221. Why Are We So Pessimistic? AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast No Stupid Questions

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Episode: 221. Why Are We So Pessimistic?

Author: Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
Duration: 00:39:21

Episode Shownotes

Are things really as bad as they seem? Has Gen Z given up hope for the world? And why was the father of positive psychology a lifelong pessimist? SOURCES:Albert Bandura, professor of psychology at Stanford University.David Brooks, author and opinion columnist. Andrew Grove, former C.E.O. and chairman of Intel Corporation.Kalev

Leetaru, founder of the GDELT Project.Steven Maier, professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder.Michelle Obama, attorney, author, and former first lady of the United States.Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University.Amanda Ripley, journalist and author.Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University.Edward Zigler, professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University. RESOURCES:"Chicken Littles Are Ruining America," by David Brooks (The Atlantic, 2024).Generations, by Jean Twenge (2023).Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker (2018)."The Short History of Global Living Conditions and Why It Matters That We Know It," by Max Roser (Our World in Data, 2016)."Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights from Neuroscience," by Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman (Psychological Review, 2016)."Short- and Long-Term Consequences of Stressor Controllability in Adolescent Rats," by Kenneth H. Kubala, John P. Christianson, Steven F. Maier, et al. (Behavioural Brain Research, 2012).The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker (2011)."Forecasting Large-Scale Human Behavior Using Global News Media Tone in Time and Space," by Kalev Leetaru (First Monday, 2011)."Motivational Aspects of Changes in IQ Test Performance of Culturally Deprived Nursery School Children," by Edward Zigler and Earl C. Butterfield (Child Development, 1968)."Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock," by Martin E. P. Seligman and Steven F. Maier (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1967).Upworthy. EXTRAS:"Why Is U.S. Media So Negative?" by Freakonomics Radio (2021).

Summary

In this episode, Angela Duckworth and Mike Maughan explore the growing pessimism in society, analyzing whether the world truly deserves its dire perception. They discuss findings such as the strikingly low percentage of Americans who believe the world is improving, particularly among Generation Z. Although notable experts highlight significant advancements in areas like health and poverty reduction, the cultural narrative maintains a sense of despair. The concept of agency and self-efficacy are emphasized as crucial in shaping optimism, with discussions on how fostering small wins could help individuals, especially the younger generation, combat feelings of helplessness and encourage a more hopeful outlook.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (221. Why Are We So Pessimistic?) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_06
I am ready. Let's go. I'm Angela Duckworth.

00:00:07 Speaker_02
I'm Mike Mahn. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

00:00:12 Speaker_05
Today on the show, are we becoming more pessimistic as a society?

00:00:16 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's really hard to have hope for the world. Yeah, I really wonder if there's any real purpose to my life. Mike, I have a question for you and me from somebody who's very special to me, and that is Jason Duckworth.

00:00:42 Speaker_02
Oh, I love it. Hello, Jason.

00:00:44 Speaker_06
Fan favorite. Well, maybe he's my favorite fan. He's wondering whether we're getting more pessimistic. And not Jason and Angela. He means, like, is humanity getting more pessimistic. He's probably speaking of Americans.

00:00:59 Speaker_06
I mean, he's just, I think, asking this question because he thinks there's a lot to be optimistic about these days.

00:01:06 Speaker_02
I will say that my immediate reaction to this is, one, I love that Jason is an optimist. Two, I think that there are trends toward pessimism in society at large.

00:01:20 Speaker_02
I have a friend in the political arena who talks all the time about conflict entrepreneurs. Conflict entrepreneurs. What are they? I mean, think about some of these more extreme news shows or news channels.

00:01:31 Speaker_02
Their entrepreneurship, their business is in driving conflict and making people angry and thinking the world is terrible.

00:01:39 Speaker_02
And the more you can get people agitated by thinking things are awful, the more you can generate attention and you can therefore sell ads. So we call some of these conflict entrepreneurs.

00:01:51 Speaker_02
There's a data scientist named Kalev Leetaru who performed sentiment analysis

00:01:56 Speaker_02
on every single New York Times article between 1945 and 2005 and found that the coverage began drifting negative in the 1960s and has only gotten progressively more negative.

00:02:10 Speaker_06
What is sentiment analysis? I think I know what it is, but I don't know the research you're talking about.

00:02:15 Speaker_02
Sentiment analysis is, we do this all the time at Qualtrics too, if you have all these free response comments in a survey, it'll just determine is the sentiment prevailingly negative in a comment or in a story or positive based on the words used and the construction of those words in a sentence, et cetera.

00:02:33 Speaker_02
So the sentiment analysis on every article between 1945 and 2005 saw the trend going down. There's this prevailing sentiment toward negativity and much that surrounds us.

00:02:45 Speaker_06
You know, my Ph.D. advisor, Marty Seligman, is like the O.G. optimism researcher. I believe he was the first scientist to try to define and measure the tendency to be an optimist versus a pessimist.

00:03:02 Speaker_06
By the way, he first started thinking about pessimism and would certainly describe himself as a lifelong pessimist personally. Really?

00:03:10 Speaker_06
Yeah, although there's little optimistic epilogue because I think he now thinks he's more of an optimist, but he would say that like most of his very long life has been as a pessimist.

00:03:18 Speaker_06
I mean, the origin story is interesting because when we say, you know, is the world becoming more pessimistic? Are we as a society becoming more pessimistic? We may not mean actually the same thing as what the OG optimism, pessimism researcher meant.

00:03:32 Speaker_06
So just going back to the origin story, Marty was a brilliant young psychologist. I think he got his PhD in like three years. He was doing the kind of research you were doing, you know, back in the day. This is now like 50 plus years ago or something.

00:03:46 Speaker_06
And that was like all this animal research. So there were dogs, they were strapped into hammocks in cages. They were also experiencing this mild electric shock through the floor of the cage.

00:03:58 Speaker_06
By the way, Marty, total dog lover, I've said this before and I'll say it again, he would probably never do these experiments again. But anyway, there's a dog and you're in this harness and the light comes on and you know that there's going to be

00:04:10 Speaker_06
a shock, but you can't control the fact that the shock is going to come, that animal becomes effectively pessimistic in a very particular way.

00:04:18 Speaker_06
As opposed to a dog in another cage, the light comes on, you know there's going to be shock, but you reach forward and then you, with your nose, like touch this panel and then you can shorten the shock or forestall the shock.

00:04:29 Speaker_06
Basically, what Marty was observing in these animal experiments is that there is this essential element of controllability.

00:04:38 Speaker_06
I think what Marty put his finger on is that in a very deep way, what it means to be a pessimist is to not believe that you can control the future. that you have a kind of helplessness about the negative things that are about to happen to you.

00:04:56 Speaker_06
He called it learned helplessness at the time.

00:04:59 Speaker_06
And we've talked about this topic on No Stupid Questions before, but in the context of Jason's question about whether we're becoming more pessimistic, if you use Marty's definition, what it means to be a pessimist is to not believe that you can achieve your goals in the future.

00:05:20 Speaker_06
I don't know when people talk about like, oh, my gosh, the economy is going to hell or like, I hate what's going on in politics or I hate half of the country or. Sure. I think sometimes it is overlapping with what Marty meant.

00:05:30 Speaker_06
And I think sometimes it's not it's not quite the same thing. But, you know, what are your thoughts?

00:05:36 Speaker_02
I mean, I think it's a really interesting framework because I look at it in two ways. One, there is, can I control—do I have the ability to control my own destiny to some degree?

00:05:46 Speaker_02
And if the circumstances are right, then I have the ability to do that, and then I can be optimistic about myself. But on the macro level, if there is some feeling of helplessness, that the country is going the wrong direction,

00:06:01 Speaker_02
I as an individual can't fix that and so might be very pessimistic about society. That's different than my own optimism or pessimism regarding myself.

00:06:10 Speaker_02
Now that bleeds into each other if I as a young Gen Zer, I'm obviously not a young Gen Zer, but if I think that the economy is going in a bad direction and I don't have an opportunity to ever buy a home, then there is a pessimism that may begin to bleed into the individual as well as society.

00:06:27 Speaker_06
Yeah, well, I think when Marty was studying this, I think he was primarily thinking about the individual when he started, but he's lately actually been wondering about the macro version of this.

00:06:39 Speaker_06
And I'm going to read to you from the book that he hasn't even published yet, and maybe that'll... Sneak peek. I think I'm allowed to do this.

00:06:48 Speaker_06
But just to, you know, understand in Marty's own words, like what he had originally discovered, he's talking about these early, early experiments that he was doing with his collaborator, another great scientist named Steve Mayer.

00:07:01 Speaker_06
He writes, we concluded that the animals in the inescapable shock group, learn that they have no control over shock.

00:07:09 Speaker_06
And when shock occurs in the next experiment, because they get another situation, they expect that they will have no control once again. This expectation undermines their trying to escape. We thought they had learned helplessness.

00:07:25 Speaker_06
So just to get precise about what Marty was thinking, I mean, that's about you as an individual.

00:07:30 Speaker_06
By the way, they later refined this theory to say that it may not be that helplessness is learned, but actually that it's the default to be helpless in the face of bad events. Really? And that only through life experience do you learn

00:07:49 Speaker_06
that you do have control. And what he believes happened is that in the escapable shock condition, where it's like the bad things are happening, but you have control, those dogs learned a kind of agency. Those dogs learned that they had control.

00:08:04 Speaker_06
So pessimism and optimism are about agency. like the most important thing to understand about what it is to be pessimistic about the future is that sense that you are, you know, not just a victim of or a consequence of your environment.

00:08:20 Speaker_06
So his sweeping theory now, this may be his magnum opus, like he believes that agency has increased over the course of human history.

00:08:31 Speaker_06
I mean, he goes back to the earliest written word that he could find across cultures, and he looks, it's a little bit like the sentiment analysis that you were describing.

00:08:42 Speaker_06
He looks actually not just for positive words or negative words, but he quantifies the degree to which there is agency in the language in which people describe life.

00:08:55 Speaker_06
And he wants to make the argument that across the sweep of human history, human beings have gone from a kind of default sense of helplessness, like think about Greek myths. In Greek myths, you just are at the complete and total mercy of the gods.

00:09:13 Speaker_06
Like Zeus decides you're going to win the battle, you win the battle. Zeus decides you're not going to win the battle, you don't win the battle.

00:09:20 Speaker_06
And even to the point where when a warrior is not only winning a battle, but just brave, it's attributed to the gods. It's like, and then Athena came and in his breast made courage.

00:09:33 Speaker_06
So the idea of agency, Marty wants to say, is that over the sweep of human history, it has gone up And he further wants to argue that this, he sometimes calls it a psychological superpower agency, like this is the engine of progress.

00:09:51 Speaker_06
He wants to say that the reason why we have much less starvation, we have toilets, we have longer lifespans, we have much more, in general, peace and harmony and order, democracy, all of those advances, he wants to say, are actually being driven

00:10:09 Speaker_06
by human agency increasing over all of these millennia.

00:10:17 Speaker_02
If that's true, and it makes sense to me, then why do we think it is that people are getting more pessimistic potentially when we have more agency than we've ever had before?

00:10:30 Speaker_02
I was reading something by a New York Times columnist, David Brooks, and the irony is that his article is called, Chicken Littles Are Ruining America.

00:10:40 Speaker_06
The sky is falling, the sky is falling.

00:10:42 Speaker_02
That's a rather pessimistic take on pessimists.

00:10:44 Speaker_06
Yeah.

00:10:45 Speaker_02
But he writes this, and I thought it was pretty interesting. He said, whether you're on the MAGA right or the social justice left, people define their identity by how you stand against what you perceive to be the dominant structures of society.

00:10:59 Speaker_02
Groups on each side of the political divide are held together less by common affections than by a common sense of threat. and experience of collective oppression.

00:11:10 Speaker_02
Today's communal culture is based on a shared belief that society is broken, systems are rotten, the game is rigged, injustice prevails, and the elites are out to get us. We find solidarity and meaning in resisting their oppression.

00:11:25 Speaker_02
Together, pessimism has become a membership badge, the ultimate sign that you're on the side of good.

00:11:32 Speaker_06
whatever side you're on, right?

00:11:33 Speaker_02
Exactly. So if this is true, that we're bound by this collective sense of oppression by the other, and yet we have more agency than we've ever had, which should lead us to be a more optimistic group of people, where's the disconnect that you see?

00:11:52 Speaker_06
Like, how do you explain this? It's like a paradox, right? I did read this book on agency that Marty is about to publish, and he cites this statistic.

00:12:03 Speaker_06
This is actually from ourworldindata.org, a site that aggregates a lot of survey data and other statistics. And Marty says that when asked, is the world getting better, that only 6 percent of Americans say yes.

00:12:17 Speaker_06
And apparently there are similarly downer statistics for lots of other countries. That is shockingly low. That's really low. Shockingly low. Six out of 100 people saying the world is getting better.

00:12:29 Speaker_06
But this is in the chapter where he talks about, you know, what agency is on one hand, this psychological superpower, and what is actual progress, like the facts of the matter. And he wants to say that the facts of the matter are quite good.

00:12:44 Speaker_06
He, like the psychologist Steven Pinker. Oh, I love him, by the way. He's brilliant.

00:12:49 Speaker_02
Yeah. I mean, I don't know Steven Pinker at all, but his book Enlightenment Now,

00:12:53 Speaker_06
So I'm familiar with the work Better Angels of Our Nature, which I think preceded Enlightenment Now, right?

00:12:59 Speaker_06
But I think they're both on the topic of how, on objective grounds, the world is actually getting much better, that this sort of dour view of how things are going is inaccurate. Do I have that right? I didn't read the Enlightenment Now book.

00:13:13 Speaker_02
It's exactly that. He's like, you know, we all run around like chicken littles and think the sky is falling. And he basically says like, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, everybody. We live in the most glorious age of all time. Prosperous, safe.

00:13:28 Speaker_02
Right, and he goes through, for example, global life expectancy. In the early 19th century, it hovered around 30 years old. Today, it's over 70 years across the world, and in some regions exceeds 80.

00:13:40 Speaker_02
In the 1820s, 90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty, and today it's less than 10%. Child mortality in 1800, about 43% of children died before their fifth birthday. By 2015, only 4%.

00:13:57 Speaker_02
Like, he goes through all of these different things saying, like, I know it seems dark.

00:14:02 Speaker_06
It seems like we're going to hell in a handbasket, but we're really, like, much closer to heaven, right? I mean, Marty has this list of statistics that are like that. I know he is very in sync with Steven Pinker.

00:14:15 Speaker_06
And I think this paradox, if you will, does need to be explained. Like Marty's argument is that over the sweep of history there, he sees the upward trend.

00:14:25 Speaker_06
But it doesn't necessarily mean that locally, right, that in very recent times, we're on this upward swing of feeling more optimistic and more agentic. So when I do think about the more recent years, I

00:14:38 Speaker_06
I think about Gene Twenge and we've talked a lot about Gene's work on the show, but I think this question of like, how are we feeling right now?

00:14:46 Speaker_06
I think Gene takes the angle of also, how is our younger generation thinking about things right now relative to people who were also young, but at a different era. So she uses data in some of her work from this survey called Monitoring the Future.

00:15:05 Speaker_06
And the Monitoring the Future data includes 12th graders in, you know, 1976. And then she has, you know, 12th graders all the way up through, at least in the figure that I'm looking at, 2021. And in particular, she notes this

00:15:23 Speaker_06
Upward trend of pessimism on these questions like, when I think about all the terrible things that have been happening, it is hard for me to hold out much hope for the world.

00:15:34 Speaker_06
Or I often wonder if there is any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation. And she notes that Gen Z, So these are the young people who have grown up and are growing up, I guess, in recent years.

00:15:48 Speaker_06
They're much more likely to answer those questions as, yeah, it's really hard to have hope for the world. Like, yeah, I really wonder if there's any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation.

00:16:00 Speaker_06
And she documents, and the graph is pretty striking, right, that just around the turn of the millennium, there begins to be this pretty striking linear upward trend towards more pessimism, particularly in that generation.

00:16:12 Speaker_02
I don't know how to say this other than that's sad to me.

00:16:15 Speaker_02
And going back to Marty and his point of agency and believing that we can be agents of change, I wonder if we need to be doing a lot more to teach people that, one, the world's not nearly as bad as you think. Two, let's get some perspective.

00:16:31 Speaker_02
We've been through hard times in the world before. But three, like, you have the power to have an impact.

00:16:37 Speaker_06
Yeah, exactly. Mike, you and I would love to hear thoughts from No Stupid Questions listeners on how pessimism is affecting society. Are we getting more pessimistic? Are you getting more pessimistic? Or alternatively,

00:16:53 Speaker_06
Do you see signs for hope in your own life or in the world at large? Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email us at NSQ at Freakonomics.com. Maybe we'll play it on a future episode of the show.

00:17:11 Speaker_05
Still to come on No Stupid Questions, what can preschoolers teach us about cultivating optimism? Is this a bucket? Like, yes. Great. You got that one right. And now, back to Mike and Angela's conversation about pessimism.

00:17:39 Speaker_02
Would you, Angela Duckworth, describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist?

00:17:45 Speaker_06
I know how I'd describe you. I think if there's something that we've been talking about since the very first moments of our friendship is that I think you are almost obsessed with agency.

00:17:56 Speaker_02
So I will say this. Like, if you look at my business life, I've always subscribed to the what I call the Andy Grove School of Business. He was a great business executive, but he always used this phrase, only the paranoid survive.

00:18:09 Speaker_02
Now, one might say that that's a pessimistic view of the world, but in terms of Marty Seligman, it's actually very optimistic in that I believe in looking at every potential

00:18:22 Speaker_02
possibility of where this could fail or where it could go wrong or go off track or whatever and make sure that I have agency to avoid those pitfalls because I believe that we can make the difference we want to have and create that future by making sure we miss all those landmines.

00:18:42 Speaker_06
So you're saying that you're one to always look for threats or obstacles, but then in your very agentic Mike Monway, asking the question like, well, how do I overcome that obstacle?

00:18:54 Speaker_02
Right, it's not just like a Pollyannish, this will all work out. It's more a, if it is to be, it is up to me. So it's that optimism rooted in realism, maybe.

00:19:05 Speaker_06
When I audit my own optimism, I don't want to pretend that it's always 10 out of 10. You know, like these dogs that Marty studied that had this sense of helplessness, this sense of like, oh my gosh, no matter what I do, things are terrible.

00:19:23 Speaker_06
I would be lying if I told you that I never felt that way, because sometimes I am, you know, not feeling like, let's do something wonderful. Let's welcome change like this. Uncertainty can be overcome. I mean, it's not steady state optimism for me.

00:19:41 Speaker_02
I think that's very fair for me as well, right? I mean, I think the limits of optimism, and this is maybe where there's a disconnect between societal optimism or pessimism and an individual.

00:19:54 Speaker_02
I can be optimistic on the things that I can control, but we all come up against that wall because of some societal constraint or something or other that inhibits it. And once we feel like we can't

00:20:08 Speaker_02
be the change or our agency is therefore limited, then pessimism bleeds in because what am I supposed to do about it?

00:20:15 Speaker_06
Well, you know, there are other great scientists who have studied agency. And I think Marty, you know, one of the people that he honors in this book is Al Bandura. The great Al Bandura was a psychologist.

00:20:30 Speaker_06
He spent most of his career at Stanford and he passed away, you know, a few years ago. And Al Bandura studied something that he called self-efficacy, which is a facet of agency that Marty would say has a slightly different nuance.

00:20:43 Speaker_06
I mean, efficacy is the expectation that you can achieve your current goals right now. It means like, yeah, I can learn this math if I try. I can do this. And optimism is more about the future, especially your distant future goals.

00:20:58 Speaker_06
So they're cousins or something, but they're both in the agency family. And the reason I bring Al Bandura up is that efficacy held Al Bandura's attention for his whole professional life.

00:21:10 Speaker_06
It was the last thing he was working on, but it was also one of the very first things that he worked on.

00:21:15 Speaker_06
And I think the reason why it was so important to Al Bandura is that he, like Marty, felt that this is what drives a person forward, like this is what gives you energy.

00:21:24 Speaker_06
But when you come to the practical question, and I'll make this personal, it's like, well, on the days where I don't feel optimistic, I think people would be shocked to know how up and down my confidence really is.

00:21:34 Speaker_06
Like, is this book ever going to be great? Is it ever going to be good? You know, what am I doing with my research? Who am I? And when I remember what Al Bandura told me before he died and what he wrote about, the one thing

00:21:48 Speaker_06
that I would say is the most important for improving our sense of efficacy and also optimism. It's not pep talks. That can do a little. Verbal persuasion, he called it, right?

00:22:00 Speaker_06
Like somebody can talk to you for half an hour and convince you that like the future is going to be great or that you have some control, etc. And he would say, it's not even modeling.

00:22:10 Speaker_06
He put a lot of stock, Al Bandura did, in seeing a model of what you can do, like evidence through somebody else, like, oh, I guess it is possible because they did it. Right. More than that, he said it was mastery experiences.

00:22:23 Speaker_06
And that's his terminology. But in my words, it would be like small wins. So when I think about what makes me more optimistic about myself in particular, but maybe collectively, it's when there is a small win. Like, oh, look, I did that.

00:22:40 Speaker_06
Maybe I can do the next thing. So when I think about my own pessimism to optimism continuum, I set up these little goals that I can achieve and I accumulate evidence.

00:22:53 Speaker_06
for being an optimist, where like, there's an obstacle, there's a challenge, but I achieve it, you know?

00:23:00 Speaker_06
And I think that if there's anything that I've done that is a misstep with this, is to make a goal too big, or to not break it down and to find enough parts, and then I get discouraged, right? Like, oh, this book is terrible.

00:23:13 Speaker_06
But if I set the goal of like, can I Look at the foreword of this book without looking away for, like, my entire morning coffee, right?

00:23:21 Speaker_06
Like, if the goal is just to sit in this chair and stare at these words while I drink my coffee, and then I do it, then it's a small win, and then I feel a little more confident.

00:23:32 Speaker_02
I love it. I laughed a little because I'm that person who sometimes makes a to do list and then does something not on the to do list. And I still then write it down only so that I can cross it off.

00:23:44 Speaker_06
I literally want to do that study where you have people write down the things that they know they can do or almost that you've just done.

00:23:52 Speaker_06
Like, you know, you're about to drink your coffee and then you write down drink coffee and then you check it off and you're like, I am ready. Let's go.

00:23:58 Speaker_02
I did something today.

00:24:00 Speaker_06
I have long wanted to do that study. It's like on my research bucket list. I assume you do that because you're like managing your own confidence.

00:24:08 Speaker_02
And I want the win. I want the feeling of progress. It's interesting you say this, though, because my natural instinct was to go say to people who are pessimistic about

00:24:20 Speaker_02
that are going on in the world is to present data to show them that, hey, it's not actually as bad as you think. For example, the majority of people, 52%, believe that the share of people in extreme poverty is rising. That's not even close to true.

00:24:39 Speaker_02
And so I would think like, hey, we just need to show you that not only are you a little bit wrong, but you're massively wrong.

00:24:47 Speaker_02
And there's probably a place, well, not to shove in people's face that they're wrong, probably a place for additional information.

00:24:53 Speaker_02
But it sounds like what you're saying as well is help people know that, like, if they even get a small win, maybe that would do even more towards shifting the view of optimism versus pessimism on all of these different things.

00:25:08 Speaker_06
Mike, all this reminds me of this very old study that was done in 1968 by these two psychologists who I believe were at Yale, and their last names were Ziegler and Butterfield.

00:25:22 Speaker_06
And this was a study that was actually about whether preschool would, you know, make kids smarter. And here's the facet of this paper that I was really interested in.

00:25:33 Speaker_06
They had this idea, these researchers, that one of the things that might happen when you go to preschool is that it would do something to motivation to be, you know, more engaged in academic tasks.

00:25:45 Speaker_06
So to explore this, they modified the way they gave IQ tests. You know, when you take an IQ test, oftentimes it's like, you know, you basically progress through questions going from easy to hard. You kind of stop when it gets too hard.

00:25:59 Speaker_06
And like, that's some measure of your intelligence. I mean, you know, that's your score. Right. But in this study, they created a parallel

00:26:08 Speaker_06
with the same test items, but they called it the optimizing test procedures because they wanted to optimize motivation. They wanted to see whether they could prop up motivation to keep going on the IQ test as much as possible.

00:26:22 Speaker_06
And the way they did that was unbelievably simple, and it all goes back to small wins. So they first presented like a really easy item. Like, is this a bucket? Like, yes. Like, you know, it's like, great, you got that one right.

00:26:35 Speaker_06
And then instead of following the usual procedures, if there were mistakes that the child was making, instead of just like stopping the test, they would go back a little and give the kid a few softballs again, right?

00:26:48 Speaker_06
Essentially, they were trying to use the same exact IQ test materials, but by going backward on difficulty, give the kid a few more small wins. In their words, to maximize the number of successes the child had early in the testing experience.

00:27:04 Speaker_06
And again, you can think of those dogs in the escapable shock condition, right? Like, how do we teach agency? How do we give the small wins that will build that sense of efficacy and perhaps optimism as well? And so IQ scores

00:27:18 Speaker_06
according to whether the kids took the standard procedure or the optimal procedure, the differences are striking. I mean, differences of like 10 points sometimes. And when I read this, I thought to myself like, oh my God, how profound is this?

00:27:37 Speaker_06
If you have a kid who's like, I can't do this. Imagine what would happen if like you secretly engineered one, two, three little victories. Yeah.

00:27:50 Speaker_06
That would allow that kid to break the ceiling on what they think is possible and therefore what is possible.

00:27:58 Speaker_02
That is actually completely transformative.

00:28:01 Speaker_06
I don't know. It was almost like personal to me, because I feel like one of the reasons I am more of an optimist more of the time than a pessimist is that I think in my life I've had a lot of small wins.

00:28:13 Speaker_06
When I started out in graduate school working with Marty, Marty said, write an article for Psych Science. I said, OK. I looked at a bunch that were in Psych Science. I was like, oh, like that. I took my data. I wrote it up. I sent it in.

00:28:27 Speaker_06
Within days, I got a basically like, yes, pretty good. Now, like if you ask me, like, Angela, when's the last time you published in psych science? I'm like, I can't even count the years. Like, it's so hard to get in.

00:28:39 Speaker_06
I wish I could publish in psych science tomorrow. But like that small win very early in my career built up a kind of confidence, you know, build up a sort of foundation.

00:28:48 Speaker_06
And I think that is something that Steve Mayer's research, I mentioned this collaborator of Marty.

00:28:55 Speaker_06
He's done these experiments where rats during their adolescent, I would say years except for their rats, so it's like the weeks of their life that they are adolescents.

00:29:05 Speaker_06
If they have these mastery experiences, they are in a way inoculated against learned helplessness later on as adult rats.

00:29:13 Speaker_06
So I really believe there's something profound about creating lives for ourselves and especially for young people that are kind of rigged for challenges that we can overcome. And I think that is maybe what's going on.

00:29:28 Speaker_06
If Jason's right that, you know, we're unduly pessimistic about the future there, maybe we need to have more evidence in our lives and about the world that there are these small victories.

00:29:40 Speaker_06
We need good news and we need credible challenges that we're succeeding at.

00:29:46 Speaker_02
And where we can see the benefits of our efforts on helping create a better life for ourselves and maybe for the world.

00:29:54 Speaker_06
I have thought about this like Gen Z question just as a mom, right? Because I think they're Gen Z, right? Amanda and Lucy, 23 and 21.

00:30:03 Speaker_02
I believe so.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
So if we take a page out of this book on small wins, it would suggest that if we want this young generation to feel more optimistic about the future and their futures, we need to create opportunities

00:30:19 Speaker_06
where they can make a difference that for themselves is evidence that they're not helpless. I wonder what you think of that idea. And I don't, by the way, have a brilliant scheme for how I could do this either in my own family or at scale.

00:30:37 Speaker_06
But what are your reactions to that? Like, how could we create more manageable challenges and small wins for Gen Z?

00:30:43 Speaker_02
I actually love this question because I think so often the pessimism is rooted in something so big as in the economy or housing or some geopolitical events that we can't necessarily impact. And Michelle Obama gave some great advice.

00:31:02 Speaker_02
She, in essence, said, I'm kind of tired of all of these kids who come with these dream big moments that they want to go change the world. And her advice back to them is not to dream big, but rather to start small.

00:31:17 Speaker_02
Why don't you look in your immediate community, maybe even in your family or your friend group, and what are three things that you can do today in order to enact some change? And it goes to this idea of getting some quick and simple wins.

00:31:34 Speaker_02
And once we start seeing the change we can make there, then her idea is go and grow from there, but start small.

00:31:43 Speaker_06
Mike, I think we need to end with a small win. I feel like we need to draw our attention to good news that will give us a sense that the future is shapeable and that the future is bright. Can you cheer me up?

00:32:01 Speaker_02
Are you familiar with Upworthy?

00:32:03 Speaker_06
I am because a lot of researchers have used the Upworthy website, I guess it is, or like newsfeed or something for research purposes. But I'll be honest, I'm not really sure exactly what Upworthy is.

00:32:16 Speaker_02
Upworthy, summed up in the simplest of terms, is a place that publishes positive stories that, quote, inspire and uplift. So I'll just share a couple examples of good news happening in the world that maybe fall along the lines of quick wins.

00:32:33 Speaker_02
This headline, Elderly Man Learns to Read at 80. After decades of struggling with literacy, an 80-year-old man fulfilled a lifelong dream of learning how to read. There are students at a high school who surprised their janitor with college tuition.

00:32:48 Speaker_02
They raised money to help their janitor, school janitor, send his children to college. There's a cafe owner who opens a cafe solely for the purpose of employing people with disabilities.

00:33:02 Speaker_02
And the coffee shop becomes a massive success because so many people want to come and support the mission. And then story after story after story.

00:33:12 Speaker_02
So if you want to go to a place to get some ideas on things that maybe you can do in your community as well, Upworthy is a place of real stories of real people doing good things.

00:33:22 Speaker_06
OK, Jason, are we becoming more pessimistic as a society? Maybe, especially people our daughter's age. But need we be? No. And also, after dinner tonight, we should go to Upworthy.com.

00:33:43 Speaker_05
Coming up after the break, a fact check of today's episode and stories from our NSQ listeners. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation.

00:33:59 Speaker_05
Mike breaks down the concept of conflict entrepreneurs, but his framing makes it sound as if his friend came up with the phrase.

00:34:07 Speaker_05
The term was popularized by journalist Amanda Ripley in her 2021 book, High Conflict, Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. The phrase was also used prior to Ripley's book in the domain of warfare.

00:34:20 Speaker_05
International peace experts have used conflict entrepreneurs to describe economic and political actors who benefit from violent conflict.

00:34:29 Speaker_05
Also, David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times, but the piece Mike referenced, Chicken Littles Are Ruining America, is an article from The Atlantic, where Brooks is also a contributing writer.

00:34:43 Speaker_05
Finally, we were not able to locate the upworthy articles about the man who learned to read at 80 and the high school students who raised money to send their janitor's children to college.

00:34:52 Speaker_05
However, Upworthy has covered a number of similar stories over the years, and a local news channel in Detroit did cover the story of 84-year-old Robert Prosser, who began his journey towards literacy at 79.

00:35:05 Speaker_05
Prosser was following in the footsteps of many other Americans who learned to read late in life, including the famous George Dawson, the grandson of a formerly enslaved person who learned to read at 98 and co-authored a book at 101.

00:35:18 Speaker_05
That's it for the fact check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on attention spans.

00:35:29 Speaker_00
Hi, Mike and Angela. This is Michael Davis in Cincinnati, Ohio. I am a public speaking and presentation skills coach. Your recent episode about attention spans resonated with me.

00:35:40 Speaker_00
I've been teaching clients for years that we don't have an attention problem. We have a getting attention and keeping attention problem. The real issue is the material and the way we deliver it.

00:35:53 Speaker_00
To prove this, I showed them clips of young people playing on video games. They have no problem with attention. Clips of people watching or binge-watching TV shows from their couch. Again, no attention problem. So they're interested in that material.

00:36:10 Speaker_00
The real proof to me, though, is Hollywood. In 1993, the top 10 most popular movies were two hours and one minute long. In 2023, the top 10 movies were two hours and 23 minutes long. They're getting longer. So the real issue is not attention.

00:36:29 Speaker_00
It's the material and how we're delivering. Thanks so much. Love your podcast. Keep up the great work.

00:36:36 Speaker_03
Hi, Mike and Angela, a fan from Canada who loves the show. I wanted to chime in on the attention span episode as Mike and I both write book reviews after finishing novels. I've been doing it for about six years now and have over 125 book reviews.

00:36:51 Speaker_03
This actually means I can't remember all the titles of the books I've read. By writing a review near the end, I'm sure I remember more of the book.

00:36:59 Speaker_03
but its true value comes from knowing I can return to the review at any point to remember, thus freeing up my attention span for new activities.

00:37:08 Speaker_03
Not entirely the slowdown action Mike was intending, but figured it would be worth mentioning all the same.

00:37:14 Speaker_01
Hi Mike and Angela, this is MJ Hawkson from the Philippines. Yeah, I think that our attention spans have been crippled by technology. And it saddens me when you really think about it. Oh look, a squirrel!

00:37:30 Speaker_05
That was, respectively, Michael Davis, a listener who would like to remain anonymous, and MJ Hawkson. Thanks to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts on optimism and pessimism.

00:37:45 Speaker_05
Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show.

00:37:53 Speaker_05
No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.

00:38:07 Speaker_05
The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lierke Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra.

00:38:22 Speaker_05
you can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show. And you can watch video clips of Mike and Angela at the Freakonomics Radio Network's YouTube Shorts channel or on Freakonomics Radio's TikTok page.

00:38:34 Speaker_05
To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ. Thanks for listening.

00:38:48 Speaker_02
Nice. That's how Gen Z-er would say nice, by the way.

00:38:56 Speaker_04
The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.