YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Nisbett

lines on the record: 91
first: 2021-12-31
most recent: 2021-12-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Exactly. So, the smarter somebody is, the more likely they are to stand aside and not give you an opinion about something if they don't feel like they have sufficient knowledge.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's interesting that the smarter you are, the quicker you realize you're not as smart as someone else. Actually, this is related to a Dunning finding, right? I mean, the more knowledgeable people are, the better calibrated they are for understanding the world. They understand, they know very little about science, so they tell you, well, I don't know. You ask me a question I can't answer. I don't know enough. More ignorant people will give you an answer because they don't realize they don't have the wherewithal.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To an attribute of the person, a personality trait or an ability that really should be understood in terms of context or situation. But in showing that this is a difference in the likelihood that we make this error for ourselves versus others, If you show people a video of someone behaving in a particular way and ask them why they did it, they'll go for the person's attributes, for their traits instead of paying attention to the context. But if it's they themselves who are doing this, they're responding to a significant extent to the context. So they say they attribute the behavior, their own behavior. They're much more likely to attribute it to the context of the situation than they would the same behavior by someone else.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in a way, that's almost the opposite of the attribution error. The fundamental attribution error, I attribute behavior.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who have been, just a second, let me make sure I get the story right about what he's finding. Yeah, Dunning has found that people are less likely to pay attention to side effects if you list 27 side effects, you know, like the TV ads, where they call, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. the more symptoms you give them, the less attention they pay to any of them and the less likely they are to remember it later. If you just tell them a few of the very most important ones, they're likely to retain that information. So psychology has a lot to do with what drug effects are and what drug side effects are and what people attribute the side effects to.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This bill is not causing any symptoms of any kind, but they think that the pill is causing certain symptoms. But it very much depends on the symptoms. If it's arousal symptoms, they will attribute any naturally occurring arousal to the pill. decreasing arousal symptoms they'll attribute any arousal to their own stake to their actual state which they will assume is worse than they might have thought so you can read in people's experiences arousal that's due to some external source or you can read it out so the FDA requires that All possible side effects be reported. You mentioned David Dunning earlier you've had on your program and he's done a fascinating study showing that”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the placebo effect is in fact you get certain symptoms, certain experiences. And if you've been given what is actually a placebo and told that it will improve your condition, the pain or your People will, in fact, often experience those things or think that they're experiencing those things. So there is definitely a phenomenon of the placebo effect. But in a way, this is the opposite of the effect.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such that people are going to be experiencing these things that they're not really having anything to do with the pill, but they're going to invent these effects. They'll start having these effects if you tell them about it via the power of suggestion.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes them longer to get to sleep because they think, look, I've got at least as much arousal as usual. Even though I've got a pill in me. So the general point made by those two studies is that you can have the effects of a pill that aren't really there. Their arousal is not being produced by that pill or reduced by that pill, but by other experiences this work got picked up by the FDA because drug companies did not want to tell people about the side effects that they might have from the drug because they said, well, the power of suggestion, we're psychologists here and we know that the power of suggestion is”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ought to get rid of those irrelevant symptoms that I have, and it didn't. So years later, somebody said, well, someone X is practically useless, so it was never going to have an effect.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we're thinking the arousal that they experience because of their worried about the situation with their girlfriend or the hour exam tomorrow, whatever, though the arousal that occurs as a result of these scary, unpleasant thoughts, they'll say, well, it must be particularly bad tonight because I've got this pill that's supposed to calm me down. And by the way, that was based on a personal experience as well. After I've had insomnia for quite a while as an undergraduate, I said, okay, I'm going to give up. I'm going to take a sleeping drug. And I took a salmonx and lay in bed waiting for it to take effect, which it never did, and it took me longer to get to sleep because I thought, well, this is...”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very bad idea. So we anticipated and found that the people that we had given the arousal instructions to got to sleep more quickly the nights that they took the pill. The people we said the pill will reduce your arousal took longer to get to sleep.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the next two nights, I want you to take this pill before you go to sleep, and it's an arousal pill that's going to cause, this may become your breathing irregular, your heart rate may become faster, etc. All the arousal symptoms, other people, we say nothing to about the effects of this pill, or we actually say it will reduce their arousal symptoms. And our anticipation was, I mean here, this is based on myself as an insomniac. You know, lie in bed, and thinking about the day and the future and the things I was concerned about, and I'd start thinking about them and I'd get kind of worked up. And so I said, you know, I'm getting aroused at bed then.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multiplying the pain experience, they're treating as an external thing. It has nothing to do with my thoughts or emotions or anything else. It's just that drug that caused those symptoms. And I did one other study which showed a therapeutic outcome for this kind of thing. I advertised for insomniacs. This was done at Yale with Yale students for a study on dreams, allegedly. So I found out how long it took them to get to sleep the previous two nights before they come into the lab. And I tell them,”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sure enough, and this is for some reason you're asking about things, all the big effects studies have ever done, an enormous effect. The people who've been told that the arousal will accompany the drug take four times the amperage of other people. And by the way, and this opens up a line of work, which we may want to talk about later, the reasoning here is completely unconscious. You ask people, tell me what did you think about the drug while you were taking the shock? And they said, I wasn't thinking about the drug at all. Yes, they were. And what they were thinking was they're getting more and more aroused as this thing that sure enough their heart rate, they're breathing patterns and so on are changing just like we said they would. They attribute the arousal, which otherwise would be.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We Well, very early on I did a study where I asked people to take a series of electric shocks of increasing intensity and I ask them to tell when can you first feel it? When does it first become painful? And it will cause your heart to race a bit. It will make your breathing heavier and more irregular. If you may find that your palms are a little bit sweaty, you may get a tightness feeling in your stomach. These are the symptoms people experience when you're giving them electric shock. They're the arousal symptoms that just come with the territory. Other people, we say it'll give them a few junk symptoms, it'll cause headache and some itching.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was a wonderful place to wander around. I would go down to the Rio Grande. I would go to the irrigation canals and look at the catfish and the crayfish. There was a kind of motel for Mexican farm workers that I would go down and visit those folks, usually taking a bunch of Walt Disney comics, which I had paid 10 cents for and I charged them five cents. And much later I realized this is a Pareto improving exchange. I got some money, which for my comics, and they got their comics cheaper than they would have had to pay for them in the store. So I wandered around a lot, so I was thinking a lot. And something of an isolate. There were not other kids in my neighborhood. So I did a lot of reading. So these days that wouldn't happen. You'd be doing... Looking at Instagram or playing video games.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my theory about that is, I mean, who knows? It's a fact. We don't really know why. But my theory is that if you're sick, you spend a lot of time in bed by yourself and there's not much to do, this is pre-TV, there's not much to do, but read and think. And this is going to stand you in good stead for certain kinds of occupations. Actually, I think most occupations. So then the reason that's in my book other than the fact that it's sort of an interesting tidbit is that I spent a huge amount of time alone wandering the area of El Paso, Texas, which is right across the border from Juarez.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You make your living historically in the South by rice farming, which is extremely social dependent. I mean, you can't do anything without lots of people cooperating. And it's wheat farming in the north of China, which is much less dependent on other people. Sure enough, people reason more holistically in the south of China than in the north of China. That's a very long answer to your question.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this Turkish student says, Well, I know an interesting town in Turkey where there are three major occupations. Farmers, fishers, and herders. Now, if you guys are right about why people think holistically in the East and analytically in the West, then we ought to find that the farmers and the fishers think more holistically than the herders. And that turns out to be true. So the herder sees the monkey and the cow as being related and the farmers and the fishers see the cow and the grass to be related. And so then the really beautiful study on this was a former student looked at reasoning in China saying, well, people ought to be more holistic in South China than in North China because”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I had a very sharp Turkish student a while back, and I should say, what was the situation in Greece? Well, Greece was mountains descending to the sea, mass agriculture is just not in the cards in that situation, people to make a living by trading and fishing and kitchen gardening and so on. They don't have to pay attention and then herdings, sheep herding, especially goats, so they don't have to pay attention to other people in order to lead an effective life.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The intellectual armaments of the East. So why do we get these perceptual differences and these cognitive differences and also as a consequence the social differences? I believed early on without much evidence that it was because of the type of economy that East Asians had versus Europeans. East Asians had a great, especially in China. I mean, terrific circumstances for mass agriculture. Mass agriculture Depends on my looking at what you're doing and understanding the relationship between your action and my action and so on. So I'm constantly looking out there and I'm seeing the reasons for behavior. I'm seeing the context that it creates them. And incidentally, if I'm paying attention out there, I have better understanding of physics.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the logic, by the way, apropos of analytic reasoning, logic was, the story goes, invented by Aristotle because he got sick of hearing lousy arguments in the marketplace and the political assembly. So he said, okay, can we agree that if your argument has this structure, it's a lousy argument. Logic was formalized very early in the West. It was never very much of an interest in the East, and it was never formalized. And there was only a very brief period in the 3rd century BC when there was any concern with logic at all. And it basically dropped out of”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“2,500 years ago already, Chinese were well aware of the concept of action at a distance. So they understood the reason for the tides, for example, which was not understood even by Galileo. He didn't get it right. And they also had a good concept of magnetism and of acoustics. They had very accurate lay intuitive physics as compared to Westerners.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I'll point out, as you did earlier, that the differences go back thousands of years. For example, if you look at physics beliefs in the West and in the East, it turns out Westerners have always tended to have physical beliefs which were a variety of the fundamental attribution error. They try to explain the behavior of objects purely in terms of properties of an object. So, you know, the object fell because it's heavy. Eastern says, well, the object fell because the material supporting it wasn't sufficient to bear the weight. So they understand the relation between the context and the object.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Asians, East Asians, when I say Asians, I nearly always mean East Asian, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, but others as well. We tell people, well, they've been told that this person was required to give this speech. What do they think they tell us Americans tell us, well, he thinks pretty much what he said, Asians don't do this. I don't really know what he thinks because he was assigned to do this by somebody else. And that effect is really huge. I mean, we make the error in that situation, a very big error, that they are much less likely to make. fundamental attribution. Also, but it's just not nearly as frequently and not nearly as strong an effect”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or some other topic. And so, and we say either this person gave this talk in response to psychology professor's request, in response to a political science assignment, or in response to a debate coach who said, I want you to give me the pro arguments as if you were in a debate. And people then hear this speech, and now you ask them, what are you supposed this guy actually thinks? And people are hugely influenced by what he's said, even though they know he was chosen randomly to give this particular talk.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we tend to attribute the causes of behavior to a person's attributes. That is his personality, his abilities, his attitudes. And we tend to ignore the context. East Asians are much more likely to pick up on the context and to attribute behavior to the context than we are. And an example of this is we do a study where we say we've asked this person you're about to hear from. We've asked them to please state the case as if you were in a debate for why marijuana should be legal.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one thing that we do, we do very simple studies to make our points. We show people a picture of a monkey, take a better example, we show people a picture of a cow grass and a monkey. And we say which two of these pictures go together? The Americans say, well, the monkey and the cow go to better go together because they're both animals. The Asians are much more likely to say, well, the grass go together because the cow eats the grass. So they're seeing relationships automatically that are not so salient. To us, and they're paying much more attention to the object. Some of the more consequential differences have to do with understanding human behavior. There is an error in reasoning that people make. I wonder how many of your guests have heard of this error. It's called the fundamental attribution error.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Japanese spend much, much more time on the context, and they're actually constantly looking back and forth between the context and the object. So they're not just seeing the object and the context. They're seeing relationships between the object and the context. The effects are huge for perception. There are some very large effects for cognition as well, which I can tell you about if you're interested.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The context, it's a 60% increase over what Americans do. And that's done with no loss of information about the central objects. So we wanted to see, well, what are they doing? Are they looking at this thing differently? And the answer is yes, they are. We put Gizmo on their heads with a camera back at their eye so we know where they're looking at every moment. This is done with still photos. And we show people the photos for 10 or 20 seconds. And what we find is that the Americans spend almost all their time looking at the object, the front of it, the back of it, the top of it, the bottom of it, etc.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were rocks and shells on the bottom and so on. The Japanese nearly always start with the context. They say I saw what looked like a stream. The water was green. There were rocks and plants on the bottom. There were three big fish swimming off to the left. Now in total we got 60% more reports about context from the Japanese, from the Americans than from the Americans. And 100% more observations about relationships like the frog was on the lily pad. And so it turns out the difference there between number of observations about”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was prepared for some differences, certainly not the differences as large as we found. My favorite examples of these cognitive differences really have to do with perception more than reasoning, although there are plenty of big differences for reasoning. In one of our studies, and this was done with Takahiko Masuda, we showed underwater scenes to Americans and Japanese for 20 seconds. And then we asked them, tell me what you saw. The Americans will say something like, well, I saw three big fish swimming off to the left. They had one fin on top. They had pink stipples on their bellies.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How it's going to react, how it's going to behave. He said, I, as Chinese, think much more holistically. I pay much more attention to the context of everything, objects and people. I pay attention to relationships. I pay attention to similarities. And this produces all kinds of different conclusions between you and me looking at the same situation. Now that's actually, he didn't quite say all of that, but he said stuff that was similar to that in what I just said is a summary of our results. And speaking of big effects, not everything I do gets big effects, I can assure you, but I didn't actually believe him exactly, although I had read a book by Nakamura called Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is a radical premise, and I just happen to have a student a number of years ago from China, a really brilliant guy who's actually now Dean of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, which is the top university in China. An attribute had been working together for a while. He said, you know, Dick, you and I think completely differently about a lot of different kinds of things. And I said, well, tell me more. And he gave me a version of the following. He said, you think very analytically, very linearly. When you look at some object or person, are you thinking what are the attributes of that object or person and you come up with rules or you consult your rules about that kind of object or person to figure out”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's surprisingly strong. If I'd been predicting what I'd find, I'd say, oh, maybe a 10 or 15% edge, but no, it's huge.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Test this, and I started looking at sports and the birth order of people who play dangerous sports versus non-dangerous sports. And it turns out a later born is about 50% more likely to play a dangerous sport than a firstborn. That's what I just found out recently. There have been 20 studies since all supporting that general statistic.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was my advisor and graduate school at Columbia, Stanley Schachter, studied birth order, and one thing he discovered is that firstborn females are more frightened of the prospect of electric shock than laterborn females. And I thought, hmm, that's interesting because I've always been kind of afraid of getting hurt and my younger brother was getting hurt all the time when he was a kid. So I sort of file that away and then I heard one of these people who looks at primates and she studied monkeys and she just made this offhand observation that when a monkey mother has her first baby she's all arms and legs and tails keep it in the Tree to keep it from falling 30 feet down from the”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gave us reports from people that we never heard of. We encounter people that we don't know at all. All of this is just completely unanticipatable from the life of a hunter-gatherer. So the problem is the rug has been pulled out from under us, so we make errors all the time.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Well, there's a whole enterprise I'm sure you're aware of and psychology and economics showing that people's reasoning is flawed in many respects. And most of many people said, well, that can't be, you know, I managed to get through my day pretty well. That sometimes self-delusional, but by and large, it's correct to say we're not terrible at reasoning across the boards. It's just that the industrial revolution and then in spades, the information revolution just changed the nature of what we need to do in our reasoning and everyday life. It gave us data, it gave us numbers, it gave us”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was just lock and key. That's what I was meant to do. But I learned it very early, fortunately. I read Calvin Hall's primer of Freudian psychology, and it was just zap. That's it. That's what I'm going to do.”
2021-12-31 · Masters in Business · Richard Nisbett on Flawed Reasoning and Societies (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source