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Episode 43: Stephanie Preston: Our Attachment to Stuff
36 Plays2 years ago
Stephanie Preston (University of Michigan) returns to the show to talk about her latest research. Why do we hoard stuff? And how can we get people to care about the consequences of all that stuff on the environment? Her research has taken her from the strategies that some rats use to hide seeds (some hide in lots of small caches, while others hoard in a single location), to the cognitive/neural/emotional mechanisms of human beings with hoarding disorder. People tend to have emotional attachments to the stuff they own, and although most of us have more stuff than we need, for those with hoarding disorder it can be overwhelming.
In other recent research, Stephanie and her colleagues found individual differences in how connected people felt to the environment -- impassive people were less likely to be concerned about the destructive effects on the environment, and that politically conservative people tended to be more impassive.
Paper discussed:
Bickel, L. A., & Preston, S. D. (2022). Environmental impassivity: Blunted emotionality undermines concern for the environment. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001072
Special Guest: Stephanie Preston.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction of Dr. Stephanie Preston
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy. And today we have on as a guest, Dr. Stephanie Preston.
Emotion, Decision-Making, and Consumer Habits
00:00:18
Speaker
You may remember Stephanie from episode seven, where she talked about heroism and heroic acts.
00:00:25
Speaker
We are excited to have her back today. She's going to be talking a little bit about some of her recent work as we think about the holiday season and the kinds of things that we consume and the impacts they might have on the environment. Stephanie studies
From Animal Hoarding to Human Behavior
00:00:39
Speaker
the relation between emotion and decision making. She works at the University of Michigan, where she's a professor in the psychology department. So welcome to the show. Great to have you back again. Thanks so much for having me, guys.
00:00:52
Speaker
First, maybe we want to talk about how you got into some of this research and what made you think about patterns of acquiring material goods and the way that people may become sometimes irrationally attached.
00:01:09
Speaker
That's a really good question and there's almost a multitude of answers to the question. But because I met you guys in graduate school, I think it sort of directly came out of my graduate research. I was in the bio psych area at Berkeley and I studied food storing animals. So animals like squirrels and kangaroo rats. And I was interested in how they make decisions, how to store the food.
00:01:37
Speaker
like the risk versus reward and the presence of competitors who might steal their caches, their memory constraints. And so how do they take in all these cues about the conditions in the environment and make a decision as to how to store food? Because there's different strategies. Animals don't all store food the same way and they can change
00:01:59
Speaker
in response to different conditions. So I studied that in the brain with the general idea that stress like physiological stress, as you might experience from food deprivation,
00:02:13
Speaker
will cause a shift in hoarding strategy or like having all your food stolen by a competitor is stressful and it causes a shift in food strategy. So when I left graduate school I was kind of interested in shifting into humans because that was when fMRI was becoming popular and I thought well that would be really great if I could
00:02:35
Speaker
You know, look into the brain of people while they're doing something and I don't even have to kill them. And that sounded really promising direction for this kind of research. So at the University of Iowa in the hospital and neurology, they actually studied patients that have frontal lobe damage to the brain.
Understanding the Endowment Effect
00:02:56
Speaker
from a variety of reasons. And those patients sometimes exhibit compulsive hoarding. So like somebody who wasn't a hoarder before the brain damage becomes one after the damage. So they were studying the role of the orbital frontal cortex in this process of
00:03:16
Speaker
disinhibiting a hoarding tendency. And at the same time, they studied, you know, frontal patients and people with frontal temporal dementia, they often have empathy impairments. So in both cases, you have this kind of emotional dysregulation that causes a behavioral change.
00:03:35
Speaker
that really alters the structure of our behavior in ways that can be alarming or distressing. So I became really interested in the neurobiological basis of these kinds of behaviors that are informed by emotion. And okay, so you started out
00:03:53
Speaker
working with kangaroo rats, and I think it was, was it Merriam's kangaroo rats? If I'm... Wow, that's a very good memory. Yes, they are the food-storing variety. And they have kinds that don't scatter hoard food, like bigger ones that can just protect, but the Merriams are really good scatter hoarders with the exceptional hippocampal memory for the locations in space. So they have to store
Stress and Security in Hoarding
00:04:18
Speaker
at all different kinds of locations, little caches of seeds and the
00:04:23
Speaker
hoarders, what is it, larder hoarders, store in one big pile, right? Yeah, you can kind of imagine it like, you know, a dominant bully and a weakling, you know, like, the Miriams is really small, and a larder hoarding animal would be a bigger one. And so a larder hoarding animal, if you came into their den under the ground in like a burrow,
00:04:45
Speaker
And you said, I'm here to take all your food. They'd fight you for it and win. So they can just keep all the food right behind them in the den and hang out there and protect it actively. Whereas the smaller species, if somebody enters the den, they're too small really to fight back successfully. So they have evolved these memory structures
00:05:06
Speaker
that are even seasonally dependent. There's great plasticity in the system. They can remember all of these different locations all over the desert basin floor where they might put five seeds here, five seeds five yards away, and then they live off of those deposits for the rest of the year because it only rains a few times a year where they live. When you were doing this research, were you thinking of
00:05:34
Speaker
possible applications to humans at the time and I'm thinking, you know, are there any sorts of, you know, evolutionary mechanisms that might be conserved? I don't know that. Well, no, is that, you know, is there a relation between the story about a bully or a weakling that might translate into the way that humans might carry out this behavior or what you think that's maybe a very separate kind of thing?
00:05:58
Speaker
No, that's a really awesome insight. And some of that I only have been researching recently. I mean, I think one reason I like the idea of studying hoarding because there is a real human analog and it turns out homolog to that behavior. So people hoard stuff.
00:06:19
Speaker
They don't think of themselves as hoarders because they're so used to this behavior and it's so normative that it's not really considered a category of behavior. But so like your bank account is a larger hoard of money.
00:06:34
Speaker
But if you felt like the bank was insecure, and somebody could get into your account and wipe it out, you would spread it around, right? You'd put like some in your mattress, some in a money market account, some, you know, with a friend, you know, so you would distribute it, you would scatter hoard it if you felt like your ability to control it
Emotional Dysregulation and Hoarding
00:06:55
Speaker
was at risk, and you're insecure about
00:06:57
Speaker
you know, the future of this stockpile or like your pantry is a stockpile or a larger hoard of food. But I'm sure you've heard about people who like keep food in other secret locations because they don't want people taking it. I've heard about that. I've heard about it. Yeah.
00:07:14
Speaker
Like they talk about the mom's hidden chocolates. Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. White and Halloween candy somewhere in their room. All of these behaviors you observe in people and financial markets and the way people diversify investments is a form of scatter hoarding. It's all analogous. What it turns out to be the case is it's not just similar looking.
00:07:37
Speaker
It's actually the same parts of the brain are mediating this process, and they're affected the same way by emotions like anxiety, security, fear, loss, reward, the possible reward you get from the item. It's really homologous, which means the same brain areas
00:08:04
Speaker
do the behavior in humans and other animals, including like rats, and not by accident because we evolved from a mammalian common ancestor.
Experiment with Pretzels and Bias
00:08:15
Speaker
That's what the homology means.
00:08:18
Speaker
And it seems like from some of your more recent research that an area of interest is this idea of loss aversion and whether someone is more attached to something that is already theirs or they put something into to create. It's not like perfectly symmetric that you're as interested in things that, you know, belong to someone else and things that belong to you.
00:08:44
Speaker
Yeah, that turns out to be a really powerful phenomenon. So it's not one of those things that's like the replication crisis. It's just the effect that someone got one time and it's going to go away. That is a really profound effect that you can get in repeated samples, even small samples. So
00:09:02
Speaker
In economics, they would refer to it as the endowment effect. So like Kahneman, Tversky, and Thaler worked this out originally,
Genetic and Environmental Factors in Hoarding
00:09:11
Speaker
where let's say I give Joe a mug, for example. And I say, Joe, this is your mug. And I say, Ralph, would you like to buy the mug off of Joe? And I say, like, you each set your price. Joe, how much would Ralph have to give you to take the mug from you?
00:09:32
Speaker
In your mind, hold up your mug that you actually are drinking out of. In your mind, how much money would Rolf have to give you to take the mug from you? And then Rolf decide how much money are you willing to pay for that mug? And I'm thinking, yeah. And I mean, there's something really intuitive about the idea that I'm not going to pay Joe
00:09:57
Speaker
as much for his mug as he really want. I mean, it's his mug. He's got whatever emotional attachment he has to it. He's probably going to want it. I'm quite attached to this mug. I definitely am. Like this is a thing that I'd use every day. You're going to have to pay a lot. I'm not attached to it. I'll give you two bucks.
00:10:16
Speaker
I was going to say 20
Consumerism and Emotional Attachment
00:10:17
Speaker
bucks. Exactly. That's a really large effect size. Normally, it's about double. Let's say, Ralph would say four and you would say eight. That's because in the experiment, it's not a mug you've actually taken home and drinking out of. It's one they just handed to you.
00:10:33
Speaker
It's like they call the mere ownership effect. You don't even have to have owned it for more than a couple minutes. And sometimes they don't even let them handle the mug. And sometimes I do it on the web. And I just say, pretend this is your mug. And no matter how you do it, you still get about a double in the price. That feeling of possession is so strong. It is. Yeah. One of the things I was thinking about that when
00:10:58
Speaker
tying it back to the previous story is like, would those like caching creatures have the same thing? Are they like as attached, they're more attached to their own nuts than, than like the, the, you know, what another critter across the way is, is, is hoarding. That's a good question. That's a good question. Do they like stolen, do they like stolen seeds better than the ones that they own chips over? Well, um,
00:11:26
Speaker
They will steal but I think like once they've put in the effort to figure out where it is then they assume it's safe and then they only go they go back to it occasionally and recash it just to keep the memory fresh, you know, but
00:11:58
Speaker
There's plenty of toys for everyone. But as soon as one kid picks up a toy, the other kid is like, I want that, you know, and then like fight breaks out amongst the toddlers as they're like grabbing for the same item, even though there's like hundreds of items that are like probably equally if not more desirable all around them. So we did
00:12:05
Speaker
I don't know the answer
Hoarding Behavior during the Pandemic
00:12:17
Speaker
like a study with little kids to see if we could demonstrate this like extra
00:12:23
Speaker
We call it like a reverse endowment effect, where you really wanted something you saw someone else holding or playing with. Like a FOMO effect. It's like, yeah, you're coveting something that they have. And you do kind of see it, it's really hard to disentangle from like
00:12:40
Speaker
the value of the item, but like you can kind of get both effects. But one thing I think is really interesting related to Ralph's earlier question is people with hoarding tendencies. So hoarding tendencies are in everybody, as I said before, only a small percentage of people have what they call hoarding disorder, which is the kind they have like TV show hoarders on A&E, you know, that's the dysregulated form.
00:13:08
Speaker
called hoarding disorder. But everyone has this continuous amount of hoarding tendencies. So if you look at hoarding tendencies or people with hoarding disorder, you can see that people who are more insecurely attached
00:13:23
Speaker
have stronger emotional attachments to their possessions. So it's kind of like the insecure individual feels more attached to the possessions because
Scarcity Mentality and Doomsday Prepping
00:13:35
Speaker
they're so worried about what will happen to them and they need them more for their emotional comfort as if they're a caregiver or a partner. And if you like something more and you need it more, you're also more scared if somebody will take it away.
00:13:52
Speaker
And we also did a study on people who have OCD and some have washing symptoms and some have hoarding symptoms. And the people with hoarding symptoms report more fears about like physical safety and security. Like if you give them these laundry lists of things you might possibly be scared of or anxious about, some of them are in common. You know, everyone's scared of rejection.
00:14:17
Speaker
or failure, but people with hoarding tendencies were much more likely to actually fear being attacked or someone breaking into their house. So they do actually feel more vulnerable like the Miriams would to the more dominant species.
00:14:37
Speaker
I mean, it's interesting. My father who passed away in the summer was cleaning out some of his stuff and realized that he was quite a hoarder of clothing, which is something I didn't know about him previously, but he had like a thousand jackets and hundreds of pair of shoes. Oh, really? Yeah.
00:15:00
Speaker
I'm so sorry for your loss. Did he keep it very organized? Like it wasn't noticeable? Yeah, everything was in the closets. He had a lot of closets of two houses and they were all completely full. My mom has like a few clothes, but it's mostly all my dad's stuff.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah,
Communal Connections and Resource Sharing
00:15:19
Speaker
a lot of domestic conflict, you know, because one person is sort of like slowly encroaching on all this space and the other person feels like, you know, they're being taken over by the other person's possessions. I was going to mention we did a really neat study recently where we tried to link the endowment effect and hoarding tendencies. So you can't like directly study hoarding tendencies as well with the mug task because you're asking people about money.
00:15:48
Speaker
And we've shown that people who are interested in hoarding stuff or food are not as concerned about money. So it's like confounding two different properties to use the mug task. So what we did is we had people come to the lab, just regular people, and they decorated pretzels. You might have seen this as a craft, even at Christmas time, where you can dip a pretzel in chocolate and then put sprinkles on it.
00:16:16
Speaker
You can do any kind of design you want, any kind of decorations you want. So we had people come to the lab and they made their own pretzels. And then in the scanner, in the fMRI scanner, they would see their pretzels or other people's pretzels. And then they could work to save the item in the second block. So first they see it and they're like, oh, that's mine or that's yours.
00:16:39
Speaker
Then they can tap as hard as they can, as fast as they can for a period of time to try and influence the outcome and save it from being thrown in the trash. And then they find out if it got thrown in the trash or saved. And people
Emotional Responses to Environmental Issues
00:16:53
Speaker
with higher hoarding tendencies, even non-patients,
00:16:57
Speaker
are much more prone to show this self-other bias, where everybody works harder, rates higher, pays more for pretzels they made than ones you made. Even though we both like the nicer ones better, you know, like if the decorating came out better, we will pay more for yours or mine to the degree that they look nice. But I'll always pay more for mine, you know, increasing with niceness.
00:17:27
Speaker
and people with hoarding tendencies have this effect exacerbated. And these same brain areas that are engaged in hoarding behavior and like decision and reward more generally are activated when people with hoarding tendencies
00:17:42
Speaker
really wanna get this pretzel, right? And the brain just like explodes with activation when you are working to save the item, even if you subtract out what kind of brain activity you need to motor tap at the same rate.
00:17:58
Speaker
you can subtract that out and see what's left. And there's still all of this like motor cognitive activation that includes the insula, which is this sort of affectively powerful region. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so that I, there's a lot there. I'm sorry. Viewers always say, yeah. Okay,
Political Influence on Environmentalism
00:18:23
Speaker
so trying to put together the pieces of what
00:18:27
Speaker
might push someone over from normal acquiring of objects or keeping things that are theirs at a reasonable level. You're talking about some brain activation that's correlated with this. How does that develop in a person? You mentioned
00:18:53
Speaker
It can be related to insecure attachment style of relating to parental figures. And I wonder if this is an explanation or what a full explanation of how this comes about. Can you think of it as a largely biological thing? Or is it something that has a lot more to do with environment that might be from seeing other people hoard, from other
00:19:20
Speaker
emotional, other emotional events that might cause this? Yeah, I think, you know, that's always kind of like the question that everybody wants to know. And I think the answer is always both. Right, right, right. Of course, there is some genetic component to something like hoarding disorder. But, but it wouldn't necessarily need to be specific to hoarding disorder, it could just be sort of like an emotion regulation.
00:19:46
Speaker
problem, but that's exacerbated of course by the environment you grew up in, right? And so when you feel insecurely attached, when you observe the people in your home valuing things over the relationships, when you feel insecure about people taking things or there's not enough to go around and you have to go into this like more active, you know, not so nonchalant mode, then
00:20:16
Speaker
it gets exacerbated. And I kind of think of hoarding disorder as one of those, they call them like final common pathway diseases, where a lot of things have to be going wrong concurrently to reach that level, right. And so there are so many demonstrations of cognitive and emotional
00:20:37
Speaker
disturbance in hoarding disorder that it's not really caused by any one thing. It's like you have trouble remembering, you have bad meta memory, so you think your memory's bad, so you better hold on to these things that you can remember. You're anxious about what people are gonna think about what you do. You're worried you'll make a mistake. If people take some stuff, you actually value the items and you're attached to them. You see them as more valuable than other people
Consumerism and Environmental Impact
00:21:06
Speaker
do.
00:21:07
Speaker
you know, even something other people regard as garbage, you see the good in, which, you know, isn't really a bad thing if you think about it, you know, like people are so quick to throw something away or waste. That it's kind of admirable that they're, you know, reusing eggshells in the compost bin, but it becomes like a burden, like an emotional burden. And then once you throw some depression in the mix,
00:21:33
Speaker
who has time to put all these things in some appropriate place that's going to maximize their great value and utility and appreciation. So all of these things come together and just make the problem very difficult to do something about. But I do think your family environment when you're growing up is a strong predictor. People have the intuition that I'm not willing to give up on that
00:22:06
Speaker
experiencing deprivation is going to make you more likely to hoard. People have anecdotal reports about the guy who lived there World War II and he cares everywhere he goes. That was the next question too. That was a time when everyone experienced scarcity during the Depression and all that.
00:22:28
Speaker
And it would be just a general cultural thing that you save, you know, glass jars, an item of value, and you kind of see everything as important in a time of scarcity like that. So I guess that sort of argues for the environmental impact, or at least cultural impact
Empathy and Resource Protection
00:22:46
Speaker
there.
00:22:46
Speaker
Again, yeah, I think you're gonna end up with like an epigenetic thing just like with PTSD, right? Like everyone went to the war. Everybody gets traumatized by something they observed or experienced or lived through. And some people can't shake it. Even after a while, you know, like it's just stuck deep, deep in there. And it doesn't happen to everyone. But you know, there is some
00:23:12
Speaker
correlations with who ends up having more trouble. But when they do studies and they try and see if your economics or hardship growing up impacts hoarding levels, they get null effects. But I also think they're not the most precisely tested phenomena. I think it's really hard to get a precise estimate of what was happening when you were a kid that isn't just a gloss of
00:23:43
Speaker
how much money you thought your parents had or what era did you live in? I think it's really hard to test things like that. So I still am a believer because in the animal models, deprivation is like immediate, illicit
Optimism and Individual Impact
00:23:58
Speaker
reporting. Did you guys do any like pandemic hoarding? I became like a little bit freaked out about food, I'm not gonna lie. When the grocery store started emptying out.
00:24:10
Speaker
That's a great question. I bet everybody has some pandemic courting that they do. I started collecting comic books again when the pandemic came around. And when it's kind of over, I'm sort of not doing it as much. It just sort of came and went. Like you needed them for entertainment? Or what was the rationale? I didn't know. It felt like maybe just acquiring stuff. I don't know. Like comforting. Yeah, right. Mass chaos and uncertainty.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. No, we definitely hoarded food, you know, for a while there. I mean, cans of beans, you know, that whole thing, especially at the very beginning. And of course, toilet paper as it was available or not. We certainly tried to acquire that. Yeah, some people will go back quicker to like their pre pandemic levels than others, you know, like I was a little appalled to realize I
Applying Psychology to Sustainability
00:25:03
Speaker
have no
00:25:04
Speaker
supplies on hand at all for a catastrophe, you know, like if you're in the Bay Area, you might at least have your earthquake kit, you know, some water and some insurance and batteries. But like having not experienced anything for 20 years, I was like a little laissez-faire about it. And so I do have like these passing thoughts still, but I'm not I definitely like shifted gears when food became plentiful again. Yeah, you know, I wonder how this relates to
00:25:33
Speaker
doomsday preppers, right? So people that put aside huge quantities of food and make a bunker and, you know, set up all this stuff, which honestly seems like an awful lot of effort for something that seems really unlikely to happen. But I have to admit there's something appealing about it, being totally self sufficient, being ready for anything. I wonder if there's any relation between some of those people that really get into that and hoarding behaviors too.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think the doomsday preppers and they have this cultural phenomenon in the Latter-day Saints also that they're supposed to have a year supply on hand at all times. And the pandemic increased the frequency where it became like almost normative and people were trying to like buy special products online to like keep in store things. And so I think
Reflecting on Sustainable Mindsets
00:26:27
Speaker
like a fear of outsiders penetrating is this kind of like core
00:26:33
Speaker
you know, scenario that can produce this. And yeah, during the pandemic, I was like, well, I guess they're the smart ones now, you know, like, and I did feel like the Miriam's kangaroo rat at some point, because I was like, well, I do have some food leftover, and I have like no way of protecting myself. So if stuff really did like go bananas Mad Max style, and people started busting in homes,
00:27:01
Speaker
And like taking food, I can't protect myself. I'm a Miram's Game Guru rat. Like as soon as people would start reporting incidents of like break-ins, I'd have to be like dinging up, you know, boxes in my yard to hide cans in. So, um, it's like a functional property of like the situation you're in. Yeah. Oh, it's interesting. It leads into this thinking about how, what you might call like a scarcity mentality, right? That's sort of what that is, right? It's like.
00:27:31
Speaker
The way you're thinking differently if there's a lot of stuff available versus when things are scarce changes your whole mindset.
00:27:40
Speaker
And in our modern society, generally speaking, if we work together as people across communities and across nations and so on and so forth, we probably have enough stuff that everyone can have some stuff. And yet we are not able to do that or unwilling to do that. And curious about your thoughts in terms of how some of these tendencies towards hoarding or your, our,
00:28:07
Speaker
relationship with stuff and consumerism relates to our ability to cooperate, to solve the world's problems, or fail to solve the world's problems. These are really big issues here, Jill. Just, you know, this quick and we get to solve all the world's problems. 30 seconds, go. There is a super interesting analogous problem with this for water, right?
00:28:33
Speaker
Everybody is now figuring out how are the people in Arizona, for example, going to get water. And with climate change, there's going to be a lot more arid zones that aren't fertile and water is going to have to come from somewhere. Lake Mead is like sinking down into nothingness. You know, dams are running low.
00:28:55
Speaker
and rivers are running dry. And there are some communities where they even are already trucking in water. So you don't have any like tap at your house, basically. They have to like bring water in a truck to your house. And I saw a recent study showing that if you felt sort of like communally connected to the next one down the line, you know, like if the city or country downstream from you,
00:29:24
Speaker
is something, someone that you feel some, you know, connection or collaboration with, you will, you will give up, you will give in and you will allow like, you know, portions of this water to continue so that they can have enough also. And you'll even restrict your own usage so that they can have enough, you know, so like people are already exhibiting this kind of behavior. But if you feel like it's us against them, like say you're a rancher and your next door neighbor is a rancher and
00:29:53
Speaker
you need the water or your cows are gonna die and you don't really care what happens to his cows, then people are actually going underground and sucking aquifers out so that they can have it all for themselves, even tunneling underground to steal water that is rightfully on someone else's property. So there's always this us versus them mentality. And I do think people are prone to be compassionate
00:30:23
Speaker
You know, when they really see the suffering of another group or individual, then they're quick to give. But if they don't yet think you're really suffering or they want to like play some blame and they don't want to take the cost of cutting down themselves or sharing and they don't see you as the in-group, they're going to withhold and resist. But when it's a true, like humanitarian crisis, I do think people
00:30:50
Speaker
are actually very giving, but they can do all kinds of mental gymnastics to like, you know, vilify the other or make it their fault or their problem, or how I deserve this water because I was so smart enough to do XYZ, you know, and so the us versus them phenomenon, I think is powerful. And it makes sense, like possessions are known to be part of what they call an extended self, right? So like your self identity,
00:31:18
Speaker
has some merge and overlap in the Venn diagram of personhood with people's possessions that they value and their family members that they consider in group and their culture or workplace that they consider part of themselves. People literally conceptualize them as part of themselves. And so those are cases where the sharing is fairly natural.
00:31:44
Speaker
And then outside of that realm, it's like not self. And then, you know, like different dynamic emerges that can, you know, even be quite cruel.
00:31:54
Speaker
Well, it kind of ties in a bit to the environmental impassivity work that you have recently published, talking about how emotionality relates to people's responses to climate change and issues related to the environment in a way, I think. Does it seem connected to you or does it seem?
00:32:17
Speaker
Yeah, I really see them as connected because our research on empathy and altruism is similar to the research we do on decision making. It's like how an emotional state impacts your behavior, you know, toward another person in the world and your decisions. So, you know, people in our altruism research feel sorry for and want to help individuals that truly seem vulnerable, that they're attached or bonded to.
00:32:47
Speaker
and that need immediate aid that they feel they can provide. So you have to have all these things on board to really dive right in to help somebody. And then it turns out with the environmental crisis, our consumerism is largely responsible for the environmental crisis. People don't seem to be aware that Americans are the biggest historical driver of anthropogenic climate change.
00:33:13
Speaker
We actually use more than China if you account for per capita, right? Because there's a lot more people in China. So at a per capita level, we're the highest consumers and emitters in the world and have been for a long time. So, you know, our ways have what they call externalities. I love that word in economics.
00:33:36
Speaker
And do people care? That's the question. Like, do they care that there's externalities? And the answer turns out to be, not always, you know, like, it's not as obvious as I thought it was, you know, as a sort of bleeding heart liberal myself. I just thought it was obvious that if you saw this beautiful forest clear cut, or this majestic mountain be chopped in, you know, the top chopped off off the Appalachian mountain, or
00:34:02
Speaker
you know, a giant flaming oil spill in the gulf that it would make you sad and you would want to do something about it, right? But people actually vary a lot in the degree that they experience these things as emotional and that they conceive of nature itself as like a beautiful, wonderful thing that's vulnerable to our action. So not everybody conceptualizes it that way.
00:34:28
Speaker
And liberals do more so. And so in the studies, we ran a whole series of studies funded by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Graham Sustainability Institute. And we found that people think of the earth in all these different ways, and people who are politically liberal are more likely to be environmentalists, to report being empathic, and to give money to environmental organizations.
00:34:55
Speaker
And they view the earth and nature as more vulnerable. So like as a target for altruism, you know, like the way we want to help like vulnerable children, liberals view the earth as vulnerable or the species that are at risk as vulnerable. But like people who are more politically conservative aren't necessarily conceptualizing the world that way. They, they view it as less vulnerable
00:35:21
Speaker
And they're more emotionally impassive to these kinds of images that I described earlier. And so it's really interesting because, you know, historically all environmentalism has been messaged with save the earth and then like these horrible, distressing stories and images of, you know, what's happening to nature and our natural resources and the people who live from them.
00:35:44
Speaker
And people just assumed if you weren't trying to change your behavior, you hadn't yet heard, you hadn't yet realized how bad things were. But there are people receiving the messages and they're like, okay, I mean, that's not awesome, but I shouldn't have to change my behavior because it's not about me and nature isn't this like wonderful oasis to me. It's just like this thing out there that I need
00:36:10
Speaker
to access resources. So, you know, it's just like really different conceptually, depending on the individual. And it's not just like a political alignment thing. These are, you know, all correlations. It's not like, oh, if you vote, if you vote a conservative in the last election, you're definitely impassive to environmental destruction. That's not the case. It's a correlational thing. Yeah. And when I think about that conservative, I mean, sort of at a
00:36:37
Speaker
kind of a root level means the conservation of existing status, including the environment. So, I mean, there's definitely a strain of environmentalism in conservatism. Yeah. Well, I mean, didn't Nixon create the EPA, right? Yeah, exactly. That whole story.
00:36:54
Speaker
Yeah, and before Nixon, you know, they called the conservation movement that was supported by Republican presidents. Yeah. Historically, we learned about this actually in our sustainability class, and I hadn't really appreciated it. Historically, it wasn't a partisan issue. And there were plenty of presidents who supported the conservation of wildlife and the creation of the national parks and the, you know, Conservation Corps and all these things.
00:37:24
Speaker
and setting aside resources for their protection. And that was not a partisan issue. And I do think it probably matters if you're talking about some kind of nature or resource relevant to you or not. So even in current day, since Reagan approximately, it became a partisan issue.
00:37:48
Speaker
Jimmy Carter had installed solar panels on the White House, and they were working fine. And President Reagan dismantled them, even though they were saving energy. And who's against that? But he actually took them down as a sign of rejection of this idea. And so ever since then, it's been increasingly used to polarize people intentionally by lobbyists.
00:38:16
Speaker
people who are going out of their way to create this division. It's not, I don't think, inherent in the people. Lots of people in America live in Midwestern states where they hunt and they have ATVs and they go fishing and they have a fishing cabin.
00:38:36
Speaker
They love the outdoors, you know, like for recreation and they would preserve it and they agree to things like limits on hunting to like preserve the colony for the future, you know. And so, you know, people are engaged in that, you know, it's just it's a lot harder to get people to save something they can't see and they and they don't really know what it is. And it's not their people getting implicated. So, you know, like, for example,
00:39:05
Speaker
Americans have a lot of clothes, let's say, sorry, Joe's father. I want to admit, I really like clothes myself. And so I'm constantly like fighting myself against this urge to like, get clothes versus be simple and minimalist. But but you know, clothes are super abundant. So if they were nuts, you know, it would be fall and the leaves would be like raining acorns everywhere. And
00:39:33
Speaker
know a t-shirt it's probably $3.99 if you go to the right sale at Old Navy so we have a lot of them and people don't know what to do with all these clothes and so they give them to like Goodwill and Goodwill doesn't know what to do with all these clothes because most of them nobody wants to buy so then what they do is they smash them into like cubes the same way they do like recycling
00:39:56
Speaker
And they export the cubes to someplace like Ghana, for example, where, you know, they have a market and they release the cubes like once a week and everybody can bid on a cube and you don't really know what's in it but you cut it open and see if you can find something to sell at your market. And then the ones that nobody claims or don't know what to do with.
00:40:16
Speaker
they just kind of end up strewn all over the place. You know, like the, the waterway is actually like totally littered with all this junk from us, you know, and they, and just think the energy it took to ship all those clothes from China and Malaysia in the first place. And then we bought it for 3.99 and then we like wore it at the 5k and then we gave it back to the reuse center and then they shipped it all the way back to Ghana and nobody wanted it. And now it's in a lake somewhere, you know, like,
00:40:45
Speaker
But we don't know. Nobody knows where this stuff comes from or where it ends up. You can feel really good about yourself and pat yourself on the back. You took something to Salvation Army because you feel like, I supported charity. I got rid of stuff. But you don't really know where it ends up. But you can't see it. So our empathy machinery evolved for direct perception. You guys study perception.
00:41:14
Speaker
seeing something with your own two eyes and hearing it with your own two ears is like, there's no replacement for that in terms of like the effect it has on your brain. And so it's just really hard to get people to protect a resource that
00:41:29
Speaker
doesn't appear to impact them at all, you know, but in the long run, these things all, they all end up affecting one another, right? Like Joe mentioned earlier, all of our resources are going to end up having to be shared multi, you know, nationally, they're, they're
00:41:48
Speaker
people are hoping to get wheat from Ukraine and corn from America and beef from Brazil. It's already international, but it's just taking our brains a little while to catch up, I think, to the interdependence of all this. Well, yeah, it's kind of what you were saying earlier about how if you want to take some action to be helpful in some capacity, it's super important that you have
00:42:16
Speaker
good information about how things work and that you feel like you can take an action that will, that will actually work, that will be effective. And I feel like maybe that's where some of the disconnects are happening, right? It's like, it's like, you say, we don't know where all these things are coming from and where they're going. And we don't know really what the real problems are.
00:42:38
Speaker
I mean, certainly what we're supposed to do about it, right? Like, like you're saying, there's not really a strong locus of control, especially if somebody is an alarmist, you know, like a lot of climate marketing is alarmist in nature. And it's like, we're all gonna die. Like, you know, it's the world's catching up fire. And
00:42:59
Speaker
That just makes people overwhelmed and feel like they have no control over the situation. So it's like, what am I going to do? Why bother? I'm just going to have to live my life. There's nothing I can do about it. So yeah, I think the problem has to be broken down into much smaller parts that people can participate in and observe and know what to do about. We had one study where the Environmental Defense Fund asked people to share stories about monarch butterflies.
00:43:28
Speaker
And people went bananas. They were so excited to talk about monarch butterflies. They got this unprecedented response from the membership and non-members, even on their website, people talking about monarch butterflies. And they made a lot of contributions also because the act was very concrete. There were a certain number of hectares of milkweed-type plants that were going to be planted for every $20 or $50 you gave.
00:43:57
Speaker
so it was very concrete like what would your money do and how would that end up impacting these butterflies that you love and appreciate you know and so people are willing to act if they you know have this bond fostered people have this bond with monarchs because they had them in like a school science class or like saw them in the backyard or you know like in california you probably get to see the migration um i don't think i've ever seen the migration in person it's you know i've just seen pictures it's like
00:44:26
Speaker
magical and so like that sense of awe and mystery and beauty evokes altruism in people and um it helps so much if you're not only attached to the thing but you know what to do you know and um so i i think you know our marketing needs to be better no no i agree and i i mean i think that with a marketing thing i think about that with climate change just the idea that the the term climate change
00:44:51
Speaker
It seems like really ineffective in that way is like marketing. It's like, well, how can I, I mean, how can I as an individual affect the climate? Like, uh, it feels like boiling the ocean. Yeah, it feels like at a scale so massive that they always talk about the drop in the bucket phenomenon, you know?
00:45:11
Speaker
you're the butterfly wing, and then there's these wins. Wait a second, though. Wait a second, though. We need to be a little more optimistic here on the holiday season, right? So what can, okay, so it's not all something that feels out of our control. What's the, is there an optimistic message to this? Well, I mean, I guess using psychology, right? Like, yeah, some psychology. So the question is, so having an idea about
00:45:39
Speaker
where these tendencies come from, what's going on in the brain, is this something that can directly inform clinical applications? So for hoarders, I suppose, but I love that your research is much more encompassing than that and could have political implications or could have environmental implications.
00:46:04
Speaker
How does an individual cope with all this information and be able to deal with stuff, possessions effectively?
00:46:17
Speaker
I have been wrestling with this and I keep kind of, if anybody follows my research, they're like, where's the pattern? And I keep shifting it slightly to get it more directly impacting people's real world behavior. And so I've been thinking a lot about this and saying, look, we just can't do any more
00:46:38
Speaker
Silly experiments in the lab that demonstrate something I probably already knew is the case that won't change the world, right? Like it's not going to change the real world, then I shouldn't do it. Like what can I do that might actually change something? And so that's why I've been doing these like collaborations with companies and nonprofits. But here's my idea.
00:46:59
Speaker
Tell me what you think. My idea is, you know, your brain has these kind of stable points, stable kind of set points. And one of them is like this really strong hedonic immediate reward phenomenon. And one of them is like, pleasure and enjoyment that is like lower frequency. But like, you know, the broader, broader band and
00:47:27
Speaker
sort of like life happiness, kind of. Yeah. So if you imagine, like, sometimes you can think of like, you know, the box of candy that you just ate as sort of like the crack cocaine for your nucleus accumbens, you know, where you're like this immediate boost, and you're like, that was awesome, you know, like, and now I just want some more, you know, and all it does is like habituate your reward system. And so
00:47:50
Speaker
the same amount later isn't going to do the trick and now you need more and like it's just this whole cycle, right? Like, are you ever going to be satisfied? And you can say this about anything, you know, about money, sex, material goods, you know, food, drinks, drugs of abuse, like they, they all have this phenomenology where
00:48:10
Speaker
When you really want it, you'll do anything to get it. You're loving it momentarily. You might even have like a stage of regret or like sickness afterwards, and then you like immediately want more, right? We've talked about in a previous episode with Michael Frank, we've talked about in this distinction of what dopamine is doing because people typically say, you know, I get a shot of dopamine as that sort of reward chemical, but dopamine is the thing that's causing you to want more, not necessarily
00:48:40
Speaker
To experience any positive effects. So it's really more of a motivational Learning and motivational system and you have like different cells Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson study this they have different cells in the nucleus accumbens for liking and wanting and like the liking Appreciation is a little bit more like opioid dependent And the wanting is like the dopaminergic version. It's very complicated. We often think of this as part is the same thing but
00:49:11
Speaker
But separating that like that, I think is helpful. Right. But then if you think about like, what's the kind of like slow, old fashioned reward where you're like, yeah, that was really good. You know, like, I feel like I have a great example for you. Okay. Kids. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A walk in the woods is an easier one. Yeah. Okay. There you go. Walk in the woods.
00:49:37
Speaker
Trees are actually like strongly implicated in research for wellbeing. Like trees per se. And they even had a recent study about birds, you know, adding to people's enjoyment. Even if you subtract out the presence of trees, the birds even added it more to this like variance. And sometimes like, you know, if you've been exercising or you've had like a long day, you haven't had a glass of water, just like a cold glass of water can be like, ah. True.
00:50:06
Speaker
Like it's just great, you know, or like a carrot that's cooked to the right amount, you know, or, you know, like spending time with your friends and, you know, like having a laugh, like talking to you guys.
00:50:17
Speaker
Those are really genuinely enjoyable things that are pretty sustainable and mostly free. So we're kind of caught up in this cycle at a local minimum of life happiness that's kind of more damaging to ourselves, more expensive, more damaging to the environment. But there's another level that we can exist at where we try and emphasize these intrinsic rewards that are
00:50:47
Speaker
like a little bit more what your body naturally evolved to appreciate, not like hyper concentrated versions of them, you know. So my idea was to make it a challenge like a competition, like the same way people will run a 5k, which is kind of painful, and they have to get money, but they do it anyway, because they kind of wanted to run anyway. You know, like,
00:51:10
Speaker
will you join like the no beef challenge, you know, like, no beef February join in the challenge, you know, like no shopping September, you know, like see if you can get people to like, enjoy the competitive and challenging nature of it because people do actually enjoy challenges. And especially if it's something they kind of wanted to do anyway, but they need a push and they need a little social approval, you know,
00:51:37
Speaker
So I'm going to try and see if you can have some contests that people will. I love that. That makes so much sense. So what month is National No Shopping Month going to be? Because you can announce it right here on the show. I haven't worked it out, but don't you think September sounds good? Because it just has the alliterative component. But people are going to say, the economy is going to crash, right? The economy is going to crash.
00:52:02
Speaker
But no, the economy won't crash. Like Americans compared to other nations are, you know, shopping a lot more. No, they'll just shop twice as much the next month. It'll make up for it. And probably that. Yeah. I was just looking this up. There is a no shop, a no, what is it? It's called no spend November.
00:52:22
Speaker
No, spend November. Because we have Black Friday in it. That seems like adding. That's extra challenging. That's adding a lot. Because if you do September, you still let people have Black Friday.
00:52:38
Speaker
But Giving Tuesday guys, you know, you got to like start changing the proportions because it turns out helping other people charitable donations make you feel good. So, like, we could try to get people to shift the proportion from
00:52:54
Speaker
how much they got on Black Friday and how much they gave on Giving Tuesday and like everybody post their two bar graphs or their pie tracks. It needs to be a social norm. We want social approval. We want to fit in. We don't want to stand out. You need your subculture at least of individuals to be accepting of this. You have to be able to package things in ways that aren't just palatable to
00:53:22
Speaker
you know, one side of the country or another. Oh, for sure. Things like climate change are especially challenging because the benefits of reducing emissions are slow and diffuse and the impacts of negative events are concentrated and quite local.
00:53:42
Speaker
So for example, in California right now we have this 1200 year drought that we're experiencing. So if you live here, it's quite noticeable. But other places in the country, it might be much less noticeable. So how can you create an environment where
00:54:06
Speaker
People are excited to work to reduce this diffuse, but nevertheless existential threat of climate change.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's where our brains as psychologists go, go right away like our brain in some ways is designed to be, you know, like a wasteful hedonic bastard, you know, that's just one side of us right like we're also this very generous cooperative
00:54:38
Speaker
patient individual like there's both sides going on there and so i had wanted to write a book about this and um you know the people receiving the book proposals they don't really like the idea of the book about how your brain is designed to make you terrible
00:54:53
Speaker
You know, like they're like, people aren't gonna want to read that. That sounds so negative, you know, and you can't be blaming and nobody wants finger wagging and you know, like this message has to be different. And so I think the message should be, think of how awesome your life would be if you only had to work half as much because you didn't need money to buy so much of the things we're currently buying.
00:55:17
Speaker
And you've got to spend more time with your family and you got to walk around in the woods and you could ride your bike places because everything wouldn't be designed around cars and the air quality wouldn't be terrible. Um, like just imagine a future where your life is so much more relaxing. You know, so if you like factor in the role of stress on your reward motivation going all the way back to the King Roo rats, right?
00:55:43
Speaker
people under stress want these rewards as ways to mitigate this really uncomfortable, immediate feeling. So it's like, if you make me write a proposal all day and I really don't feel like sitting on my laptop, I'll do it. If you give me a giant muffin and a latte, I'll be like, okay, I'll do it.
00:56:06
Speaker
But if we didn't have to produce at such a high level and everyone just sort of like calmed the whole system down a little, we would have much more enjoyable lives with lower externalities. And the economy wouldn't crash. It would just be different. It would be like the things we focus on making and using our money for and using our time for would shift.
00:56:29
Speaker
But that doesn't mean you don't need things like you still would need solar panels and wind farms and you'd need some electric buses and you'd need new roads that like took like public transportation into account, you know, like you still need things in this like sort of Stephanie's utopia.
00:56:49
Speaker
But I just like the idea of selling the idea to people by making their life happier. You know, like I said things in the in the pandemic, people really enjoyed being with their families and not having to commute and look at the sky turned blue because no one was driving. Can you believe it? You know, like, I think we have to learn from some of that enjoyment and people people are there. They're trying to make changes.
00:57:16
Speaker
No, absolutely. I think that might be a good place to start to wind this, uh, episode up, you know, with the idea of, yeah, what can we do to like relax a little bit more, be a little bit more chill and, you know, uh, the future of a little bit lower growth for more happiness sounds like a great, a great way to go. So maybe people have the one idea though, one concrete thing they can do is, you know, when you start to think about what do you want people to give you for the holidays?
00:57:46
Speaker
try and change the mindset and what can I give to somebody to make them feel good? What can I give? Research shows that people are happier when they give than receive. So if you can like catch yourself in that moment, oh, I wish somebody would buy me this, I'm going to put it on a list, you know, just try and like switch it and say, what could I give to that person to make them feel good? And that will in turn, for sure, make you feel good.
00:58:12
Speaker
Maybe one last question, which is, what are you really excited about in terms of your research and the work that you have going on? Yeah, I'm really excited about this idea of
00:58:25
Speaker
taking it to the real world. Demonstrating that these phenomena are effective and have utility in the real world. How can we make therapist-client relationships more empathic? Monitoring people's emotional physiology, submitting it to machine learning, and then figuring out what are the keys of showing comfort in an environment that people consider stressful?
00:58:54
Speaker
And, you know, if I do one of these challenges, will it make people more sustainable? Can you get people to sign agreement to give up beef for a time? And if they do, like you're saying, is there going to be a boomerang and then they're going to like go back and eat more or they're going to be like, Oh, that actually wasn't so bad. I could probably do that a couple of days a week or, you know, I could easily do that a month or two a year. So can, can you get it to stick is kind of,
00:59:22
Speaker
in the real world, can you get these phenomena to work? That's what I'm excited about. Well, great to have you on the show a second time. So thanks again, Stephanie, for being with us. Thank you so much. You guys have such good insights. You're like really drill right to the heart of the matter and like the scope of the problem. I love it. We appreciate how well you've talked about all of your research and it's always great hearing about what you're up to. Well, thanks for having me.