What they're using is kitchen cutlery I would imagine and that is not necessarily all that sharp it is I do can't imagine how painful it was. Was a linguist that Louisiana State University specializing in medieval law she died in 2015 we spoke with her a couple years earlier what do you think Oliver was talking about that was so darn painful between the 5th and the 12th century in early modern Europe barbarity swept through the continent and also the island of England and often the targets of these attacks were monasteries and nunneries but nunneries you had added incentive of rape to add to search pillage and destruction for a nun rape was especially problematic side from the obvious reasons reap violated a nun's chastity which meant that as a bride of Christ she might be forbidden entry into heaven so what do you do if you are a nun and there are barbarians at the gate in the 9th century one nun and Abas who came to be known as. Came up with a plan here's we see all over reading from history by Roger of Wendover. The obvious within her ROIC Spirit took a razor and with it cut off her nose together with her upper lip on to the teeth presenting herself off horrible spectacle to those who stood by filled with admiration at this admirable deed the whole assembly followed her maternal example and several a good the like to themselves when this was done together with the morrow's dawn the pagan attackers came on beholding the Abas and the sister so outrageously mutilated and stained with their own blood from the soil of their foot unto their head they retired in haste from the place their leaders ordered their wicked followers to set fire and burn the monastery with all its buildings and its holy inmates which being done by these workers of iniquity the holy at. Yes and all the most holy virgins with her attain the glory of martyrdom there's a very graphic picture of Saint Abba cutting her nose and lips off and all of the women around her looking thrilled at the concept in terms of pain it must just been dreadful to cut your nose off at night and then wait until the morning with that pain wracking your body but that is the pain of martyrdom it's the crown of thorns . I know it's hard to transpose oneself to a different time and place but if you could put yourself back in a nunnery do you think you would have followed suit and gone ahead and cut off your own nose to spite your face. Probably why. I think that there is a wave of hysteria that follows that kind of action where I don't think I would have been number 2 but I probably would have been number 20. I mean it's the happenin thing man we're all cutting our noses off right. Now why are we telling you this grisly tale because today we're going to talk about spite as in cutting off your nose to spite your face scholars aren't certain but this phrase quite likely originates with the practice of medieval nuns like St women who mutilated themselves in an attempt to preserve their chastity. Now economics is all about trade offs everything has a cost and a benefit. What do you make of the nuns trade off. Was it worth. That's radio. Show that explores the inside of every thank. You. 1st up on the show today we're talking about spite we're going to look at why people sometimes try to hurt others when it's very costly to them so now it struck me this is in some ways an economic concept so I called up an economist I know Steve Levitt he's my Freakonomics friend and co-author teaches at the University of Chicago. When I think about spade as an economist the way I would think of spite is that it is the response of an individual who has been wronged in some way by another who then is willing in the future to pay a large cost in order to punish the person who wronged him in the 1st place so in a strange sense it's not a very economic concept because in general we don't think that people are going to be overly willing to pay a lot of costs themselves to punish other people yet I think what you described is more revenge than spite. I thought and maybe I don't even know it's bite is what despite. It's in question well it's not so easy to defined by it that's Benedict Herman he's also an economist originally from Germany now he works as a policy officer for the European Commission he's done a lot of research on anti-social behavior you might in fact call him a scholar of spy. Let's have an easy start here in the fine spite of behavior or an individual is ready to harm him or herself I don't cost to himself any else without creating anything good for 3rd party for anyone outside because he could sometimes be nasty to somebody just because he or she has misbehaved and he would like to do it in a kind of educational way which then I would not call spying because it's not. Costing you anything know if I am punishing somebody who has misbehaved or community to our group if I punish him or her its own cost it could look like spying but it's not spied because it's an educational momentum you try to get somebody who has done something bad to behave better in the future so it's a kind of moralistic way of punishing a moralistic way of being aggressive in so it's not the kind of spite I'm after I'm after the kind of behavior somebody would harm others with for no reason for no moral reason apart from something that might satisfy him or herself only. Traditional economics argues that most people try to satisfy their self-interest to maximize their profits and opportunities economists have a name for this model of self interest homo economics but within that framework is a bit puzzling why would someone pay outsized costs for no benefit other than to hurt someone else well Benedict Herman thinks that the idea of homo economic us is a bit archaic he prefers a different term. Homo revolve. Meaning that humans are driven at our core by competition rather than simple self-interest homo economic us once again as much as possible for himself homo revolve this just want to make sure he gets more than the other guy in other words as much as we like to think that we are absolute animals we are in fact relative and now we know this in part through the experimental games that economists like to play one of the classics is called the ultimatum again here Steve Levitt again for the ultimatum game it's a little experimental game that the behavioral economists have developed in which 2 players come into the lab and they're completely anonymous I'll never meet each other to one shot game and one player is given say $10.00 and they're allowed to divide that $10.00 however they'd like between themselves and the other player that other players in informed about the way in which the division has occurred and is given a choice they can either accept the division say $7.00 for the person who splitting the pot in $3.00 for me or I have another option to say no I prefer both of us to get 0 So what you always face a choice between as the recipient of the ultimatum is I can accept what. The other person offered me or I can have it both kids 0 and imperiously what we see is that rarely will anyone except an offer that's less than 20 percent so if good person who splits the pot divides it more on evenly then $7525.00 you're almost guaranteed to have it rejected even though the rejecter is giving out the $25.00 or the 20 percent of their own money in order to take the 75 or the 80 percent away from you . Now to an economist This might seem perplexing why am I willing to throw away 2 or 3 of my dollars just to make sure that you don't get 7 or 8 well maybe it's because I feel you've wronged me by splitting the pot so unevenly but remember what Benedict Herman said earlier about spite true spite as he sees it is not motivated by a desire to punish someone's bad behavior so he wanted to see how people behave Absent such a moral incentive he and a colleague came up with an experiment. So let me quickly trying to explain here on the radio how this experiment work so you would be unwise to experiment like many of us do and you don't know which of you will come to. The insight you have to sit behind computers your requested not to talk with anyone during the whole experiment. So you're paired with another player but you don't see that person each get $10.00 and then you're given an option if you surrender $1.00 of your money you can destroy $5.00 of the other person's Well there's no revenge going on here there wouldn't seem to be anything for you to gain by destroying the other person's money but as Benedict Herman found about 10 percent of the players did take that option Herman calls such a player a difference maximizing. That means that we want to maximize the payoff differential between the opponent and us so maybe in a more fit to rest way being aware that we are losing out throws us for the sake and for the hope that their opponent will lose both to sure who. In other words some people were always willing to cut off their noses to spite the other player. Herman was perplexed by this finding and he tried the experiment in a variety of versions variety of settings different parts of the world different kinds of societies but in each case he found that a surprising number of people would give up some of what was there for the sole purpose of taking something away from someone else and what are you as the researcher thinking are you thinking this is remarkably surprising sad strange irrational What is your I mean on the one hand you must be excited because for the sake of a paper it's a fascinating finding this exactly these are 2 souls of a researcher of course only one so exactly as you decided said it very nicely you are very excited but on the other side of course who starts in your own my goat who the heck are we to humans from the outcome of this research is definitely a kind of Senna's and also worried it we can be too fast we humans we can get too fast into into group conflict which don't make any sense to anyone that we start to harm each other or did we start innocent people to kill each other for something that of the end of the day could have been decided in a much more reasonable way. It's. Now as interesting as this may be as believable as it may be Steve Levitt warns us not to make too much of lab experiments like these it's hard to extrapolate from a lab setting to the hurly burly of the real world. When people are in the lab they're completely anonymous is the only time I've ever played but the real world isn't usually like that. So after the break we'll get back to the real world see if we can find a story where someone willingly gives up money and not just a few bucks like in these last games but lots and lots of bucks in order to prove a point where the contract he was offered was 5 years 7660000 dollars. May cost you a lot but our podcast completely free you can subscribe at Apple podcast stitcher or come visit us at Freakonomics dot com. 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There is Freakonomics Radio here's your host Stephen Dubner. We're talking today about Spike about actions that hurt someone else that are specially costly to ourselves Dave O'Connor is a filmmaker with majordomo media in New York he was the executive producer of a documentary film made for e.s.p.n. Called You don't know but the bow in question though Jack. If you want to your father. Was probably the single greatest athlete of his generation to sports star football and baseball and was just a transformative athlete and he just physically there's something about his presence that feels different than normal human beings that I've heard is a little. In the spring of 1906 Bo Jackson was playing his senior year of college baseball at Auburn he showed signs of being a very highly valued Major League Baseball player. On here in a cover off a ball back in over 400. 0 I don't know how many home runs I was sitting on there that's Jackson himself from the film now he had just completed his senior season of college football which had gone even better they have O'Connor again. Football in his senior year is one of the all time great seasons of a running back in college football he rushes for nearly $1800.00 yards he wins the Heisman Trophy and basically enshrines himself as a legend of college football sort of the common wisdom was that Bo will be the number one draft pick in football he will probably not play baseball at all and if he does somebody should pick him in the 20th round or 30th round on a flyer just in case you don't want to waste a pick on a guy who's going to be playing football right. So while finishing up his college baseball career Jackson starts getting courted by n.f.l. Teams the football draft happens before the baseball draft the number one overall n.f.l. Pick is held by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who are owned by a man named Hugh Culverhouse The Bucs have made it clear that they want Jackson I was all gone home and I had taken a few trips to. Visit some claims my senior year I got the Ok to go to the Tampa Bay. Cover house a tooth jet to Columbus airport. Drove over got on the jet went to camper before my visit it was almost like a college visit when your high school senior and you going to visit college and they get some of the players to show you around town to show you the night spots take you to a nice restaurant and then to tell you. About 4 or 5 days later I'm back at all or . Getting ready for my baseball game and I walk out on the field then as I get to the gate to come around the dugout. Coach Bear approaches me. As I think he said Bo can I talk to you for a 2nd I think you're covered he said let's go over behind the dugout Let's go said go. So we got it done and I'm thinking that he's going to tell me hey some big league team wants to Sammy. And. He said. Did you take a trip last week on Hugh cover houses yet to go down a bit at Tampa I say yes and the folks checked and said that it was Ok they took with the n.c. And said that it was Ok to do that he said Well Bo somebody didn't jack and the n.c.a.a. Has declared you ineligible for any more college sports so you can't play baseball no more and I said there on that ground and I cried like a baby. I cried like a baby. Jackson immediately felt that he'd been wronged he loved baseball and even though it looked like he was going to play football professionally he was distraught about being barred from finishing out his college baseball career and what's more he became convinced that Hugh Culverhouse the Tampa Bay owner had done this to bow on purpose . Because if a show that Tampa Bay told me personally yes we checked and they said that it was Ok I think it was all a plot now just to get me an eligible from baseball because I saw the season that I was having and they thought that they were going to lose me to baseball and if we declare him an elder then we got it. Now we don't know whether the Bucs actually meant for this to happen but it certainly did seem to work out well for them they were in line to pick Bo Jackson number one in the n.f.l. Draft and pay him so much money that he'd forget about baseball in a heartbeat there's just one problem Bode Jackson isn't the forgetting type and I said there's no way I'm signing with Tampa Bay and I told Hugh Coburn out I say you draft Me If You Won't you don't waste a draft pick I said I promise you that. This is what I'm all for you have a signing bonus and you're going to take it whether you want to or not I said all right they don't think I was serious. In the n.f.l. Draft that April Tampa Bay did select Bo Jackson with the number one pick which was attached to a 7660000 dollar 5 year contract and then a couple of months later Jackson was selected in the baseball jam in the 4th round by the Kansas City Royals they offered him 3 years just $1000000.00 The choice would seem obvious but both doesn't know obvious he rejects a football offer and he takes the baseball offer and how surprising is this because they have a common unprecedented It just doesn't happen you can't. I mean money talks right I mean you have $7600000.00 sitting there and you sign a contract for one. That's that's a rare occurrence it sounds like a decision that very few people that I know at least would have made do you think that was an act of spite. Or it's interesting because I think Bo would say that he did the honorable thing and that he has a code but when you look at it on its surface. It is spite there is no rational explanation for walking away from that kind of money he's not just hurting himself here he's also doing this to hurt Tampa Bay The opportunity cost of losing a 1st round draft pick isn't just that Bo Jackson isn't playing on my team it's that every other player I could have selected with that pick is not playing on my team either so it's a huge impact to Tampa Bay Not to mention the public relations nightmare of going out on a limb and selecting somebody and not getting him. So Jackson does sign with the royals he starts the year in the minor leagues but by the end of the season he makes a major league team he's on track for a nice baseball career and then the next year he becomes eligible to reenter football now will he play nobody knows but the Los Angeles Raiders draft him in the 7th round he signs and suddenly he's playing to professional sports at the end of the baseball season he jumped straight into football and he became a star in both he also becomes a household name in part because of his athletic feats and in part because he was the star of one of the most beguiling campaigns in history Bono's from 1000. Photos baseball. Basketball coach could surf could roller blade both could not play ice hockey that's one thing they couldn't agree to let him actually be able to do Gretzky shakes his head and says no. But pretty much everything else volleyball tennis running lifting weights aerobics all kinds of stuff. And you know no longer there. All right so we agree that Jackson's athletic career turned out pretty well remarkable in some dimensions but overall not one of the greatest ever because it wasn't long enough perhaps we agreed that because he was such an unusual athlete into sports he became this icon and the focus of a remarkable and probably quite remunerative ad campaign right we on the so far have do we therefore agree that had this catastrophe not happened with him with getting drafted for the n.f.l. By a team that out of spite or something like spite he turned down that if that had not happened all the rest may not have happened yeah I think that's a plausible argument to make because he probably had he signed that deal with Tampa Bay if he doesn't get injured he probably becomes one of the best running backs in n.f.l. History but that's probably it I mean honestly. My take away lesson here is spite pays Yeah you would say I mean if you take a look at where he ends up. Spiked certainly paid in his case. So here's a question worth thinking about if spite indeed exists is it something that we humans have always carried around in our genetic code for we pick it up along the way were very biological organism and we've inherited are all full. In fact most of the basic emotions. That guide us from our. Own and Paleolithic early human. That is Ito wealth and he's a rino and biologist and author and that's Katherine Wells. She was a producer on our show when we 1st aired this episode Catherine you had a chat with Professor Wilson Yes I did it was cool so I called him up because I wanted to know where all of this self destructive spite comes from you know is this a common behavior throughout nature or are we on usual and that and I have to say that I just assumed that we would be the meanest creatures in existence given everything we've heard today but Wilson said that wasn't true. Oh no we. Only moderately mean. Now you know Wilson has done a lot of thinking about the origins of human behavior and he thinks the nastiness that we see in animals might give us a clue to why we act the way we do couple of cases in the end where the workers have huge clan of poisonous mature ial containing it and when they get into a tough fight oh they are able to contract or have Noons and explode their abdomen show that the poison covers the enemy it can disable several enemies doing that by giving its life the list of this kind of behavior goes on and on I mean things that you really don't want to think about too much for you go to sleep. At night. But here's a story about bite if we defined by. Doing harm to someone else. Cost of harm to your shelf. And that involves a surrender of some advantage or emotional reward on your part that might not exist in nature. And it's very difficult to find it in a cage and the great encyclopedia of animal aggression word doesn't go of. Some advantage to the individual doing the aggression but it's very rare that an animal would deliberately injure itself just in order to create injury in another individual without any further gain to itself to deliberately do that I think fight does not exist in the animal kingdom now in the way that it does in humans and well interest look the take humans when a person injures she himself or herself say in refutation. In diminishing wealth causing their own early death whatever it is in order to harm another person you would say all that might have got to be spite but it really would be true spite in my mind as opposed to mere risk taking or trade off. For one kind of gain in exchange for one kind of lost taken. If you can't see again and that that's hard to imagine even vengeance has it's gay and it has strong emotional award even a mass murderer who goes out of harms a lot of people is she taking some benefit emotional benefit from that when suicide is intended a lot of mass murders are just a terrible form of suicide in which a person decides to get the satisfaction of vast of committing it and maybe the satisfaction person will get and striking out against something they imagine to been there in a 1000000 diminish them before so when you add the fact or maybe shrill spite does not exist. So I don't know whether this is a relief or not I mean the idea that spite might not even exist seems good but the fact that we get personal satisfaction out of hurting other people I told Wilson that was kind of a bummer that your shows you're not a psychopath. And I'm not I'm a total nerd. But here's the upside spite is not the only motivation we have for being self destructive there's actually another altruism. When we hurt ourselves we aren't always doing it just hurt someone else sometimes we're doing it to help one of the things that makes us human is our internally conflicted nature confliction our ambivalence to our own selves we are conscious we rush when with our conscience and with a tendency to deviate from social norms in a risky way and to do wrong to be selfish the contest within us between doing the moral thing even the heroic thing on one side. And doing the selfish perhaps even criminal thing on the other side that contrast is what gives us such a continuously conflicted nature if we want to became completely outraged then we would be like yeah if we went to the opposite extreme and had a complete. Lack of constraint and it was completed a vigil isn't then we would have chaos who would not have order they or the group would dissolve. So we have to be sure in the middle. To be the human condition. It's funny listening to him talk about that but Steve Levitt again he took a class with Wilson when he Levitt was an undergrad at Harvard he's very fond of the way Wilson thinks there could be no 2 disciplines closer than evolutionary biology and economics and they study different questions and they use different methods but the way that evolutionary biologists think is exactly like the way that economists think both are very much a model of behavior of individual behavior in individual behavior that motivated by cost and benefits the other thing is that at its heart both economics and evolution about $80.00 strive for simplicity that the simplest story which can explain a set of facts is the one that we gravitate to as opposed to other disciplines history histories all about complexity and you know literature it's all about complexity even sociology I think at heart it's about complexity but economics is about simplicity. Like e.o. Wilson Levitt think that spite true spite may not really exist because that would mean that I hurt you even though I get nothing for nothing. And while it may seem that I get nothing. I probably get something. What I would say about Spike. To try I would say this to know that an actress by. You have to be inside the head of the perpetrator because the idea of spite is that it's being done without benefit but it's interesting because one of the 1st premise is an economics is you can never really know what other people are thinking in why they're doing what they're doing instead we focus on what they do and so consequently my view is forget about what's going on inside of other people's heads you'll probably never know what it is and focus on what they're actually doing. Do you see altruism as sort of the flipside of the coin to spite and therefore not. Quite real altruism is exactly the flipside of spike in the sense that their acts which are very well could be l. Terrific. But equally could be done in a perfectly self interested way both make you feel really good Him If you're good to help other people sometimes and it just so good to punish other people who run you so I think they're both actually completely consistent with the idea of of people doing the best they can and what about you personally Leva do you get more satisfaction generally from helping people or punishing people. I'm a lover not a fire you know that guy that I had to help. When we come back we'll shift from spite to shame and will visit Bogota Colombia to learn what the mayor there most unusual did. About the traffic jams we used as a local replacement in the small quad of the c.p. Hold the traffic police excuse me Maire Mochas you said you replaced the traffic police with Moslems Yes. That's coming up on Freakonomics Radio. 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We just told you all about spite in the next part of the hour we're leaving that behind to talk about what social scientists call prosocial behavior so if you want people to behave better to treat others well to contribute to our collective good how do you accomplish that. We'll start in Bogota Colombia on a busy street in the middle of traffic. It's pretty chaotic or skirts right beside B.M.W.'s bikes and pedestrians and buses all competing for the same patch of pavement but as bad as traffic is now. Used to be worse. Oh my God it's crossing the street it was that act of folly maybe that's Margarita Martinez she's a journalist and filmmaker because you were going to have an assurance that it was spread no one was going to let you walk that maybe they felt like they just couldn't you know kept driving you know the traffic lights didn't mean anything it was just like a suggestion not really something that would be important back then there they didn't even exist rules so we can say with the jungle. In the early 1990 s. Bogota was one of the most dangerous cities around its homicide rate was triple that of New York's and traffic fatalities were also very common with the rate more than 4 times of New York's But in 1904 Bogota voted in a new mayor. A most unusual Mer his name was and Thomas mochas. How unusual was he well Mochas had previously served as president of Bogota as National University but he resigned after an incident in which he mooned a group of unruly students still in a city as chaotic as Bogota maybe he was just the kind of mayor they needed. They felt free to be a little bit both sides of the norm of behavior. That's Mochas he wound up serving 2 terms as mayor from 1905 to 1907 and again from 2001 to 2003 he did all kinds of things that weren't quite normal behavior he gave tens of thousands of citizens placebo vaccine against violence he preached the evils of graffiti by dressing up as a character he called super citizen in a spandex suit he encouraged people to take out their aggression on balloons rather than one another and he also had an idea for that terrible traffic. The traffic police was very corrupt that we used as a local replacement in a small part of the city of the traffic police wait a minute so I mean excuse me as you said you replaced the traffic police with my names yes. It is maybe worth pointing out here how Mocha spells his name it's m o c k u s as in mock us here's Margarita Martinez again she has directed a film about moments. For example you are crossing. The street not through the crosswalk but through you know the middle of the street and then my I'm following each year with this really funny and kind of playful way and they make their way you watch how you get your hair or whatever and you felt that you were the worst in the world and after that that was a lesson that you learned in your heart you know not in your pocket the you were shamed shamed profoundly shamed because of this mines and everybody in front of you . It wasn't just the mines Moca says government handed out thousands of cord to drivers on one side the card had a cartoon drawing of a thumbs up and on the other side a thumbs down a red thumbs down kind of like the red card that a soccer referee uses to eject a player from a game. It was just a very polite way to change people's behavior and to take out. You had when some went to something terrible but also the other person feel like I'm being seen people don't agree with what I'm doing and it was also shameful Yes Well shaming is way over indicating it was a very polite way of insulting you it seems ridiculous Probably but really were. So the mayor of Bogota and Thomas Mogis had some serious problems to solve and he thought that shame might help him. From the beginning of his 1st term until the end of the 2nd term life got much better in Bogota the homicide rate fell dramatically now it's probably had a lot more to do with new gun laws and alcohol laws than with my names but observers generally agree that Mocha's is shaming techniques sent a valuable message the rules of the city have changed and if you need help upholding these new rules well we're going to make your fellow citizens help you traffic fatalities also fell over the 8 years that bracketed Mochas his reign by roughly 60 percent. Now even though most of us don't have my names to help shape our behavior we do all follow cues suggesting what is acceptable behavior and what's not in academic circles they're known as social norms they're the way we try to avoid being the nail that's taking out. If we're uncertain about what we should do in a situation one shortcut way of knowing what's probably the right thing for us to do here is to look at what our peers are doing. That's Robert Cialdini he is America's professor of psychology and marketing at Arizona State University birds flock together in very neat patterns fish school cattle herd social insects swarm together so this is something that doesn't require a lot of cognitive capacity in order to trigger the conformity all you need to do is to see what those around you like you are doing and it's a good sure. To deciding what you should do in a situation. Years back Cialdini wrote a book that became a classic in business circles it's called influence his research career has been dedicated to the power of social norms for instance in one experiment Cialdini wanted to know what would influence people to reduce their home energy consumption so he and his researchers went around neighborhoods in San Diego hanging signs on people's doors they used 4 different versions of the sign so they could measure the effectiveness between. One of the message said Please reduce energy in your home in order to reduce the expenditure of resources on the planet another said Please reduce energy consumption in the home in order to save money at the end of the month on your own do. A 3rd said please do this for future generations so that your children will have access to these resources including we had yet another that we've never seen employed and it said simply the majority of your neighbors are regularly undertaking efforts to reduce energy in their homes. Please follow. That's it doesn't say the majority of your neighbors are doing better than you or worse than you just as they're they're doing stuff right and we're going to put this ball in your court now and you should do stuff too right Ok and then we measured their energy use at the end of the month we were actually walking going into their yards risking. Vicious dogs and systems and we looked at their energy use as a result of receiving one or another of those messages to interesting findings wait before you before you even give it you know because if people are listening to this whether you're a you know a policymaker parent or a teacher like you're about to tell them kind of the secret of the universe are you like everybody wants to encourage what you call prosocial behavior get people to do things that are collectively better for all of us but you're telling me that through this one experiment at least that you kind of know how all of us can be doing this thing right well you're right to use the caviar through this one experiment at least there is one secret to the universe that we seem to under recognize and it is what those around us are doing powerfully influences what we choose to do next even though we tend to think of ourselves as freestanding entities. Immune to the blandishments of information and evidence from those around us know we are powerfully influenced and in this case it was the only message that significantly reduced energy consumption in the home. The only one that had any effect was the one that said people around you are doing this already didn't even read that they're doing better than you or worse exactly right so what the heck does that mean other than I mean my my lay person's kneejerk reaction is Dr told me you're telling me that oh we basically are herd animals as much as we like to think that we're not. We are at it very elemental level of course we are because this is an adaptive approach to our environment right so when I hear you say that I say well yes that makes good sense on a scientific level and on a kind of emotional level as well but I and I'm guessing most people listening to this would say this is well I'm not like that I don't travel with a herd like that I think for myself so what I really want to ask you now is well what kinds of people 1st of all most of us are probably wrong we think we we all think we're above average certainly and I'm probably wrong I'm probably much more heard like than I think but I guess the next thing I want to know out of that is what kind of people are least susceptible to that kind of herd thinking I'm guessing from your San Diego energy experiment we don't know that because you don't know too much about the demographics of each of these individuals and I right that's right but let me say that from that study we also interviewed people in those neighborhoods and asked them of these 4 pretty messages you know do this for the environment do this to save money do this for future generations or do this because your neighbors are doing it we asked them which of these would be most powerful in spring you into energy conservation the one that was by far the least rated as a motivator of their change was the one that was indeed the one that did their change the Great is the one that said your neighbors are doing this and this leads to a real problem which is because people don't believe that these kinds of pulls and draws in motives affect them powerfully when they get into positions of developing programs to create pro-social behavior they don't think of this way you know because when they introspect they see all this would work. On Me Why would I load it into my the wording of of a message designed to move people in to social directions. But it doesn't always work it does appear information does not always work give me an example of where telling people what other people are doing actually might have a boomerang effect we've recognized that very often public service messages are designed to move people in societal ie desirable directions by telling them how many people are behaving in undesirable directions so many people are drinking and driving we have to stop Yes teenage pregnancy is so prevalent in our schools we have to do something about this tax fraud is so rampant that we have to increase the penalties for that and yet we're all instinct right to whip out the evidence to beat people on the Right right it's a very human but wrong headed strategy because the subtext message is a lot of people just like you are doing this therefore I too so it it normalizes it legitimizes the undesirable behavior we've actually done a study in this regard I live in Arizona and there's something here called the Petrified Forest National Park. Their problem is people steal pieces of petrified wood from the forest floor and crystals very frequently and the problem is widespread enough that it is undermining the integrity of the forest and so there is a sign as you enter the park that says because so many people are stealing wood from the forest floor at the rate of nearly a ton a month. It is undermining the integrity of the forest I had a graduate student who was working with me and he and his fiance went to the forest and they saw that sign and he said before he was finished reading it he heard his fiancee who he counts as the single most honest person to ever met in his life say to him we'd better get ours now. What could possibly do that take this otherwise whole e honest young woman and turn her into an environmental criminal who is depleting a national treasure in the process but also you're thinking well if they're taking a ton of month I'm only going to take a few ounces that's nothing compared to a ton Yeah and we put that sign in front of certain pathways that ran through the forest and we salted those pathways with pieces of petrified wood and then we looked to see what the effect of that sign was on stealing the wood that we had marked compared to a control condition that didn't get anything done right it nearly tripled theft. So if you're trying to influence someone else's behavior it's good to keep in mind the power of social norms. Those norms are tricky it's hard to tell what kind of shaming and peer pressure will work what might backfire I called up my Freakonomics coauthors. From an economic perspective the shaming is a wonderful punishment because unlike imprisonment. It's free it's not only free that society can impose as much same as they want on people without any kind of cost or resources used but in fact the rest of the society actually likes it when other people get same people loved to read in the national wire the New York Times about the shame that comes down on public people so it's actually really incredibly efficient mechanism for punishing people who do things we don't like the only thing that hard about it only real shortcoming associated with shame is that someone's got to be willing to be shamed for instance after after we published Freakonomics some of my colleagues were not that wild about the book and the attention we received and so to try to shame me one of my colleagues put up anonymously and the Bolton board for the Department of Economics a supposed quote from me that said they claimed that I had said that mathematics was not required to understand reality. And this was supposed to be the most shameful embarrassing quote Any idea was if it was known publicly that I had said this that it would ruin my reputation and I would feel awful by myself but in fact it had just the opposite effect because I don't think mathematics is necessary to understand reality and you know I took tremendous satisfaction from the idea that that that I stood apart from. Profession in believing the thing which I think is obviously true and so while the intention of the act was to shame me I've still got that sign up in my office and I get utility out of it every single day when I walk in and I said. I'm Stephen Dubner And that was Freakonomics Radio thanks for listening will be back next week if you just can't wait that long you can find our entire Freakonomics Radio podcast archive at Freakonomics dot com or at Apple podcast 3 can also subscribe to the. I heard somebody say he's here so I rushed over there too and as I made my way through the people right in a circle was trying for getting his horn now it was magic just seeing him like that my 1st day pod cast is back I'm interacting with a new take the season focusing on life changing moments by new episodes where we get your pov casts or it could be a start or slash my 1st day my 1st day is made possible by Hornblower cruises and events info at Hornblower dot com This is 89.5 k. P.b.s. San Diego's n.p.r. 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Q Vo Calexico where news matters the modern package tour began about 150 years ago in the English book passage for some fresh mountain air in the Alps we can enjoy beautiful mountain trains or a little bit of a luxury if we can afford it and it's all there because 150 years ago Thomas Cook decided to take some people to Switzerland coming up today on travel with Rick Steves we look at what an exotic holiday getaway meant back in the days of Queen Victoria if you ever get to go on a safari in Africa wildlife artist Fred crack of the accident. That you put your camera way. You want to show your eyes and other senses to listen to the language the enemy being the Muses to speak the messages they communicate about the magnificence and Creole tree of life and we look at the motional reward you can expect when you allow time to be a little spontaneous only the traveler goes to sleep with absolutely no idea what tomorrow will bring just for the fun of it it's. Live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Janine hurts the already say 2 people were killed at a shooting at a gaming tournament on a mall in Jacksonville Florida today the sheriff says the gunman also died killing himself. Of member station. Has more Jacksonville sheriff Mike Williams says authorities found 3 dead including the shooter and about a dozen more injured inside the Chicago Pizza Bar and Restaurant at the landing shopping center in downtown Jacksonville this is Spector shooter is believed to be 24 year old David Katz a white male from Baltimore Maryland at the words believe Kat's was here for the tournament but Jacksonville Sheriff's Office along with other law enforcement is continuing the investigation and they have not identified a motive at this time for n.p.r. News I'm Delores Hinckley in Jacksonville the mechanic Senator Chuck Schumer.
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