? Psychologist Martin Seligman describes his groundbreaking research on learned helplessness, and explains how optimism can help us rediscover our ability to change things for the better.
Listen and follow: open.spotify.com/episode/0F7…
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Why is it harder to think clearly when you're in the presence of someone who intimidates you?
Cornell psychologist Vanessa Bohns has spent her career studying the hidden influence we exert on others.
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When Bohns heard Ana's story, she recognized this vulnerability.
The person exerting influence may not even notice the effect they’re producing on the other person. The trainer next to Ana didn't appreciate his own weight on her thinking.
You probably don't feel the influence you exert either.
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Bohns’ research can explain what happened to Ana. It looks at what happens when one person makes a face-to-face request of another.
When the person making the request exerts pressure or is intimidating, the person on the other end of the ask may shift into panic mode.
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“I began to ask: What is it that gives some people the courage to transcend helplessness? And this was the turning point in my career.”
Do you have the power to change the course of your life? A half century ago, psychologist Martin Seligman became fascinated by how people answer this question. In this week’s episode, how a sense of agency shapes who we are—and who we become.
hiddenbrain.org/podcast/how-…
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For thousands of years of human history, marrying for love would have sounded absurd.
Marriage was about survival, land, and political alliances.
The idea that love should be the point of marriage is only a few hundred years old. 🧵
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Jane Austen was an English novelist who captured this shift.
In her novel Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy was expected to marry to his wealthy cousin. He chose Elizabeth Bennet instead. His aunt was outraged.
He was choosing a feeling over a financial arrangement.
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In a famous experiment, a capuchin monkey happily performs a task for a cucumber. Then it sees another monkey doing the same task and getting a grape.
The first monkey throws the cucumber back at the researcher.
It's been 40 million years since humans shared an ancestor with capuchin monkeys. But we're both wired for fairness. 🧵
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The monkey doesn't just refuse the cucumber. It hurls it back at the researcher.
Notice what happened. The cucumber didn't get worse. The monkey wasn't hungrier. Nothing about its situation changed.
Except one thing. It saw someone else get more.
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