YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert H. Frank

lines on the record: 49
first: 2020-05-22
most recent: 2020-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A more dedicated climate advocate. And that's the key step. As you become more of a climate advocate, then you're more likely to vote for, to campaign for, to donate to the politicians who will enact the policies that we need to enact in order to make a difference here. So I still think we need the policies, but I don't think of individual steps to reduce carbon footprints as a distraction any longer. They're important contributors to the dynamic that will ultimately give us those policies.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've completely changed my mind about the efficacy of individual action in the course of writing the book, and it's because individual actions it's true they have very little direct effect, but they often spawn huge changes as others are influenced when they see you do them. That's particularly true in the adoption of solar panels and hybrid cars and things of that sort. The effect of one move can be a hundredfold by the time it plays out. These individual actions are much more consequential than I ever realized. But the more important reason is that taking these kinds of actions changes who we are, as Aristotle emphasized. We don't come into the world with fixed identities and preferences. We become who we are in the process of living our lives. And when you take these steps, it changes. It makes you into more...”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second draft of the book by the time I got to it, I began to realize that the most important implications for the ideas in the book were for the climate crisis. As an economist, I'd often voice skepticism like most of my colleagues do about conscious consumption, the individual steps to reduce your carbon footprint, walking to work instead of driving, eating less meat, things of that sort. Those have negligible impact if you do them. Everybody else does them, that would be good. But if everybody else does them and you don't, it's the same effect either way. So economists have always said stop focusing on those issues, focus on the policies that we need to adopt to really clean up the climate mess, which is adopting a stiff carbon tax, massive public investment in green energy and things of that sort. We can't do that as individuals. We need policy changes to do that.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The memory of an oven and tell you about it too, and then suddenly they're suggesting investments we ought to be making to help the next cohort coming along. So yeah, we don't do a very good job of talking to the other side, and I think we can do better.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're trying to persuade successful people that they have an obligation to invest in the next generation's chances to succeed like they do, you don't want to tell them that they were lucky, that they hired their workers from public schools that we paid for, they shipped their goods to market on public roads and so on. When Obama reminded businesses, successful business owners, that they had that obligation. They thought he was telling them they didn't succeed on their own, that they didn't deserve the lofty positions that they held. Instead, it's just way more effective to ask successful people if they can recall examples of times they've enjoyed a little luck on their way to the top. They don't seem at all threatened or offended by the question. They light up when they think of an example. They tell you about it, remembering one kindles.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To begin with is that you shouldn't try to persuade somebody that they're wrong about whatever it is they believe defensive and become less likely to adopt your view. Just talk to them and listen attentively. The main finding from this literature is that the most powerful single step you can do talking to somebody from the other side of the fence is to ask the right question.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think when you refer to today being worse than the past, conservatives are more likely to act on a policy that would address that problem. It's an interesting asymmetry. And I think the first thing to be mindful of when you're trying to talk to somebody on the other side of the fence is that you not do harm. I mean, Al Gore would call attention to a study that said warming was occurring more rapidly than we had thought at first, and immediately the effect would be to harden attitudes among climate denialists. You don't want to make other people less likely to adopt the policies that we need to adopt by advocating them. So what do you do? And I think one of the most informative findings from the literature on what makes for an effective exchange of ideas between people who don't agree to”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“maintain the social safety net and everything else that we're not attending nearly sufficiently to in the current environment and they wouldn't have to give up anything important in the process. It's an illusion that they would suffer if they paid more.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything they need, of course, they'd still be able to do that. What are they worried about? They wouldn't be able to buy what they want. Well, once you've got everything you need, what do you care about? It's the special extras in life. Those are invariably things that are in short supply. The way you get them is to outbid other people like yourself who will also want them. And what people never stop to realize is that when your taxes go up and the taxes of people like you go up, your relative bidding power is completely unaffected by that. So the same marvelous penthouse apartments with three hundred sixty degree views of the city end up in exactly the same hands as before. If people realize that, I don't think they would resist paying the taxes that we need to levy in order to finance investment in green infrastructure.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's wasteful compared to what the same money would do if we invested it in various ways in the public sphere. I've been saying that for a long time. It's consistent with all the available evidence on the question of what determines happiness from different things we might spend money on, but it raises the question, why don't we vote for people who will do that? Why don't we vote for politicians who will tax the wealthy more heavily and make the public investments that would benefit not just the wealthy, but everyone else? And I didn't really address that question as early as I should have, but I've been thinking about it of late. And my answer to it tentatively is that it's because people suffer from what I'm calling the mother of all cognitive illusions. They think the wealthy think that if they had to pay more in taxes, that would make their lives less pleasant. They surely don't think that they wouldn't be able to buy.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been saying for 35 or 40 years that the evidence from the large and contentious literature on human happiness makes one point probably more clearly than any other, and that's that in the West, especially we've long since passed a point where for upper income people further increases in many forms of private consumption don't really deliver much bang for the buck. So if all the mansions get were to double in size, the rich wouldn't be any happier at all. Probably they'd be less happy because bigger mansions are more trouble. It would just raise the bar that defines how big a mansion they feel they need.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've just said we're going to tax carbon, and then they try to do it, and they get voted out of office. So I think it's important not just that you adopt the right policies, but that you attend to what the distributional consequences of them are and try to compensate people who would be harmed unduly by them if we were to give more attention to that. There are so many things we could do that we're not doing now.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fact that people in various countries who have proposed carbon taxes haven't taken the time to explain carefully to voters that they would make the tax revenue neutral, that means take the revenue from the tax and give it back to the taxpayers. Most of the revenue would come from upper-income individuals. They use much more energy than others. If you then took all the revenue that came in and gave an equal monthly check to middle and low income households, ninety percent of voters would get back more each month in that rebate check than they had paid in carbon taxes. And so it would be, you would think, very easy for a politician to persuade voters, hey, we ought to do this. It's going to clean up the air, and you're actually going to have more money to spend, and you'll have an incentive to buy less carbon intensive things with your money. It's a total winning approach, but we haven't done that.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tax has. Those for whom it's most expensive to cut back, they'll cut back less and in return they'll pay a much higher share of the tax on pollution that we levy. So it's both fair. The people who are emitting more pollution pay a higher tax. It's efficient. The people who can cut back most cheaply are the ones who undertake the lion's share of the cutback effort. So on those grounds, the tax is really a very desirable instrument and it cuts exactly in a parallel fashion for subsidies if we're trying to encourage people to do something that they don't naturally do enough of, subsidizing gets the right people to do it and does it in the most efficient way. I think when you think about taxes though, everybody gets very angry. Oh, you're going to take money away from me. And so they don't like it. I think it's been an act of gross political malpractice.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't mean to say that we need only to implement taxes or subsidies to steer behavior in different directions from what we'd see otherwise. But as an economist, I think that that's a bias that I share with many of my colleagues. A tax really is more forgiving of individual differences. So if there's somebody in the pollution realm that this was established early on, it's much more costly for some firms and individuals to cut back on their pollution than it is for others. We want to keep cutting pollution back as long as the benefit of the last unit we cut back at least as great as the cost of cutting it back. So a scheme that leads people to cut back the most who can cut back the most cheaply is a good scheme. That's efficient. That reduces the cost of reducing pollution. And that's exactly the effect that it's...”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“they please and it was dangerous to say you believe that when only 10% of the people believed it but if you say you believe that now I mean I'm not worried people are not going to buy my book because they hear me say that in 1989 it would have been rational for somebody to worry oh if I say that they won't hire me for the job I want or they'll discriminate against me in some way so What we believe does depend, or what we're willing to say publicly that we believe depends often very much on what others say they believe”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact is often we believe things just because they've been traditional and there's no real basis for them. Maybe they're one. Explaining in great detail why it would be good for the community if you let people marry whomever they please the general rate of approval of same sex marriage was about ten percent. Almost nobody was willing to say publicly that they thought that was an acceptable idea. Even as recently as 2008, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were publicly on record as opposed to same-sex marriage when the California state had a referendum about that question. Just a few years later, 2015 the Supreme Court handed down a decision declaring that every state had to allow people to marry anyone they please, same-sex or opposite sex, it didn't matter. And now 70% of Americans say, yeah, why should we stand in the way of people marrying?”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we come into the world with very few pre-formed beliefs. A lot of debates are complicated. We don't know what to think about them. I think if you ask students today how they feel about human slavery, you would get almost a unanimous response. Oh, no, that's a bad thing. But most of today's students, I'm guessing, couldn't reproduce the details of the debates that led societies to reach the judgment that, no, slavery is really not okay. Why do people believe it's not okay? Because everybody they know believes it's not okay. And that's not a bad reason for believing something necessarily. The fact is slavery is not okay if we don't have to waste a lot of time figuring out why it's not okay. We have time free to devote to other ideas that maybe are more urgent for us to find answers. To questions than those old ones.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. There have been some reasonable conjectures about that. The one that I find most plausible is that If you want to do something that you know everyone approves of anyway, then you don't really need license to do that. You can do it if you want to go out and exercise. Nobody's going to give you any grief about doing that. It's when you want to do something that you know you shouldn't do that you feel some restraint about doing it. And when you see others doing it in a way that gives you license to do it yourself. So I think that if there is an asymmetry, and I think there probably is one, it's likely to come from that distinction.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metaphor everyone stands to see better. So we all bid a little extra for house in a better school district, the good schools are invariably served in the neighborhoods. They serve the neighborhoods where the houses are more expensive if you want your kid to go to a better school. You buy a more expensive house. We all bid for the best school district we can. When we do that, even if we deplete our savings and take extra jobs to boost our bidding power, all we do is end up bidding the prices up of the houses in the better school districts, and half of all kids still attend bottom half schools the same as always. So yeah, it would be good if we could find ways to scale back in the inevitable pressures that we feel to act in accordance with what our peers are doing. So much of the The theme of the book is centered on that idea.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were misestimating the frequency of an event by using the availability heuristic, which is a misleading indicator often. You learn that you're making a mistake, you regret the fact that you're making one, you want to change your behavior, but there's a whole other class of instances. They're really collective action problems, many of them. It's like when everybody stands up to see better and nobody sees any better than if everybody had remained comfortably seated. That's not a cognitive error. You do that quite rationally because if others are standing in front of you, you don't see it all unless you stand too. from a collective vantage point, it's irrational that you're all standing. It would be better if you could all find some way to sit down. And I think when we follow one another's example in the world, often that's a good thing. Some memes lead us to the right destination. But in spending decisions, often we see outcomes that are very much like the stadium.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When behavioral economics started, it was really heavily shaped by Amos Taversky's work together with Danny Kahneman. Richard Thaylor had worked with them for a year while he was away on a sabbatic. He and I talked a lot when he got back from that visit. And I taught the first undergraduate behavioral economics course, and I called it departures from rational choice. I sort of regret that title now because it led to a lot of empty debates about what it meant to be rational, but that is the title I chose for it. And I divided up the material into two segments, departures from rational choice with regret and departures without regret. And with regret, departures were ones where you were just making a cognitive mistake. You were taking sunk costs into account when you shouldn't.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The argument of the book, basically, is that when you behave in a way that makes the social environment less supportive, that's a negative behavioral externality. And the logic of how to respond to behavioral externalities is exactly parallel to the arguments that we economists have used about pollution and other traditional externalities.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good thing about taxing behaviors that degrade social environments that make people more likely to smoke, for example, is that you raise revenue when you do that and you can use every pound you raise from a tax like that. You can use to reduce the tax on a useful activity. So taxes are bad. Well, no, taxes are not bad. You need some taxes. But what should we tax? We should tax behaviors that cause harm to others. And there are so many instances in which what we do causes harm in these subtle ways. I call it behavioral externalities. Economists talk about externalities by which they mean typically things like smoke or noise or congestion. Toxic effluence and the like.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it really is the social dimension that's the main driver, but the taxes were a critical step in getting that first movement away from the high smoking rate. And I think it's clear people don't like to be taxed on anything that they do, but I think you have to step back. Some people, well, we see more of this in the States than you see here, but some people say all taxation is theft. Those people really don't belong in the conversation at all. If you don't tax, then you don't have a government, you don't have an army, you get invaded by somebody that has an army, and then you pay tax to them. So set that view off to the side. The interesting questions are what should we tax and how much should we tax it? Right now we tax a lot of things we shouldn't tax. We tax business payrolls. Why should we discourage companies from hiring workers? What a bizarre thing to do.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think every parent, if given a choice, would say, I'd much rather raise my kids in an environment where fourteen percent of the adults are out there smoking than one in which they're sixty percent out there smoking, which is what it was when I was a kid. So yeah, I think it's a huge benefit that we've reaped. The taxes by themselves wouldn't have given us that benefit. The fact of making it inconvenient to smoke wouldn't have had that big an effect unless you weave contagion into the narrative. You don't get that big of a decline that quickly. Some people didn't start because of the taxes or the inconvenience because they didn't start. Fewer people had friends who smoked, so they were less likely to start, and it just radiated out. If you don't have that contagion element in the narrative, you don't get the big reductions that we've seen.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I had a conversation with a friend and I said to him that if my kids had grown up when I did, I have four sons, they're all adults now. If they'd grown up when I'd grown up, I told him that I thought at least two of them would have become smokers. One of my sons was present during this conversation. He immediately asked me which two, and I said, well, my oldest for sure, David Hayden, my youngest, I thought he would be two. What about me? He seemed offended that I didn't think he would have been a smoker, so maybe three, I thought two, maybe three. When I was growing up, I started smoking at age 14, most of my friends had already been smoking for a year or two by then. It was quite common for teenagers to inhabit groups most of whom smoked. My kids didn't smoke not because I was a brilliant parent, but because most of their friends didn't.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should resist those bad examples. What about the parents of all those kids who are going to become smokers because people in the peer group were smoking at a high rate? Don't we care about the energy they've invested their whole lives trying to raise their kids to be healthy? They're going to be disappointed because too many people are smoking. Why wouldn't we want to lessen the injury to them then? So I think there are lots of reasons to consider intervening here.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The great harm we do, by far the greatest harm we do when we smoke, is to make other people more likely to smoke. And John Stuart Mill Harm principle speaks clearly here. The only legitimate reason the government can restrain you from doing what you want to do is to prevent you from causing harm to others. When you smoke, you cause harm to others, not by secondhand smoke so much, although that is a minor harm, but making other people more likely to smoke. And every parent wants his kid not to smoke. I mean, perhaps there's some strange parent out there who doesn't have that view, but it would be strange at least to hear a parent say, I hope my kid grows up to be a smoker. Smokers don't want to smoke. They regret that they do. And so even if you don't want to count the harm to people who are induced to become smokers, you say, oh, that's their problem.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could say it's not the government's job to protect you from harming yourself. When John Stuart Mill said that, and I read his book as a junior in high school, I thought, yeah, that sounds right to me, but now as an experienced behavioral scientist, I think that's a more interesting question than I.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If there were some way that policy makers could encourage us to choose as if we cared about how our choices would affect the social environment and if those policies that had that effect weren't for some reason objectionable in their own right, why wouldn't we want to consider implementing those? And so in the case of smoking, we did exactly that, although not for the reason I'm suggesting. We started taxing cigarettes and making it less convenient to smoke. We did that under the rationale that new studies had shown that exposure to secondhand smoke could contribute to various illnesses. In fact, those links show that there is harm from exposure to secondhand smoke, but the harm is minuscule compared to the harm from actually being a smoker. Okay.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About his or her own choice and what its effect will be on the social environment because the effects essentially negligible from any individual's point of view. Why worry about that? And yet together our effect is hugely important. And since the social environment affects us so strongly, both for good and ill,”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“fiction fan, nope, uninformative. What you need to know is the proportion of her friends who smoke. And it's a huge effect if that number goes from 20% up to 30%, she becomes 25% more likely to become or remain a smoker. If there's no other effect remotely as strong as that. So the social environment affects us. We don't act in independence of it. I think this is a well demonstrated fact, uncontroversial to say. It's also uncontroversial, I think, to note that we affect the social environment. It is, after all, just a consequence in the aggregate of our own individual choices. So the smoking rate that affects us where that come from, that's just the sum of all people who chose to smoke divided by the total number of people. That's the smoking rate. Nobody were.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's spaced on the maxim of the psychologist who says it's the situation, not the person by that they mean if we see somebody behave in a certain way and we ask ourselves why did she do that the impulse we have is to say what kind of person would do such a thing. That's not a good way to think about the psychologists tell us. They say traits of personality and character are usually not the most important explanation for the behaviors we see. It's really the social situation that is the most powerful determinant of what she'll choose in a given setting. And so in the case of smoking, if you're worried, if you have a teenage daughter, you're worried she might become a smoker. It really doesn't help you to know at all that she's a Manchester United fan. That doesn't predict anything. She's good in math. That doesn't tell you much either. She's a son.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the standard economic models assume that we're all well informed. We have preferences that originate within us and we make decisions that are ours alone taken in isolation. They're not affected by what others do. That's, of course, not the way the world works. The argument of the book is actually quite simple.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Summarizable on the back of an index card, you know, save a lot each month, put it all in index funds, and don't worry about it. Just leave it alone.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Momentum investors, all this stuff, yeah, no, I think if anybody asks for advice, just do what Harold Pollock, the economist at Chicago, says he says all you need to know about investing is.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to explode in the months ahead if I don't buy now, I'll be missing the boat. So, yeah, we see it going both ways. Again, it's just taking cues from people who you think might know something that's better informed than what you know. It's not necessarily irrational, but you need to be measured in your judgment about when to do that. It can obviously get you into trouble.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think if you're an investor, your concern is that somebody out there knows something that you don't know. And much of the time that's, of course, true, if you see the price of a stock you hold falling suddenly, it's quite possible that somebody knows something material about the prospects of the company that has led him or her to sell this stock. Others see that and are fearful that there will be a sustained price drop in the stock. And so rather than hold the stock and suffer those losses, there's a rush to dump it quickly, and then that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The stock will go down, even if the first movement was a completely random step. It can work, of course, the other way, and that's where you really see the fear of missing out. Somebody knows something about this company.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spot in the queue for this job, or do I say, no, I'm out of here, and you can't really find fault with him for thinking, well, maybe I'll take the next step and see what happens.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standing there waiting for what comes next. And when I saw that scene in the film long ago, my first reaction was No way would I have done that. And of course, we don't know how many people he”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shows him into the waiting room. There are already four other men sitting there waiting, so he's seated. The film goes on about its business. Business. It shows various other scenes. It keeps coming back. Still, nothing's happening in this room. The five men are sitting there quietly. Comes back another time with a close up of the subject's face, the subject being the last guy to arrive, we the viewer know that the other four Confederate surveillance, the subject does not know that. Subjects face is impassive as it has been throughout, but all of a sudden he looks agitated and And why is he? So upset the camera pulls back To show that the other four have at no apparent signal. Stood up and have begun taking off all their clothing. The subject looks more and more agitated until finally Again a look of calm comes across his face.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't sound like a very difficult job. What's the cat's, you would ask yourself. But a lot of people signed up they wanted to interview for this job. He scheduled appointments and in the scene we see a man shows up for his interview with”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like this example. Somebody asked what's the most vivid example you've come across of our impulse to follow what others do. And I've not found in... Many decades have not found an example that's more vivid than this one. It's a simple scene, Funt, the director of Candid Camera, made a film, and one of the episodes in it is he places an ad for this unbelievably good-sounding job. It has a high...”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's the same with memes The ideas Have staying power and that transmit easily aren't necessarily the ones that are good for us. Sometimes they are, maybe even more often than not, but not always.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greater staying power than others, they were more likely to be transmitted from one person to another. Successful ones, the ones that propagated, were much like successful genes. General a gene that succeeds has good effects on the individual, but that's not always true”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Subsequent studies much more formal that have demonstrated that we're really way more connected than anyone ever.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the final destination which to me Astonishing because most people, I'm guessing, through it in the trash straight away. Small minority probably tried to follow the instructions Out of that. Unknown number eighteen of made it. It was really quite remarkable.”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an old idea, really. There was a check. Short story that explored it, the idea was that everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else through a chain of”
2020-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · Putting Peer Pressure to Work with Robert H Frank and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source