Basically we're trying to answer is Why do people think that life is so hard for them we wanted to try to get a handle on how or why it's so easy for people to feel put upon to feel resentful to feel that life has made things harder for them than it has for other people that's Tom Gilovich I'm a professor of psychology at Cornell University and I study how people make judgments and decisions in their every day and professional lives and Shy David I or in Hebrew shy and I'm a an assistant professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research. Gilovich and David I recently published a paper called the headwinds tailwinds asymmetry in addition to being a clever piece of experimental research it has the amazing capacity to make you feel both much better about your life in much worse yeah and a nutshell is the paper explains why you think your parents were tougher on you than your siblings so my older sister she had all the freedom because she was older she got to go out and do things but I got punished it explains why rooting for your sports team could be so painful there is a tendency to feel like the team that you favor has a harder time than ever teams explains why Democrats are convinced the deck is stacked against them end why Republicans are convinced of the same thing they really are and most important it explains why most of us aren't nearly as grateful as we ought to be how did I get even to be alive how did I get to be alive in a world that has the beauty that it does and so on. Today I'm Freakonomics Radio how we build resentments how those resentments can curdle our well being and how we would all benefit from feeling some more gratitude Ok I'll try to. Hey I'm grateful for that song you know the song that goes like this. It's. From the w n y c Studios this is Freakonomics Radio the show that explores the hidden side of everything here's your host Stephen Dubner. So what are you grateful for today I'm grateful for Tom Shy David I again I'm not joking I know I had the best graduate school advisor mentor and friend in Tom and the fact that we could sit for hours and just talk about our ideas and then go and see if those ideas are Reo run experiments and then you know even talk about a result that was just an amazing experience for what it's worth the feeling is mutual shies just terrific and I'm convinced is going to have a great career David I 33 years old got his Ph d. In psychology just a couple years ago if you were going to pick a mentor in the field you can do much better than Tom Gilovich there to guide many of the topics we've discussed on this program over the years especially those relating to behavioral economics Oa debt to Gilovich is research. I'd love to read off just a quick list of phenomena that you're known for studying in some cases pioneering and maybe have you just give a very brief description of what the thing is and what it means so that number one the spotlight effect yeah the spotlight effect refers to feel a most of us can relate to it's the feeling that when we're doing something that other people are really attending to what we're doing a social spotlight is on us and it turns out that other people are paying much less attention to us then. And we thank. The hot hands notion or maybe the hot hand fallacy Well everyone who's ever played the game of basketball just knows you get this feeling where the game seems to slow down it becomes easier you almost don't even have to aim that carefully the ball's just going to go and it's one of the most compelling feelings that you can have and it turns out if you statistically analyze people's shots whether it's professional games or college basketball player shooting in a gym although the feeling exists when you make several shots in a row you will feel hot that feeling very surprisingly doesn't predict how you're going to do it the next shot there of the next several shots the distribution of hits and misses in the game of basketball looks just like the distribution of heads and tails when you're flipping a coin although of course not every player shoots exactly 50 percent very few of them do talk for just a minute about your work in happiness or he Donek studies Yeah almost so many psychologists who study judgment decision making have an interest in wellbeing or happiness as well because after all we we try to make sound judgments and decisions to advance star physical and psychological well being so the question just asks that self how good a job do we do that and how can we advance our wellbeing more and my particular case that has involved studying such of motions as regret decisions got a wry gratitude either on the part of decisions that have worked out well or just offense that have happened to a person that you feel grateful for great briefly describe your research into biased blind spot. Yeah the bias blind spot is refers to the fact that everybody knows that people are biased but it's much easier to see the bias in other people than in oneself and and one last one and this one strikes me plays into today's conversation about headwinds and tailwinds handicapping describe that for me briefly Yeah self handicapping is familiar idea particularly if we go back to the world of sports where before a contest people claim a certain obstacle in their favorite teams path. You know maybe it will weigh on but we've got a key player out and that's setting everyone up for an explanation if you should lose students often do this today Mike study as hard as they can and pretend that they haven't studied so if they bomb the exam people don't think they're challenged and if they should succeed all the better the more glorious victory if you've overcome an obstacle so people will put these obstacles in their path to manage other people's and their own attributions or explanations for why they succeeded or failed. Why people succeed and fail an important topic plainly but a complicated one especially for academic psychologists like Gilovich and David I it's a huge question a messy question with a ton of variables hard to measure but people's attributions were explanations for why they succeeded or failed that they could explore we wanted to try to get a handle on how or why it's so easy for people to feel put upon to feel resentful to feel that life has made things harder for them than it has for other people and at the same time try to understand why it might be hard for people to be as grateful as perhaps we should which gets us to their paper the headwinds tailwinds asymmetry the idea should be familiar to anyone who cycles or runs for exercise sometimes you're running or cycling into the wind and it's not pleasant you're aware of it the whole time it's retarded in your progress and you can't wait until the course changes so that you get the wind at your back and when that happens you're grateful for about a minute and very. You no longer notice the wind your back that's helping push you along and what's true when it comes to running our cycling is true of life generally you argue that gratitude has been shown to be good for us what's the evidence for that a lot of people have done work on gratitude over the last 20 years where they'll do things like have people keep a gratitude diary where every day or every week you write down what you have to be grateful for most people do it at the evening just before we go to sleep and you do that for a few days in a row and you just see that people are happier or more satisfied with their lives or you have assignments to write a letter to a person every week expressing gratitude for something they've done for you and giving it to someone face to face and not just emailing them but actually sitting there having them read it and then having a conversation about it and when people do that they sleep better they go to the doctor or less often they are also show less depressive symptoms so there are all sorts of direct benefits to the grateful person it's just amazing how many positive correlates very hard to gratitude. But when you ask people what they're grateful for when you ask people what are you grateful for the prototypical answer is my parents my family my friends my loved ones what they're missing is all these Invisibles What are these Invisibles. They're so many the fact of it I had opportunities for education how did I get even to be alive the fact that we can sit here and talk right no one is monitoring what we're talking about that is something very Not everyone has that is something that we should feel grateful for comedian Louis c.k. Has a brilliant bit on this it's called Everything is amazing and no one cares child mortality is declined dramatically in the past 100 years and he talks about example after example of some new technology comes in your Alex. And then 10 minutes later it's not a luxury it's a necessity are we going to always on an airplane and there was Internet high speed Internet on the airplane that's the newest thing that I know exists and I'm sitting on the plane they go open up your laptop you can go on the Internet it's fast and I'm watching You Tube clips it's a me I'm in an airplane and then it breaks down and they apologize the internet's not working the guy next to me goes. I. Like how quickly the world owes him something yet he knew existed only time seconds ago I. Was a psychologist referred to this says the head on a treadmill you run really hard to get something the thing that you get that you're aiming for feels good when you've got it but then you adapt to it and you have to run ever faster to get more and more but here's a question if gratitude is such a positive emotion it's just amazing how many positive correlates of error to gratitude then you'd think we'd all be chasing after a hard all the time so why aren't we. Gilovich in David I suspect it has to do with what psychologists call the availability bias meaning we tend to overweight the experiences that are readily available in our memories which Gilovich and David I argue are more likely to be headwinds and tailwinds we have to pay attention to the barriers in front of us because we have to get over them or get through them in some way we have to overcome them we don't have to pay attention to those things that are boosting us along we can just be boosted and that fundamental asymmetry in attention is the headwinds tailwinds asymmetry meaning that it's easier to summon emotions that are the opposite of gratitude in fact they're the enemies of gratitude and one of them is a bit you ation or adaptation that we thank you have some good fortune befell us we'd be happy we'd be grateful and we'd be happy forever or we wouldn't sweat the small stuff anymore and that's true for a while but then we adapt to it and all of a sudden we're sweating the small stuff again but that's hardly the only enemy of gratitude the big ones are greed and envy Ok 1st greed inherent in greed is the idea that this is not enough it's not a means to an end having is that the end when you experience greed and when you're just focusing on this accumulation it's hard for you to take stock of what you already have and envy which is when all you're focused on is whatever people have especially when it's malicious and be not benign and b when you're really focusing on you know I don't want them to have that didn't deserve this it's unfair when you experience that it's hard to stop in feel grateful so that's the theory at least once Tom Gilovich and Shy David I den of find it all they had to do was find evidence that it's actually true you know if this had wings telling the symmetry is a real psychological phenomena we should find it in very. Different conflicts and domains. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio evidence of headwinds in family matters sports and politics and how feeling the headwinds might persuade you that your country is in worse shape than it is and that you need a new leader who will really shake things up a willingness to do that I think is failing to appreciate all the things that make our lives really the envy of the rest of the world. Freakonomics Radio is supported by Harry's and online research company offering German engineer blades and other shaving products learn more about Harris and its products at Harris dot com. Support for k.q.e.d. Comes from European sleep works the store that bases its design in materials or research factors affecting sleep including comfort and support humidity levels and ease of breathing details online about their mattresses and bedding sleep Works dot com On this week's On the media the a.p. 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Studios this is Freakonomics Radio here's your host Stephen Dubner the academic psychologists Tom Gilovich and Shy David I wanted to know whether people put more emphasis on the headwinds they face the barriers and obstacles and difficulties then they're tailwinds like free society and good health and so on this meant trying to measure people's perception of headwinds and tailwinds in a variety of domains so we did studies to see how it effects siblings views of whether they had it harder than their brother or sister easier whether Republicans and Democrats think that this strange thing known as the Electoral College favors their side or hurts their side whether sports fans think that the schedule is fair and then my favorite example comes from my own field of academia in psychology if you talk to graduate students in different subdisciplines each subdiscipline both think the other ones have it easier than they do developmental psychologists well. I wish I was a social psychology person I wouldn't so much easier on college students than it is to run a baby but then you talk to the social psychologist the developmental us have it so easy that they have a sample sizes of like $6.00 to $8.00 we now have to run a 100 in each condition. And every every group moans its own difficult fate. Ok we'll start with the sibling study the one thing that we kept coming back to is this idea that siblings always feel like the other one had it easier for the study to. But I and Gilovich recruited people who had only one sibling no twins allowed and we asked them to think back to when they were younger both living at the same house think about how Rover parents treated them versus verb brother or sister. Who got more praise who got more encouraged to do things who had more freedom to go out and party and in contrast who got punished more who got lectured more and what we found was that siblings fog the everyone had it easier and that they had it harder in other words headwinds for everybody another study looked at how self identified Democrats and Republicans think their party makes out in terms of raising campaign money and getting Congress to cooperate in winning the Electoral College as with the siblings people on either side of the political aisle fell the other side had all the advantages. Would the same effect hold true among sports fans so what we did is we went on Reddit and the n.f.l. Subsection of red it's right after the 2014 schedule was published and we just wanted to see how people are reacting specifically they want to see how fans perceive their team's upcoming schedule do I tend to think that my team had it easier or harder they had winds tailwinds asymmetry predicts that what would jump out of the page of the schedule when you look at are all the hard games your team has to play and what we found was that most of the comments were about how difficult it is for me finally Gilovich and David I looked at some of their academic brethren to see if they too primarily feel the headwinds they looked at accounting professors make and like in many disciplines be divided into experimental and non experimental accountants What's an experimental account what they do is study the human aspect and the Human behavior of accountings and things like auditing things like When do people lie and when can we detect lying stuff like that you'll bitch and David I surveyed roughly $100.00 experimental and non experimental accountants and we asked each of them how easy is it for our experimental and non experimental accountants to get their papers published to get grants to get tenure and so on and each of them thought that it was easier for the other group than it was for them to have these good things happen but to this study we added a twist after having them get themselves in touch with their headwinds more than their tailwinds We then asked them about a variety of what you might call questionable research practices Is it Ok to take money from a questionable source if the research itself is Ok Is it Ok. To publish the same paper twice in 2 very different journals can you put your name on a paper as a co-author if you really didn't do anything what we wanted to see is seeing your field and yourself as disadvantages does that give you more moral flexibility does that tell you in your own mind to maybe cut some corners and what you find is that if people have just thought about who has it harder or easier than are other people in their discipline they are more accepting of these questionable research practices so when you feel like no the deck is stacked against me it appears that people want to make up for that and they're willing to kind of bend the rules to do that and obviously that has a lot of implications for real life it encourages feeling resentful and unappreciated and that's a psychological state where we're not at our best I'm curious how the idea of headwinds and tailwinds plays into the conversation these days about privilege versus discrimination or lack of opportunity so there's a lot of conversation about white and or male privilege perhaps that's an example of tailwinds that aren't properly appreciated and on the other side some claims of discrimination or lack of opportunity perhaps being an example of of headwinds being exaggerated I'm curious what your thoughts are on that yeah I think the what we've shown in the lab is directly applicable to some of the discussions going on in the country right now there's this term that. There's a war on white males these days white Christian men and channeled through the headwinds tailwinds asymmetry you could see why that group would think that that is to say the influence they've had has deep. Creased and of course that's the focus of their attention that decrease at the same time if you look at it from the outside what you see is an enormous advantage that has existed for hundreds of years to be reduced just a little bit and from an outside perspective it doesn't look like at all like a war it looks like yeah just a little a little bit of rebalance a day and we even need to rebalance some are what about on the flip side what about if I feel aggrieved if I feel I am facing way more headwinds then the other people around me whether it's in the labor markets or in academia